Nick Lane

Is it too hot?

Is there a virus?

Do I have enough iron to be able to do all these reactions?

So you've got all these potentially conflicting feedback loops

And you've got to make a decision.

So you're just thinking loosely about how a bacterial cell is going to behave.

You find that you're already framing it in terms of, well, as an entity, as a cell, it's got to make some kind of decision about what to do.

It's got to integrate all this information and make a coherent decision as a self, as an entity.

Is that free will?

Probably not in any way that we recognize it, but it makes a decision in relation to its environment and the outcome is survival or not.

So what I think a feeling is then is effectively it's the electromagnetic fields generated by membrane potential, which is telling you what your physical metabolic state is in relation to the environment you're in.

But that leaves me to a question.

So if consciousness is somehow about mitochondria, are the mitochondria in that sense just really simply an ATP generating engine and you interfere with the way they make ATP and so anesthetics work by effectively giving you an energy deficit so the brain closes down?

That would be dull if it were true, but it would be useful to know if it were true.

But much more excitingly would be do mitochondria generate the kind of fields that I was talking about in bacteria that are giving some kind of indication of your status in certain mitochondria, certain neurons, and the anesthetics interfere with that.

That would be magical if that were true.

That would be a whole new direction of research, which would be fantastic.

It's very difficult measuring fields.

It's very easy to measure artifacts that you don't know what you're really doing.

We need more physicists working in this area to do the hard calculations.