It’s well accepted that human beings are conscious, but their body parts might display many of the same behaviours as conscious entities too.
This provocative idea comes from Dr. Michael Levin, a distinguished American developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University. In a recent statement, Dr. Levin challenges us to reconsider the very nature of consciousness, suggesting it might not be the exclusive domain of the brain. His work, which delves into the bioelectric signals that guide cellular behavior, has led him to a radical hypothesis: other organs in our body, like the liver, could possess their own form of consciousness.
Dr. Levin argues that if we apply the same criteria we use to infer consciousness in other people—a philosophical puzzle known as the “problem of other minds”—we might be forced to extend that courtesy to our own organs. “If we make a list of the reasons for which we tend to attribute consciousness to each other—in other words, the problem of other minds—there are a few standard reasons. If you run through those reasons, it ends up that pretty much many organs and structures in your body meet all those criteria,” he says.
He continues by detailing what these criteria entail, moving from observable behaviors to underlying mechanisms. “So to whatever extent that we are willing to attribute based on behavior—so problem-solving and valence and things like that—and mechanism—the kinds of things that we know underlie cognition in the brain, evolutionary lineage, relationships, all these kinds of things. All of those reasons should mean that you have to take very seriously the idea of consciousness in other parts of your body,” he adds.
Dr. Levin anticipates the immediate skepticism such a claim invites. The common-sense objection is, “But I don’t feel my liver being conscious.” To this, he offers a sharp counterpoint that draws on the inherent isolation of conscious experience: “And usually at this point, people say, ‘But I don’t feel that my liver’s conscious.’ Well, right. And you don’t feel that I’m conscious either. Your left hemisphere puts up a very nice discussion about what it feels like for it to be conscious, but in the absence of language, which we don’t have evidence for in these other structures, everything else is there. So I think we have to take that very seriously.”
The implications of this perspective are profound, and Dr. Levin and his team are not just stopping at the philosophical. They are actively working on technologies that could bridge this communication gap, potentially allowing us to interact with the “intelligences” within our own bodies.
“In fact, we are working on some tools to enable us to communicate with these other intelligences inside the body. So that we should be able to talk in language, with a translator interface made of AI and so on. We should be able to ask the liver questions about things it cares about and how it’s doing and its various goals and things like that,” he says.
Dr. Levin’s proposition, while startling, is rooted in his extensive research on bioelectricity—the electrical signals that cells, tissues, and organs use to communicate and make decisions. His work has shown that these bioelectric networks can store and process information, guiding the growth and regeneration of complex biological structures. From this perspective, it’s not a huge leap to suggest that these networks could also support a form of basal consciousness.
This idea aligns with a growing trend in biology and artificial intelligence to understand intelligence and cognition as phenomena that are not limited to brains. The field of “basal cognition” explores the problem-solving abilities of non-neural organisms and even individual cells. In the tech world, the development of decentralized and multi-agent AI systems, where collective intelligence emerges from the interaction of many simpler parts, offers a parallel.