My Amoeba Amiga

According to embodied cognition, the brain is hardwired for metaphorical understanding. What are these basic metaphors that are so basic and essential in nature with which we can understand reality, i.e. give duration, consistence to phenomena? I asked my amoeba amiga and all I can say is that she wasn’t exceedingly effusive. She seems to be moved by gradients or variations in concentrations in her environment of suspension or by variations and gradients of light and shadow. So while I mused on this, I put a grain of salt and a grain of sugar at opposite ends of her petri dish and let her enjoy the affects of that for a while.

Putting myself in someone else’s shoes, or in someone else’s cilia so to speak, I ask myself what would consciousness be like if I were an amoeba? When it comes to salt and sugar, likely not too different! But how can we deduce or intuit a model of consciousness based on the amoeba? I don’t think that a human being and an amoeba are the same, but as sentient beings I believe that we share reactive propensities towards our environment. I wondered about what cognitive metaphors she would need for her individual perpetuation as well as be a happening, happy amoeba in her own kind of suspenseful way.

If the amoeba is flat, the pull of gravity will likely have forced the evolution of a perception of above and below, would it have a concept for faciality or symmetry? Being encased in an osmotic membrane, the amoeba is likely sensitive to salinity, so would it have an idea for danger? Being on Earth, on a rotating planet dependent on the Sun’s energy, suspended in liquid, the amoeba is likely also sensitive to gradients of heat, and possibly sensitive to the forces arising from centripetal rotation; its cilia are likely sensitive to movement or microcurrents in its suspension fluid. So, does my amoeba amiga see the light and move towards it? Because it’s hotter in the light, or because there’s more oxygen in brightly lit water? When it moves towards the light, does the amoeba feel happy or suffused by religious sentiment? Would an amoeba consider other amoebas hot and want to siddle up close to them? Or would it consider them stand-offish if they moved away from it? Is my amoeba suffused with love, and rejection and self-loathing as it considers the distance of others?

I don't know whether the physiological aspects of my discussion are valid or not but the concerns could be. There appears to be a certain amount of litterature on cellular communication and response mechanisms.Perhaps there's something here that can extend all the way up the food chain to human scsale and beyond? Spinozist ideas as to what constitutes a body and how it is constituted... something to thing about.