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A 'Third State' Exists Between Life and Death—And That Suggests Your Cells Are Conscious, Some Scientists Say

A growing number of new studies have found that, at least for some cells, death isn’t the end, but the beginning of something wholly unexpected.

The biological cycle of our existence seems relatively straightforward: we’re born, we live, we die. The end. 

But when you examine existence at the cellular level, things get a bit more interesting. You, me, and all of the 108 billion or so Homo sapiens who’ve ever walked the Earth have all been our own constellation of some 30 trillion cells. Each of our bodies is a collective organism of living human cells and microbes working in cooperation to create what our minds view as “life.” However, a growing number of new studies have found that, at least for some cells, death isn’t the end. Instead, it’s possibly the beginning of something new and wholly unexpected. 

A growing snowball of research concerning a new class of AI-designed multicellular organisms known as “xenobots” is gaining scientific attention for their apparent autonomy. In September 2024, Peter Noble, Ph.D., a microbiologist from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, along with  Pozhitkov, Ph.D., a bioinformatics researcher at the City of Hope cancer center, detailed this research on the website The Conversation.

Xenobots are cells that form new roles beyond their original biological function—for example, using hairlike cilia for locomotion rather than transporting mucus. Because they appear to reassemble into this new form and function, the authors argue that xenobots form a kind of “third state” of life, wherein cells can reorganize after the death of an organism to form something new. These forms likely wouldn’t materialize in nature, but xenobots show that cells have a surprising ability to adapt to changes in their environment. Experiments with human cells, or “anthrobots,” exhibit this behavior, too.

“Taken together, these findings … challenge the idea that cells and organisms can evolve only in predetermined ways,” the authors write in The Conversation. “The third state suggests that [an organism’s] death may play a significant role in how life transforms over time.”

The implications for these cellular robots, or biobots, are pretty big—imagine tailor-made medicines crafted from your own tissues to avoid a dangerous immune response. But they also form a complicated picture of what a cell actually is. At least, that’s what evolutionary biologist and physician William Miller thinks. He’s the co-author of the 2023 book The Sentient Cell, which explores ideas found in the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) theory suggesting that cells retain a kind of consciousness. Miller believes that xenobots are just another example of how we don’t give credit to the inherent cognitive—or even conscious—abilities of the cells that make up our bodies.

“The organism as a whole no longer responds as it had, but subsets of cells are active, decision-making, and problem-solving,” Miller says. “So this fundamentally reconstitutes how we see the living frame … the fundamental unit of biological agency is the conscious cell.” 

Consciousness is a notoriously slippery term, and one whose definition can change based on fields of a study, context, or even across time. Famously, the 17th century philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and all-around smart guy René Descartes thought only the human mind was conscious (which led to some inhumane experiments). Thankfully, today science recognizes various types of consciousness throughout the animal kingdom, but when it comes to forms of life fundamentally unlike us, human biases of what can be conscious or intelligent slowly creep in.

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