I think single celled organisms do have private, conscious, inner life. Life is what a certain dissociative process in consciousness looks like. We can get intoe details of that. But if you look at a paramesium under a microscope, it runs from from danger. It goes after food. Wen this thing doesn't have nervous system. It's basically just gelatin inside lipid membrane a. So yes, i think private, conscious inner life A e is entirely correlated with life and metabolism.
In this expansive conversation, Michael Shermer speaks with Bernardo Kastrup, the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). Shermer and Kastrup discuss: materialism, idealism, dualism, monism, panpsychism, free will, determinism, consciousness, the problem of other minds, artificial intelligence, out of body and near-death experiences, model dependent realism, and the ultimate nature of reality.