What if you are not the “highest” level of consciousness in your own body?

aCosmicWave@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 356 points –

I see the human organism as a layering of different levels of consciousness. Each layer supports mostly automated processes that sustain the layers beneath it.

For example, we have cells that only know what it’s like to be a cell and to perform their cellular processes without any awareness of the more complex layers above them. Organs are much more complex than cells and they perform their duties without any awareness of anything above them either. And the complexity keeps increasing with various systems like endocrine, cardiovascular, etc. Then we have our subconscious and finally our conscious.

At our level, we do not consciously control any of the layers beneath us. Our primary task is to keep our bodies alive.

This got me thinking… isn’t it a little too self aggrandizing to think that we have a near infinite layering of consciousness beneath us and then it just stops at our level of awareness? What if there is some other conscious process that exists above us within our own bodies?

When people take psychedelic drugs they often describe achieving a higher level of awareness akin to ecstasy. Well what if this layer is always there actively ”living” within us but we are just the chumps that go to work, do our taxes, and exercise, while it doles out just enough feel good chemicals to keep us going (sometimes not even that)?

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This is an interesting idea for sure. However, we have some evidence to support the existence of the systems beneath our minds. What evidence supports the existence of a greater awareness within ourselves? Do we have anything beyond reports from people under the influence of drugs?

I prefer to take an evidence-based approach, taking non-existence to be the null hypothesis here.

One example would be when people move around in large crowds. Their behavior can be misspelled by following fluid dynamics equations. It's as if thousands of people share a consciousness that they don't understand/notice.

Taoism teaches us that the it true consciousness is universal. We are essentially waves of energy, all bound together/connected by empty space. So we share a consciousness that can be tapped into his meditation and being in the moment.

I don’t think that really follows. Would you say molecules of fluid have a collective consciousness?

We might be picking up on things we don’t consciously notice that guide our movement but it’s still a local thing that doesn’t require a collective consciousness

Good to know we can just "teach" any imaginary thing we want. It sounds like it'd be neat? Fuck it, let's teach it.

Relax. It just some mildly funny idea to entertain that we are not all there is. Such as imagining the collective conscience of all humanity and animals makes up the real God. We just can't perceive it being inside the experiment.

There are anecdotal stories of people entering higher states of consciousness during near death experiences, extremely deep meditation, holotropic breathing exercises, etc.

Really creative people describe their most proud acts of creation as if the idea came from somewhere else. As if the concept arose independently and they tried their best to relay it into the real world.

As for the people on psychedelic drugs, they usually speak of the higher state of consciousness as being more real than the real world... which would make sense if our usual consciousness was a subset of something bigger.

Damn. All that is relatively common knowledge, yet you're getting some weird downvotes.

They're inconvenient to people with world views that depend on this being all there is.

I think that is the point. Does a cell have any evidence of something above it?

A cell doesn’t have evidence of anything and is incapable of pondering such a thing. So the very idea of a cell having evidence is absurd.

The idea of a person having evidence is not absurd. And I would argue that there is evidence that there is not a higher consciousness in our bodies. There is no bodily system that behaves in a conscious way other than the brain.

Except you can not prove that we are capable of pondering this higher level of consciousness just like a cell is unable to ponder anything as we understand it. For all we know, this higher level of consciousness also has a Reddit equivalence and has provided the same response as you in that they argue our own level of consciousness has no capacity to ponder anything. Or at least it's definition of what it is to 'ponder'.

Maybe we are a single conscript in an infinite number of alternate universes that together with an infinite number of related and connected conscripts create some higher level of consciousness. Have you considered that?

You also technically can't fully know that the cell has no awareness, ability to ponder, etc...because you are presuming those things stem from attributes that are exclusively human, when that might not be the case.

That is why I said ponder anything... as we understand it.

Well no I can’t disprove it because it’s not falsifiable. But there’s no evidence for it so in my opinion it’s not worthy of much consideration beyond a half-hearted musing.

I haven’t considered those things but again I would want to see evidence for them before taking them seriously. The first step would be proving that alternate universes exist. I’m not a physicist but I know this has been theorized. Is there any evidence for it yet? Then you would need to demonstrate that communication between these universes is happening in our brains somehow. At that point you might start to wonder about such things.

I think you aree using the word "consciousness" without having actually defined it, thus leading to an observation that sounds remarkable but might not be at all.

To be precise, I have no idea what you mean by lower levels of consciousness. Certainly there are systems that build upon each other, but where do you think consciousness resides other than where people ordinarily think it resides? And I mean this seriously. There might be some discussion about dreaming and subconsciousness, but at most that's giving us three different types or levels of consciousness. What you wrote clearly describes more levels, and I just don't know what they could be or where you think they are.

I have a panpsychist definition of consciousness.

I do not equate consciousness with “intelligence” or life for that matter. I think consciousness is a fundamental property of every little thing in our universe. I believe that higher levels of consciousness arise due to higher levels of systemic complexity.

This definition is more intuitive to me as compared to the modern definition where conscious life develops on earth from essentially nothing that is itself “alive”.

Well, this is kind of a different discussion, but I also find the modern consciousness concept self-contradictory, but the way that resolves for me is that I don't think consciousness exists.

At best, it's self-awareness. As in, we have the mental ability to recognize groups of atoms as objects. And we're able to look in a mirror and realize that a given object is moving like we're moving, so this object must be ourselves.

And with this horribly dry view on life, the next step upwards in your question is trivial: It's nature.
Much like a cell plays its part in our body without understanding the whole, we play our part in nature without understanding the whole.

However, having said that, it's not logical that there has to always be a greater, grander thing that everything else is a part of. That's a significant logical leap from just having a grand thing that happens to have lots of parts.

All you describe doesn’t contradict the idea of consciousness at all. Indeed there is no consciousness in the systems and in the self-awareness. Those are the results of matter interacting in increasingly complex ways.

Consciousness is not the mind though.

It’s awareness itself. It’s the “experience of being”. You can’t direct your consciousness towards itself, it is the base. Existence is the base. Awareness, being.

This is more and more clear the more you do try to feel it, to “see” it. And more and more it’s clear you are it. You aren’t “you”, the clump of cells that spurt out random thoughts. You’re the one who sees the thoughts. Who hear the sounds. Who believed it was you. But you are it. The base. You are being, awareness. And nothing more. But it really is all there is.

The universe, the whole of reality, that we experience is consciousness. It’s a “dream” in a way. A simulation, but not a computer one.

At least this is a very very old idea. One of the oldest actually, that we have records for.

And coincidentally, physics and the study of consciousness through science are bringing us closer and closer to it again…

Can you provide a panpsychist definition of consciousness? I had a hard time finding an actual definition in searching. I understand the idea that panpsychists believe that mind is a fundamental part of reality, but haven't seen a solid definition of consciousness in that context.

Also are you on the Panexperientialism or Pancognitivism bandwagon? Or maybe both?

Edit: From plato.stanford.edu I found this, but it is attributed to analytic philosophy:

"something is conscious just in case there is something that it’s like to be it; that is to say, if it has some kind of experience, no matter how basic."

I am purely panpsychist. My intuition says that literally everything in this universe has a bit of consciousness in it. An atom has a bit, a cell has a few bits, a human brain has trillions of bits.

As an analogy, in a vivid dream "you" may be holding an apple, but in the end both you and that apple are made of dream-stuff. I believe that is the case for reality as well.

What is consciousness in this context though? What do you mean by "a bit of?" Are atoms only partially experiencing being atoms?

What was trying to say is that I believe that neutrons are experiencing being neutrons, protons are experiencing being protons, electrons are experiencing being electrons, etc. Meanwhile an atom that contains all of the above is a more complex system and thus has a higher level of consciousness. Again I don’t equate consciousness with intelligence but more of an elementary state of awareness that allows these entities to perform their function.

This is really hard for me to articulate because I’m coming at this from a philosophical point of view and not a scientific one!

Roger that... In which case, your original question is answered by your definition. If everything has consciousness at every level, then of course you can zoom in or out as much as you want.

I personally don't know what to make of that use of those words, though. Verifiability is long gone, which raises consistency questions.

I think they mean that what if you aren't actually flying your meat ship and just think that you are. That something else is flying it and maybe 'you' are just making constant justifications of behaviour to make it feel like you're flying it.

What if you're not even number two? What if you're like 10th in line? You ever pick something up and think 'i should remember where I put that ' then you run around trying to find it later? Actual pilot can't remember and you're just justifying behavior. 'oh I forgot where I put it '
Your forgetting is just a coping mechanism. ....

You're basically describing ego, which is what we think we are. If you've ever been in a true fight or flight situation where the survival part of the brain takes over, you quickly realize that the ego (I guess what OP would think of as the top layer of consciousness) is not the only one calling the shots.

Not currently high enough to answer, will come back later

How about now?

Houston, I think we lost him...

Other comment haha.

Ok guys, I think we have a big misconception here.

Consciousness is the donation of the society that is our body. The body has only enough energy to gift it to us, if it has enough to sustain its needs very well.

That is why we monkeys have such a high consciousness, every animal that managed to have a whole lot to eat, that can then rest and think about shit, has more Consciousness!

There is situatial consciosness, I think every complex animal has this a lot, and the more you do things, the better it gets. Its the control over all the details of your body, feeling pure presence, managing your arms in the heat of the fight. Kungfu fighters have it, masters of every sports discipline. Thats why chess is also a sport, its "how well do you function under immense load" as well.

And then there is meta-consciousness. Not only experiencing your body, but also understanding it deeper, thinking about the world, meaning, thought, yourself and the thing thinking about it. Thats especially something that kinda requires you to be rich, have lots of free time to hang around lazy and get smarter.

So if you have this amount of free time, you can consider yourself rich.

Our society gets more and more complex and smart if people get the free time they deserve. Leaders, "managers" and control-people know this. Philosophers in the beginning of industrializazion predicted, that we would need Psychologists to deal with the immense boredom of doing nothing. But actually its the other way around, people keep on working, producing useless products more and more, as capitalists found out that the process itself is fruitful for them. Its purpose is not to serve a real purpose, help society, but the companies manipulators create Ads, create an artificial need in the minds of the people, to generate this unreal need, they fulfill it and get rich from the process.

As we are intelligent, we are also Monkeys. Other than horses, Sheep, Cows or the other nice pets we decided to not hunt to extinction, we think in 3D, with our arms in the sky, looking to create a new tool to make our effords yield for less work. So we react to Ads, promising that this tool, fundamentally anchored in our subconsciousness, as the partner to fulfill our needs, will help us be happy.

Why are we fascinated by fishing, woodworking, drawing, repairing stuff, photography, clothing, tech, bikes, cars? All these are a fetishism of tools, while tools would normally only have the role to help us fulfill real goals, that should be the motivators of our action.

So in our society we just continue to produce more and more, and deep down most people know their work is useless. We have an alarmingly shrinking number of people holding up the non-capitalist pillars of our welfare. Many of the others are often doing useless work, manage useless numbers with useless collegues, in a company that creates and fulfills useless needs one after another.

The situation of so many people is comparable to Sisyfus, rolling that stone up a hill. The hill is made of trash, when he reaches the top, more trash piles up and he has to push it again. Its nevereding, as on the other end sits a capitalist that gets richer with every push. The capitalist makes Sisyfus go on, as Sisyfus needs the money the capitalist leaves to him, to pay up is depts. The depts where used to buy things from another capitalist, which the same "engine" in the background.

We are a society of slaves of capitalism, at least to some extent. And people react to this in the totally wrong direction, the right-wing one. Of course, "the others" are faulty that their homes get more expensive, that capitalists abuse desperate situations to get even richer (Covid...). Of course its the fault of some poor refugees, and not of the millionaires that literally produce as much CO2 as 100 normal people.

What our society needs is a pause. Realising what we really need next, how we can manage to get our shit together, keep this planet under +2°C, stop killing people or animals. Stop working all the damn day. Dividing the work that has to be done, that nobody wants to do, equally among all parts of this society.

And with this freedom, and our shared luxury, we could then start to think, develop planetary consciousness. Realise what we want to do as Planet, what to do next, what to experience.

But at the moment it looks more like we are in a fucked up simulation. On #Earth3999 that will also fail, go up in flames and maybe #Earth4000 will make it.

Fun fact: vegan we could already feed more than 10.000.000.000 people on this planet. Also, nobody needs to be rich.

Really wonderful comment and very thought provoking. I think more people, myself included, should be thinking about what the transition away from capitalism looks like and not just banging on the drum that capitalism is all that is wrong. We need to be thinking about what steps 1 and 2 look like, not the last step which is way too difficult for anyone to properly see how to get there.

A group of brain cells begins to have emergent properties such as consciousness and intelligence. A group of human brains has similar emergent properties. An individual human mind wants this and that, but an entire human community will have completely different priorities.

I prefer to think of the human population on Earth as a single massive organism that spreads like the mycelia of a fungus. Individual cells have simple needs and goals, but the organism as a whole will do much more than just expand everywhere and extract nutrients.

I will ponder on this when I go to feed my ant colonies later this evening. I think it will be fish flakes tonight.

Think about the behavior of the colony. What does it do and when. How does the colony solve problems. That’s emergent behavior far beyond the capabilities of a single ant.

I've been thinking this for years, but never been able to put it into words to convey the idea to someone else... emergent properties is a start...

We have scientifically measured data that indicates our “consciousness” is emergent in the first place, and our actual senses and reasoning faculties feed data to the part of the brain that assimilates it all and creates a story post-facto.

In other words, the consciousness you think you have is really a hallucination that tries to make sense of the world after the fact. It’s a process that has worked well enough to see humanity flourish.

But some of the underlying drivers include feedback from things like gut bacteria that we don’t consciously monitor; the brain assimilates all sorts of inputs that we never really take into consideration.

So of THESE inputs, there could be all sorts that control our body that our mind then creates parallel construction to explain… and we’d almost never know.

I learned a lot just by reading your response. If I might steal a moment of your time, I'd like to ask a follow-on question.

If consciousness is completely an emergent behavior, why does it exist at all? Can't we simply be robots that execute this programming? Why create the story after the fact? Why should there be a watcher?

Of course, these are difficult questions and I don't expect you to be able to address them completely, but I wonder if there is a reasonable answer.

This is the hottest question in theory of mind right now thanks to David Chalmers. It's called the Hard Problem of Consciousness and it's about connecting the reductionist view of the brain's function with the first-person experience of consciousness.

I think that any explanation of consciousness completely from "the outside" will result in not being able to quantify the experience part of it. Any explanation completely from "the inside" will eventually run into the same issues as empiricism where it will be limited by subjectivity. I think that fundamentally we can't rigorously combine these two views because they aren't compatible. The starting points for each view carry different base assumptions.

Both may be true from within their perspectives but combining them is basically just stating that a subjective experience "maps" to a physical function. There isn't any explanatory usefulness of mapping. It doesn't explain why the subjective experience is there just that it happens when these other physical things happen. I'm not sure we'll find an answer that truly resolves the hard problem, but we're still trying.

That's fascinating and I'd love to learn more, do you happen to have some good sources on the emerging consciousness portion at hand?

I'm a personal fan of Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts theory of consciousness. The biggest problem of defining consciousness is that the deeper you look into where it comes from the definitions we commonly use to describe consciousness fall apart.

It's a collaborative effort between different parts of your brain and the environment. A lot of it we aren't even aware of. At the same time we often generate explanations for our behavior after the fact so our experience of consciousness tends to be mostly a justification mechanism, not necessarily primarily a control mechanism.

I love how such a deep and meta question can just exist on one of the biggest Sublemmys.

It's possible that there are multiple consciousnesses within a single person, and when each of them reads this post, they all think it refers to them. "You" are just one of the consciousnesses, thinking you are the main one. Or maybe you think it refers to you, but another consciousness in the same body is aware of itself as well as you and laughing at your ignorance.

Could these be the negative and positive thoughts within ourselves?

The thalamus filters input to the brain. LSD removes this filter.

As someone with untreated ADHD, I absolutely don't feel I'm the highest level of control in my brain. I can make all the plans and decisions I want, but I can only gently steer what I ultimately end up doing and paying attention to. My "executive function" wields ultimate power and not only can overrule me, but also prevent me from having the thoughts I want to have.

Another indicator that I'm not the only consciousness in here: anxiety-inducing events like deadlines and exams can give me physiological symptoms even when I've forgotten about them. I'll just be sitting there wondering "why is my stomach upset at me?" and only later realize it's from stress for an upcoming test I hadn't paid attention to.

I can completely relate! I sometimes enter states of depression or anxiety without seemingly any triggers. I could be having a great evening and then wake up the next morning feeling anxious or numb. It's like my subconscious is bubbling stuff up to let me know that it's not happy but my modern life has made me so disconnected from my own feelings that I don't even understand what it wants.

Oh man I am saving this one. Next time I'm stoned with someone.

I have to say, the title did not convey the good argument you make.

I'm going to ignore the drugs part; having taken a great many myself, I suspect any revelations gathered under the influence unless they withstand scrutiny after the drugs are out of my system. This perspective has occasionally allowed me to prevent bad experiences from turning into horror trips.

As to your thesis, there are not infinite levels of "life" below us, right? At some point, the mechanisms at play are purely chemical interactions. Are there an infinite levels above us? If not, there must be an ultimate consciousness, above which there are no more. Why aren't our consciousnesses that level? If we aren't, then can that superior, ultimate consciousness also hallucinate and imagine something greater than itself? Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem implies that even an ultimate consciousness at the very top would not be able to know as a fact that there isn't a hidden consciousness superior to itself.

As an aside, I don't know that I'd place the subconscious below consciousness in the foundational way you built. I have wondered whether what we've thought of as the subconcious is merely the manifestation of right hemisphere expressing itself; callosal syndrome - while still controversial - raises some interesting questions, and while I've found no research exploring it, I think it's an interesting possibility. In any case, I don't think it's accurate to consider it the "subconscious and finally our conscious." I think they're at the same level, two equal partners.

An interesting point is that no level below consciousness does science. No organ (besides the brain), no cell, no DNA strand, ponders the the question you pose.

As to your thesis, there are not infinite levels of “life” below us, right? At some point, the mechanisms at play are purely chemical interactions.

I do not believe that are are infinite levels of "life" below us or above, but I do believe there are infinite levels of consciousness. But my definition of consciousness is not restricted to life. I do not equate consciousness with “intelligence” or life. I think consciousness is a fundamental property of every little thing in our universe. I believe that higher levels of consciousness arise due to higher levels of systemic complexity. This definition is more intuitive to me as compared to the modern definition where conscious life develops on earth from essentially nothing that is itself “alive”.

As an aside, I don’t know that I’d place the subconscious below consciousness in the foundational way you built. I have wondered whether what we’ve thought of as the subconcious is merely the manifestation of right hemisphere expressing itself

This is a fascinating idea! Thank you for sharing and I'll be sure to read more about this.

An interesting point is that no level below consciousness does science. No organ (besides the brain), no cell, no DNA strand, ponders the the question you pose.

I would argue that all levels below us do science, at our meta level we simply have ability to observe and describe the science that they do. Sure our cells almost definitely do not have the capacity ponder the question that I raised. But how do you know they don't have other ways to express their agency? A renown biologist Michael Levin took some basic skin cells from a frog embryo and separated them from the rest of the organism. Astonishingly these "skin" cells rebooted themselves and converted into a new type of organism that is able to solve simple mazes, and demonstrate individual and group behaviors. Source: https://youtu.be/p3lsYlod5OU?si=t2-mBbwNWTSX2Lp8&t=389

This is exactly the thought behind the Hindu philosophy of Advaita (non-dualism). Not only does it argue that our state of consciousness and our state of dream are identical but also posits that in order to switch between them we have a thirst state of deep sleep. It then argues that all of these three are not the ultimate state of consciousness but there must be a state which experiences all these. Not only is this the highest state of consciousness but it should also be universal i.e. all of us are the same consciousness.

There is absolutely a subconscious super-brain within our minds that we can sometimes observe and even control to an extent. It can calculate things a lot faster that we consciously do. It's how we dream of elaborate things, it's how we can approximate distances, it's how our intuition works. It can be turned into your personal assistant with enough training and awareness. I believe you can become a genius if you train this part of the mind to interact with your conscious.

It can calculate things a lot faster that we consciously do.

Conscious is the one calculating. Subconscious is more like a huge archive and is good at fetching from the archive or using your past experiences to approximate. It seems like fast because you have already learned it. But only the conscious brain handles totally new knowledge, and subconcious brain learn the approximations based on that.

Yeah, I think that my interpretation was an oversimplification and things are pretty nuanced. I gotta learn more about this stuff if I want to achieve the things I dream of. Thanks for the insight!

So are you a genius or are you just giving up on the grind? Get back to the gym bro we need to train out subconscious super brain

Interesting intellectual work. You can further extrapolate though, there's no good reason not to, within the thought experiment. Why should consciousness stop at cells or solar systems?

Then you can consider the multitude of distinct philosophies that are fond of all things being fundamentally and inescapably interconnected in ways we do not understand yet.

Even Jesus said the Kingdom of God lies within us, not external to us.

I actually don't believe that consciousness stops at cells or solar systems :). I am a panpsychist which holds the view that everything in our universe is made up of consciousness (just not the super intelligent type that we typically associate with the word).

People usually get hung up on the idea... "how can you consider this rock to be conscious". Well within this rock there are protons, neutrons, electrons, atoms, molecules, etc, that all "know" how to do their thing to form a rock. If things weren't conscious then nothing in our universe would have a shape. I believe that higher states of consciousness arise from simpler lower states.

I also suspect that consciousness is far more complex than we have guessed at so far. I'm betting the AI pursuit is going to be the research path that eventually nails it down.

Which will dismay a great many people that disagree with the idea that humans are supposed to create our own world, and bear responsibility for the things we create.

I’ve always been curious at scaling up to astrological size. Galaxies just being possible cells in an even larger entity. Not that I take this as some belief, just something I think about often.

So we have nodes, points in a mesh network, that communicate, exchange nutrients, signals and so on.

The product of this is something like a society, a whole that acts on a more abstract level. Our gut bacteria may not know they are helping us to take up food, but this is what they do on the higher level. At the same time they only get this livable environment because we exist, feed them with food. At the same time though, our bodies also fight them, thats why they eat up our bodies when we die.

Its pretty crazy but in my view live is such a constant fight, and if you would stand still and do nothing, stop breathing, stop digesting, stop pumping blood through your vessels, you would be dead withing minutes.

So cells, individuals, environments, bigger systems. I think the bigger system than that is our society, but thinking that everything has an internal sense is kinda what our monkey brains want, I think its called "false causality". We think everything has to have a structure and purpose, so that we can create a simplified concept of it in our brains and understand it more easily.

Meanwhile on LSD it felt really crazy, the trees where like Antennas, sticking toward the sky, capturing radiation. Earth felt like our space ship, like the floating organic society on a rock that it is. We are a society with all the living beings on this planet, as we depend on each other.

If the air on this planet is used up, if the reserves in the ground are used up, if the sensible living conditions are surpassed, this organism can't sustain our little lives anymore.

We are not almighty, as we are also just a tiny part of this planet. But we are special, as we have never accepted this role, built tools and went further and further, until today huge parts of the earth are entirely human-made.

So practically, and maybe also in some deep metaphysical sense I cant grasp right now, we are all a huge consciousness, or should be, as consciousness is like the control center of this huge complex society of cells, organism, compartiments.

But we pretend not to be a part of the same organism, and this results in absurd, stupid and destructive behavior.

Thanks so much for sharing your LSD experience! That is wild. One thing that I struggle with internally is whether humanity is good or bad for the greater organism on this planet?

On the one hand, humans have the best chance of expanding all life from our planet to other planets and thus ensuring the survival of this organism should anything catastrophic happen to Earth. On the other hand we also have the best chance of destroying ourselves along with everything else here.

I was watching Oppenheimer recently and I just couldn't believe that the brightest minds of that generation banded together to create... a weapon. Instead of launching rockets to other planets we are launching rockets at ourselves. It's pure idiocy. Then I thought about how things aren't that much different today. The brightest engineering minds are working for large corporations that are also destroying our planet, our attention, our privacy, etc.

I'm really curious to hear where you stand on the matter!

Yes, I think I talked about this in my other comment too.

If "good" simply is to increase the general consciousness of the planet, so to understand more, I still have no idea. How foolish can we be to think, our monkey idea of consciousness, or good and bad, could simply be extended to this planet?

I will say this: what we do, serves us. We may plant a seed, but not for the plant, but to get something from the plant. The exception maaaybe being nature conservatists. But also they are simply smart enough to understand that this helps us survive too.

If "being smart" would be a goal. Would a planet with only one elite, mostly white, male, homo sapiens, be better than with Neanderthals, other intelligent animals etc?

We hunted every other intelligent species down. Dogs are our tameable friends, the smartest creatures we can control regularly.

Even if we may keep this planet alive, get together and fix our shit, we would certainly not commit mass-suicide after saving the planet. To offer these nice conditions to other species?

Also, fungi are intelligent. Dolphins are. Forests are. What else is? Do psychedelic plants "outsource" their brain to save energy? Would be pretty smart.

I was thinking,

The hive mind of social media

Cultural consciousness

Familial decisions

National/tribal consciousness

But this is not within the body so maybe I'm wrong

If there were no people, would there be a national consciousness? If such a think exists, it is the sum of parts, so it is partially within the body (if what you say is real).

I actually share your thoughts! I used our body as an example to illustrate my point but I believe that this concept expands beyond our bodies and into everything.

We could both be wrong though!

Yes and in perspective we just might be a cog in an organic web of life that we might not be aware of. Just like the cells, functioning without being aware that they are part of an organ.

I have one issue with this. You're assume that this "higher level" is not us. Wouldn't it be us as much as the cells that make up our body be us? We are whatever we're made of. Once we discovered the brain controlled almost everything didn't make us not us. Being conscious of something doesn't make it exist. It either is or it isn't. If this higher level is controlling a lower level, we're as much it as we are the lower level.

As a cognitive scientist, this is my jam. Firstly I’d just like to point out that there is no widely accepted definition of consciousness, so we don’t really know what being conscious means. There are theories, but all of them have large holes in them at the moment.

Secondly, most people report the feeling of being “conscious” but can’t pinpont how it happens or where it happens. There are some individuals in the world that have trained their whole life to better understand their body and are able to control parts of their organisms that are deemed as part of the autonomic nervous system.

There is a branch of philosophy that deals with a large chunk of what the main theories of consciousness are, but in a manner on how we experience things as humans. It’s called Phenomenology and it’s a super funky science, I recommend it to anyone and everyone interested in learning how they ‘tick’.

But yeah at the end of the day it’s an interesting thought. Personally I think the evolution of “consciousness” is due to our collective nature and that our “consciousness” at the end of our lives is the mark that we left onto the world.

Wait cognitive sciences take this seriously? that does wonders for my depression!

This was my issue with Cogito ergo sum when I was younger.

Can we really assume as Descartes does that I am the one thinking?

Or is it only that I'm the part of me observing the thoughts go by?

So I preferred further reduction to "I observe therefore I am."

Vedanta philosophies from India propose exactly this:

"According to Advaita Vedanta, these different categories of consciousness are classified as absolute consciousness (brahma-caitanya), cosmic consciousness (īśvara-caitanya), individual consciousness (jīva-caitanya), and indwelling consciousness (sāksi-caitanya)."

https://www.hindupedia.com/en/Consciousness_in_Advaita_Vedanta#:~:text=According%20to%20Advaita%20Vedanta%2C%20these,consciousness%20(s%C4%81ksi%2Dcaitanya).

I usually see this word expressed in Western characters as "chaitanya" rather than "caitanya" if you want to go Google things.

Perhaps the next emergent entity is not corporeal, but, instead, of the collective. A good example could be similar to what @kozy138@lemm.ee stated about how the movements of people in crowds are, on the "microscopic" scale, seemingly random, and unpredictable, but, on the "macroscopic" scale, can be predicted quite accurately. One could look at economies, traffic flow, entire nations, etc. as emergent entities that rely on our individual, autonomous interaction. A very interesting such example is outlined in this paper which explains how "Online communities featuring ‘anti-X’ hate and extremism" can be accurately modeled using "novel generalization of nonlinear fluid physics".

I would say that the question makes no sense and the discussion of this kind of thing is rather pointless and ends up merely being people dressing vague feelings in flowery pseudoscientific language.

People can't agree on a definition of consciousness and it's questionable whether consciousness is even a thing, so i don't see how you can tangibly draw any conclusions about even more abstract stuff.

I don't think this is true. Most philosophers agree to define consciousness as what it is like to be something, or the act of experiencing.

If you experience things, you are conscious.

That is interesting and I have no opinion on whether it is real or not, however I think it would be a great plot to a movie learning of the higher consciousness and working with what it can do.

How can cells know what it's like to be a cell? What capacity do they have to perceive information, what organs do they have to store memories and examine them?

I commented this elsewhere but please take a look at a few minutes of this video. Just because we do not understand the mechanism does not mean that it doesn't exist.

A renowned biologist Michael Levin took some basic skin cells from a frog embryo and separated them from the rest of the organism. Astonishingly these “skin” cells rebooted themselves and converted into a new type of organism that is able to solve simple mazes, and demonstrate individual and group behaviors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU&t=389s

That is very cool, thanks for sharing it. Watching through the video though, there don't seem to be any claims made or evidence presented that suggest these cells possess a mechanism, understood or otherwise, to know, understand or experience anything. Nothing to suggest they are capable of consciousness.

A hair cell that has had no prior exposure to a brand new environment is able to sense the change and adapt itself. To me this is indicative of an elementary consciousness.

A reaction does not imply consciousness. Water reacts when it hits fire by turning into steam and putting out the fire. That doesn't make the water or the fire conscious.

These cells are able to solve simple puzzles and behave differently as individuals as compared to groups too.

From my understanding:

  1. Consciousness is simply a "sense of self".

  2. Consciousness resides in the brain.

Your idea is intriguing. However, let me clarify our assumptions in this context.

The reason we consider our consciousness to be at the top is because we seem to be able to control the abstract processes of our body (including the mind). This can be anything from moving your hands to rejecting a religious belief.

If there is a greater consciousness in our very bodies, I think we would have seen its effect in the physical world by now. Assuming said entity is part of an intelligent organism (supposed to be us but not sure, going by the prompt), or will likely take decisions based on a structure.

I do not know how to answer this question if the higher consciousness exists in the metaphysical realm, since we exist in a 3D world and metaphysics in this case can be subjective.

Cheers

A common definition of consciousness is that it's the fact that there's something it's like to be. It's the ability to have a subjective experience. I think it's a safe assumption that the brain is responsible for the emergence of consciousness, but I wouldn't necessarily say it's located in the brain. It's not really located anywhere. That's kind of like saying that waves are at the surface of the ocean when, in fact, they're indistinguishable from each other. Your entire sense of existence is an appearance in consciousness. The feeling that it's located behind your face is just another wave on the ocean.

I believe it originates from the brain because at the end of the day, consciousness manifests on top of a network of neurons, which is effectively the result of a massive (in terms of complexity) chemical reaction. As a side note: I think the growth of AI will show us quite clearly that throwing compute power behind black boxes (artificial neural networks) will not invoke consciousness.

I say that consciousness is created and held in our brain. What I think you're saying is that consciousness encompasses our entire subjective experience, in which case you'd be correct.

Coming back to the point, when I said that our consciousness is present in the brain, I meant our level of consciousness (going by your definition). I do not know if my liver has a consciousness, but assuming that it does, perhaps it's only really capable enough to latch on to the purpose it is provided with by the inherent automation that our bodies possess?

À very interesting questions. I've long felt there was two possible answers to this. You can see a more complex layer at the level of the relationship we have with other beings or even objects (Me + My Favorite Song would be a being of n+1 level of complexity). I call it the Deleuze/Spinoza hypothesis.

Then, you could see it as a kind of personal truth you're embodying, not as a creator but just as an operator, a tool. Although "personal" wouldn't be the right word. You would embody, express, a fraction of a deep truth which is specific to each being.

Or maybe something else I'm unable to imagine.

Also, if I may add and as other have stated, some do not see consciousness as the most complex layer of the human being. Some even consider it as an off-product of our highest functions.

I love the way you’ve articulated the n+1 level of complexity! As if the information that we consume alters the complexity of our own consciousness.

There is something a bit contradictory in saying that there is a level above us that we are not aware of, but by taking drugs we can become aware of it. If it's a separate layer than ours, how can we move towards it while remaining ourselves? And why can't we go lower, and become aware of the consciousness of our organs or cells?

The way I see it, our consciousness is like a hot air balloon, always floating upwards, but our brain (specifically the ego) tethers it to the here and now, so that we can survive in the physical world. What psychedelic drugs do is loosen the rope, weaken the ego, and let us float higher. If you get high enough, you experience "ego death", which in this metaphor just means that you can't see the ground anymore.

(in contrast, some drugs, like cocaine, make the ego even stronger)

This is a really interesting thought experiment.

Definitely I sometimes feel like my consciousness is not controlling my body (think of how you might act sometimes with a really strong emotion), but I think you're meaning on an even higher level.

A couple of things come to mind.

  1. this is not unlike the idea that we are all living in a simulation
  2. this is not unlike the premise of earth in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Just so you know if you feel like you're not controlling your body you could be experiencing derealisation.

Perhaps, but I think it's better described as running on autopilot. Reading through the wikipedia page on derealisation didn't really make me think this is what I was thinking of.

What does this higher conscious do all day? Like even if I'm unable to perceive their thoughts, surely I could see the output of their actions?

My endocrine system may not be able to perceive my tax forms, yet they exist in the same plane of existence.

Finally, there's only one layer we know of with the ability to reason.

Each system attempts to offload work to the lower systems to ensure its own health and survival. Similarly to humans using automation and technology to simplify and enhance their own lives. I don't think its out of the realm of possibility that there exists a higher version of you that is essentially experiencing heaven for the duration of your entire life while you take care of the day-to day-survival duties.

Fun fact, the human gut has as many neurons as a cat.

Maybe they're just laid out very simply, but I don't think anyone has proof. And, apparently, after surgery your intestines will inch their way back into perfect position on their own.

I had a challenge to this idea, but after I thought about it more I'm going to take it in a different direction.

Consciousness seems to be an emergent behavior of at least some complex systems (what systems qualify is unknown). Just sticking with my own neurons, each neuron simply reacts to the signals sent to it and then sends out it's own signal. No neuron has the full context or is necessarily even aware that it's playing part in my own consciousness. Even I don't have the full context of what's happening in my brain.

If we extrapolate this to group behaviors then we can't assume any greater consciousness is any smarter than it's parts.

I think consciousness is all about experience. Neither the neuron, nor you, Ron (I assume your name is Ron for the pun), has the full context. However who has the more complete conscious experience? You are able to touch, smell, see, hear and taste. A neuron is not. Who is to say there aren't other senses in the higher consciousness that are beyond your comprehension, Ron?

I think social structures can be thought of in terms of consciousness, and whether or not they are a "higher" level of human consciousness is mostly a question of your definition of what that means.

From our perspective we are all making individual decisions, but that's similar to how a given cell is just managing its own individual chemical reactions. What initially made humanity unique in the animal kingdom was how complex our social animal is able to be - human clans were more complex than other mammals' packs in the same way that a vertebrate is more complex than an invertebrate. Our social animal is the one that reached the tipping point of adding technology into the mix, which allowed us to add phenomenally more complexity that what evolution on its own is able to create.

In the modern day, in the western world, people principally think of themselves as individual subjects, and as Marxists we recognize that this is one of the most critical self-defense mechanisms of liberalism, since it prevents class consciousness (and allows false consciousness to form). This is akin to how our cells are programmed by dna not to become cancerous - and when this mechanism fails and a cancer/revolutionary group forms the white blood cells/police usually stamp it out to protect the organism/capitalist society.

The big difference between society and an organism when viewed through this lense is that when an organism dies its cells all die too, but when society "dies" all the people who were part of it will naturally form a new one atop the corpse of the old. Imagine if when you died your cells all hit a reset button and your corpse formed into a new person - that might disqualify society from being thought of as a consciousness, or perhaps it's evidence that "consciousness" is independent of life and death.

I don't think there's any reason to assume there's something that it's like to be an individual cell. Consciousness probably needs a certain level of ability to process information for it to emerge, and I doubt cells reach this level. I mean, they could, but I wouldn't make that assumption.

In order to extend the logic all humanity would be part of a hive mind.

That's such a weird concept, definitely a shower thought. I like the idea of it, even though it's very unlikely. We might never know... That's the same vibe as with the "we're in a simulation" theory. Hard to prove or disprove.

I find it hard to imagine being conscious but unable to control any part of your body as anything but a terrible nightmare. Shut-in would suck, higher consciousness or not.

All things are a little bit alive/conscious even innanimate things like vibrating guitar strings, grains of sand blowing in the wind, and photons of light traveling the cosmos. They aren't quite as conscious as say a living organism but they still in experience things and interact with the rest of reality. They may even have a meager ability to feel emotion after after a few billion years of existence, you never know. microorganisms almost certainly do have basic emotions like hunger, relief from eating, and a instinctual fear of death/getting eaten, though a scientist would argue against such an idea till they were blue in the face. Your individual cells are also alive and experience a whole unseen life individually, they are a little bit conscious though not as conscious as 'you' as a whole.

Psychadellics can allow your consciousness to expand and telepathically connect with the universal conciousness of reality from which all other conciousness is ultimately born from and returns to, sometimes called the godhead in daoist philosophy but I think of it as a paradoxical being both an individual that split split itself into countless parts to go through every aspect of experience seeing through the eyes and feeling the feelings of everything in reality. Every conciousness in reality also harmonizes and comes together to form the godhead, the universal conciousness.

I'm a scientist and I agree with the statement that most if not all organisms have emotions and some degree of consciousness.

There is no evidence to support this, though

The big issue of the scientific method is that it throws away all truths that cannot be falsifiable, riggerously tested or measured. Or to put it simply, not everything that is true has a gaurentee to be proveable. There are some truths which no system of logic or experimentation can definitively determine the validity of. Mathematicians already had to deal with this existencial crisis of limits to provability with Gödel's incompleteness theorem. If absolute knowability is already screwed in the purely theoretical world of abstract logic, there is most likely an equivalence in the physical sciences. They are two sides of the same coin after all. There is most likely no theory of everything, not even of just physical reality, and never will be.

There are parts of human experience and more generally reality itself that science will forever denounce because they are non-physical and non-falsifiable. Unfalsifiability doesn't make the experiences any less real or true in the eyes of reality, just unprovable by the standards of the scientific model.

I was always a big fan of science, even as a kid. The universe facinated me and I always wondered why things work the way they do. Now I see its limits as well as the inherent flaws and biases that exist within the scientific community.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I think that the scientific method is invaluable. I also think that it will never be complete because it is mostly quantitative while consciousness is qualitative (qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience).

For as long as science keeps subjective experience out of the equation (which by definition it kinda has to) then I also don't think there will ever be a theory of everything.

You do make a good point, and what you suppose is entirely possible, but personally I don’t agree with this interpretation:

…isn’t it a little too self aggrandizing to think that we have a near infinite layering of consciousness beneath us and then it just stops at our level of awareness?

Nah. I think the perspective that our awareness is the “top” is what lets us make the best of ourselves. If everyone’s attitude was “well, I’m no better than a pancreas, so fuck it” we’d all be lazy and depressed.

Still, though, I think it’s an interesting observation.

But "fuck it" does not by definition follow, even if we're pancreases. You might, for example, take pride in being a really good pancreas. And pancreases arguably have more structured purpose than most people feel--they are very definably serving a greater whole, whereas it's not always clear how we are doing so, short of intentional effort.

You’re right. I like this idea better!

Please bear in mind that I was in a pretty negative headspace when I wrote this post yesterday! On most days, I’d wager that it is in the best interest of each higher entity to nurture and support the lower entities because they need each other to exist.

In other words I wouldn’t be able to enjoy life if my heart was in constant pain or simply gave out. Likewise, the heart would have more trouble doing its thing if I chose to never exercise, only eat fried foods, etc.

I’d like to think that each layer “desires” an equilibrium and harmony.

Hey, I was in a pretty negative headspace when I read it!

The closest comparison I can think of is being part of a job I liked. I wasn’t the boss, or part of the management team. I was at the bottom, but I knew I was good at my job and reliable. I liked the people I worked with. Not even a remotely glamorous job, but doing it well made me feel good. It didn’t matter, but it mattered, ya know?

I do know! As my favorite job in the world thus far has been delivering Chinese food ☺️.

I hope that you’re feeling better today! Apologies if my post sent you further down into negativity yesterday.

Thanks! I guess my main point is that at every layer each conscious entity is not aware of the more complex conscious entity above it. If a heart knew that it works tirelessly to beat 2.5 billion times in an average lifetime only to support a (typically) ungrateful higher consciousness that gets to experience joy, happiness, flavor, touch, scent etc while the heart experiences none of it... it may consider stopping beating. It's in the best interest of the higher consciousness to keep the lower consciousness beating along for as long as possible while being essentially in the dark.

It’s probably good that we’re unaware, then. I don’t want to know what I’m missing!

This seems to just be rehashing the logic of simulation theory without considering that most of those levels of consciousness are not capable of reflection remotely similar to what we experience even just to consider this question.

What kind of organism would want to wage war on itself? Kill and mame other "cells?" But while there may be the possibility of an emergent world consciousness, a "hive mind" if you will, I'd imagine it'd be a slow processing one.