Distributed Consciousness
What is Consciousness? Well that’s a deep question so we won’t explore in this scope. Let’s treat that as an axiom. What we are going to explore; is distributed form of it. That will help us understand why team work is dream work ranging from universal consciousness to team of 2.
Chartered territory
Components of consciousness
Before I start flinging out-worldly concepts let’s start with the things science currently agrees with.
Human consciousness is a result of collection and interaction of neurons. You are a result of your set of neurons and the connection between them.
These neurons don’t have consciousness, in the sense that they don’t have knowledge about who they are, what they are and where exactly they are, they are aware of their immediate surroundings and to some extent themselves.
Well, that can be said about me too. Anyways, let’s keep the existential crisis aside to focus on the task at hand.
Let’s say neurons are less conscious than us. They have some consciousness, but we can’t tap into their consciousness, i.e. I as a “person” can’t know what a particular neuron’s “thinking”. Well that’s symmetric, neuron can’t know what I am thinking either.
I will use this argument later so try to remember this.
Group as an organism
If you look at a group of organisms it behaves quite a lot like an organism itself. Think of a colony of ants, the colony reacts as an organism, it runs away from water builds a home not something an ant would for itself. Individual ant can’t reproduce, the colony can, through the queen, so you can say the queen is the reproductive organ of this organism. This is an extreme case, where the individual is insignificant.
For a group of humans, they also act a lot like one organism if their is a fire they group runs away. There are some white blood cells like the police. etc. etc.
Distributed Consciousness
As we discussed earlier consciousness has 2 components:
- Individual computation units (neurons).
- Presence of communication between them.
As we looked into the case of ant colonies where each ant is significantly more complex than a neuron but colony still behaves like one organism, and the rules above still apply.
What I am proposing here, is that whenever more than one computation units come together and communicate a consciousness is formed. This consciousness might be on varying levels of complexity but the statement is true.
In case of human each group of individuals who have some form of communication make a whole new “person” with it’s own consciousness. Such a consciousness can’t be perceived by the participating individuals and external observers due to the distributed nature of it, in other words we can’t see the big picture. Just as respective neurons are unaware to author writing this post and reader.
What that means is, we can create a consciousness from anything once we figure out the magic sauces, like how figuring out engine braking and counter steering helped me ride my motorcycle faster.
Variables
It’s not always 1 + 1, communication is just as important as individuals. Let’s look at variables we can play with that determine complexity of such a distributed consciousness. Obviously it’s for ideal case where all nodes are co-operative to the fullest.
Complexity of individual units
The more complex individual units are, the more complex resultant consciousness can be; we’ll look into caveats later.
Quality of Communication
Factors affecting communication are surprisingly related to those in computer networking.
- Bandwidth: amount of information that can be sent.
- Latency: Delay between transmission and reception of information.
- Network Topology: Not all nodes are always connected to all nodes, a group where every one talks to each other will have a different than a group where one person talks to 2 people like a queue in a school assembly.
Size of the group
The more the merrier, for consciousness complexity.
God
Heaven
Rebirth
You might have heard the phrase you truly die when every body who knows you dies.