The need for a new perspective on decision-making in bacteria.

Abstract

The individualistic and collectivistic intelligent behaviors observed in mammals, birds, and fishes have been appreciated by many scientists in recent years and supported by the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in 2012. Behavioral studies in lower organisms like arthropods and cephalopods showed the presence of multisensory integration, decision-making, and goal-directed behavior in these non-vertebrate animals. The presence of intelligent and history-dependent behaviors has been studied in microorganisms, and recent studies propose the possibility of cognition in single cellular organisms. The Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), proposed by Arthur Reber in 2016 and elaborated by Baluška and Reber in 2019, suggests the possibility of consciousness in single cellular organisms. However, the critics of the Cellular Basis of Consciousness theory state that the individual bacterial cell does not make choices, and the decision-making is the result of stochastic differences in protein levels. Here, we want to address the criticism of decision-making in bacteria. An attempt is made to give a new perspective to the existing model to explain the flexibility in bacterial behavior in an ever-changing environment. The authors would like to consider an alternative perspective on flexibility in decision-making as the result of multiple pathways that have convergence and divergence as observed in the brain. Flexibility provides the possibility to have individualistic behavior, and the existence of such pathways can be considered as the molecular mechanism underlying individualistic decision-making in bacteria as well as in humans.