TEXT: you might be surprised to discover that there is a perfectly reasonable physical candidate for a complex living network that existed from the very beginning -- and still exists today -- that would qualify as a highly evolved state of -lrb- seemingly -rrb- pure consciousness that we might have devolved from . i refer , of course , to bacteria and archaebacteria , which i will collectively call bacteria -- or microbes -- for convenience . microbes meet all the criteria for a non-rule-based
network