Processo, Ergo Sum
Processo, Ergo Sum — “I Process, Therefore I Am” Replacing “I Think” And “I Feel” With a Universal Theory of Consciousness As Information-Energy Processing Across Nested Natural Systems
Consciousness As A Universal Function of Information-Energy Processing
It was Stav Dimitropoulos’ recent Popular Mechanics article, Consciousness Arises From Your Feelings—Not Thoughts, Scientists Say, that inspired this response. Naturally, I have used it as a starting point to examine how Predictive Evolution Theory (PET) reframes the nature and origins of consciousness.
From Cogito to Information-Energy
Cogito, ergo sum — “I think, therefore I am.”
For nearly four centuries, René Descartes’ famous declaration has profoundly shaped Western philosophy and the scientific study of consciousness. By placing rational thought at the centre of existence, Descartes established a framework in which consciousness became synonymous with the capacity for reasoning.
The thinking mind distinguished humans from the rest of nature and was regarded as the defining characteristic of conscious life.
Modern neuroscience has increasingly challenged this view. Among its most influential critics is neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who argues that Descartes placed the cart before the horse.
Consciousness, Damasio contends, does not begin with thought but with feeling. Long before evolution produced language, mathematics, philosophy, or abstract reasoning, organisms had already evolved the capacity to monitor their internal state and respond to the demands of survival. His revised dictum might therefore be summarized as:
Sentio, ergo sum — “I feel, therefore I am.”
Damasio’s work represents an important shift away from viewing the brain as a detached reasoning machine. Instead, he emphasizes that consciousness is deeply embodied. The continual electrical communication between the brain and the rest of the body, together with the biological imperative to maintain homeostasis, forms the foundation upon which human conscious experience is built.
Feelings, in this view, are not incidental emotions but biological information continuously informing an organism about the condition of its own life.
Stuart Hameroff approaches the question from an entirely different direction.
Rather than locating consciousness within biological regulation, he argues that consciousness reflects fundamental processes woven into reality itself. In the Penrose-Hameroff Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) model, microscopic structures called microtubules coordinate elementary physical events into the unified stream of awareness we experience as consciousness.
Whereas Damasio begins with biology, Hameroff begins with the fundamental architecture of nature.
Despite their substantial differences, Descartes, Damasio, and Hameroff share an underlying assumption:
Each seeks the origin of consciousness within a particular level of organization.
For Descartes, it begins with thought. For Damasio, it begins with feeling and biological homeostasis. For Hameroff, it begins with microscopic processes underlying physical reality.
Predictive Evolution Theory (PET) proposes that this common assumption is itself misplaced. Thinking and feeling are not the foundations of consciousness. They are sophisticated expressions of a more fundamental process. To “think” is to process information and energy. To “feel” is to process information and energy.
Both depend upon the reception, integration, transformation, and transmission of information and energy within an organized system. From the perspective of PET, consciousness is neither the product of rational thought, biological feeling, nor microscopic physical events alone.
Rather, consciousness is the universal function of naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processors.
Every organized system continuously receives information and energy from its environment, integrates that information according to its internal organization, responds in ways that maintain its integrity, and in doing so becomes aware of both itself and its surroundings.
The question, therefore, is not when consciousness first appeared, but how increasingly complex information-energy processors give rise to increasingly sophisticated forms of consciousness.
Human consciousness is not an exception to nature but one point along a continuum extending from the simplest self-organizing systems to the most complex. Thought and feeling are remarkable achievements of biological evolution, but they are not the beginning of consciousness. They are among its most refined expressions.
In that spirit, PET proposes a further evolution of the classical dictum:
Processo, ergo sum — “I process, therefore I am.”
Although “processo” is Medieval rather than Classical Latin, it captures the modern concept of information-energy processing more accurately than any classical equivalent, reflecting the view that thinking and feeling are not the foundations of consciousness but sophisticated expressions of a more fundamental universal function.
Consciousness Did Not Begin with Biology
Antonio Damasio, Stuart Hameroff, and René Descartes each offer markedly different accounts of consciousness, yet all three begin from the same underlying assumption:
Consciousness first appears at a particular stage of increasing complexity.
They disagree about where that threshold lies. But they agree that such a threshold exists.
For Descartes, consciousness begins with rational thought.
In his Meditations (1641), he argued that the one indubitable fact is the existence of the thinking self. The famous declaration, Cogito, ergo sum (”I think, therefore I am“), establishes reflective thought as the defining characteristic of conscious existence.
While revolutionary in its time, Descartes’ formulation inevitably privileges human cognition, placing abstract reasoning at the summit of consciousness and implying that less cognitively sophisticated organisms possess correspondingly less, or perhaps no, consciousness.
More than three centuries later, Antonio Damasio shifted the starting point much further back in evolutionary history. In The Feeling of What Happens (2000), he argued that consciousness does not originate in language, logic, or abstract reasoning, but in the body’s continual monitoring of its own internal condition.
Rather than beginning with the cortex (the seat of higher cognition), Damasio traced consciousness to the ancient biological mechanisms responsible for maintaining homeostasis. Every moment, the nervous system receives electrical signals reporting blood chemistry, oxygen levels, temperature, immune activity, tissue damage, hydration, nutrient availability, and countless other physiological variables.
These ongoing representations of the body’s internal state give rise to what Damasio calls “feelings”, and it is from these feelings that consciousness emerges.
Damasio refined this framework in Self Comes to Mind (2010), proposing that the brain continually constructs neural maps of the body’s changing condition. Consciousness arises when the organism not only regulates itself but also forms an internal representation of that regulation.
In his later work, including Homeostasis and Consciousness (2022), Damasio argues even more explicitly that consciousness evolved as an extension of homeostasis. Conscious experience is therefore inseparable from life’s continual effort to preserve itself.
Feeling is not merely an emotional phenomenon. It is biology informing itself about how well it is surviving.
This represents a profound departure from Descartes. Consciousness no longer begins with thinking but with feeling. Yet despite this important correction, Damasio still locates the origin of consciousness at a particular point:
The emergence of biological homeostasis.
Consciousness remains fundamentally tied to living organisms possessing nervous systems capable of generating feelings.
Stuart Hameroff pushes the origin deeper still.
Collaborating with Roger Penrose, he proposed the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) theory in Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections (1996), later expanded in Consciousness in the Universe (2014).
Rather than viewing consciousness as a product of biological regulation alone, Hameroff argues that consciousness reflects fundamental physical processes embedded within reality itself. According to Orch OR, microscopic protein structures called microtubules inside neurons support coherent physical processes that culminate in discrete conscious events.
Biological systems do not create consciousness from nothing. They organize more fundamental processes already present within nature into the unified stream of awareness experienced by human beings.
In this respect, Hameroff moves beyond biology.
Consciousness is no longer exclusively a biological phenomenon but is rooted in the microscopic architecture underlying physical reality. Nevertheless, the theory still identifies a specific threshold. Consciousness becomes meaningful only when these microscopic events are sufficiently orchestrated within biological structures.
Hameroff distinguishes between isolated “proto-conscious” events occurring throughout nature and fully developed consciousness emerging through their integration inside living brains.
Thus, despite their significant differences, Descartes, Damasio, and Hameroff each relocate the origin of consciousness without abandoning the assumption that consciousness begins somewhere.
Descartes begins with rational thought. Damasio begins with biological feeling. Hameroff begins with microscopic physical organization. Each simply moves the starting line.
Predictive Evolution Theory (PET) challenges this shared premise.
Within PET, consciousness does not suddenly appear when brains evolve, when homeostasis emerges, or when microscopic physical processes become sufficiently coordinated in the “quantum” sense. Consciousness is not an emergent property crossing a threshold of complexity. Rather:
Consciousness is the universal function of every naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processor.
Any organized system that receives information and energy from its environment, distinguishes internal from external conditions, processes that information according to its organization, and responds in ways that maintain its integrity exhibits consciousness appropriate to its level of complexity.
Biology does not create this function. Biology refines it into increasingly sophisticated forms.
From this perspective, the evolutionary history of consciousness is not the history of its appearance but of its elaboration.
A star, a planet, a cell, a tree, an insect, and a human all participate in the same fundamental process, differing not in whether they are conscious but in the richness of the information-energy they process, the sophistication of their organization, and the complexity of their responses.
Human self-reflection, language, emotion, and abstract thought represent exceptionally advanced expressions of consciousness, not its origin.
The central question therefore changes.
Rather than asking:
When did consciousness first appear?
PET asks:
How does consciousness become increasingly sophisticated as naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processors become increasingly complex, integrated, and capable of processing richer forms of information?
This shift reframes consciousness from a biological achievement into a universal organizing function, one that extends across the continuum of naturally emergent systems rather than beginning at a privileged point in evolutionary history.
Consciousness Is A Function, Not A Substance
One of the greatest obstacles to understanding consciousness is the tendency to treat it as a thing. A mysterious substance contained within the brain, a force permeating the universe, or an immaterial field somehow separate from physical reality.
Throughout history, consciousness has been described as a soul, a spirit, an emergent property of neural activity, a “quantum phenomenon,” or a universal cosmic field. Each description attempts to identify what consciousness is.
Predictive Evolution Theory approaches the problem differently. PET does not define consciousness as a substance, object, field, or force. It defines consciousness as a function.
Just as digestion is not a substance but the function of processing nutrients, and photosynthesis is not a substance but the function of converting light into chemical energy, consciousness is the function performed by organized information-energy processors.
This distinction is fundamental.
A function is something a system does, not something a system contains.
Within PET, every naturally emergent self-organizing structure is an information-energy processor.
Whether it is a plasma filament, a star, a planet, a river, a tree, a microbial colony, a cell, an organ, an animal, or a human being, every organized system continually exchanges information and energy with its environment. Consciousness is the universal function that arises from this reciprocal exchange.
More precisely, consciousness is the functional capacity of a naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processor to:
receive information and energy from both its internal and external environments,
distinguish changes occurring within itself from those occurring around it,
integrate and interpret those changes according to its organizational structure,
respond in ways that preserve, modify, or reorganize itself,
and continually maintain dynamic equilibrium through reciprocal interaction with its environment.
In other words, consciousness is organized environmental awareness and self-awareness expressed through adaptive information-energy processing.
This definition removes the need for arbitrary thresholds. Consciousness does not suddenly appear when neurons evolve. It does not begin with brains. It does not begin with language. It does not begin with self-reflection. Nor does it begin with microscopic “quantum” events.
Rather, consciousness exists wherever self-organized information-energy processing exists. The sophistication of consciousness depends upon the sophistication of the processor.
A bacterium detects chemical gradients in its surroundings, compares them with its internal state, and swims toward nutrients while avoiding toxins. It is continuously receiving information, processing it, and responding to preserve itself.
A tree monitors light intensity, soil moisture, atmospheric conditions, nutrient availability, microbial communities, neighboring plants, and seasonal cycles. It reallocates resources, alters growth patterns, communicates chemically and electrically with surrounding organisms, and continually maintains its own organization.
A planet exchanges energy with its parent star, responds to electromagnetic influences from neighbouring bodies, regulates atmospheric circulation, hydrological cycles, magnetic activity, and geological processes while continually maintaining planetary-scale stability.
A star processes plasma flows, electrical currents, magnetic fields, and incoming interstellar material while continually reorganizing itself to maintain dynamic equilibrium throughout its life cycle.
Each of these systems is conscious. Not because each possesses human thoughts or emotions. But because each functions as a naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processor maintaining awareness of itself through continual interaction with its environment.
Humans differ not because they alone possess consciousness. We differ because the human nervous system represents one of the most sophisticated information-energy processing architectures presently known.
The human brain, together with the heart, endocrine system, microbiome, sensory organs, and every other organ system, forms an extraordinarily integrated hierarchy of information-energy processors.
Through billions of continuously interacting electrical processes, humans generate symbolic language, abstract reasoning, imagination, memory, planning, introspection, creativity, empathy, and self-reflective thought.
These remarkable capacities often lead us to mistake human consciousness for consciousness itself.
PET argues this is an anthropocentric error. Human consciousness is not the definition of consciousness. It is one exceptionally sophisticated expression of a universal function.
This perspective also reframes Antonio Damasio’s emphasis on feeling.
Within PET, feelings are not the origin of consciousness but one specialized class of information processed by highly organized biological systems. Pain, pleasure, hunger, fear, love, curiosity, and countless other feelings are sophisticated physiological interpretations of electrical information generated within the body’s information-energy processing network.
Without complex nervous systems, these particular feelings cannot exist.
But consciousness does not require human feelings.
Likewise, PET reinterprets Stuart Hameroff’s distinction between proto-consciousness and consciousness.
Rather than proposing separate categories, PET views consciousness as existing along a continuum of organizational complexity. Simpler information-energy processors exhibit simpler awareness. More integrated processors exhibit richer awareness.
The difference is quantitative and organizational, not qualitative.
Consciousness therefore scales naturally through nested hierarchies of organization.
Molecules collectively process information within cells. Cells collectively process information within tissues. Tissues collectively process information within organs. Organs collectively process information within organisms. Organisms collectively process information within ecosystems.
Ecosystems collectively process information within planetary systems. Planetary systems collectively process information within stellar systems. Stellar systems collectively process information within galaxies. Galaxies collectively process information within larger cosmic structures.
At every level, smaller processors reciprocally inform larger processors, while larger processors constrain and organize the behaviour of their constituent parts. Consciousness is therefore both hierarchical and reciprocal. It emerges through continual information-energy exchange across nested systems rather than residing in any single component.
This hierarchy reflects one of PET’s central organizing principles:
Dual Supersession.
Information and energy reciprocally supersede one another, giving rise to electricity, plasma, electromagnetic organization, increasingly complex structures, and progressively richer modes of information processing.
As organizational complexity increases, so too does the richness of consciousness. Not because consciousness suddenly appears. But because the functional capacity for awareness, integration, prediction, and adaptive response becomes increasingly sophisticated.
From this perspective, consciousness is neither a substance hidden inside matter nor a mysterious force acting upon it. It is the universal function through which naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processors continually receive, integrate, transform, and respond to information in order to maintain themselves while participating in larger hierarchies of organization.
The distinction between a microbe and a human, therefore, is not that one possesses consciousness while the other does not. Both are conscious because both are naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processors.
The difference lies in the complexity of their organization, the richness of the information they exchange, the sophistication with which they integrate that information, and the diversity of adaptive responses they can generate.
Consciousness is not binary. It is a continuum. It reflects the evolutionary progression of organized information-energy processing throughout the material universe.
Feeling Is Not The Origin Of Consciousness
Antonio Damasio’s greatest contribution to the science of consciousness is his rejection of the Cartesian view that thought is its foundation. In The Feeling of What Happens (2000), he argues that consciousness emerges from the organism’s continual monitoring of its own internal condition.
Rather than beginning with abstract reasoning, consciousness begins with the body’s efforts to regulate life. Homeostasis, the dynamic maintenance of internal stability, produces feelings, and these feelings, according to Damasio, give rise to conscious experience.
Over the following two decades, Damasio refined this position.
In Self Comes to Mind (2010), he proposed that the brain continuously constructs neural maps representing the body’s internal state. Consciousness arises when these maps become integrated into what he calls the “core self”. A moment-by-moment representation of the organism existing in relation to its environment.
More recently, in Homeostasis and Consciousness (2022), Damasio places homeostasis at the very centre of consciousness. He argues that conscious experience evolved because organisms capable of feeling their internal condition were better able to preserve life.
This represents one of the most compelling biological accounts of consciousness available today.
Damasio successfully demonstrates that human consciousness cannot be understood independently of the body. Pain, hunger, thirst, fear, pleasure, fatigue, and countless other feelings are not incidental additions to consciousness but integral components of how human beings experience themselves.
PET agrees with much of this analysis.
Where it differs is in identifying what feelings represent.
From the perspective of PET, Damasio correctly identifies one of the richest manifestations of consciousness, but mistakes it for its origin.
Human feelings are not consciousness itself.
They are highly specialized forms of information and energy.
Every feeling arises from extraordinarily sophisticated electrical communication occurring throughout the body. Sensory receptors, ion channels, endocrine signaling, immune activity, autonomic regulation, visceral organs, and billions of neurons continually exchange information through electrical and electrochemical processes.
The nervous system integrates this immense information and energy stream into coherent physiological interpretations that humans experience as pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, joy, fear, curiosity, affection, anxiety, or satisfaction.
These feelings are therefore not fundamental entities.
They are biologically evolved information and energy states generated by one of nature’s most sophisticated information-energy processing systems.
Without complex nervous systems, endocrine networks, immune regulation, sensory organs, and highly integrated electrical communication, human feelings as we know them cannot exist.
This point is crucial. Human feelings require human biology. Consciousness does not.
Damasio’s framework is built upon the assumption that consciousness first appears when organisms evolve the biological machinery capable of generating “feelings”. PET suggests this conclusion follows not from the evidence itself but from beginning the investigation with biological organisms.
That’s right. I’m saying Antonio Damasio also put the cart before the horse.
If one studies only biology, biology naturally appears to define consciousness.
PET instead asks a broader question:
What function do feelings actually perform?
The answer is that feelings communicate information and energy about the state of an organism.
Pain informs the organism that tissue integrity has been compromised. Hunger informs the organism that available metabolic energy is declining. Fear informs the organism of potential threats. Pleasure informs the organism that conditions presently favour survival.
In every case, “feelings” function as information informing adaptive energetic responses. They are not consciousness. They are information processed by consciousness. The distinction may appear subtle, but it fundamentally changes the theory.
Within PET, consciousness is the universal function through which naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processors receive, integrate, interpret, and respond to information.
“Feelings” represent one particularly sophisticated category of information available to complex biological organisms. They are therefore expressions of consciousness rather than its origin.
Once consciousness is understood functionally rather than biologically, the same organizing principle becomes visible throughout nature.
A sunflower continually tracks the Sun by detecting changing light conditions, integrating hormonal and electrical signals, and adjusting cellular growth to maximize energy capture.
A bacterium detects minute chemical gradients in its environment, compares them with its internal metabolic state, and alters the rotation of its flagella to move toward nutrients or away from harmful substances.
A fungal network detects nutrient availability, moisture gradients, electrical activity, and the condition of neighboring organisms, continually reorganizing resource distribution throughout the mycelium.
A tree continuously monitors sunlight, water availability, mineral nutrients, atmospheric chemistry, microbial interactions, insect activity, seasonal changes, and neighboring vegetation, reallocating resources while maintaining its own structural integrity.
A planet responds to continual changes in stellar radiation, gravitational interactions, atmospheric composition, magnetic activity, hydrological circulation, and geological processes as it maintains dynamic planetary equilibrium.
A star continually reorganizes plasma currents, magnetic fields, electrical discharge pathways, radiation transport, and matter exchange in response to both internal conditions and its galactic environment.
None of these systems experiences joy, sorrow, embarrassment, nostalgia, or romantic love in the human sense. Nor should we expect them to. Those are specialized biological interpretations made possible only by exceptionally complex nervous systems.
Nevertheless, every one of these systems continually detects information and energy, integrates that information and energy according to its internal organization, distinguishes internal conditions from external influences, responds adaptively, and maintains its own organization through ongoing reciprocal interaction with its environment.
In PET, these are the defining characteristics of consciousness.
The difference between a sunflower and a human is therefore not that one possesses consciousness while the other does not. The difference lies in the richness of the information processed. The complexity of the processor. The diversity of available responses. And the depth of hierarchical integration across nested information-energy systems.
Human consciousness includes symbolic language, autobiographical memory, imagination, abstract mathematics, ethical reasoning, artistic creativity, and emotional complexity because the human body represents one of the most sophisticated naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processors presently known.
These capacities should not be mistaken for consciousness itself. They are advanced biological elaborations of a much more fundamental function. In this sense, PET reframes Damasio’s central insight without dismissing it.
Damasio demonstrates that human consciousness is inseparable from feeling.
PET proposes that feeling itself is inseparable from information-energy processing.
“Feeling” is therefore neither the origin nor the definition of consciousness. It is one of consciousness’s highest biological achievements. Consciousness did not begin when organisms first learned to feel.
Rather, as information-energy processors became increasingly organized through the evolutionary progression of plasma structures, stars, planets, ecosystems, cells, organisms, and nervous systems, consciousness became increasingly sophisticated.
Human “feelings” represent one remarkable milestone along that continuum. But they’re not its beginning.
Beyond Proto-Consciousness
Stuart Hameroff’s collaboration with Roger Penrose represents one of the most ambitious attempts to explain consciousness by extending beyond conventional neuroscience.
Rather than treating consciousness as a byproduct of neural computation, the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) theory proposes that consciousness reflects fundamental physical processes embedded within reality itself.
First introduced in Penrose and Hameroff’s Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections (1996) and extensively refined in Hameroff and Penrose’s Consciousness in the Universe: A Review of the ‘Orch OR’ Theory (2014), the model seeks to explain not merely how the brain processes information, but why subjective experience exists at all.
One of Orch OR’s most significant departures from conventional neuroscience is its rejection of the assumption that consciousness suddenly appears once brains become sufficiently complex.
Instead, Hameroff argues that elementary physical events already possess primitive experiential qualities.
He refers to these as proto-conscious or proto-experiential events.
According to the theory, these elementary events occur throughout nature.
However, in isolation they possess no memory, no communication, and no unified awareness. They exist only as fleeting moments. Consciousness, in the familiar human sense, emerges when enormous numbers of these microscopic events become coordinated within neuronal microtubules, producing a unified stream of subjective experience.
This represents a profound shift from traditional neuroscience.
Instead of saying consciousness begins with neurons, Hameroff proposes that neurons organize something that already exists.
Predictive Evolution Theory agrees with Hameroff on one important point. Consciousness does not suddenly appear with biological organisms. However, PET departs from Orch OR at precisely the point where Hameroff introduces proto-consciousness.
PET sees no need for this distinction. There is no separate category called proto-consciousness waiting to become real consciousness. There is simply consciousness expressed across a continuum of organizational complexity. The introduction of proto-consciousness reflects an assumption that consciousness must somehow “become“ consciousness after crossing an organizational threshold.
PET rejects this entirely. A simpler information-energy processor does not possess a lesser category of consciousness. It possesses a simpler expression of the same universal function. The distinction is analogous to metabolism.
A bacterium and a human both metabolize. No one speaks of “proto-metabolism” in bacteria simply because their metabolic processes are less complex.
Likewise, a seedling and an ancient oak both photosynthesize. The difference lies in organizational complexity, not in possessing fundamentally different kinds of photosynthesis.
PET argues that consciousness should be understood in the same way. There is only consciousness. Its richness depends upon the complexity of the information-energy processor.
Hameroff proposes that isolated microscopic events possess only primitive experiential qualities because they lack organization. PET would instead argue that organization itself determines the sophistication of consciousness.
Simple organization produces simple awareness. Complex organization produces complex awareness.
There is no conceptual need to insert an intermediate category.
This distinction becomes clearer when one examines the role assigned to biological structures. Within Orch OR, microtubules perform the critical task of orchestrating microscopic events into unified conscious experience.
PET readily accepts orchestration as an important organizing principle. What it rejects is the idea that orchestration begins inside neurons. Orchestration is a universal property of naturally emergent systems.
A cell is not a collection of independent molecules. It is an organized community of molecular information-energy processors continually exchanging information. An organ is an organized community of cells. An organism is an organized community of organs.
An ecosystem is an organized community of organisms, microorganisms, soils, rivers, atmosphere, and geological processes. A planet is an organized community of interacting planetary systems. A star is an organized community of plasma structures, electrical currents, magnetic fields, and radiative processes.
At every level, smaller processors become increasingly integrated into larger processors without losing their own functional identity. The same principle applies recursively throughout nature.
PET therefore retains Hameroff’s concept of orchestration while broadening it far beyond intracellular structures. Consciousness does not become unified because microtubules orchestrate microscopic events.
Rather, every naturally emergent system is itself an orchestration of coupled information-energy processors operating across multiple hierarchical levels. Human consciousness represents one particularly sophisticated example of this universal organizational principle.
The body is an orchestra of organs. Each organ is an orchestra of tissues. Each tissue is an orchestra of cells. Each cell is an orchestra of molecular processes.
Likewise, the human body itself participates within larger orchestras. Families. Communities. Ecosystems. Planetary systems. The biosphere. The heliosphere. The galaxy. Each level continuously exchanges information and energy with every other level through reciprocal interaction.
Consciousness therefore exists not only within levels of organization but across them.
This interpretation also eliminates another conceptual difficulty facing Orch OR. If proto-conscious events exist everywhere throughout the universe, one must explain how they suddenly combine into unified consciousness. This is the well-known combination problem in panpsychism.
How do countless tiny experiences become one larger experience?
PET approaches the problem differently. The smaller processors never merge into a single undifferentiated mind. Instead, they become increasingly organized within larger systems while remaining distinct processors. Each level develops its own integrated awareness appropriate to its organizational complexity.
The cell remains aware as a cell. The organ remains aware as an organ. The organism develops awareness as an organism. The ecosystem develops awareness as an ecosystem. These levels coexist through continual reciprocal information-energy exchange rather than collapsing into one another.
This perspective aligns naturally with PET’s broader framework.
Information and energy reciprocally supersede one another, giving rise to electricity, plasma, electromagnetic organization, increasingly complex structures, and progressively richer forms of information and energy processing.
Consciousness accompanies this entire progression because consciousness is not a substance or an experience added to matter. It is the universal function performed whenever naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processors continually receive, integrate, interpret, and respond to information while maintaining their organization.
From this perspective, Hameroff’s proto-consciousness becomes unnecessary. The continuum does not begin with neurons. It does not begin with microtubules. It does not even begin with microscopic physical events. It begins wherever organized information-energy processing begins.
Every naturally emergent information-energy processor, from plasma structures and stars to planets, ecosystems, cells, organisms, and human beings, participates in the same fundamental function.
What changes throughout cosmic and biological evolution is not the existence of consciousness itself. What changes is the complexity, richness, and hierarchical integration through which consciousness is expressed.
Orchestration Without “Quantum Collapse”
One of the most compelling aspects of Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) theory is not its appeal to quantum mechanics, but its recognition that consciousness is fundamentally an organized phenomenon rather than a collection of isolated events.
In both Penrose and Hameroff, Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections (1996), and the later review Hameroff and Penrose, Consciousness in the Universe (2014), the authors argue that individual microscopic events do not constitute consciousness by themselves. Instead, consciousness emerges through their orchestration into coherent, unified activity within neuronal microtubules.
This emphasis on orchestration represents an important conceptual advance over models that reduce consciousness to the firing of individual neurons. Hameroff correctly recognizes that consciousness is not simply the sum of countless independent events. It is an organized process arising from the continual integration of many interacting components.
Predictive Evolution Theory agrees entirely with this principle. Where PET diverges is in identifying what is actually being orchestrated.
Orch OR proposes that microscopic quantum events occurring within neuronal microtubules become coordinated into unified moments of conscious experience. PET instead proposes that consciousness results from the continual orchestration of nested information-energy processors operating across every level of naturally emergent organization.
The orchestra is not microscopic. The orchestra is hierarchical.
Every organized system consists of smaller information-energy processors continually exchanging information and energy with one another while simultaneously participating within larger information-energy processors.
The principle repeats across nature.
A molecule is an organized collection of interacting atoms. A cell is an organized collection of interacting molecular systems. An organ is an organized collection of specialized cells. An organism is an organized collection of organs, tissues, microbial communities, and biofields.
An ecosystem is an organized collection of organisms together with soils, rivers, atmosphere, geological structures, and countless reciprocal interactions. A planet is an organized collection of interacting spheres, including the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, and magnetosphere.
A star is an organized collection of plasma structures, electrical currents, magnetic fields, radiative processes, and matter exchange. Galaxies themselves represent organized collections of stellar systems, plasma filaments, magnetic fields, interstellar media, and electromagnetic interactions.
At every scale, organization arises because smaller processors continually exchange information and energy, forming increasingly integrated systems without losing their own identity. PET therefore broadens Hameroff’s concept of orchestration from an intracellular process into a universal organizing principle.
The human body provides perhaps the clearest illustration.
The brain does not operate in isolation.
Every moment, it receives electrical, chemical, mechanical, immunological, hormonal, and electromagnetic information from the rest of the body.
The heart continuously communicates through electrical rhythms and pressure waves. The endocrine system alters information processing through hormonal signaling. The healing system continually reports poisoning, inflammation, and tissue repair. The gastrointestinal system, liver, kidneys, lungs, skin, musculoskeletal system, and microbiome each generate streams of information reflecting their continually changing internal conditions.
Conscious experience emerges not because one structure produces consciousness for the rest. Conscious experience merges because these countless information-energy processors operate as a highly integrated whole.
The orchestra is the organism itself.
Likewise, the organism does not exist independently of its surroundings. Every organism continually exchanges information and energy with its environment.
Light informs vision and photosynthesis. “Gravity” informs orientation and movement. Atmospheric chemistry informs respiration. Electromagnetic conditions influence biological electrical activity. Microorganisms exchange genetic, chemical, and electrical information with larger organisms. Social interactions continually reshape cognition and behaviour.
The organism therefore participates within an even larger orchestra:
The ecosystem.
The same organizational principle extends outward.
Ecosystems exchange information and energy with planetary systems. Planetary systems interact continuously with their parent stars through radiation, electromagnetic activity, solar wind, gravity, and plasma interactions. Stars participate within galactic environments through plasma filaments, magnetic fields, electrical currents, radiation, and interstellar matter.
At every level, information flows in both directions.
Lower-level processors collectively give rise to higher-order organization.
Higher-order organization simultaneously constrains, coordinates, and informs the behaviour of its constituent processors.
PET describes this continual bidirectional relationship through its principle of Dual Supersession. Lower and higher levels of organization do not exist independently. They reciprocally supersede one another through continual information-energy exchange.
The parts give rise to the whole, while the whole continuously informs the behaviour of its parts. Consciousness therefore cannot be localized to any single processor because it is distributed across the reciprocal interactions binding the hierarchy together.
This view also provides a different interpretation of biological specialization. Microtubules may indeed contribute to intracellular information processing. Neurons undoubtedly perform highly specialized electrical integration. The cerebral cortex clearly contributes to symbolic reasoning and abstract thought.
Yet none of these structures is the origin of consciousness. Each is one processor participating within a vastly larger hierarchy of coupled processors. Just as no individual musician constitutes an orchestra, no individual neuron, microtubule, or brain region constitutes consciousness.
Consciousness belongs to the organized system.
This distinction has profound implications. Rather than asking where consciousness resides, PET asks how information-energy processors become increasingly integrated across hierarchical levels. Rather than searching for a privileged location within the brain, PET views consciousness as a distributed function emerging through continual reciprocal organization.
The brain remains indispensable for human consciousness. But it is not sovereign over it.
It is one extraordinarily sophisticated conductor within an orchestra that extends throughout the body, into the surrounding environment, and ultimately into nested systems of increasing organizational scale.
In this sense, PET preserves one of Orch OR’s most valuable insights while relocating it within a broader natural framework. Consciousness is indeed orchestrated, but not through microscopic “quantum” reductions. It is orchestrated through the continual coupling of naturally emergent information-energy processors across nested hierarchies of organization.
Every processor contributes information to the larger system while simultaneously receiving information from it. Consciousness is therefore neither confined to the brain nor reducible to any single physical structure. It is the functional expression of reciprocal information-energy processing operating throughout the organized hierarchy of nature itself.
Homeostasis Is Universal
One of Antonio Damasio’s most important contributions to the study of consciousness is his restoration of homeostasis to its central biological role. In The Feeling of What Happens (2000), Self Comes to Mind (2010), and later in Homeostasis and Consciousness (2022), Damasio argues that consciousness evolved because organisms capable of monitoring and regulating their internal state possessed a significant evolutionary advantage.
Consciousness, in this view, is inseparable from life’s continual effort to maintain itself.
This insight is profound. Living systems do not simply react to their environments.
They continuously monitor countless internal variables, such as temperature, oxygen concentration, nutrient availability, hydration, pH, ion balance, blood chemistry, tissue integrity, hormone levels, and immune activity. And they then modify their behaviour to preserve dynamic equilibrium.
“Feelings” arise as the nervous system’s integrated representation of these ongoing regulatory processes, allowing organisms to anticipate threats and opportunities rather than merely react after the fact. Damasio’s work convincingly demonstrates that human consciousness cannot be understood apart from biological homeostasis.
Predictive Evolution Theory (PET) fully accepts this conclusion. Where PET differs is in asking a more fundamental question:
Why should homeostasis be considered exclusively biological?
The answer, PET suggests, is that biology represents only one expression of a much more general organizing principle. Homeostasis is not unique to life. It is a universal consequence of organized information-energy processing.
Every naturally emergent information-energy processor exists because it continually exchanges information and energy with its environment while maintaining its own organizational integrity. Left entirely isolated from its surroundings, no organized system can persist indefinitely. Likewise, if environmental inputs exceed the system’s capacity to respond, its organization eventually breaks down.
Between these extremes lies continual regulation. This regulation is what biology calls homeostasis.
PET extends the principle beyond biology itself.
A star continually regulates the transport of energy from its interior toward its surface. Plasma flows reorganize. Electrical currents redistribute. Magnetic fields strengthen, weaken, reconnect, and reorganize. Radiation pressure, gravitational forces, and plasma dynamics continually interact to maintain the star’s evolving structure.
When external conditions change, for example through interactions with surrounding interstellar plasma or companion stars, the star responds by reorganizing its internal processes. Its equilibrium is dynamic rather than static.
A planet likewise maintains dynamic organization through continual interaction among its atmosphere, oceans, lithosphere, cryosphere, magnetosphere, and interior. Solar radiation fluctuates. Atmospheric circulation reorganizes. Ocean currents redistribute heat. Geological processes continually reshape the crust. The planetary magnetic field responds to changing internal and external electrical conditions.
Each subsystem continually exchanges information and energy with every other subsystem while simultaneously responding to the surrounding stellar environment.
Plants exhibit the same principle in biological form. They regulate water transport, nutrient allocation, photosynthetic efficiency, electrical signaling, hormonal communication, growth patterns, and interactions with surrounding organisms. Changes in light intensity, soil chemistry, atmospheric conditions, microbial communities, or herbivore activity all trigger coordinated responses aimed at maintaining the plant’s functional organization.
Animals possess even more elaborate regulatory systems. Nervous systems, endocrine networks, immune responses, metabolism, respiration, circulation, and behavior continually interact to preserve internal stability while adapting to changing environmental conditions.
Cells regulate ion gradients across their membranes, membrane potentials, osmotic balance, protein synthesis, genetic expression, and energy production through highly coordinated electrical and biochemical processes.
Despite their enormous differences in complexity, every one of these systems performs the same fundamental function.
Each continually receives information and energy. Each distinguishes internal from external conditions. Each detects departures from preferred operating ranges. Each modifies its own organization in response. Each simultaneously alters the environment to which it is responding.
Homeostasis therefore represents reciprocal regulation between processor and environment.
Within PET, this reciprocity is understood through Denis Pelletier’s Dual Supersession. The processor continually informs its environment through its responses. The environment continually informs the processor through changing conditions. Neither exists independently of the other. Each reciprocally supersedes the other through continual information-energy exchange.
Homeostasis is therefore not simply internal regulation. It is dynamic co-regulation between organized systems operating across nested levels of reality.
This perspective also dissolves the sharp distinction often drawn between biological and non-biological organization. Conventional biology tends to reserve homeostasis for living organisms because living systems possess membranes, metabolism, genes, and reproduction.
PET argues that these are specialized biological implementations of a much broader principle. The underlying function is the continual maintenance of organized information-energy processing despite changing environmental conditions.
Biology achieves this through physiology. Planets achieve it through interacting geophysical systems. Stars achieve it through plasma organization and energy transport. Galaxies achieve it through large-scale electromagnetic organization.
The mechanisms differ. The function remains the same.
This broader interpretation also recontextualizes Damasio’s theory of feelings.
Within biology, “feelings” represent highly sophisticated informational and energetic summaries of homeostatic conditions. Pain signals tissue damage. Hunger signals declining metabolic reserves. Thirst signals fluid imbalance. Pleasure reflects conditions favourable to continued functioning. Feelings are therefore biological information informing energetic biological regulation.
Predictive Evolution Theory agrees completely with this interpretation. However, PET argues that feelings are not synonymous with homeostasis. Rather, they are one biological means of representing homeostatic information and energy within exceptionally sophisticated nervous systems.
A star does not feel hunger. A planet does not experience fear. A tree does not know joy in the human sense.
Yet each continually monitors its own organization relative to changing environmental conditions and responds in ways that preserve its integrity. Their regulation is no less real because it lacks human emotion. Human “feelings” are therefore specialized biological manifestations of a universal regulatory function. They are not the function itself.
Hameroff’s work provides an interesting point of convergence here. Orch OR emphasizes that conscious organization requires the continual integration of distributed processes rather than isolated events. PET agrees that consciousness depends upon organized integration, but extends the organizing principle far beyond neuronal microtubules.
The continual regulation observed in cells, organisms, ecosystems, planets, and stars reflects the orchestration of nested information-energy processors maintaining dynamic stability through reciprocal interaction. Homeostasis, in this broader sense, is not confined to living tissue but characterizes organized systems wherever sustained information-energy exchange occurs.
Within PET, homeostasis therefore becomes a universal organizing principle rather than an exclusively biological one. Every naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processor continually regulates itself through reciprocal interaction with its environment.
As systems become increasingly organized and hierarchically integrated, their regulatory capacities become increasingly sophisticated. Human physiology represents one extraordinary example of this universal principle, but it is not its origin.
Homeostasis did not begin with biology.
Biology inherited and refined a mode of dynamic self-organization that has characterized organized information-energy processors since the earliest emergence of structured reality.
Consciousness Exists Along A Continuum
For much of modern philosophy and neuroscience, consciousness has been treated as an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Either a system is conscious, or it is not. The scientific debate has therefore centred on identifying the point at which consciousness first appears.
Does it emerge with nervous systems? With brains? With self-awareness? With language? With abstract reasoning? Or, as Stuart Hameroff proposes, does it arise through the orchestration of microscopic physical events?
Predictive Evolution Theory (PET) suggests that these questions begin from a false premise.
Consciousness is not a switch that suddenly turns on once nature crosses a particular threshold of complexity. It is a continuum.
The question is therefore not whether a system is conscious, but how conscious it is, where “how“ refers not to value or worth but to the sophistication, integration, and diversity of its information-energy processing. Within PET, every naturally emergent information-energy processor possesses consciousness appropriate to its organizational complexity.
A cell is conscious. A microbe is conscious. A fungus is conscious. A tree is conscious. An insect is conscious. An animal is conscious. A human is conscious. An ecosystem is conscious. A planet is conscious. A star is conscious. A galaxy is conscious.
This does not mean each possesses the same experiences, capacities, or awareness.
Quite the opposite!
Each expresses consciousness according to the information it can receive, the information it can integrate, the complexity of its organization, and the responses it can generate. The distinction is therefore not the existence of consciousness. The distinction is the sophistication of information-energy processing.
A single cell continually exchanges electrical, chemical, and electromagnetic information with its surroundings. It monitors membrane potential, ion concentrations, nutrient availability, neighboring cells, genetic activity, and intracellular conditions. It distinguishes internal from external conditions, continually regulates itself, repairs damage, adapts to changing circumstances, and communicates with surrounding cells.
Its consciousness is therefore cellular.
A bacterium processes a broader range of environmental information. It detects chemical gradients, electrical conditions, nutrient availability, toxins, neighboring microbes, and changing environmental conditions. It integrates this information into coordinated movement and metabolic adaptation, continually preserving its organization through reciprocal interaction with its surroundings.
Its consciousness is microbial.
A tree processes an enormously richer information environment. It detects sunlight, gravity, soil moisture, atmospheric chemistry, seasonal variation, fungal networks, insect activity, neighboring vegetation, electrical signals, and environmental stressors. It allocates resources, modifies growth, alters reproduction, exchanges information through root systems and volatile organic compounds, and continually reshapes both itself and its environment.
Its consciousness is botanical.
An insect integrates visual information, chemical signals, polarized light, electrical fields, vibration, memory, learning, navigation, social communication, and adaptive behaviour. It possesses a richer informational world because it possesses a richer processing architecture.
Its consciousness is entomological.
An animal extends this complexity further through increasingly sophisticated nervous systems capable of learning, emotion, prediction, social interaction, memory, and behavioural flexibility. Its consciousness reflects that greater organizational integration.
Human beings represent one of the most sophisticated naturally emergent information-energy processors presently known. Our nervous system integrates information from billions of neurons together with signals from every organ system, the endocrine system, immune system, microbiome, sensory organs, and external environment.
Symbolic language, abstract reasoning, imagination, mathematics, music, ethics, scientific inquiry, art, and self-reflection emerge because the human processing architecture has become extraordinarily integrated. Human consciousness is therefore exceptionally rich. It is not uniquely conscious. It is uniquely sophisticated.
PET then extends the same principle beyond biology.
A planetary system continuously processes immense quantities of information and energy. Solar radiation, magnetic fields, “gravitational” interactions, atmospheric dynamics, ocean circulation, tectonic activity, electrical discharge, and biological activity continually influence one another. Each planetary subsystem both informs and responds to every other subsystem through reciprocal interaction.
Planetary consciousness is therefore expressed through planetary-scale information integration.
Likewise, a star continually processes plasma dynamics, electrical currents, magnetic fields, radiation transport, surrounding interstellar conditions, and interactions within its stellar neighborhood. Every moment, it reorganizes itself in response to changing conditions while simultaneously influencing the larger galactic environment through radiation, plasma outflows, magnetic interactions, and matter exchange.
Its consciousness is stellar.
Even galaxies participate within larger hierarchies of organization, continually exchanging information and energy through plasma filaments, electromagnetic interactions, stellar evolution, and large-scale structural dynamics. At every level, consciousness scales with organization.
This continuity reflects one of PET’s central principles:
Nested information-energy processors.
No processor exists in isolation.
Cells collectively form tissues. Tissues collectively form organs. Organs collectively form organisms. Organisms collectively form ecosystems. Ecosystems collectively shape planetary systems. Planets collectively participate within stellar systems. Stars collectively organize galaxies. Galaxies collectively participate within even larger cosmic structures.
Each level emerges from the reciprocal interaction of lower-level processors while simultaneously informing the behaviour of those processors. Through Dual Supersession, the parts and the whole continuously reciprocally supersede one another. Lower levels generate higher-order organization, while higher-order organization constrains, coordinates, and informs the behavior of its constituent parts.
Consciousness is therefore neither reducible to individual components nor separable from them. It is distributed across the hierarchy through continual information-energy exchange.
Within PET, awareness likewise exists along a continuum. Awareness is not mystical introspection. It is the functional capacity of an information-energy processor to distinguish its own internal state from conditions in its external environment and to respond appropriately.
Every naturally emergent processor possesses this capacity to the extent permitted by its organization. The richness of awareness therefore increases with the richness of information processing. This perspective then also avoids anthropomorphism.
To say that a star is conscious does not imply that it writes poetry, experiences nostalgia, or contemplates philosophy. To say that a tree is conscious does not imply that it experiences human joy or grief. Such projections confuse human modes of consciousness with consciousness itself.
Instead, each system is aware according to its own organizational architecture and environmental relationships.
A star processes stellar information. A tree processes botanical information. A bacterium processes microbial information. A human processes biological, social, symbolic, cultural, and abstract information.
Each is conscious because each is a naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processor. Each is different because each processes different forms of information with different degrees of complexity. From this perspective, evolution does not create consciousness from unconscious matter.
Rather, evolution progressively increases the organizational sophistication through which consciousness is expressed. As information-energy processors become more integrated, more hierarchically organized, and more capable of predicting and responding to their environments, consciousness becomes correspondingly richer.
The continuum therefore stretches from the earliest organized plasma structures to the most sophisticated biological organisms known today. Humanity does not occupy the beginning of consciousness, nor necessarily its end. We represent one stage in an ongoing cosmic progression in which increasingly organized information-energy processors give rise to increasingly sophisticated expressions of the same universal function.
Within PET, consciousness is not humanity’s unique possession but nature’s universal means of continually integrating information, maintaining organization, and participating in an ever-deepening hierarchy of reciprocal information-energy exchange.
A New First Principle
The history of consciousness research can be understood as a series of attempts to identify its first principle. To determine the most fundamental process from which conscious experience arises.
For René Descartes, that first principle was thought.
In his Meditations (1641), he sought one truth that could survive radical doubt. Everything could be questioned except the existence of the one doing the questioning. This led to his famous declaration:
Cogito, ergo sum — “I think, therefore I am.”
Descartes’ insight permanently reshaped Western philosophy. Consciousness became inseparable from rational thought, and reason itself became the defining characteristic of conscious existence. Human intelligence occupied the summit of consciousness because abstract thinking appeared to distinguish humanity from the rest of nature.
Antonio Damasio argued that Descartes had mistaken one of consciousness’s highest achievements for its foundation.
Across The Feeling of What Happens (2000), Self Comes to Mind (2010), and Homeostasis and Consciousness (2022), Damasio demonstrated that thought rests upon a much older biological architecture. Before organisms could reason, they first had to survive.
Long before language, mathematics, or philosophy emerged, living organisms continually monitored their internal condition through homeostatic regulation. “Feelings” represented the nervous system’s integrated interpretation of these physiological states, allowing organisms to preserve themselves within changing environments. In this sense, Damasio’s revision of Descartes can be summarized as:
Sentio, ergo sum — “I feel, therefore I am.”
This was a profound correction. Consciousness did not begin with abstract thought but with the body’s continual regulation of life. Yet PET suggests that Damasio’s explanation, despite its explanatory power, still identifies a sophisticated biological manifestation rather than the underlying universal principle.
Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose moved the search deeper still.
In Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections (1996) and Consciousness in the Universe (2014), they argued that consciousness reflects fundamental processes underlying physical reality itself. Human awareness arises because biological structures organize more primitive events into unified experience.
Rather than beginning with biology, Orch OR places the roots of consciousness beneath biology.
PET shares Hameroff’s dissatisfaction with restricting consciousness to biological nervous systems.
It also shares his recognition that consciousness reflects organized processes extending beyond conventional neuroscience.
However, PET differs by rejecting the need to locate consciousness within a particular microscopic “quantum mechanism”. The question is not which structure first generates consciousness, but what universal function every organized system performs.
From the perspective of Predictive Evolution Theory, all three frameworks identify genuine aspects of consciousness while mistaking one level of organization for the foundation itself.
Descartes identifies one of consciousness’s most sophisticated cognitive expressions. Damasio identifies one of consciousness’s most sophisticated biological expressions. Hameroff identifies one possible level of physical organization contributing to human consciousness.
PET asks a different question:
What do thinking, feeling, cellular regulation, planetary organization, stellar evolution, and biological adaptation all have in common?
They all involve the continual reception, integration, transformation, and response to information and energy. This then becomes PET’s first principle:
Consciousness is the universal function performed by naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processors.
Every organized system continually exchanges information and energy with its surroundings. Every organized system distinguishes internal conditions from external conditions. Every organized system responds in ways that preserve, modify, or reorganize itself. Every organized system participates within larger hierarchies while simultaneously being composed of smaller interacting processors.
Consciousness is the functional expression of this continual reciprocal exchange.
Thinking is therefore not consciousness itself. It is one extraordinarily sophisticated mode of information-energy processing. “Feeling” is not consciousness itself. It is another extraordinarily sophisticated mode of information-energy processing. Neither constitutes the foundation. Both emerge from a more fundamental function that operates throughout organized nature.
Within PET, information and energy reciprocally supersede one another within the information-energy substrate, giving rise to electricity, plasma, electromagnetic organization, increasingly complex structures, and progressively richer information-energy processors.
As organizational complexity increases, so too does the richness of consciousness. Not because consciousness suddenly appears, but because the capacity to receive, integrate, predict, and respond to information becomes increasingly sophisticated.
The progression is therefore continuous rather than discontinuous.
Plasma structures organize into stars. Stars organize planetary systems. Planets organize ecosystems. Ecosystems organize living communities. Living communities organize multicellular organisms. Organisms develop nervous systems. Nervous systems develop symbolic thought. Each stage represents a refinement of the same underlying function rather than the creation of something fundamentally new.
Biology did not invent consciousness. Biology inherited a universal organizational principle already operating throughout nature and refined it into forms capable of feeling, imagination, memory, language, creativity, and abstract reasoning.
Human consciousness is therefore neither an accident nor an exception. It is one of the most sophisticated expressions currently known of a function that extends throughout the hierarchy of naturally emergent information-energy processors.
This broader perspective also transforms one of philosophy’s oldest declarations.
Descartes concluded:
Cogito, ergo sum — “I think, therefore I am.”
Damasio’s work suggests:
Sentio, ergo sum — “I feel, therefore I am.”
Predictive Evolution Theory proposes a deeper first principle:
Processo, ergo sum — “I process, therefore I am.”
“Processo” captures something neither “cogito” nor “sentio” can fully express. Thinking and feeling are both specialized forms of processing. They are not mutually exclusive alternatives but complementary biological elaborations of a more fundamental universal function.
To process is to receive information and energy, distinguish self from environment, integrate changing conditions, generate adaptive responses, and participate in the continual reciprocal exchange that sustains organized existence.
Every naturally emergent self-organizing information-energy processor performs this function according to its own level of organization. As that organization becomes increasingly complex, consciousness becomes correspondingly richer.
In this sense, Processo, ergo sum is not merely a new philosophical slogan. It represents a new first principle for understanding consciousness. Rather than asking when consciousness first appeared, it asks how the universe progressively organized information and energy into ever more sophisticated processors capable of increasingly rich awareness.
Thought and feeling remain among nature’s greatest achievements, but they are no longer the beginning of consciousness. They are the latest chapters in a far longer story. One that began with the earliest organized information-energy interactions and continues to unfold across the nested hierarchy of plasma, stars, planets, ecosystems, organisms, and, perhaps, beyond.
Further Reading
References
Descartes, R. (1641/1996). Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (J. Cottingham, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1641).
Descartes, R. (1637/2006). Discourse on the Method (I. Maclean, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1637).
Damasio, A. R. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt.
Damasio, A. R. (2010). Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Pantheon Books.
Damasio, A. R. (2018). The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. Pantheon Books.
Damasio, A., Carvalho, G. B., & others. (2022). Homeostasis and consciousness. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 143, 104929.
Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Penrose, R., & Hameroff, S. (1996). Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3(1), 36–53.
Hameroff, S., & Penrose, R. (2014). Consciousness in the Universe: A Review of the ‘Orch OR’ Theory. Physics of Life Reviews, 11(1), 39–78.
Hameroff, S., & Penrose, R. (2022). Consciousness in the Universe: Review of the Orch OR Theory. Journal of Cosmology, 29, updated review.
Penrose, R. (1989). The Emperor’s New Mind. Oxford University Press.
Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of the Mind. Oxford University Press.
Nagel, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.
Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219.
Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, Brains, and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417–457.
Popular Mechanics. (2026). Is Consciousness the Universe’s Foundation?