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Comment by resource0x | Hacker News Reader

I believe Hameroff is on the right track, but the track can be extended much further.

Every cell (and every bacteria) is a conscious, intelligent being. Nothing else is conscious. Our sense of "I" comes from a single cell in our body, getting inputs from other cells. We are products of the self-modification of cells. We need to find a way to talk with our cells - they will tell us a lot about physics and life.

Whether the cell consciousness is due to quantum effects or not is of secondary importance at this stage IMO.

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> Every cell (and every bacteria) is a conscious, intelligent being.

Then why isn't inanimate matter conscious?

Your question contains the answer. If it were conscious, it would be animate matter :) Seriously, I don't know , maybe everything is conscious, but for bacteria/cells - we can be sure. This realization is already a big step forward :)

I'm not certain we can be sure that's where we draw the line for consciousness, actually, but to each his own.

Seriously, on what basis are you making these claims?

Several reasons: 1. Explanatory power

2. Reduction

3. Simplicity

4. Occam's razor

5. Crazy enough (necessary condition for any new theory)

There's much more to be said, but not here, sorry.

EDIT: whoever wants to discuss the idea further, please send me a personal message to resource0x at gmail. I was thinking on this idea for quite a while, pretty sure it makes much more sense than "emergence" and other mystic voodoo.

Those are not great reasons. For instance, 2-4 are essentially the same, and are not explained at all. 5 is a joke of some kind, and 1 is not reason enough to believe anything. Might be reason enough to form a hypothesis, but how would you even go about testing such a hypothesis?

After all you can cook up multiple self-consistent ideas of how a machine works in your imagination, but until you actually examine the machine you can't say that your idea actually explains how it works. It's a way it might work.

Usually you want to have at least some cursory observation to form a hypothesis, but admittedly it's inherently very difficult to observe something like the nature of how you are able to observe things. That's why I'm so hesitant to believe anyone who says they have objective knowledge about it.

Normally, 1) is enough. Explanatory power. E.g., evolution driven not by random mutations, but by self-modification of bacteria/cells, based on same engineering principles as we use in programming. There's a rational goal behind all this endeavor, we will get it sooner or later. The alternative is the admission of meaninglessness of everything and total depression (recurrent topic on HN)

Don't you see that you're projecting your own needs on the world around you? Physics isn't required to make you comfortable or happy. You aren't finding truth, you're just inventing reassuring delusions.

What is delusion and what is not is in the eye of the beholder until proven experimentally. Randomness is impossible to prove in principle, even for a sequence of 0 and 1, and you know it. But I see you are really interested in the topic :) There are things discovered in recent years that challenge the dogma. E.g. each neuron has its own DNA (like hardware that can rewire itself - not randomly, but for a purpose). Cells communicate using complex language through more than one communication channel. Look for "plant intelligence" on youtube (TED talks). BTW, the idea of single-cell consciousness is not mine - it's Hameroff's idea (derived from his practice of anesthesiology). Bacterial intelligence is an active area of research. The picture gradually emerges. But don't expect anyone to publish a coherent theory anytime soon - simply for fear, b/c for some reason, in US and western countries, any mention of intelligence is perceived as religious belief. But in fact, belief in human exceptionalism and intellectual superiority is a religious belief. My view is that humans are not that smart - we are just average among other species.

Evolution does not require consciousness, so I have no idea why you think the hypothesis that bacteria are conscious has any "explanatory power".

Thank you for letting me know :)

I think you're on the right track, but the track can be extended much further. All energy is conscious because by the laws of physics, it does computation/work when flowing along energy gradients. The whole entire thing is an electric light disco of conscious entities on every scale. Every single body of matter absorbs and emits a characteristic spectrum of electromagnetic energy solely dependent on its construction. Yet my neighbors say we don't interact... :-)

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