The Sentient Cell

All species, extant and extinct, from the simplest unicellular prokaryotes to humans, have an existential consciousness. Without sentience, the first cells that emerged some 4 billion years ago would have been evolutionary dead-ends, unable to survive in the chaotic, dangerous environment in which life first appeared and evolved. In this book, Arthur Reber's theory, the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), is outlined and distinguished from those models that argue that minds could be instantiated on artificial entities and those that maintain consciousness requires a nervous system.

The CBC framework takes a novel approach to classic topics such as the origin-of-life, philosophy of mind, the role of genes, the impact of cognition, and how biological information is processed by all species. It also calls for a rethinking of a variety of issues including the moral implications of the sentient capacities of all species, how welfare concerns need to be expanded beyond where they currently are, and critically, how all life is intertwined in a coordinated cognitive ecology.

The Sentient Cell explores this revolutionary model, which updates the standard neo-Darwinian framework within which current approaches operate and examines the underlying biomolecular features that are the likely candidates for the "invention" of consciousness and outline their role in cellular life.

1. Prologue: Setting the Stage
2. The Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)
3. It's Cells All the Way Down
4. What is Life? The Vitalism-Mechanism Debate and the Origins of Life
5. Emergence and Evolution of Cells
6. The Structural and Bioelectrical Basis of Cells
7. Biophysical Basis of Cellular Sentience
8. The Biological Information Cycle: The Terms of Consciousness
9. Genes are Tools of Intelligent Cells: Biological and Evolutionary Development in the 21st Century
10. The N-space Episenome: Life as Information Management
11. Anesthetics and their Cellular Targets
12. Plant Sentience: Linking Cellular Consciousness to the Cognitive and Behavioral Features of Plant Life
13. Issues of Ethics and Morality: Entailments of the CBC