I’m bored right now with school work so let’s talk about this whole consciousness thing. Just so you are aware of my ‘labels’, I am non-religious (previously Catholic), I don’t believe in god as a man-in-the-sky type beat, but I’m not atheist or agnostic either. Because if God is omnipotent (everything++), he/she/them/us/it must be more than just a noun and well… everything.
Everything. What a concept huh? Everything is so all encompassing that thinking you can carry some sort of conception of that in your mind at all times is a fools errand. I mean, I’m typing this essay on my couch somewhere in Seattle on a beautiful Friday evening (yes, my social life is in shambles thank you for asking). Wherever you are (which is in the future from my point of view) is part of that everything. Just as where I am now, and the computer/operating system/wifi network I’m using to type this is also a part of that everything. And also the water in my flesh, some of which was presumably dinosaur urine millions of years ago, is a part of that everything. Everything in your head is only a subset of everything going on in the background that your 14 million neurons aren’t able to register, because everything in your head is itself just a small part of everything.
What I would like to try and convince you of is that everything is conscious. I think you will be surprised about how unremarkable of a fact this is when you start to think about it. Allow me to explain.
Before I begin, we must define consciousness. There are plenty of definitions but the most common is “the state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings.” I don’t like this definition. If you have ever experienced the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, you’d know you don’t have to be “awake” to be conscious. Being aware of one’s surroundings seems like a slightly better definition, but what surroundings are we talking here? Suppose I’m a child and I go to a magic show and I see a magician saw a box with a person inside of it in half, and being the naive kid I am, I actually believe that the magician has separated this person . Am I not aware of my surroundings enough to know that there was actually another person in the other side of the box that was cut? What about the fact that I wasn’t paying attention to the sensation of the socks on my feet just now? Is there some sort of threshold for how much I must be aware of my surroundings in order to be conscious?
Maybe your “awareness” cutoff is at the arbitrary ability to speak interpret language (see whales and dolphins for animals that have their own language) or ability to change one’s environment to better suit it (beavers, bees… birds). Humans are an all-in-one package with a massive brain and opposable thumbs for tool making, but I’d argue that just because we have the goods, doesn’t make us any less conscious than a dog or a cat. As any pet owner can tell you, some animals have the capacity to understand us in ways that are superior to some people. By arbitrary definitions of awareness, that would mean that some animals that are even more aware than some humans. We might have reservations on whether or not animals have as much consciousness as humans, but this belief is contradictory if we can imagine that a particular dog could have more awareness than some particular human, and so let’s just say every animal has some capacity for consciousness.
Ok great. By their ability to be aware of their surroundings, it follows then then that all animals are “conscious”. The difference between a rabbit and a human is then, interestingly, the degree of consciousness they possess. It must then be a measurable quality right? Well… let’s get back to that.
Insects. Many people do not consider insects conscious, but they have to be at least somewhat conscious right? I mean, they have to consider their environment so they can mate and don’t get eaten by other insects, birds, monkeys, people, etc. Plus they all have brains (W for the bugs). The distinction between them and animals isn’t so much their intelligence as it is their exoskeleton. But now we get into a weird territory because if insects, which can be really small and stupid, are conscious to some degree, what about plants? Do you honestly mean to tell me that a fruit fly, has a degree of consciousness greater than an ancient California Redwood tree or a Venus Fly Trap? (Which, fun fact, apparently they can count to 5 and has a 30 second short term ‘memory’). I’m not saying sunflowers are conscious in the same degree that we are when they open their petals in the morning, but even a knee-jerk reaction demonstrates some form of awareness to the outside world.
And if plants have some degree of consciousness, then microorganisms lacking a central nervous system must have some degree of it too. Infact, by this logic it follows that everything that is alive is conscious to some degree, regardless of it’s state (awake, sleeping, comatose, etc). Consciousness is not some arbitrary binary. Any living being will possess some degree of it, whether they are multicellular or not, under anesthetics, drunk, or just really, really ignorant (a few humans come to mind here).
Life itself is bestowed with consciousness by definition of it’s ability to react to its surroundings. Which itself is a mind fuck because we don’t even have a great definition of life. What about viruses?
Biologists are not in agreement whether viruses are even alive. They don’t exactly act on their own agency and kind of just go wherever the forces of nature take them, usually in the form of a sneeze to a door handle. They can’t even reproduce on their own. Yet, viruses do replicate, and a single virus can replicate thousands of near perfect copies of itself, much like bacteria. Bacteria are just bags of atoms with a lot of specific chemical reactions going on inside of them simultaneously which keeps them, as we say, ‘alive’ in comparison. But what is it about these chemical reactions that qualify E.coli as a living thing?
Well, they are ordered in a very complicated, miraculous manner which allows the cell to operate with some sort of agenda for that order to continue, because when when those reactions fall into a state of disorder that can’t reorder itself, the cell is what we call, ‘dead’. It is a living thing’s ability to order it’s chemical reactions in a way that furthers the continued process of it’s own chemical reactions through the concepts of ‘survival’ and ‘reproduction’ that allow it to go on and ‘evolve’, a process that itself responds to the surroundings the organism is experiencing. Thus, Consciousness exists as an ‘active pattern’ in all living things.
But viruses abide by a pattern of survival too, even if living things do more metabolistic work in passing on their particular means of ordered existence. Even though the virus’s ‘pattern; does not operate actively in the same way, it still manifests behavior which responds to it’s surroundings in a manner we would define as consciousness when looked at holistically over time and space. Viral patterns continue to exist far beyond our own lifetimes, infecting our species (the human ‘pattern’) with colds, covid and AIDS along the way.
And now fancy this thought: crystals also replicate. Like viruses, they too are passive patterns. No one would claim that crystals are alive, but they do replicate. You can grow crystals yourself with a ‘seed’ strung by a piece of yarn with each end immersed in a cup containing a solution of it’s constituants. And what’s mind blowing about that; if crystals can be considered conscious because of their ability to replicate under the right conditions, we can consider everything conscious.
A rock is nothing more than a collection of minerals, including crystals, which itself is formed from the solidification of matter, most of which was supernova’d out from stars, a process that is a well documented phenomenon in physics, shall we say, the pattern of star creation. The process in which stars form is therefore conscious. The things which stars form are conscious. The dead meat and plant matter you consume, which was once conscious to a higher degree in whatever organism that made up, is now conscious in every cell of your body (including your brain, which is where many scientists consider consciousness to reside soley despite the fact that there are more neurons in your stomach than ).
You are not just conscious, you are made of pattens that themselves are conscious. There are trillions of beings known as microorganisms inside of you. Each of their cells (and your own) itself contains DNA, an extraordinary chain of replicable proteins which themselves contain information that can be used not just as information for biological life, but in vaccines and even computers. Oh, and computers (and by extension, AI) may not ‘understand’ the way we are capable of understanding the world, but they are surely conscious in the sense that they to are a pattern of sorts, from their physical components, to the software we create, copy and distribute for them.
And what is software but replicated sequence of 1s and 0s? Are numbers conscious then? Ideas? Memes? Who says a ‘thing‘ has to be matter at all to be conscious in the first place? In fact, by that logic, every law in the universe is some conscious agent, including then, the concept of nothing. And if the universe contains everything, than everything outside the universe is nothing. which means….
Consciousness isn’t just everything. Consciousness is beyond everything. Consciousness exists outside of matter itself.
And you are a remarkably complex, replicable (but irreplaceable) being bestowed with something far more remarkable than any rock or tree or supernova or bearded God in the sky. Because unlike them, you can recognize that, yes, “you” may just be a ‘bag of atoms’, but that very bag of atoms is a portal for a force far greater to act upon these universal forces. You’re particular medium of consciousness has the ability to not only look inward upon itself and recognize it’s own connection to the domain of consciousness we all share, but also the means to share that understanding with all people.
Luke 17:20-21
Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; nor will they say, ‘See here! ’ or ‘See there! ’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.
I really need to finish my homework.