Interestingly, I think that there is value in co-sleeping even when it is not experienced as pleasurable. My children have gone through various phases of sleeping together and separately. For the past year, they’ve been back to sleeping in the same room and they love to cuddle, chat and share their secrets until they fall asleep. It’s pretty adorable. But they went through an earlier phase in which they constantly complained about the other not letting them sleep very well – yet they insisted on sleeping together.

Suppose you are a cell within a self-organising biological system called the human body and you are obsessed with survival, like all sensible living creatures are. You don’t have a brain yet, no neurons at your disposal, but you still need to survive somehow. What do you do? How do you keep track of you when you don’t have a brain yet? It’s a major puzzle that Nature had to solve via billions of years of trials and errors. And she did! How?

To answer this, we need to answer the following question: which is the basic system at the organismic level that tells your cells which one is your cell, and which one is not? The world is full of signals, and disturbing noise. You have to have some sort of filter that allows you to focus on what is vital for you and to dismiss or fight back against what is not good for you. That’s the job of the immune system. For adaptive biological self-organising systems such as the human body, immune cells develop before neurons, in order to take care and keep track of one’s self.

Does this really mean that we need our whole body to think? Surely I can cut off my toe, say, and still think? So what exactly is meant by saying that cognition is not in the brain and that I need the whole body? However, the really important question is: was your body ‘dumb’ before you had a brain? If so, how did you manage to survive without neurons? Who did the smart heavy lifting of information-processing for survival, to allow brains to grow properly in the first place?

For most of history, entire families slept in the same bed for warmth, lack of space, and protection from intruders. Bed-sharing was common even for strangers, when travelling. Now, in most cultures, bed-sharing is conceived of as an intimate practice, but it is still common: most people sleep with their small children, and children often sleep with their siblings; romantic partners usually share a bed; it’s also not uncommon to sleep with one’s dogs or cats. While some people prefer to sleep alone (which can be joyful and liberating especially when one is freed of care duties, or a snoring companion), many of us value sleeping with others.

One can experience without thinking, but one cannot think without experiencing.

The question is: how confident should we be that the best justification for this moral concern is sentience (the ability to experience pleasure and pain), as opposed to agency (the ability to set and pursue goals), relationality (the ability to participate in bonds of care or interdependence), or other such features?