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.

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.

Not currently high enough to answer, will come back later

How many drugs have you taken today?

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.

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.

This is the coolest ask Lemmy I've ever seen!

I love how such a deep and meta question can just exist on one of the biggest Sublemmys.

Who knows man

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.

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.

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.

This is exactly the thought behind the Hindu philosophy of Advaita (non-dualism). Not only does it argue that our state of consciousness and our state of dream are identical but also posits that in order to switch between them we have a thirst state of deep sleep. It then argues that all of these three are not the ultimate state of consciousness but there must be a state which experiences all these. Not only is this the highest state of consciousness but it should also be universal i.e. all of us are the same consciousness.

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.

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.

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

Interesting intellectual work. You can further extrapolate though, there's no good reason not to, within the thought experiment. Why should consciousness stop at cells or solar systems?

Then you can consider the multitude of distinct philosophies that are fond of all things being fundamentally and inescapably interconnected in ways we do not understand yet.

Even Jesus said the Kingdom of God lies within us, not external to us.

This was my issue with Cogito ergo sum when I was younger.

Can we really assume as Descartes does that I am the one thinking?

Or is it only that I'm the part of me observing the thoughts go by?

So I preferred further reduction to "I observe therefore I am."

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.

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".

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 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.

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.

You should really read Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising

You will love it.

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.

1. this is not unlike the idea that we are all living in a simulation
2. this is not unlike the premise of earth in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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.

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.

From my understanding:

1. Consciousness is simply a "sense of self".
2. Consciousness resides in the brain.

Your idea is intriguing. However, let me clarify our assumptions in this context.

The reason we consider our consciousness to be at the top is because we seem to be able to control the abstract processes of our body (including the mind). This can be anything from moving your hands to rejecting a religious belief.

If there is a greater consciousness in our very bodies, I think we would have seen its effect in the physical world by now. Assuming said entity is part of an intelligent organism (supposed to be us but not sure, going by the prompt), or will likely take decisions based on a structure.

I do not know how to answer this question if the higher consciousness exists in the metaphysical realm, since we exist in a 3D world and metaphysics in this case can be subjective.

Cheers

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)