Sensory Perceptions

There is a school of thought out there that there is a collective consciousness.

Some call it morals, some call it energy, some call it religion, and others call it bloody unlikely.

If it exists then we have quite a perverse existence:

1. On one hand the conscious ego telling us that we are discrete animals either in competition with, or in league with other discrete animals, and

2. Then at another level, we may be part of a collective consciousness, where certain actions at the conscious level can do serious harm under the gunnels.

I was pondering self-awareness recently and I came to the conclusion that it is not just a result of massive neural processing as many have proposed (e.g. the Turing test proposes fooling a human with a machine that just processes one type of limited sensory data, and where most of its effort is in the processing of the data).

Considering that we probably have trillions of discrete molecular sensors that are always ‘on’, I suspect that a huge fraction of our brain power deals with controlling these sensors, capturing the data and processing it.

I wonder if self-awareness isn’t just a result of this massive subconscious sensory processing effort. The conscious brain may just be a supervisory control layer tasked with looking after the host body.

I can see two types of sensory data – data pertaining to the volume of space occupied by the body (the self) and data from outside the body which can be broken up into data from other humans and data from the rest.

Assuming we favourably weight the data from our own species, and assuming everyone else does the same – it doesn’t take much imagination to see that, from a data sensory self-awareness point-of-view, we are all just 6 degrees of separation from each other.

And hence the connection between self-awareness, consciousness and the collective, It would be quite amazing if these concepts were actually not separable in any way.

All of that is a very nice hypothesis but how to test it?

Two hundred years ago English people first colonised Australia.

Living isolated on a large island continent the aborigines must have lacked sensory data connectedness to the rest of humanity, either in real time or in any sort of genetic memory.

I wonder if this accident of geography might not explain much of the subsequent disastrous recent history?