consciousness as a nested perspective
consciousness lives at every level of being, not just the one we happen to see from. we fully grant it to humans (or at least to some), hand a smaller portion to other animals, a bit to plants, and draw the line there. that line is arbitrary, and it's arbitrary because we can only see from where we stand
when i say "level", i do not mean there's a top or a bottom, bigger or smaller, better or worse. that's not it. these aren't floors stacked above and below each other, they're perspectives nested within each other, sounding at the same time
think of a chord. the notes aren't ranked, none of them is more real or more alive than the others, they're just different sound waves happening all at once, and the combination is what you hear. that's how i mean it. the cell isn't beneath me and the planet isn't above me, we're all playing together right now, each one alive in its own register, each one a point of view the others can't quite hear
the cell isn't beneath me and the planet isn't above me: we're all playing together right now
going in
i'll start with my body. it gives "me" a level of consciousness, the one that connects me to the larger universe. but my body isn't a single thing. it's systems and organs that run on their own, mostly without asking me. they talk to each other, they coordinate, and they do it in a way that's self-organized rather than commanded
my organs are made of smaller systems with parts, those parts of cells, and every cell lives a full life of its own, independent and collective at the same time, needing the others and being needed
go further and you reach molecules, then atoms, things we call stable, but they still react, still shift, still respond to what touches them. they behave, in their own register, like they're alive. and you could keep going in…
going out
my human body doesn't exist alone, "i" doesn't exist alone. for starters, i needed at least two other humans to even arrive here. so we humans build communities, economies, whole webs of supply and care, and none of it survives without the environment holding it up. we treat all of this as separate, but the body needs its head no more than it needs the water supply, the vegetables, the meat, or a way to get them. infrastructure, service, a butcher and a grocery store. my body needs the different parts of the world as much as i need every cell that keeps me working in its specific role
keep going and you get ecosystems, mountains, rivers, rain, the seas, an entire planet that behaves like one living organism with its own way of sensing - senses we can't read because we're standing at the wrong scale to read them. and the planet sits inside the solar system, the solar system inside the galaxy, on and on…
fish in water
the reason none of this is obvious is that we're fish in water. we don't perceive the medium we're suspended in. we call air empty even though it fills the space, even though the space between atoms isn't really empty either. perception is bound to scale. what looks like nothing to us might be the whole world to something larger or smaller, and what we call the world might be background to it
the thread is self-organization
the thread running through all of it is self-organization. at every level, parts respond to each other's states, information moves, the system adjusts itself with no one standing outside it pulling the strings. that's true of a cell and it's true of an ecosystem and it's true, in its own way, of whatever the galaxy is doing. i think that capacity - stuff registering and responding to stuff and arranging itself because of it - is where i'd locate consciousness. not as a thing poured in from above, but as something that comes with the territory of being a system at all
we are nothing, but part of it. that
the part i won't pretend about
i can't prove any of this from the inside. the inside of anything that isn't me is sealed off, permanently i suppose. i can't get into a water molecule to check whether the lights are on - and the strange thing is i can't really do it for another person either, i just infer it from the outside and trust the inference. so when i say the atom has some level of consciousness, i'm not claiming proof, and i know that someone who says the atom has none can't prove that either. the question might be one that no one standing at any single level ever gets to answer
a lean, not a verdict
so this is a theory i hold openly. the structure i'm confident about: the nesting is real, you genuinely are a colony that feels like an individual, and you're a piece of something larger you'll never see the edges of. what i can't hand anyone is certainty about the inner side, whether there's something it's like to be a cell, a planet, an atom. i lean toward yes, that consciousness is the rule and not the exception, that it scales in both directions and just wears a face we can't recognize from here. but i hold it as a lean, not a verdict, because the honest position is that no one can know, and any theory that forgets that is pretending to a view from nowhere that none of us actually have
