Combinations of Consciousness
Exploring how consciousness combines and unifies at different levels.
In our everyday lives we're very accustomed to the idea of consciousness being associated with ourselves and our own bodies. I am a conscious being, and you are a conscious being. In strict classical/materialist view, we think of each human as a separate consciousness, with the threshold of our brains being the outer barrier of each consciousness. Consciousness, however, is much more fluid and multi-faceted.
The Consciousness of Our Bodies
There is evidence in cutting edge biology and biophysics that the brain is not the only "region of consciousness" in our bodies -- Rather, our bodies have a distributed consciousness, and separate organs have a sort of lower level consciousness (or sub consciousness). Our cardiovascular system, nervous systems, and muscle organs each have a sort of consciousness to them which allows them to perform autonomous operation and in the case of our muscle organs, they learn skills such as shooting a basketball or playing a guitar. We call this "muscle memory", and it literally is a form of memory that our conscious muscle organs develop -- to the point that we can completely detach our higher level focus, and our conscious muscle organs can perform complex tasks without high level conscious focus or direction.
When great athletes play a game, they aren't focused on the minutia of all the micro movements and timing they need to shoot a jumping three point basketball shot... it just becomes natural to the consciousness of our bodies. Same with playing guitar or any other motor skill. This is just to point out the often overlooked fact that our human consciousness is rather many spheres of consciousness in the body, and we have a higher level consciousness (sometimes called our "id"), which can micromanage and direct the lower levels of consciousness, or completely go off daydreaming or focused on something unrelated while our other conscious subsystems perform complex tasks.
Have you ever commuted to/from work, and spent the entire drive thinking about random things or engrossed in an audiobook, and upon arrival, you realize you don't even remember any part of the drive? Lower levels of conscious focus (or subconscious focus) can take care of amazing tasks, while your higher level conscious focus (your id) can be off in another world of thought.
The Consciousness of Close Friends and Family
At a higher level, we form conscious spheres with the people we associate with on a daily basis. When we become bonded in groups of friends or family, we form these conscious units which work together toward shared goals. When we have a family with parents and children, the familial unit works together to achieve family goals. Each person in the family acts as a sort of organ in the familial body.
Each family may operate slightly differently, but the general idea is that we divide up responsibilities and opportunities like various organs in a larger system, so that we support the growth of each other, and achieve larger and longer term familial goals over periods of years or decades. In some cases, there may be a father or mother figure who acts as a primary breadwinner working to earn money for the family, and another parent may focus more on the raising of kids or ensuring the household operations run efficiently. Other contributions may come from grandparents and kids, helping to guide the family toward shared goals and growth.
In many cases familial bonds are so well developed that family members can sort of read the mind of others in the family, and collaborate and take actions without even communicating with words, knowing that our actions will facilitate and support the overall conscious family goals.
In our daily lives, we are often primarily focused on our individual human consciousness, but at a higher level, we are organs in these higher level units of consciousness. We combine together in united families, and spread our values and collective ideas over generations of time. We collaborate together to nurture the branches of our family tree, providing ongoing growth of a lineage of conscious influence. When we take a step back from our day to day, minute to minute focus on ourselves, we see that we are part of a higher level conscious unit focused on year-by-year growth and generation-by-generation growth of our conscious family tree.
The Consciousness of Communities, Societies, Ecosystems, and Planetary Bodies
At an even higher level, we participate in local communities and societies defined by our cities, states or countries of residence. Together we work together in small groups like organs in a larger body, specializing in separate jobs and development of ideas which contribute to the movement and direction of the societies which we live in.
Most modern countries are fairly balanced, featuring democratic means of electing representatives who are put in charge of forming the rules and actions of our society -- however some societies are more autocratic dictatorships, where there is not a good balance of conscious representation of citizens in the direction of the country.
At an even wider scale, focusing on scales of cosmological time, we are all part of a larger conscious movement that encompasses our entire planet Earth and solar system -- and we have advanced to a point in which our technology and space program capabilities allow humanity to extend conscious presence to other planets in our solar system, and perhaps beyond our solar system someday. Often the key to focusing on these various levels or combinations of consciousness involves forcing our conscious minds-eye to focus on different time spans, rather than being so focused on our day to day and minute to minute tasks which we always fall back to.
The Combination Problem
In philosophy and consciousness research circles, "the combination problem" is an often debated topic. The combination problem basically says: If consciousness is fundamental and ever present in reality and all matter, how is it that our human identities form from this combined amalgamation of matter in our bodies. In the Consciocentric view, there isn't just one combination into human consciousness, but there is consciousness at many levels. In our day to day lives, we often only focus on the individual id, but at a more fundamental level, we can meditate and focus down into the consciousness of our sub systems of our bodies, like our cardiovascular system, and be present at that level. And in the other direction, we participate in conscious spheres larger than our body, as units that combine into families, communities, societies, and the ecosystem at large on our planet. The time span focus of each of these conscious spheres we participate in varies. When we're talking about the family tree of conscious ideas we are part of, we're focused more on years, decades and even centuries which we participate in, spreading our ideas through our family units. On an ecological scale, we are participants of a larger conscious movement which shapes the direction of our entire planetary ecosystem over centuries and millenniums. The biggest mental roadblock when talking about the "combination problem" is that we need to understand that conscious combination occurs at many levels... we just happen to be programmed to primarily focus on our individual human bodies, as that is the conscious sphere in which we have the most control and agility for change over daily lives.
David BohmPhysicist, Conscious Researcher, Philosopher "(regarding interconnected behaviors of plasma and superconductive states) Electrons are not scattered because, through the action of the quantum potential, the whole system is undergoing a co-ordinated movement more like a ballet dance than like a crowd of unorganized people -- such quantum wholeness of activity is closer to the organized unity of functioning of the parts of a living being than it is to the kind of unity that is obtained by putting together the parts of a machine."
Max PlanckPhysicist, Father of Quantum Theory "Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by itself... We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts."
Erwin SchrodingerPhysicist, Quantum Mechanics Pioneer "The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings."
Dalai Lama Tenzin GyatsoDalai Lama, Spiritual Teacher "As individuals we can influence our own families. Our families can influence our communities and our communities can influence our nations."
Suzanne SimardEcological Scientist and Professor "An old-growth forest is neither an assemblage of stoic organisms tolerating one another’s presence nor a merciless battle royale: It’s a vast, ancient and intricate society. There is conflict in a forest, but there is also negotiation, reciprocity and perhaps even selflessness. The trees, understory plants, fungi and microbes in a forest are so thoroughly connected, communicative and codependent that some scientists have described them as superorganisms."
Dean RadinPsychologist, Parapsychology Researcher, Author "Telepathy arises not because something is transmitted between "Gail" and "Tom", but because from a holistic perspective the objects we perceive as “Gail” and “Tom” are not as separate as they seem. At a deeper level of reality, there is no separateness, including no isolated Gails and Toms. From that view, Gail can know Tom’s mind because a part of Gail is already identical with a part of Tom."
Sara WalkerAstrobiologist, Theoretical Physicist, Professor "Consciousness and matter are part of the same causal structure, the key difference being whether we are looking deep in time or looking at what exists only now."
Sara WalkerAstrobiologist, Theoretical Physicist, Professor "I am not my atoms. You are not your molecules. We are part of the current moment of a billions-year-old lineage of propagating information that has structured matter on our Earth since the origin of life."
Michael LevinBiophysicist, Biology Professor, Tufts Director "The idea that cognition just magically shows up at some biological step, and then humans gain a true self... that runs against everything we know about evolution and developmental biology."
Michael LevinBiophysicist, Biology Professor, Tufts Director "A fertilized egg has tens of thousands of cells. Among those cells you have an ocean of potentiality for the initial forming of individual self-hood. Certain regions of cells organize and form together to become an embryo, and that embryo group of cells essentially tells the rest of the cells in the egg to back down at that point, generally resulting in a single embryo per fertilized egg. However, by scratching the cellular surface and temporarily breaking the communication between the thousands of cells with this potential, you will see multiple embryos form instead of just one. This collective organization of cells and pursuit of goals is the origin of self-hood."
Michael LevinBiophysicist, Biology Professor, Tufts Director "Potential energy and least action principles are the tiniest hopes and dreams there are."
Michael LevinBiophysicist, Biology Professor, Tufts Director "The backbone of biology and things we call life are just systems that are very good at scaling up the cognitive properties of their parts into bigger and bigger cognitive light cones... The future unified theory of biology is going to be less about physics and chemistry, and more about goals, memories, preferences, and basically terms that you would recognize from psychology and behavior science."
Neil deGrasse TysonAstrophysicist, Author, Lecturer "We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically."
Carlo RovelliTheoretical Physicist "From communication to the basis of genetics; from thermodynamics to quantum mechanics; up to quantum gravity, the notion of information is gaining ground as a tool for understanding. The world should not be understood as an amorphous ensemble of atoms-but rather as a game of mirrors, founded on the correlations between the structures formed by combinations of these atoms."