[test-it]

OK, what's your definition of consciousness?

Most animals, even single celled, need to have some way to handle the separation between "me" and "the rest of the world". I look at say my cat - it definitely has this concept somewhere in its brain circuitry. What human has is just more neurons.

[tatumizer]

If single-cell organism is conscious, and each cell of our body is a "single cell", it immediately follows from here that "our" consciousness is in fact consciousness of a certain, very specialized, cell which resides somewhere in our body. Maybe it lives in the brain, maybe elsewhere, but it's a single cell nonetheless.

[jongraehl]

It doesn't follow - the type of consciousness we experience could be different. Though if you were saying that it's absurd to call single cell 'conscious' in the sense that human brains are, then I agree.

[tatumizer]

I really think every cell is conscious, and whatever we believe to be "our" consciousness comes from a single cell. I am not alone in this opinion: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~regfjxe/awnew.htm (though I came up with this trivial idea independently, and later found the article by googling) This ME-cell gets inputs from other cells obvioously.

[Dylan16807]

What happens when that cell dies? Lots of neurons die, it must happen all the time.

[tatumizer]

Do you know that MANY cells in our body are not replaceable? E.g. those that control muscles. If this cell dies, the man dies, it's that simple. BTW, bacteria (=~cell) intelligence is an active area of research (google it, you will be surprised). That's the only form of intelligence we know. Apparently, we are not familiar with the most intelligent ones yet - they (certain species) may have very developed knowledge of things, including the art of DNA manipulation, which goes far beyond everything ME-cell (=human) knows. Why assume we are the brightest ones? It's laughable.

[yohui]

As someone with a modicum of biological knowledge, I am not aware of any single cell that is critical to human survival in the way you describe.

As for your analogy, it is true that microorganisms can perform wonderful feats, but it is a bit misleading to equate that to general intelligence. It is like saying a compiler is smarter than a programmer, because its design incorporates tricks the human may not know. (The bacteria being "designed" by the trial-and-error process of natural selection, rather than an intelligent entity, of course.)