06 Consciousness Emerges from Human Networks

Two paradigm shifts help us understand what human consciousness is and how it arises.

First, a lot of the smart kids, the ones with the doctorate degrees, think that consciousness is largely an illusion and that your actions are determined, or in other words, that you do not have the ability to choose your own actions. Second, most approaches to understanding consciousness are scientific and reductionist.

In response, I will try to demonstrate to you first, that consciousness is an emergent principle of networked human minds in relationship with one another; and second, that amidst the infinite complexity of your creative mind in relation with other unknowably complex human minds, there is ample of scope to choose and act in creative, novel ways according to your cultivated will power.

You are not a meat robot. You are not determined by the motions of genes or proteins, or even powerful human institutions. You are a conscious, self-aware agent. Your family helped you develop into such a conscious being. You are connected with dozens of other conscious humans. All of us looking at each other, copying each other, telling so many stories, singing so many songs. But also singing and telling fundamentally similar human songs and stories.

You are not alone. You are connected. Your life, your existence, your thoughts and feelings, are connected through your memories and shared experiences, and through your actual relationships and cooperative activities with dozens and hundreds of other humans who know you and care about you. And through our overlapping networks of relationships and out communities, we are all interconnected.