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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
How many drugs have you taken today?
Just my anti-depressants, I swear!
I believe you, aCosmicWave.
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
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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.
This is the coolest ask Lemmy I’ve ever seen!
Who knows man
I was hoping that the CEO of Lemmy would!
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.
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?
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
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