But that is what a sponge can do.
Though, they are like 900 millions years worth of primitive, so bet they don’t have that much information to begin with.
As for where the information is stored, it gets crazy complicated, check out the work of Dr. Michael Levin, he will amaze, in a way my words never will.
My Self, me, myself and I. An individual animal, possessing the accumulated total of a half a billion years worth of Earth’s evolutionary processes. The components of my body have another four billion years of research, development, culling packed into them.
My senses + body + brain + interaction (interior & exterior) produce my consciousness-continuum - the introspective consciousness being my mind.
Ah, but then, you are right, there’s all the other people and events who have gone into making the Being I am. When I think about that grumpy little loner who finished high school in '73, I am shocked and amazed at the pageant of people who have become part of me, and am in wonder when pondering the many interwoven connects that are a big part of what makes life worth living for me.
@Chasmys see ya around the neighborhood. 
We are talking about biological creatures and living functionality?
Ask AI: "Has any scientist written about the different levels of consciousness as creature complexity increases?" I tried it and it pulled up half a dozen different groups of researcher writing about just that. Some names I’ve already dropped a few times. I’m told Simona Ginsburg & Eva Jablonka I really need to get to know. I have their book in my cue.
But living creatures need to have awareness turned on 24/7, even when sleeping, systems are monitoring the situation, and spring up into action when needed.
Senses + Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) produces the consciousness spectrum, which is directly tied to creature & lifestyle complexity.
I don’t understand where your “sharp boundaries” exist.
But to the scientific view, the entire spectrum of life is an example. Microorganisms have been documented to exhibit classic “conscious behavior” - knowing what to eat, what to excrete, knowing when to stop eating or excreting, recognizing bad stuff, deliberate movement towards good stuff, and movement away from bad stuff, ability to learn on the fly and appropriately adjust behavior in light of circumstance, and so on.
That is a single celled creature we’re talking about. Its response is limited by its hardware. Doesn’t it stand to reason that as hardware increases in complexity and competence that the software of awareness and influence over ourselves, would increase as the hardware improves?
And it seems to me scientists have made a great deal of progress that is not receiving the attention it deserves.
I see no reason why single cells need a sense of self.
I think a self, and a perspective, requires these three things:
(1) To create and maintain a model of the world we find ourselves embedded in, with ourselves in it as an entity which persists over time.
(2) To predict the future course of events, which is necessarily a range of possible futures, of differing probability, rather than just one specific future.
(3) To assign value and meaning to these possibilities, in an attempt to actualise the best possible future, or to avoid the actualisation of the worst ones.
This requires a brain. Jellyfish don’t quite make the cut - they just react. The most primitive creature that might have been capable of meeting these criteria can be located quite precisely in evolutionary history, because it was the first bilaterian. This is already recognised as a revolutionary moment in evolution, because it is just before the Cambrian Explosion – the exact point that all the branches of life first appeared which we now intuitively think are conscious. I call this first conscious creature LUCAS - the Last Universal Common Ancestor of Subjectivity.
More info here: LUCAS | Two-Phase Cosmology
I had a quick look, and his stuff sounds fascinating. But I haven’t got time to evaluate his life’s work. Can you point me to anything a bit more specific to our discussion here? TIA 
It would probably be better to think in terms of awareness of self, which started with chemotaxis but quickly evolved beyond as molecular hardware stepped up.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with introspection and self-consciousness - which is the problem with using “consciousness” because to our ears it implies introspection, thoughtfulness, when at the other end of the spectrum, it gets vague ultimately disappears into chemotaxis as we move back further in time.
So I agree at a certain level of complexity, consciousness requires a brain and its accompanying body. Without the body the brain is useless.
But to use that to argue that what happens below that biological level is irrelevant to understanding the consciousness-spectrum and how our own system operates, I believe is fatally flawed.
Cool.
Bilaterian, was certainly another earth shattering achievement that radically upended the direction of evolution; and bodily manipulatory potential; and development of introspective consciousness, although the Krebs cycle was even more pivotal, if invisible.
But yeah, bilaterians are pretty amazing - I’m really impress with the wisdom of having our bodily nerves, switch sides to land in the opposite side of the brain.
What a nifty invention for helping the body keep track of what the other side was always doing. A central location where bilateral neurons would touch base with their opposite member as they crossed over, thus constantly keeping updated.
It is even more important than that. Are you familiar with the work of Iain McGilchrist?
I agree. I suggest that hive animals (e.g. bees, ants) either do NOT have a sense of self, or if they do - it’s secondary to their instincts to promote the well-being of the hive.
You are a functional entity that interacts with other functional entities. As a functional entity, your continued existence is not dependent on the specific set of cells that happen to be present today.
It been a long day, and guess a bunch of this is redundant, but then what else is philosophy if not redundant. So I’ll take a chance and share some thoughts I had as I was review this thread, this evening.
I want to try a better response, than my first one.
Ah, but, even at the single cell stage, there’s the membrane that divides the world into two.
Me on the inside - everything else on the outside.
Your membrane needs to know what to excrete, what to ingest, how to get to what it wants, how to get away from danger, how to single across itself, how to adapt to external condition. Sure it started with homeostasis, but then increasingly complex subsystems learned to process more information in more creative manners.
Afterwards, everything else built upon that foundation.
Agreed. I’m sorry if it sounded like I was suggesting that.
… Well, … actually that invention of the Krebs cycle that was a pretty outrageously singularly event, that changed everything like no other single event I can imagine.
The expertise of Nick Lane among others. I’ve read and digested 4 of his 5 popular books.
And I never implied that. You’ve touched the key point. The profundity of realizing the body you exist within is an actual learning, changing being. And if one manages to help make some children, we have contributed to Earth’s generational pageant.
Bonus factoid: There is no mystery about the Self, from an evolutionary perspective.
Why do you say: “utterly unrelated to neurons” ?
It seems to me neurons transmit information, in some ways not unlike electrical wiring.
Wires can send off signals other wires can pick up and even decipher. Guess I’m suggesting the sort of natural laws that make radio possible are also valid at biological, organism levels. Along with my understanding of, and deep respect for Evolution’s, creative abilities, feels absolutely plausible to me.
Does that make any sense?
I don’t think there’s anything, significant, that is missing when it comes to the biological understanding of thought processes, as they are being outlined within a number different scientific fields.
I’m trying to get some philosophy to explain what’s missing.
They have gotten as far a telling me, that it is not about the “attaining the sensation of the experience of another creature having an experience.” As I keep interpreting it as.
They keep telling me, I simply don’t get it.
I’m still waiting for one to clearly describe what it is I am “simply not getting.”
Sorry we are talking different languages.
Appreciating Earth’s Evolution is the cornerstone and foundation of my “mindscape” - I can’t deal with a mental world that has no place (nor respect) for Earth’s physical reality.
Thank you for your time.
Spot on.
Thanks ! ( I needed that 
)
Valid question, but if the prevailing philosophers’ attitude is evolution/biology is uninteresting and irrelevant to their metaphysical world - then how will one ever find out what biologist have learned about cellular information storage and dissemination structures.
I’ve got a simple mind and can’t keep up, and I certainly don’t have the kind of memory recall that a serious successful scientist (any scholar) requires - but I’m constantly being wow’ed by this new finding and that new insight and how it helps explain aspects of exactly such a question.
What that mean? Within this context? simply curious
I’m not talking about “sense of self” - it’s more “like awareness of being.”
Originally all chemotaxis, but with increasing complexity over deep-time, well complexity happens.
How much time have you spent learning about the inner life of a cell? or what research has been publishing these past decades? [ Nick Lane: Writer of the most excellent summary of “SELF” - Jack Szostak - Michael Russell - Arthur Reber The “Cellular Basis of Consciousness” proposal -Michael Levin and many more]
Probably not, remember I’m an enthusiast and make no pretend to expertise - beyond being a life long proactive science lover and consumer.
More importantly, can you answer the central question here?
I see Chalmers Hard Problem directly tied to Nagel’s
“What it’s like to be a Bat”
And I’m told that I’m wrong to say it’s nothing more than “Spock Envy” :
*in not being able to experience the experience of another creature’s experience. ***
So @PatternChaser, can you answer: What is the so-called Hard Problem all about?
I don’t think single cells are aware of anything at all. Maybe you mean something different by “awareness”, but I can’t think what.
They are very obviously closely related. I prefer Nagel’s formulation in the bat essay though. Chalmers’ version has a problem – it defines p-zombies as behaving exactly like normal humans, but normal humans are conscious and p-zombies are not. What I cannot accept is that something like a human but not conscious would claim that it is conscious. Instead it would say “Consciousness? What’s that? I have never understood what that word is supposed to refer to.” And that is not what normal humans say, so this cannot be a p-zombie by Chalmers’ definition.
The DNA system seems to be an information processing system. It could be considered an incipient mind, although to consisder that then we have to reject the evolution idea that the DNA system cannot rationally input information, where evolutionists traditionally believe it can only rationally output information.
So the human mind as being an information processing system also, would then be something of an extension of the DNA information processing system, and not only a product of it.
The efficient theory about this is Rowlands, Diaz, Hill rewrite theory. Which is an interpretation of mathematics to derive all mathematics from the symbol zero by rewriting it. Which then delivers an ordering of mathematical structures in efficient steps away from zero. And this zero based ordering is the same as the ordering in the universe, and also the same as the ordering in the DNA system. And obviously also the human mind would have the same zero based universal ordering, why not.
And then you just have to find some organization of decision-making processes in it. But probably much of it could shift between operating in a forced way, and operating in a free way, just as like you can calculate a chess move by selection, but you can also choose a chess move.
Yes
I know lots of philosophers and scientists do think consciousness admits of degree. They are either confused or talking about a different sense of ‘consciousness’.
These are all functions, and can therefore be conceived of separately from consciousness. Why can’t all that happen without consciousness?
I know. Maybe we simply have different concepts of consciousness, and we’re talking about different things. But if that’s the case, your frustration with philosophy is misplaced. Before you can justly criticise philosophers for ignoring the science and dreaming up nonsense, you need to understand the concept they are talking about.
Yes, I get that you, and Reber, and many others are talking about single celled organisms. I have no difficulty accepting they are conscious. Indeed I think rocks, quarks and space are also conscious. This is precisely because consciousness does not admit of degree that I think this. ‘The entire spectrum of life’ is not a counter-example, as it is all conscious. What I’m asking you for is an entity that is neither clearly conscious, nor clearly non-conscious. As you are happy to say that a cell is conscious, I’ll ask about that. I’m going to presume you don’t think that a puddle of water is conscious (but maybe you do). In terms of complexity and function, what is there between a puddle of water and a cell that is a borderline case of consciousness?
This isn’s about opinion, it is being observed and written about. For details there’s Nick Lane, Michael Levin, Arthur Reber, Jack Szostak, among others.
You put it very nicely. I’m not as indulgent. In magic it’s called a “Misdirection.”
Quite true, that’s why I prefer consciousness-spectrum, and yes it would help if people were more specific with, awareness, sentience, introspection.
How could it?
How could one accomplish anything if not accompanied by constant feedback loops reporting on the developing situation and issuing action orders?
Why would nature imbue elemental atomic matter with some sense of consciousness?
Where is there any need for atoms or rocks to make any decisions? They simply following natural laws.
Can you remember a situation where they would need to make a choice?
Whereas biological living matter is constantly required to make decisions that are a matter of life and death.
Or could you dispute that basic outline?
The sophistication of consciousness is dependent on the complexity and size of sensing systems, and it started before neurons and brains, which simply provides hugely more efficient data processing systems.
Can you support your claim with something written up by an expert on this tangent?
A) You would have to come up with a rigorous definition for ‘consciousness’ - before the question can even be seriously raised.
B) If a mod of self-awareness, consciousness-spectrum developed within the complexity of single cells being formed.
It stands to reason all that following builds upon that template.
A puddle of water is not composed of biological matter. Remember the Krebs cycle
Oh so we agree.
As both Lane and Reber and others point out, consciousness is an outcome of creature kind and complexity.
Meaning that it is all about a matter of degrees, and those degrees of different are intimately connected to creature’s, biological hardware along with the software, that constant relevant feedback loops. Consciousness is what those systems are broadcasting to the body whole.
Nothing.
The border being, the Kreb cycle. What possesses it, biological matter - and what does not possess it, that would be elemental matter such as water, air, rock, etc.
It is 100% unsubstantiated opinion.
Right back at ya.
It’s been nice, thanks for the challenge.
It does not. Reaction is not the same as response.
Where to draw the line?
In biological systems both reaction and response require feedback loops.
So it begins.
Very briefly, yes. (I’m off on holiday tomorrow but will try to reply to the rest of your points when I can). The sorites argument is mentioned in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
More recently, Goff (2013) has argued that consciousness is not vague, and that this leads to a sorites-style argument for panpsychism. Very roughly if consciousness does not admit of borderline cases, then we will have to suppose that some utterly precise micro-level change—down to an exact arrangement of particles—marked the first appearance of consciousness (or the change from non-conscious to conscious embryo/foetus), and it is going to seem arbitrary that it was that utterly precise change that was responsible for this significant change in nature. Influential materialist Michael Tye (2021) converted to a form of panprotopsychism on similar grounds, arguing that ‘a key element of consciousness itself was always here, as a fundamental feature of micro-reality.’
There are others as well as Goff and Tye. Here’s a paper by Michael Antony:
The idea is that even an unconscious robot/android/zombie could have all these feedback loops and other necessary functions to survive and reproduce perfectly well.
Of course, as a panspychist, I think consciousness is necessary for anything to happen at all, even, say, a couple of hydrogens and an oxygen combining to make water.