I am supportive of the idea of starting with the most basic of organisms when considering these issues. For starters, I found this link regarding habituation in the slime mold (https://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/2016/04/160427081533. htm).

In my discussions with Gregg over the past several months, I have explained my 'epiphany' regarding the centrality of thinking about how the protocell resolved the relationship between the internal and external environments. In a number of publications, I have outlined a view called “The First Principles of Physiology”, which orients the reader to thinking about many of the issues that Jason refers to, particularly those where he reduces the problem to the unicellular state, which is where I ended up biologically by reverse-engineering the mammalian lung a decade ago. The First Pinciples are composed of 1) negentropy, or negative entropy (free energy, Schrodinger, 'What is Life', 1944); 2) Chemiosmosis, which is Peter Mitchell's explanation for how bioenergy originated (1961); 3) homeostasis, or the maintenance of energetic balance biologically, but more so how the cell(s) recognizes the stress of being out of balance, and then correcting the imbalance by 'autoengineering' itself based on the principles of self-referential self-organization. (BTW, this is not metaphysics.....when the cell senses physiologic stress it generates Radical Oxygen Species that cause mutations and gene duplications).

Up until 2017 there was no experimental evidence for this phenomenology, but then two independent labs showed that Yttrium atoms self-align spontaneously. Theoretically, I have hypothesized that the origin of self-referential self-organization came about as a result of the Big Bang, for which there must have been and 'equal and opposite reaction' based on Newton's Third Law of Motion. The 'reaction' was balanced chemical reactions, black holes and stellar evolution on the physical side, and 'life' as we know it on the biologic side. In combination with the realization that evolution is serial pre-adaptations or exaptations or co-options (depending upon who you read), and the concept of Niche Construction (the organism forming its own environment), particularly when the cell is considered the first Niche Construction (Torday JS. The Cell as the First Niche Construction. Biology (Basel). 2016 Apr28;5(2)), offers insight to the continuum from the unicell to Gaia (the theory that the Earth is an organic whole). More importantly, it offers the opportunity to trace what we think of as consciousness all the way from the Singularity/Big Bang to complex physiology and mind as an integral whole. This, coupled with the emerging understanding of epigenetics, the active obtaining of information from the environment in the form of what are referred to as epigenetic 'marks', provides even greater insight into the basic nature of evolution. That is to say, if the organism is a vehicle for collecting epigenetic marks, the phenotype can be seen to have active 'agency'. To restate that, the epigenetic marks are assimilated by the egg and sperm of the organism. The epigenetic marks are subsequently acquired by the zygote after fertilization, leading to new genetic traits in the offspring. So if the 'Phenotype as Agent' is thought of in psychological terms as 'behavior', then there is a merging of evolution, physiology, consciousness and mind into one holistic psychological entity. By seeing the processes involved in 'self' from this perspective many aspects of the organism can be understood causally, beginning from the origins of life as a continuum rather than as anecdotes, dogmas, teleology or tautology. This is particularly true because development is the only mechanism we know of in biology that is non-teleologic, and non-tautologic. When combined with phylogeny, evolution can be seen objectively.

One of the most interesting connections between the cell and the mind/brain is the idea that there is a connection between the cell membrane, the skin and the brain. A big breakthrough in understanding brain evolution was the paper on skin-brain (Holland ND. Early central nervous system evolution: an era of skin brains? Nat Rev Neurosci. 2003 Aug;4(8):617-27). This gives rise to the idea that the brain is almost the skin turned inward. (OR PUT IN YOUR OWN LANGUAGE).

There is a lot more to say, but I think I will end it here for now with a point that the questions of physiological organization that Jason is seeing from animals into cells actually goes very deep. In fact, I trace the organization all the way into physics and quantum mechanics and back to the Big Bang. More on those pieces later.