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)?
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
In order to extend the logic all humanity would be part of a hive mind.
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’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…
See also: emergence
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How about now?
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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.
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”.
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.
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.
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”.
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 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.
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.
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.
This is the coolest ask Lemmy I’ve ever seen!
