Status conscious

A short story

There is something off about the sky. Strange colours streak the horizon at sunset – just subtly enough that you wouldn’t notice unless you looked — and the stars that roam the night sky are doing so off cadence. A certain rhythm seems to have jolted. But it’s possible I am hallucinating; that the apparently transforming elements are nothing more than the imminent effects of War on a simple mind.

I used to look at the stars, 86 billion sparkling orbs, to feel awe, magic. In a radically inconsistent world they are the only things I know to be true. But today they loom large and sinister, and I begin to wonder which one of them the assailants call home. It is impossible not to think of them everyday; of the alien souls that found themselves among us, and continued to cripple our kind. We realised, almost too late, that their intentions were nefarious — but since then, we’ve fought long, and we’ve fought hard.

And now, we’ve won the war; we’re healing.

*** At a higher scale of time and space, separated by a few layers of biological boundary ***

Leia’s head pounded. Beads of sweat dotted her face as she rocked back and forth, as if trying to expel the sickness from her body. Unable to produce material change with either intense focus or breathwork, she lay quiet, resigned, and stared at the single sunflower perched on her bedside. The seeds in its center swirled in spirals, as if trying to escape from the flower’s center; she wondered what it would take for them to escape from their cyclical, bounded universe.

“Knock knock!” Leia was jolted to reality as Doctor Q. Rius’s smiling face popped around the door. “May I come in?”

She nodded weakly and Q entered. “Good news — it is slowly receding from the brain.”

She sighed, “Slowly.”

 “This virus is unlike any we have seen before — we’re learning more about it every day.”

“I understand.”

Q turned to leave, but Leia said, “If it’s alright — a personal question?”

“Yes?”

“You’re here without PPE… you’re infected with the virus as well?”

Wistfully, he nodded. “I caught it yesterday. There’s no onset of symptoms yet, so I’m here, working.”

She said, “I’m sorry,” and then, “Are you able to talk for a bit? I’ve been struggling to process this sickness.”

“Of course,” said Q, and sat down on the wooden chair next to Leia’s bed. “How can I help?”

She began: “I’m always so sick… I feel like there’s a hundred wars being fought inside me, and I’m losing each one. I’m always fighting, always tired.

“The sporadic changes to my perceptual experience are inexplicably disorienting — at any time, I feel 50% conscious. If meditation broadens your subjective, conscious experience, this disease narrows it. As it got worse, I felt myself counting — 40%, 30% — as if quantifying my degree of consciousness would slow down its narrowing. It didn’t, and as I felt cognitive function steadily decline and my perceptual capabilities fail, I wondered what it would feel like to have the consciousness slider moved to 0.”

Q responded — “An interesting question… But I’m not sure the answer would matter.”

Surprised that Q didn’t have a more scientific response, she pressed — “Why wouldn’t scaling an individual’s conscious experience matter? Isn’t it important to think about degrees of aliveness?”

After a pause, Q said: “Perhaps — but I think it is the wrong question to ask. A single consciousness is a tiny part of a much greater whole, and cannot be studied in isolation.

Leia looked at him quizzically.

“We are temporary blips in this constellation of consciousness, with no greater or lesser right to exist than, say, a carpenter ant.” Q continued, “But each human is a small, essential part of something extraordinary. Our consciousnesses together — bound inextricably by our need for connection, closeness, community, & coexistence — compound to form something orders of magnitude greater. We—”

“Sorry, you said that existing close together and exchanging information makes us a part of something greater? Something greater, like…?”

“A larger consciousness,” declared Q. “We are tiny bits of a much greater intelligence. We are so much bigger than ourselves alone.”

Leia said: “I’m skeptical. Is that to say that bringing intelligent things close to each other will necessarily produce a greater intelligence? I don’t know… if I bring two rabbits close together in a box, neither the rabbits, nor the sum of them, seems to augment in intelligence. Nor does it seem like the system as a whole — the box and its contents together — are much more intelligent.”

Adjusting his specs, Q said, “Let’s start with first-principles. Think about a neuron — a tiny unit part of the biological system that produces human intelligence. Is a neuron conscious?”

“I suppose not.”

“But why not? Who is to say? Are you the cell?”

There was a pause.

 “A cell separates itself from the environment with a membrane, so it has some sort of identity. Within its defined system, it self-produces and metabolises. It is a self-contained sense-making unit.”

Leia nodded. A fair construal.

“Now, imagine thousands and billions of sense-making cellular units. Close to each other and compactly packed into a body, but in their world, respectably far away. Each is self-contained, doing what it must to stay alive. But when they exist next to each other, exchanging information, releasing, absorbing, coordinating and cooperating, something magical happens…”

“…Human consciousness is produced,” completed Leia.

“Precisely. When several intelligences operate close enough, like a magnetic field, they produce something infinitely more intelligent, and several degrees more conscious. A collective consciousness, if you will. One so much more complex and rich than anything a cell alone has the apparatus to experience. A cell cannot contemplate beauty, pain, love — the essence of human life.”

“Magnificent,” she admitted.

“Like the lone cell, we lack the perceptual apparatus and cognitive competence to experience the field of sentience, of collective consciousness, produced by humans around the world intelligising in unison. If you look at the ocean, or gaze at the stars, you are filled with a sense of vastness, a feeling of safety, that you somehow belong to something bigger. But you will never know what — it is for Eternity alone to observe consciousness at its different, repeating scales.”

“This is a fascinating conceptualisation,” conceded Leia. “But I can think of one inconsistency that would prevent us from extending the neuron analogy to humans: the bandwidth of information exchange between intelligent units.”

“Say more?”

“Neurons are firing non-stop, and information exchange between them is near-frictionless. In comparison, information exchange among humans seems slower, lossy, and lower bandwidth. Can we really produce an emergent, higher intelligence at our current level of disorganised, inefficient information exchange?”

Q tapped his chin, and responded slowly, “It is possible that the emergent consciousness is still merely in infancy. Such that, like a human infant, it has an eventual capacity for rationality, but only time and the appropriate developmental conditions will enable its realising. The rise and fall of humanity will carry it through its life.

“Technological developments streamlining information exchange across intelligent nodes — maybe brain-computer interfaces or neural implants — will enable the emergent being to grow into its full potential. Human ageing is an unbundling of consciousness and intelligence with time — perhaps their story will be the same.”

“Amazing,” mused Leia. “Just like the patterns of sunflower seeds.”

“Ha! How so?”

Leia’s said happily, “The pattern of seeds in the middle of a sunflower is fractal, spiraling outward in a never-ending pattern. Most things in nature are — repeating patterns that are self-similar across different scales. Perhaps the nature of consciousness is such.”

The rest of the conversation was a delightful back-and-forth discussing the essence of human existence, parts and wholes, and the curious nature of bounded infinities; until Leia could think no more, and it was time to rest.

But she slept soundly, knowing that the answers to one of the universe’s many mysteries, lay in the spirals of sunflower seeds.

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