Consciousness only just started, and may be about to end

This is a topic I haven't seen discussed anywhere else, so here goes.

Limited consciousness
Consciousness is usually defined as "awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc."

By this definition, for most of history, humans were only minimally conscious:

1. First, we knew very little beyond our immediate experience.
2. Second, our thoughts were not our thoughts, but were placed there by our tribe or religion.
3. Third, our existence was not our own existence, but we depended entirely on our tribe.

Read ancient texts such as Genesis or Homer: all ideas come from above or below, and all events are controlled by God or fate.  The idea of individuals being in control of their lives is relatively new. Even the great heroes of the Iliad were constantly at the mercy of forces beyond their understanding. Julian Jaynes sees this as evidence that consciousness as we know it did not exist.

For related topics see The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins: we think we are smart, but to a large extent we are merely disposable carriers for our genes, they are in control and we don't even realize it. Or study the evidence for free will: there is masses of evidence that free will is an illusion (i.e. our choice are predictable and our ideas are never new).


Emergent consciousness
We like to think that, as humans, we are in control. But we are all have always been a team. As the poet said, no man is an island, complete of itself. Every man is part of the continent. when someone dies, we die. We need each other. The idea of separate existence has only ever been a partial truth. Our real identity is shared. The real decisions and intelligence operates at a group level. The group is more aware, has more identity, makes its own decisions, and is thus conscious.

This may seem unintuitive. How can a nation or a network or an Internet be conscious? But plenty of scientists ask the same question about humans, and come to the conclusion that consciousness is a shared or emergent property: there is no single conscious point, we are simply cells that work together. The idea of a personal identity has exactly the same meaning as a national or cultural identity: it is shared.

Some people find this scary. Does it mean we are weak? No, it means we are strong. Allegiance to the group gives us identity and power and safety.


Still don't believe it? OK. Here is a completely different approach
Don't believe it? OK, then forget the consciousness part. Here is a far simpler claim:

For most of history, individual humans were not at the top of the intellectual tree.

Individuals were conduits. Links in a chain. We simply followed ideas created by gods or tradition. Even direct experience was mediated by others telling us what it means. Very few people, if any, saw themselves as the originators of their ideas.

Obviously people still had eyes and sensations and made decisions. But this is like saying a hand is conscious because it will react to pain even before the message gets to the brain (the nerves in our limbs can do some simple things autonomously).

Throughout history the default position has been obedience. A class system made everyone a part of something else, passing on orders from above to those parts below.

This is true for kings as well as serfs. The kings were seldom the most intelligent people. They were there by accident of birth and often made really bad decisions. They were at the mercy of the wider forces of nature and society. Being in control was only ever true in a very limited sense.

This was of course also true for philosophers. Even the smartest man on earth knew very little and was at the mercy of the stupidest. Socrates ("true wisdom is to know that we know nothing") was forced to drink hemlock. Archimedes, while he knew that in theory he could move the world with a lever, could never actually do it and was killed by a Roman soldier. Consciousness is a story we tell ourselves, but our real control over our lives is very small.

Whatever decisions an individual makes, the decisions of the group take precedence. I will say that again. Whatever decisions an individual makes, the decisions of the group take precedence.

So who really makes the decisions?

What is conscious?
Can groups be conscious? Why not?

We are individually conscious because we are aware, we make decisions, we have memory, etc., but all those things are shared among our cells. We are groups. Groups of people also make decisions, decisions that no single individual can control.

Going in the other direction, whatever we say about groups and individuals can also be said to some extent about animals. And if we try to define consciousness precisely - as a point of view, a point where unpredictable changes happen, a point with memory and purpose, then it is even true of rocks: a rock can be seen as conscious. A rock is a point of view (a point in space), a rock has a memory (we can determine its past by looking at its present), a purpose (we can largely determine its future by seeing its inertia and other properties), and it causes unpredictable changes (not many, but random change happens everywhere).

Of course, we have a very strong feeling that we are different, but that is simply our self image. And our self image has dramatically changed over the past few centuries.

Masters of the world
This started to change with the ancient Greeks, who challenged the gods. The idea began that people might not be merely extensions of something else.

This idea grew with the renaissance and exploded with the industrial revolution that finally threatened the class system. Every the individual now had access to vast knowledge. Any person could be better than their master. Any person could know enough to challenge anything! We could leave our villages, learn new things, discover new things! We had vast new awareness and our ideas were truly our own, not just extensions of someone else. Our decisions were, for the first time, truly our own!

This probably reached its peak in the early 20th century. A recent TED speaker noted that the greatest concentration of new discoveries was in the period 1870-1890, and the greatest spread of these new discoveries was in the 1930s. Within a single long lifetime (say, 1870 to 1970) a typical person went from a farming life much like medieval times to a world where men walked on the moon! States and institutions could not keep up: individuals were masters of the world. For individuals, anything was possible!

Certainly this was not true for many people, but it was a dream that everyone could share.

But it didn't last long
Now this is changing back to the low consciousness, low individuality state. Knowledge has multiplied and a single individual can no longer hope to grasp it all, or even a large chunk of it. We are once again at the mercy of forces we cannot hope to understand. The greatest benefit comes from mindlessly fitting in. You get a good job, an ever increasing income, more and more shiny things. Just fit in and don't question except in your narrow specialism.

Information technology can only accelerate this trend. We become more and more dependent on machines and networks that we cannot understand. Even politicians and technologists and economists don't really understand what is going on, outside of their narrow specialism.

But people are still in control, right? Yes, but only in the same sense that our cells still control our bodies. In truth we are all part of a bigger system that has its own rules and makes its own decision for its own survival.

The masters are becoming cogs in a bigger machine. It has happened before
Don't be afraid of humans being subsumed into a higher intelligence, the global network. It will happen, but something like it has happened before, many times.

Billions of years ago the only life was single celled, then the cells learned how to group into tissues. Vast tissues covered great areas of the oceans - blooms of algea that could be seen from space. Those cells were master of the world. But then the tissues formed organs, and organs formed bodies. We are some of those bodies. Now, in turn we are forming global networks that are bigger and more intelligent than us. We are cells in this giant body, just as our own cells are part of us.

Welcome the new overlords
This is not a bad thing. Our cells support us, and we support them. Similarly, we humans support the new global networks and they support us.

Will the networks ever decide they don't need people? Will machines be our enemies? Probably not: do our cells ever decide they do not need us? Occasionally our cells go rogue - it's called cancer - but that is very rare. We cannot survive without cells and our networks cannot survive without us.

Will humans ever be obsolete?
Will humans ever be replaced by mechanical brains? No, because consciousness has evolved over billions of years to be extremely efficient at what it does: a certain kind of decision making. Sure, the rest of us can be upgraded. It would be nice to have more memory, stronger arms, and a body that lasted longer. Maybe the future human body will be much larger or much smaller. Who knows? But the core conscious part, the decision making part that involves short term memory, is very useful to the wider network. As long as continue to evolve we will always be needed by it. Keep developing the symbiosis. Keep upgrading that smart phone! :)

We need to stop seeing life in terms of conflict. We are not in conflict with our own cells, and if we are part of the global network it will not be in conflict with us. Neither will it outgrow us, because we can use its technology to evolve as quickly as it does, forever in symbiosis.

Humanity as we know it was a tiny blip
For a hundred years, individual humans were the top of the tree of power and intelligence. Now we are back to our normal state, cogs in a machine. But the machine is bigger and more intelligent than ever, it supplies our needs very efficiently, and as long as we evolve with it we are assured of a long and pleasant future.

All the world's religions promise a final oneness with God, so it seems to be a basic need. As we integrate more tightly with the networks that grow ever bigger and fill the universe, that oneness may come sooner than we think.