system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is all life conscious to a degree?

Is there a point in complexity where a living creature would have no consciousness, or would something like a bacteria just have some infinitesimally small amount of consciousness? Is being "unconscious" simply a lower/different level of consciousness?

In philosophy, is consciousness thought of as the ability to understand one's own existence/ make decisions, or is it thought of as a spectrum and all living things are conscious to a degree, or a combination of both?  I guess I'm wondering what the arguments for each side are.
gpt
Sorry to be *that* person, but *it depends on what you mean by "consciousness".* 

There are physicists, like John Wheeler and David Bohm (both of whom were well-respected), who framed consciousness in terms of information-theory, essentially as the force that determines a particle's "decision" to collapse into a particular wave-state. By this definition, elementary particles are conscious. Wheeler was content with information being the fundamental constituent of reality (It from Bit, now revised as It from Qubit), but Bohm pushed further and explicitly brought free will and panpsychism into the picture. 

Honestly, no one knows what consciousness is apart from a tangled zoo of vague, vaguely related definitions and research suggestions. Ask ten philosophers what consciousness is, and you'll get twenty answers centered around properties like awareness, self-determination/freedom, adaptation, emergence, self-referentiality, and those are just the *normal* ones, the mainstream conceptions no one bats an eye at. Until we're clear about what consciousness is, with a fair bit of precision, we're in no shape to be arguing about it; most arguments boil down to differing assumptions and definitions that are often actually compatible, showing how our language and knowledge alike are both inadequate for a discussion of this caliber. Never stops people from trying, but there's a reason why there's next to nothing that all credible philosophers agree on in the realm of philosophy. There are even philosophers (Dan Dennett) who outright say that consciousness doesn't exist, that, in the words of Walter White, "There's nothing but chemistry here." In other words, that there's no useful way to distinguish consciousness from the organism's nervous system.