What is an individualized unit of consciousness?

Tagged:

Consciousness doesn’t work that way, it’s not quantizable in the same way that light or other things are. What happens when you try is that you get less conscious things. Increasing consciousness is not a matter of simply adding more of what’s already there. Two brains aren’t necessarily more conscious than one brain. In fact, having two brains doing one job can easily be less efficient than just using one.

In order to get multiple ‘units’ of consciousness, they need to do more than just communicate with each other. They also need to learn how to cooperate properly. The history of humanity is the history of people learning how to do that.

Similarly, just making brains bigger doesn’t necessarily make them smarter. In fact, pound for pound, bird brains are more efficient than mammal brains, meaning, technically, if you measured bird intelligence the same way we measure MMA effectiveness, parrots are smarter than we are.

The process of getting smarter is an evolutionary one. The way evolution works is that nature tries, over and over and over again, in a massive parallel operation, until a small advantage is gained, then the whole species gains the advantage and the process starts over with the new normal. This process is not quantizable. You can try to approximate by calling a mutation the smallest unit of evolution, but one mutation does not an evolution make. Millions, perhaps billions, of mutations must be tried before one bears fruit.

It’s the same with finding ways for people to cooperate. Society has a set point, a baseline, we call it a social contract, that people have internalized that allows said society to function normally. Sometimes people want to change that social contract, sometimes those changes work, sometimes they don’t. Over time society slowly changes and new things become normal. Trying to find an individual ‘unit’ of quantized social change is impossible, that completely misses how the process operates.