Are mitochondria conscious?

If you click the search line and type “consciousness,” you will see several posts about “Consciousness.”

The posts address the problem of defining consciousness, a problem whose solution has confounded philosophers for centuries. The problem is in defining its boundaries, i.e., when is something conscious and when is it not.

In previous posts, I have proposed a simple, unifying idea: Consciousness is the capacity to respond to stimuli. The more complex or varied the responses and the stimuli, the higher the degree of consciousness. By this definition, everything — from atoms to humans — is conscious to some degree.

This idea eliminates the need for an arbitrary cutoff. Instead of asking “Is it conscious?” we ask, “To what degree is it conscious?”

Turn to the usual questions: Is a person conscious? While asleep? During anesthesia? Emerging from the womb? Are chimpanzees conscious? Bees? Fish? Trees? Bacteria? The moon? The Sun? The universe? Your AI?

What are your answers?

All of them respond to stimuli. In that regard, they are all conscious. They sense and respond. A sleeping person responds to many stimuli including sound, light, temperature, touch.

A tree, for instance, leans toward sunlight, defends itself with chemical signals, and communicates with other trees. Is that conscious behavior?

Yes, because it is a reaction to stimuli.

Some may find this definition unsatisfying. Many prefer to define consciousness as including self-awareness, intention, or thought, typically human traits.

But such definitions are anthropocentric, centered on human experience. We shouldn’t require that consciousness conform to human patterns of introspection or language to be valid.

Consider a fly. Many would say it isn’t conscious — it merely responds reflexively. But I’ve struck flies, watched them fall to the ground, apparently lifeless. They were what is termed “unconscious,” that is, unresponsive.

Minutes later, I saw them revive and fly away. If an entity can shift between states we misleadingly call “unconscious” (unresponsive) and “conscious,” that should be a clue.

Humans clearly cycle between those states. So do sleeping and even hibernating bears. Flies, too. sleep, and clearly are less conscious than when they are awake.

Even deciduous trees enter dormancy in winter and reawaken in spring, sensing what they previously didn’t. Does that seasonal shift demonstrate tree-consciousness?

All entities can be in both an active/reactive state and a less reactive one. They are more conscious during the more responsive state. 

This re-measures consciousness not by self-awareness or by mirror recognition, but by change in responsiveness. This test doesn’t give us a hard line, but it offers a gradient.

Consider a bacterium that ceases activity under stress and revives when conditions improve. It has this duality. When reactive, it should be considered conscious.

A virus that lies dormant inside a host, then activates under the right conditions, also shows a degree of consciousness.

What about an atom? It responds to forces and fields. But does it have an unresponsive state? Atoms do have minimal energy (ground) states when they are less responsive, and excited states when they are more responsive. These can parallel the unconscious/conscious test.

I was reminded of this by an article I just read in the May 2025 issue of Scientific American Magazine:

Central Processing Unit Long called the powerhouses of the cell, mitochondria are more like the cells’ motherboards, writes Martin Picard, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University.

His research team and others examined 3D images of the inner membrane of mitochondria, called the cristae, which is jam-packed with folded proteins. They discovered that mitochondria can communicate with their neighbors and influence each other—particularly in the way their cristae are aligned.

Over the years a picture has emerged showing how mitochondria from different parts of the body talk to one another, using hormones as their language.

The organelles also have a life cycle: old ones die out, and new ones are born out of existing ones. Communities of these organelles live within each cell, usually clustered around the nucleus.

Why this is important: The health of mitochondria directly impacts human health. The organelles receive signals about aspects of the environment in which we live, such as air pollution levels and stress triggers, and then integrate this information and emit signalssuch as molecules that regulate processes within the cell and throughout the body.

Consciousness is the degree of response to stimuli; There is no reason to believe it must be binary, centralized, or always synchronized within an organism.

Just as you can be sleeping (low consciousness), or dozing (higher consciousness), your immune system still responds to infection. Certain neurons remain active.

Consciousness is not a thing one has or entirely lacks, but a universal condition that fluctuates in intensity and distribution.

The whole of you can be partly conscious and partly unresponsive. Even parts of your brain can be unresponsive, while other parts are active and responsive.

Even a rock can be minimally conscious to the degree that it reacts with its environment. If it sits quietly in a desert, it still is conscious. It may change in size because of temperature changes, chemical effects, and erosion. Then, when it is in a river, it reacts chemically and physically with the water, and the river bottom, only to return as part of a geologic layer, eons later.

Bottom Line

Consciousness = responsiveness. It is not an “is/isn’t binary state, with clear boundaries. It does not rely on vague, emotional self-recognition, thought generation factors, or intent. It is not related to the ability to think.

Instead, consciousness is a measure of response to stimuli, with greater response and more stimuli being associated with greater consciousness.

Since everything responds to stimuli, everything, from the smallest quantum particle to the universe itself, is conscious to some degree.

Tests for consciousness are physiological, not psychological. Self-recognition is not a criterion; reaction is.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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