Asklemmy

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.

The brain, your conciousness, is the central coordinating centre of you as an organism, the highest level of control. It is formed with the end goal of propagating its genes, which one might however argue makes it a submechanism arising from the super-conciousness, evolution which has the intention of creating as many organisms as possible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.