Introduction
In the Stabilism article I denoted the dual nature of a conscious human individual. Here I would like to explore the extraordinary conclusions from the „probablility roulette” part of us.
The article is meant to be playful and intellectually inspiring above all – by seemingly logical reasoning we arrive at really weird grounds. Don’t confuse it with my personal beliefs or a scientific analysis.
Dual Nature Of A Conscious Human
You’re one object, exactly determined by the past including your ancestors. It is not body + soul, its just body with developed consciousness and the feeling of selfness.
At the same time you’re probably just one of many conscious entities. If there is one conscious organism in the world its you. If there are billions, you’re one of them and the chances for your existence were higher.
We would like to explore the 2. more now.
Each of us is a consciouss processes – „selfness” arises when the process starts and vanishes when it ends. „Selfness” is an illusion brought up by consciousness probably due to natural selection. What happens in order is:
Consciousness process starts.
We learn who, where and when we are.
So what I am is one of started consciousness processes. I can’t be an unconscious entity as „I” is an illusion provided by consciousness. If I’m not conscious I don’t know I exist.
I’m probably a completely random consciousness process. The process just started and it defines me. It could have been any of consciousness processes in the world.
At superficial level its similar to soul + body duality: there are many „body-vehicles” possible and your „soul” infuses one of these without your agenda.
The Consciousness Processes Pool
Now we reach unsure grounds. If I’m a random consciousness process, then it may convey some information – nothing certain, but just likelihood. Both space and time are domains to choose from – why am I here and why am I now?
The answer might be that this location and time was more probable than others beacuse of higher abundance of consciousness processes. Of course, one could have also „rolled” unique consciousness of a mutated intelligent fish 10m years ago and get quite wrong conclusions based on such assumptions.
If somehow the reasoning like this is legit, then we can look into the future based on nothing else but our position on the timeline.
„The End Is Nigh” or Time Domain
Human population is assumed to be highest ever in the history and it makes perfect sense that my consciousness process happens now. Yet if the rapid growth trend remains for thousands of years (and one can also for example dream of colonization of other planets, further advances of medicine etc.), then suddenly the timing is off.
Moreover I remind you that the space is consciousness rather than mankind. If human gets to copy own consciousness mechanisms to machine or create completely new kind of them, a machine would be included in the consciousness pool. If these would be replicated in billions to serve human (or AI like Skynet from Terminator), then also what is now high probability becomes much lower.
The highest probability of „my” process happening exactly now is if the consciousness space shrinks over time in the future. This can happen in an apocalyptic event – „the end of time”, destruction of the humankind. But also the consciousness itself can decease amongst homo sapiens, gradually or abruptly, for example due to the impact of AI.
It could also be imagined that consciousness and humankind remains, but new processes wouldn’t start. For example when science finds a way to pass some consciousness elements from the parent to the child. Then instead of rebuilded consciousness we have one passed through generations. Its generally an interesting topic: why knowledge and experience isn’t passed in a biological way to next generations? We would often like to „restart” our lives with the knowledge we got in our 30s and later. I guess learning rather than a form of biological inheritance is necessary because of how human brain works and maybe also the passing of consciousness is too risky due to propagation of mental diseases. A good feed for an imaginative science fiction.
„Androids and Aliens”
or Space Domain
I’m Polish, so most people on Earth must be Polish, right? Sadly we have data on this, so my loose and hopeful inference in the style of this article must be cut short. Poland is like ~ 1/200 of the world’s population; not much, but not negligible either. Unless… let’s consider spicy, borderline racist possibility.
What if a high % of human isn’t conscious? What if they are automata, often more intelligent than conscious ones, but „soulless”. Just like some of us can roll tongue and the others can’t, maybe real consciousness is a non-essential perk amongst human? Maybe it even is stabilized at some % for the benefit of society: too much is too risky, too little is bad for adaptability?
Then consciousness might be varied between nations and groups. The important thing is, its hard to test consciousness. the layers go really deep. Imagine if you still have an „internal dialogue”, but you’re unaware of it. You’re unconscious then, yet for example you can solve complex and abstract mathematical problems. Its much easier to test the ability of pattern recognition or problem solving (like we do in IQ tests) than to judge on someone’s consciousness. Its almost analogous to „does group X have soul?” dillemas from the past. The Voight-Kampff android test in Blade Runner seems rather straightforward compared with what is needed to detect a human without deep consciousness.
Back to the probability though – of course the hypothesis would be that Poland has higher % of conscious people than average 😉 If actions which are hard to explain both from natural and basic rationale perspective could be an indicator of consciousness, then Poland is probably amongst the top (but Slavs stand tall in general, take for example Czech movies).
Finally the fact of being born as a human on Earth, means that probably the number of conscious processes on Earth is not negligible in the Universe scale.
Closure
Hope you enjoyed another philosophical journey! As I said in the intro, this article is meant to be playful above all. Could you dismantle the weak inference on consciousness apocalypse in the future? Do you think most people are conscious on a deep level and how would you test it? I’d like to leave you with that questions.
Stay stable,
lerio2