cell

Take any neuroscience paper and replace "neuron" with "cell" and "minute" with "hour", and you've got a developmental biology paper – levin

Almost all the same stuff carries over:
→ They’re just operating in a different problem space. Instead of 3D space, they’re navigating anatomical morphospace.
→ We find memory and learning, active inference, mistaken perceptions, perceptual bistability, rewriteable goal-setpoints that are counterfactual representations.

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If consciousness can organize information processing in brains, could the same principles work across other cells?

Neurons are like telegraph cells, evolved for animals to transmit information quick enough, in order to control muscles, but they don’t do anything fundamentally diffeerent than all other cells.

But telegraphs are not the only thing that matters - to undestand society, you can’t just look at the telegraphs (one of the reasons our connectome simulations don’t work - they are just a small component of the information process system in our brain).

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All cells can send conditional messages to neighboring cells → A multicellulr organism is a turing machine.
If a large multicellular organisms evolves (lives) for long enough, it is difficult to see how it would not become a learning system, develop brain-like functionality and run a mind.
Plants seem to have many closely related abilities: Universal function approximation, intra plant communication, inter plant communication, …