I thought mother would be interested in this discussion, in light of MMario's borrowing of a brain cell:

"Although the literature is dominated by the idea of a single centre of consciousness, the alternative idea of more than one centre of consciousness is not new. As indicated, William James considered a pontificial polyzoism very seriously and implied that the idea had a long tradition. However, in a democratic polyzoism there is no single 'me' cell; in at least some parts of the brain there may be millions that have the experience of being me. This has the advantage that it is consistent both with James's fundamental requirements for binding and with the apparently distributed nature of consciousness. It is also very compatible with the 'holographic' aspects of consciousness described by Pribram (1991) in the sense that a version of the 'experiential story' is distributed widely throughout the brain.

If one neurone benefits from sentient pattern-based processing why not all? I suspect that 99% of what goes on in my brain is decided on somewhere other than the site of any subjective viewpoint that I see it from. This 99% is termed unconscious, but a lot of the clever things that brains do emerge from this unconsciousness. It would be easier if, rather than being unconscious, these events were in other cellular consciousnesses, or at least sentiences. This would resolve a problem with Penrose's (1994) masterly argument that conscious thought is non-computable; that the best thoughts often seem to surface from somewhere else. "

(Linked to source in the Intelidity Design thread)

A