A super-resolution image of SpudCell’s liposomes with an encapsulated genome and active protein expression. Photograph: Orion Venero/Adamala Lab
How Does it Feel to be a Living Cell?
David Ray Griffin, Panexperientialism,
and the Interiority of Cells
Single-celled organisms, such as amoebae and neurons, accordingly, could be supposed to be compound individuals, having a unity of experience over and above that of their constituents."
- "Panexperientialism and the Mind-Body Problem" (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4, No. 3, 1997)
SpudCell is a synthetic, self-sustaining cell built entirely from non-living chemical components, marking a major milestone in synthetic biology. Developed by Kate Adamala and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, it is the first such cell to complete a full life cycle — including growth, feeding, DNA replication, and division — in a lab setting.
- International Business Times, UK. Bernadette Tixon. July 1, 2026
Introduction
As we learn about the creation of living—or at least life-like—cells in the laboratory, it seems natural to wonder about their ontological status, their mode of being. Are they simply extraordinarily sophisticated biochemical machines, or have they become genuine individuals with an inside as well as an outside?
These questions have become especially timely with the creation of SpudCell, a synthetic cell assembled from nonliving chemical components that can feed, grow, reproduce, and complete an entire life cycle.
The title of this essay is partly tongue-in-cheek, because we really do not know how it feels to be a living cell. Indeed, many would argue that the very word feeling is entirely unwarranted when applied to cells—a human projection onto what is, obviously, an insentient world at the cellular level. Nevertheless, one of the questions raised by SpudCell is precisely whether there is anything it is like to be such a cell, however primitive that "likeness" might be.
Those of us in the Whiteheadian tradition beg to differ. We propose that something like experience or feeling goes all the way down into the depths of matter and all the way out into the expanses of the cosmos. Following David Ray Griffin, we call this view panexperientialism.
By experience or feeling, we do not mean consciousness, reflection, or thought. Rather, we mean the most primitive form of subjectivity: the capacity to receive influences from the surrounding world, respond to them in a way that is not wholly predetermined, and thereby enjoy a moment of subjective immediacy. Wherever there is experience in this minimal sense, there is also a measure of self-enjoyment and self-creativity. Living beings add to this an extraordinary capacity for self-maintenance and self-production—what biologists call autopoiesis. Experience, however faint, is never merely passive. It is always the becoming of a subject.
A living cell, then, is itself a subject in the making, with a life of its own. But it is a special kind of subject, what Griffin and others call a compound individual. The essay below is an amplification of this proposal.
Compound Individuals and Synthetic Cells
David Ray Griffin is well known for advocating what he calls panexperientialism. By this he means that the fundamental units of reality are best understood as moments of experience or, to say the same thing, moments of feeling.
Each moment of feeling receives influences from its actual world and creatively responds to what it receives. This reception need not be conscious. It need not involve the clear and distinct awareness characteristic of conscious perception, reflection, or deliberation.
Nevertheless, it is experiential. A moment of experience is a felt reception of the past accompanied by a creative response; and in this act of receiving and responding it is is a subject of its own life and not simply an object for others. It has what Whitehead calls "subjective immediacy" and "self-enjoyment" and "self-creativity."
At the same time, Griffin recognizes that many familiar objects in the world seem to lack anything resembling experience. Rocks, tables, and chairs, for example, do not appear to possess any kind of unified interior life. His response is that such objects are not themselves fundamental units of reality. Rather, they are aggregates of more elementary actual entities—submicroscopic energy-events within atoms—that do receive influences from their past actual worlds and respond to them in creative ways. Such energy events are acts of feeling, he believes, and the quantitative dimensions of their feelings, are what scientists call energy.
Accordingly, Griffin often points to two paradigmatic examples of actual subjects or, to say the same thing, actual occasions of experience: subatomic energy-events and moments of human experience. Consciousness - clear and distinct awareness of the kinds that human beings and other animals possess - is a late emergent in the history of the universe and the history of life on earth. Long before there was consciousness there was interiority.
Compound Individuals
What, then, of the living cell? Is it mere aggregate of subatomic energy-events or is it a subject in its own right. Griffin believes that living cells are more than mere aggregates. They possess a genuine subjective unity that emerges from, but is not reducible to, the activities of their constituent parts. They are, as it were, centers of feeling. Following Charles Hartshorne, he speaks of them as compound individuals. In his words:
Each moment of feeling receives influences from its actual world and creatively responds to what it receives. This reception need not be conscious. It need not involve the clear and distinct awareness characteristic of conscious perception, reflection, or deliberation.
Nevertheless, it is experiential. A moment of experience is a felt reception of the past accompanied by a creative response; and in this act of receiving and responding it is is a subject of its own life and not simply an object for others. It has what Whitehead calls "subjective immediacy" and "self-enjoyment" and "self-creativity."
At the same time, Griffin recognizes that many familiar objects in the world seem to lack anything resembling experience. Rocks, tables, and chairs, for example, do not appear to possess any kind of unified interior life. His response is that such objects are not themselves fundamental units of reality. Rather, they are aggregates of more elementary actual entities—submicroscopic energy-events within atoms—that do receive influences from their past actual worlds and respond to them in creative ways. Such energy events are acts of feeling, he believes, and the quantitative dimensions of their feelings, are what scientists call energy.
Accordingly, Griffin often points to two paradigmatic examples of actual subjects or, to say the same thing, actual occasions of experience: subatomic energy-events and moments of human experience. Consciousness - clear and distinct awareness of the kinds that human beings and other animals possess - is a late emergent in the history of the universe and the history of life on earth. Long before there was consciousness there was interiority.
Compound Individuals
What, then, of the living cell? Is it mere aggregate of subatomic energy-events or is it a subject in its own right. Griffin believes that living cells are more than mere aggregates. They possess a genuine subjective unity that emerges from, but is not reducible to, the activities of their constituent parts. They are, as it were, centers of feeling. Following Charles Hartshorne, he speaks of them as compound individuals. In his words:
"The most obvious examples of compound individuals are animals with central nervous systems. But this kind of part-whole relation should also be attributed to any entity seeming to respond as a whole with a degree of spontaneity to its environment. Single-celled organisms, such as amoebae and neurons, accordingly, could be supposed to be compound individuals, having a unity of experience over and above that of their constituents."
- from Panexperientialism and the Mind-Body Problem. (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4, No. 3, 1997)
The felt unity of experience characteristic of a compound individual may or may not extend through time. Some compound individuals, such as human beings and many other animals, enjoy and suffer a sense of enduring identity shaped by memory, anticipation, and habit. Others may possess only a momentary unity of experience that perishes almost as soon as it arises. An amoeba or neuron, for example, may be more than its constituent parts, and yet it may not have a sense of enduring through time, It is not like a living person or, for that matter, a living porpoise or a dog or cat. It is 'this moment' and then 'this moment' and then 'this moment,' but with no felt sense that predecessor moments contribute to successor moments.
In either case, the living whole, whether for a moment or for a duration, is more than the sum of its parts. It is a living whole not a mechanical whole. The 'parts' of the living whole may themselves be living, too. Consider the human mind in relation to the human brain. On Griffin's view, the brain is a tremendously complex network of neurons, each of which is itself a living whole, albeit perhaps of the momentary type. And the human mind is likewise a living whole that receives influences from the brain (and other parts of the body and the world at large) and initiates responses of its own. The mind is not itself a single entity, but a self-renewing whole with a sense of identity through time based on memory and anticipation. Thus the mind is a living whole of living wholes. Both the mind and the neurons are compound indviduals.
Equally important, living wholes may develop over time. Organisms that begin as momentary wholes may evolve into enduring wholes. Something like this may occur during mammalian embryonic development. The union of sperm and egg, both living wholes in their own right, results in a compound individual: living whole with some degree of subjective feeling which then develops into a sentient life with even more feeling that is shaped by memory, anticipation, and a desire for experiential fulfillment.
These ideas naturally raise a question. What is the metaphysical status of a living cell that is synthesized by human beings from nonliving materials? On July 1, 2026, news outlets reported such an achievement in synthetic biology. Scientists announced that they had built a living cell from scratch that could feed, grow, and reproduce. As one report summarized:
"Scientists say they have built a cell from scratch for the first time that can feed, grow and replicate like a natural cell. This breakthrough in synthetic biology could usher in an era of made-to-order organisms that function like living machines. Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist and professor at the University of Minnesota, and her team constructed the cell piece by piece from nonliving chemical components. The creation is a limited and fragile prototype, but it could help scientists better understand the origins of life and could potentially be programmed to help mitigate some of the world's biggest biological problems. The cell is nonspecific—neither plant nor animal—but most closely resembles a simple bacterium." (CNN, Jul 1, 2026)
Does this cell - knicknamed SpudCell- have interiority? If we follow Griffin's type of panexperientialism, the answer seems to be Yes. And strangely, when it multiplies, it becomes two compound inviduals, each with interiority, and then more. The one becomes many, and are increased by many more.
None of this implies self-consciousness. Rather, it suggests that even the simplest living organism possesses what Whitehead calls subjective immediacy: an inward perspective from which the world is felt and integrated into a moment of lived experience. The SpudCell, if it truly functions as a living organism, would possess this subjective immediacy no less than naturally evolved bacteria, even though its interior life would be unimaginably simple compared to that of an animal or a human being.
Gradations of Interiority
If both the living cell and the scientists who construct it are compound individuals possessing interiority, how do their respective forms of experience differ? The answer, I believe, is not a matter of 'intelligence' or 'consciousness.' The decisive difference lies in the capacity to integrate increasingly diverse forms of experience into increasingly complex patterns of unity.
This means that experience can be understood aesthetically. Every actual occasion, every concrescing subject, seeks not merely existence but the realization of value through the harmonious integration of felt contrasts. At the simplest levels, only a few contrasts can be integrated at once. As organisms become more complex, their capacity for feeling contrasts expands dramatically. A bacterium may integrate only a narrow range of chemical contrasts. A mammal integrates sensations, memories, emotions, bodily feelings, and environmental awareness into a far richer experiential unity. Human beings add symbolic thought, language, imagination, moral reflection, and aesthetic appreciation, creating possibilities for contrasts of extraordinary complexity. And there is no reason not to think that other organisms have forms of richness that parallel or surpass human sentience. A reognition of gradations of interiority is not license for human exceptionalism. It is an invitation to appreciate the many diverse forms of feeling at work in the universe, some of them cellular.
Interiority is not an all-or-nothing property but a graded achievement. Every compound individual possesses its own kind of subjective immediacy, yet these forms of experience differ enormously in richness, complexity, and intensity.