its freaky to think my parts, glands, organs were not freely and willingly coordinating by way of the cns.. and i have no experiential evidence .. in the amoeba and up .. that a brain is even needed for consciousness.
its freaky to think my parts, glands, organs were not freely and willingly coordinating by way of the cns.. and i have no experiential evidence .. in the amoeba and up .. that a brain is even needed for consciousness.
and sure, in that sense maybe even a rock is conscious to some degree, at least compared to hard vacuum.
but conflating the importance of the CNS with the lack of a hard cut-off is a folly.
similarly, just because the concert pianist can't play well after a hand injury doesn't make the hand more important than the brain. because similarly, the pianist can't play well after many types of head/brain injury. naturally, because the pianist learned to play through the hands, fine-tuned and memorized what to do with the hands to get what the brain wants to hear. hence the importance of practice.
amoebas behavior and adaptability is very limited, because its comparatively very simple. an so we might be fairly certain it lacks the hardware/wetware to run what we call consciousness. and it might turn out that a big fancy brain like ours is not needed for consciousness, but likely there's still some cut off, meaning at least a few neurons (or similar networks and [predictive?] feedback loops) are likely needed.