2min chapter

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#317 – John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom

Lex Fridman Podcast

CHAPTER

Do Bacteria Have Consciousness?

I think there's no reason in principle why there couldn't be a consciousness for distributed cognition, collection, collective intelligence. I do not think that we can attribute consciousness, at least what we mean by consciousness, this kind of self-awareness to bacteria. It's conceivable that if we got some horrible Frankensteinian neural link and we linked our brains and we had the right density and dynamics and bandwidth and speed, that a group consciousness could take shape. I don't have any argument in principle against that. I'm just saying those contingent facts do not yet exist... it is implausible that consciousness exists at the level of collective intelligence.

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