Reply #15: Universal human consciousness is at a little more plausible. [View All]

[Silent3]

Certainly humanity as a whole can respond collectively, such as to an environmental threat as you've suggested, in ways that would indicate a crude type of self awareness.

I suppose it's useful to think of consciousness not as something which simply exists or doesn't exist, but something that can exist in degrees. I can see myself willing to work with a definition of consciousness that would define humanity as a whole as conscious, albeit to a fairly low and disorganized degree. One could say that this level of consciousness, even as low as it is, is probably much higher now than it was just a century or two ago because technology has greatly increased the speed and number of interconnections between people, institutions, and storehouses of information.

That collective consciousness, however, hasn't been honed by much experience at functioning in a strongly unified and collective way, or by cooperating with or competing with similar but separate consciousnesses. While that wouldn't put universal human consciousness in as terrible a bind, by analogy, as an individual human cut off from birth from all external stimulus as I talked about previously, I think we'd be dealing with something roughly akin to a brain damaged human growing up in isolation, in a very deprived environment.