What Living Things are Conscious? | Jonathan Schooler

Added: 2026-05-04

[00:00:00]Jonathan, one of the major interesting discussions in consciousness studies now is what living things are are conscious.

[00:00:08]Uh maybe originally people thought only humans and then primates and mammals and birds and going down to invertebrates and which is now being a hot area to discuss invertebrate consciousness and then the people even go down to cells in different different ways. Uh you you've explored um how you can make inferences about what things are conscious. Uh how does that work and how would it apply to uh different living things that we see?

[00:00:38]Yeah, well, and and I need to say at the outset that this is one of the most difficult questions and I don't think there is any sort of absolutely clear way to make these types of uh determinations. I also think that it's not unreasonable to um use one's own intuition to some degree uh in this context. Uh for example, I uh infer uh that you are conscious even though I can't can't prove that you are.

[00:01:07]I infer that a dog is conscious and and much of the way that we do this is by uh seeing uh similarities in the way that uh these uh the different individuals respond to situations. When someone sees a an animal suffering, it's very compelling to think that they're actually having an experience. And and I don't want to dismiss the importance of that kind of uh intuition. Although it also becomes somewhat challenging when you take AI which you can imagine is increasingly seeming as if it's conscious, but may really be sort of tricking our systems.

[00:01:45]But coming back to animals, I think that what we can begin to do is to look for the uh characteristics of uh consciousness in uh humans in in situations where we really know it to be the case and try to identify uh particular uh patterns of uh of connection that represent consciousness and then see whether or not we can see that same patterns at lower and lower levels. Yeah. One of the challenges though is to distinguish between uh the patterns of consciousness and and and uh stimulus response with the environment.

[00:02:26]Seems like there's a fuzzy line there. Yeah. I I think that um we can be we can be tricked in these situations and like I said, there's no certain way. But for example, uh we suspect that there may be uh particular patterns of uh of resonance and cross frequency coupling uh that we can see neurologically uh in brains when they're exhibiting uh consciousness and that those patterns may then also be observed at lower levels of uh of of information modules uh that will show similar relationship to lower levels, which may then show a similar relationship to lower levels. So if you see this very uh similar kind of fractal pattern of uh of communication between systems, then it becomes increasingly plausible that the very same kind of uh centrality of experience that we're having at this level may happen at lower levels and lower levels and lower levels. So if we can find sort of these fractal patterns of information communication and organization, that may encourage us to recognize the level >> What could be some examples of those uh um resonances? Well, so uh particular uh uh cross frequency coupling where you have a lot of different cross frequency coupling at a lower level leading to a synchronization at at a singular level.

[00:03:50]So that at at one level you see this very tight coupling of uh resonance uh together. And if we see this sort of pattern of embedded fractal cooperations and connectivities, that would be consistent with the possibility that we have uh sort of a panpsychic organization. Uh uh so let's let's look at the extreme.

[00:04:15]Let's go down to a single cellular animal, paramecium or bacteria or whatever. Uh you can see the that that one cell interacting with the environment in very predictable ways. And then if you go to the organelles within that cell, it has its own information patterns and how it reacts.

[00:04:33]>> Right. So the the what would be compelling is if you found very similar organizational patterns of of information communication at the cellular level, at the organelle level, potentially at the protein level, uh to the degree that we see these these very similar patterns, that would lead me to increasingly suspect that consciousness may actually be going lower and lower levels down.