Scientists estimate that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. For nearly the first billion years, the planet was inhospitable to life. But by about 3.8 billion years ago, the Earth's crust had cooled, the oceans had formed and conditions were more suitable for the formation of life. The first single celled eukaryotes, organisms whose membrane bound cells contain a nucleus and other organelles including microtubules, began to evolve about 2.1 billion years ago. Today, our planet teams with life which has evolved from these ancient eukaryotes. Their descendents, from singled celled organisms to all multi celled plants and animals, have the same life characteristics. They thrive by converting food into energy. They grow, repair, and rebuild themselves. They reproduce. They respond to their environment and adapt to survive. On some level, they are all conscious.
It’s easy to conceive that the most evolved animals, the primates, are conscious. Chimpanzees, for example, develop different practices depending on their environment, and transmit their culture as learned behaviors. Group structure, communication, and hunting practices are often common from one chimpanzee group to another. In ways, they are very similar to humans. Mental differences may only be limited to the human capacity for language. But what about the oldest of all living things, plants. Plants have evolved incredibly sensitive and complex mechanisms that guide their directional movements in response to their environment. Plants have a way of distinguishing their own roots from others of their same species as well as alien root structures. Root Brains compete for physical space by means of toxic and non-toxic chemical and electric signaling that ward off alien roots and support their own kind. Plants communicate with each other and with animals. They hear, feel, and appear to be self aware and aware of others. And then there are the smallest, least evolved, single celled organisms. There is a body of evidence that indicates that Paramecia learn and adapt. A number of studies have observed these little hairy animals swimming and escaping from capillary tubes. Test results show that with practice, they take successively less time to escape, indicative of a learning mechanism. There is substantial evidence that Paramecia learn very quickly to retreat from their enemies and to snuggle with their lovers. From the most evolved animals and plants to the least evolved singled celled organism, there is anecdotal evidence of some level of conscious in all species.
Plants and single celled organisms don’t have brains and central nervous systems like more evolved animals. How can it be then that plants can experience the sounds of predators and respond by releasing chemicals in defense? How can Paramecia sense the presence of one of its kind through the thickness of a glass wall and send photons across the glass to communicate? The common denominator can be found in the cell structure organelles of all eukaryotes, microtubules. British physicist Sir Roger Penrose and American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff proposed in the mid 1990’s that consciousness depends on quantum computations in microtubules. For many years, the proposal was not accepted by most scientists because cells, especially neurons, were considered too “warm, wet and noisy” for the seemly delicate quantum functions. Skeptics, however, have been quieted by a 2006 study that found that photosynthesis, the essential mechanism by which plants produce food from sunlight, routinely utilizes quantum coherence at warm temperatures. Further, a 2014 study discovered quantum vibrations in microtubules inside neurons. The study found that EEG rhythms (brain waves) are derived from deeper level quantum microtubule vibrations. According to Hameroff, microtubules possess crystal-like lattice structures, hollow inner cores, organizational cell functions and the capacity for information processing which make them suitable for quantum effects. Since all cells have microtubules, then all cells, whether of a plant, a human, or a singled celled animal have the ability to process qubits of information as a quantum computer.
The integrated information theory of consciousness, developed by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, explains that consciousness has information regarding its experience, and that the experience is integrated to the extent that parts of the experience are informative of each other. Therefore, if consciousness is quantifiable, the equation is weighted by some measure of integrated complexity. The more complex the integration of information collection and processing, the greater the quality of consciousness. This suggests that the quantity of consciousness in a system can be measured by the amount of integrated information it generates. Consciousness can be defined, preliminary, as the collection and processing of information that makes a difference, therefore all living things are, on some level, conscious. However, the experience of a Paramecia or a Redwood tree is quite different from that of an ant, frog, bird, chimpanzee or a human due to the specie’s system of information integration and thus the quantity and quality of its consciousness.
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