Measuring Consciousness Through Landauer's Principle and Hydra Experiments

of a mammal or a higher animal, might be out of reach. Nevertheless, an actual experiment might be conceived in the case of a Hydra. A Hydra is a freshwater organism of the phylum Cnidaria that has nerve nets, made by few hundreds of neurons, connected to sensory photoreceptors and touch sensitive nerve cells in the body and in the tentacles. Even though the Hydra is brainless, it has four networks of neurons, that unify during specific behaviors. Moreover, recent studies reported sleep-like states with a 4-hour rhythm (Kanaya H. J. et al. 2020) that might be particularly relevant for our research since might allow a discrimination between conscious and not conscious events. The Hydra is transparent and can be genetically engineered so that its neurons can emit light in proportion to their activity (Ji 2017). Comprehensive modelling of Hydra's neural activity and thus simulations of it are being developed and will conceivably be ready in the next few years. Once a complete simulation of the brain activity of the Hydra is realized, it might theoretically possible to confront the neural firing emission of the Hydra with a software simulation of it and measure any local energy violation, which would hint to a conscious act of the Hydra.

Conclusions

In this article we establish for the first time, in a specific panpsychistic philosophical framework, a quantitative formula that might be used to measure the existence of consciousness through a flow of energy making use of a principle of information theory that has never been contradicted to date and which is here assumed to be of universal value. We think this approach to be new and relevant for the foundational physical and philosophical debate on the theory of mind and consciousness. Indeed, if Landauer's Principle will turn out to be as general as new experimental data seem to suggest, then its limit might be relevant in the detection and even measurement of consciousness.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Alessandro Benassai, whose discussions on Palamidessi's Panpsychism inspired this article. I would like to thank J. P. Costa, who encouraged me to publish the present article.