Asklemmy

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)

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.

Sounds a bit like the book “flatland”.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You do make a good point, and what you suppose is entirely possible, but personally I don’t agree with this interpretation:

…isn’t it a little too self aggrandizing to think that we have a near infinite layering of consciousness beneath us and then it just stops at our level of awareness?

Nah. I think the perspective that our awareness is the “top” is what lets us make the best of ourselves. If everyone’s attitude was “well, I’m no better than a pancreas, so fuck it” we’d all be lazy and depressed.

Still, though, I think it’s an interesting observation.