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.
Damn. All that is relatively common knowledge, yet you're getting some weird downvotes.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Could we equate "consciousness" to "perspective" or "way of seeing"? That might be useful.
It would include a way of seeing, hearing, smelling etc... and a way of thinking too (which could be called a way of seeing thoughts) (don't want to give thinking special treatment here)
I think those are aspects of consciousness. Parts that make something greater. I would say consciousness is definitely connected with perception but I think there is much more to it than that.
Well it's our term. We can throw anything we want in there.
What would you add?
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
