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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.
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
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…
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.
How many drugs have you taken today?
Just my anti-depressants, I swear!
I believe you, aCosmicWave.
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.
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?
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...
I love how such a deep and meta question can just exist on one of the biggest Sublemmys.
This is the coolest ask Lemmy I've ever seen!
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.
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
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.
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.
The thalamus filters input to the brain. LSD removes this filter.
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!
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
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".
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)
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.
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.
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.
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)."
I usually see this word expressed in Western characters as "chaitanya" rather than "caitanya" if you want to go Google things.
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.
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.