This is exactly where my thoughts have been leading. Consciousness is a fundamentally INTRA-cellular process, that is augmented by INTER-cellular effects. Neurons are merely specialized to support (among other things) higher consciousness, but every cell participates in some form of it.

These ideas go a long way to explain things like the somatic effects of trauma, personality aspects being transmitted through organ transplant, the obviously aware and self-interested behavior of micro-organisms, the way mental complexity doesn’t really seem to scale with organism size, and a lot of other things that I have been thinking about that perhaps get a bit more metaphysical.

I suspect that consciousness is not generated but rather captured and exploited by biological systems.

I’m writing a game that explores a lot of these concepts.