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.

Fun fact, the human gut has as many neurons as a cat.

Maybe they're just laid out very simply, but I don't think anyone has proof. And, apparently, after surgery your intestines will inch their way back into perfect position on their own.

I don't think there's any reason to assume there's something that it's like to be an individual cell. Consciousness probably needs a certain level of ability to process information for it to emerge, and I doubt cells reach this level. I mean, they could, but I wouldn't make that assumption.

I think social structures can be thought of in terms of consciousness, and whether or not they are a "higher" level of human consciousness is mostly a question of your definition of what that means.

From our perspective we are all making individual decisions, but that's similar to how a given cell is just managing its own individual chemical reactions. What initially made humanity unique in the animal kingdom was how complex our social animal is able to be - human clans were more complex than other mammals' packs in the same way that a vertebrate is more complex than an invertebrate. Our social animal is the one that reached the tipping point of adding technology into the mix, which allowed us to add phenomenally more complexity that what evolution on its own is able to create.

In the modern day, in the western world, people principally think of themselves as individual subjects, and as Marxists we recognize that this is one of the most critical self-defense mechanisms of liberalism, since it prevents class consciousness (and allows false consciousness to form). This is akin to how our cells are programmed by dna not to become cancerous - and when this mechanism fails and a cancer/revolutionary group forms the white blood cells/police usually stamp it out to protect the organism/capitalist society.

The big difference between society and an organism when viewed through this lense is that when an organism dies its cells all die too, but when society "dies" all the people who were part of it will naturally form a new one atop the corpse of the old. Imagine if when you died your cells all hit a reset button and your corpse formed into a new person - that might disqualify society from being thought of as a consciousness, or perhaps it's evidence that "consciousness" is independent of life and death.

I had a challenge to this idea, but after I thought about it more I'm going to take it in a different direction.

Consciousness seems to be an emergent behavior of at least some complex systems (what systems qualify is unknown). Just sticking with my own neurons, each neuron simply reacts to the signals sent to it and then sends out it's own signal. No neuron has the full context or is necessarily even aware that it's playing part in my own consciousness. Even I don't have the full context of what's happening in my brain.

If we extrapolate this to group behaviors then we can't assume any greater consciousness is any smarter than it's parts.

Sounds a bit like the book “flatland”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland

In order to extend the logic all humanity would be part of a hive mind.

That's such a weird concept, definitely a shower thought. I like the idea of it, even though it's very unlikely. We might never know... That's the same vibe as with the "we're in a simulation" theory. Hard to prove or disprove.

All things are a little bit alive/conscious even innanimate things like vibrating guitar strings, grains of sand blowing in the wind, and photons of light traveling the cosmos. They aren't quite as conscious as say a living organism but they still in experience things and interact with the rest of reality. They may even have a meager ability to feel emotion after after a few billion years of existence, you never know. microorganisms almost certainly do have basic emotions like hunger, relief from eating, and a instinctual fear of death/getting eaten, though a scientist would argue against such an idea till they were blue in the face. Your individual cells are also alive and experience a whole unseen life individually, they are a little bit conscious though not as conscious as 'you' as a whole.

Psychadellics can allow your consciousness to expand and telepathically connect with the universal conciousness of reality from which all other conciousness is ultimately born from and returns to, sometimes called the godhead in daoist philosophy but I think of it as a paradoxical being both an individual that split split itself into countless parts to go through every aspect of experience seeing through the eyes and feeling the feelings of everything in reality. Every conciousness in reality also harmonizes and comes together to form the godhead, the universal conciousness.

I find it hard to imagine being conscious but unable to control any part of your body as anything but a terrible nightmare. Shut-in would suck, higher consciousness or not.

This seems to just be rehashing the logic of simulation theory without considering that most of those levels of consciousness are not capable of reflection remotely similar to what we experience even just to consider this question.