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)?
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…
See also: emergence
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.
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.
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.
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?
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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…
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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!
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.
I love how such a deep and meta question can just exist on one of the biggest Sublemmys.
The thalamus filters input to the brain. LSD removes this filter.
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.
You’re just jealous because the voices talk to me.
The voices in my head tell me things all the time
Could these be the negative and positive thoughts within ourselves?
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
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https://youtu.be/p3lsYlod5OU?si=t2-mBbwNWTSX2Lp8&t=389
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I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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 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!
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.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU&t=389s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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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 many drugs have you taken today?
Just my anti-depressants, I swear!
I believe you, aCosmicWave.
