Before some so-called Events intervened, @MCHammer and I had agreed to talk about 1. the nature of consciousness and 2. the value of thinking. (I will later put up a thread about planaria, the beautiful animals that started off the conversation!)

argues here that new discoveries about the two-way relationship between microorganisms and brain function should change the way we think about organisms and

(Caveat: I am not a biologist or a philosopher of mind, so I welcome more expert interventions in the thread.) But here is how I see it. It is amazing to think that whole organisms (bacteria) may be a crucial part of human cognition and perception.

The difficulty I see with the piece is that its challenges to the notion of organism (early in the piece, where he argues that we are holobionts) don't seem to work. The mystery of consciousness-- and life-- is not just reactivity and flexibility.

There is a *unity* to my consciousness, just as there is a unity to my life. On the latter: when I lose consciousness, or die, do my gut bacteria change? Not necessarily, I'd guess. Nor am I persuaded that a single organism's life or death is a "spectrum".