Biological mechanisms contradict AI consciousness: The spaces between the notes.

The presumption that experiential consciousness requires a nervous system and brain has been central to the debate on the possibility of developing a conscious form of artificial intelligence (AI). The likelihood of future AI consciousness or devising tools to assess its presence has focused on how AI might mimic brain-centered activities. Currently, dual general assumptions prevail: AI consciousness is primarily an issue of functional information density and integration, and no substantive technical barriers exist to prevent its achievement.

Sensing, feeling and sentience in unicellular organisms and living cells.

Cells represent the basic units of life, not only as structural building blocks, but also as cognitive agents endowed with subjective cellular feelings, sentience (consciousness), and cognitive infocomputatioal competence. Living cells act as 'Kantian Wholes': All of its parts exist for and by means of the whole system, allowing cells to use sentient agency for solving existential problems and evolve as living self-organizing units. Cell sentience is based on its excitable plasma membrane generating bioelectromagnetic fields that link to a whole-cell sensory architecture.

5-aza-2'-deoxycytidine induces telomere dysfunction in breast cancer cells.

Aims: Azacitidine, a drug that epigenetically modifies DNA, is widely used to treat haematological malignancies. However, at low doses, it demethylates DNA, and as a result, can alter gene expression. In our previous publication, we showed that low doses of azacitidine induce telomere length elongation in breast cancer cells.

Biology in the 21st century: Natural selection is cognitive selection.

Natural selection has a formal definition as the natural process that results in the survival and reproductive success of individuals or groups best adjusted to their environment, leading to the perpetuation of those genetic qualities best suited to that organism's environmental niche. Within conventional Neo-Darwinism, the largest source of those variations that can be selected is presumed to be secondary to random genetic mutations. As these arise, natural selection sustains adaptive traits in the context of a 'struggle for existence'.

The sensual cell: Feeling and affect in unicellular species.

Our previous efforts to probe the complex, rich experiential lives of unicellular species have focused on the origins of consciousness (Reber, 2019) and the biomolecular processes that underlie sentience (Reber et al., 2023). Implied, but unexplored, was the assumption that these cognitive functions and associated unicellular organismal behaviors were linked with and often driven by affect, feelings, sensual experiences.