The Combination Problem and Panpsychism
Examining panpsychism and the combination problem.
From a theory of mind perspective, Consciocentrism most closely relates to the Panpsychist perspective. Panpsychism states that all matter possesses some level of consciousness, down to the most fundamental units of atoms, quarks, and the quantum mechanics field. The term "proto-consciousness" might be used for these lower levels of consciousness, just to differentiate from our higher level conscious abilities in animals and humans.
The panpsychism theory of mind is often contrasted with materialism/physicalism, idealism or dualism. Dualism is a belief that matter and mind operate in totally different domains and that consciousness is somehow magically connected with complex beings of matter. Materialism/physicalism states that matter is primary and consciousness just magically emerges from matter at some arbitrary threshold of complexity.
Recent discoveries in biophysics have led to more and more physicists and biologists believing that the panpsychism approach is correct. Dr. Michael Levin of Tufts University has performed cutting edge experiments showing that individual cells, when divided from their original purpose as part of a larger conscious being, will change course and dynamically show individual conscious like behavior. Dr. Levin has experimented with frog skin cells -- dividing them from the frog as they are growing. Instead of just dying, or trying to make skin once they are separated, they instead change their behavior, and begin to gather with other cells, and explore their surrounding, feel out their environment, and even regenerate / replicate themselves. ie: A cell which you would think is just purposed to grow as skin suddenly becomes an independent sort of conscious cell which uses its sense abilities, actuation and movement, and shows goal oriented behavior or babbling with the environment to test and learn about its surroundings.
With the panpsychism theory of mind, the biggest criticism is usually referred to as "The Combination Problem".
The Combination Problem
The Combination Problem can be stated as "if all matter is on the spectrum of consciousness, down to individual atoms and quarks, then how is it that matter combines together to create more advanced conscious beings? If our bodies are full of approximately seven octillion atoms, and dozens of organs and subsystems, why is it we experience our single identity (our id)? How does conscious matter combine, and why do we experience consciousness as we do?
Firstly, one can question whether this is really a "problem" at all. If we take our human bodies, the expectation would be that our organs do have a sort of limited consciousness under our more global id consciousness. Consciocentrism proposes that this shouldn't be viewed as a "problem" though, and instinctually, we already know this to be true in some sense.
Through meditation, or practiced awareness, one can focus in on our individual subsystems and control our heart rate or alter functions of body subsystems. In our language, we have many sayings like "butterflies in the stomach", "gut feeling", and "muscle memory" that attribute feeling or thought to our organs.
Looking at our muscle organs and tissues, there is a strong case to be made that the term "muscle memory" is not just a figurative phrase, but rather a literal one that attributes memories directly to our muscle organs. When we train as an athlete, or musician, or learn other skills which require agility, we are literally training the muscles to remember the complex motions and chemical interactions which allow us to pull off incredible skills in extremely short time periods. Initially, when we learn to shoot a basketball, or play guitar, we do have a higher level of conscious focus that is used in coordination with our muscle's conscious focus, collaborating to learn a new skill. As we progress through proficiency and then mastery, the need for our high level conscious focus completely fades away, and it becomes second nature for our muscles and bodies to perform amazing acts of agility with no higher level thought associated.
Muscle Memory and Organ Memory
A professional basketball player enters a sort of flow state, where they are just focused on the moment of now and a short window ahead, and their body takes over with managing amazing coordination in millisecond timeframes, to adjust body positioning, jump in the air, move a basketball upward and perfectly roll it off the fingertips so that it arcs 24 feet through the air into a basket that has only a few inches of clearance. The micro adjustments to our entire body, or arm muscles, hand muscles and fingertips have to be exactly precise to pull off a three point shot like this, and its done so with little to no higher level consciousness directing these movements. The higher level consciousness is just focused on surveying the court and positioning of players and planning a high level way to beat the current defense.
Same goes for playing musical instruments. Initially, when learning guitar, there is a combination of high level conscious focus and muscle focus to learn the basics, but as a guitarist becomes proficient, and then masters the skill, their arm and hand and finger muscles become trained with a memory of how to play guitar, and the guitarist can play incredible harmonies, melodies and rapid fire leads with little to no high level conscious focus. The player can even daydream about something completely unrelated like "what's for lunch", while their bodies and hands play beautiful passages. There is a sort of distribution to consciousness, where individual organs have their own memory, sense of touch, and actuation abilities. We can, from a high level, set them on a task, and they will handle these incredible acts of agility in real time.
Some additional examples would be driving a car or even walking. We don't need to devote any conscious focus to walking around, or driving a car, once we have become proficient. In fact, many people report that they can drive home from work or around town, and after they arrive, they may have not given any high level thought to driving.. it was all performed by a coordinated interaction of their organs, while they thought about their children, or what's for dinner, or got lost in an audio book story.
Breaking the Combination
Our organs have their own consciousness and memory, but its just not as rich as our higher level capabilities. When we're in a sort of flow state, we do get this window of altered consciousness though, where we're not focused on medium to long term planning, or considering past memories or alternate choices. We're just focused on the moment of now, or millisecond changes in our environment, and our conscious focus changes to be more based in our organs/muscles. We "break the combination" on a daily basis, and allow our consciousness to flow between states. Under this view, there really isn't a combination problem at all -- it's more about how we focus, and the timeframes involved.
4D Temporal Prejudice of Conscious Definitions
Ultimately, when we consider our highest level of individual human consciousness, we have a sort of temporal prejudice, where we're defining consciousness as the ability to make feel/sense our environment, make choices, and perform actions over a longer time frame. Neuroscientist Karl Friston mentions ~300 milliseconds as being a key threshold to our definition of high level human consciousness. ie: We're generally focused on actions or choices that occur over at least a 300 millisecond gap... though we're often focused on much longer time spans like minutes, hours, days or months or years... considering macro choices that may have repercussions for our lives, our friends/family, or society. This focus on longer time frames may be a defining characteristic of how we define combination, along with larger conglomerates of matter / organs. ie: As consciousness combines between larger masses of matter or organs, it also focuses on longer term goals.
Our organs are conscious as well, but they don't have ability to focus on longer timespans and goals, and their interaction with the environment is more limited. Our heart and gut and liver and muscles are focused more on the biophysical space, and ensuring the master plan of "being a proper healthy organ" is orchestrated among the subsystems and cellular structures involved.
A Continuous Spectrum in 5D
Under the Consciocentric paradigm, there is a continuous spectrum of consciousness, which participates in the 5D Many Verse, which is present even down to single atoms. Every atom has a limited "sense" of its environment and creative impulses through the fundamental forces. Gravity itself is an element of 5D consciousness, exhibiting an impulse to join together and create new constructs of matter, with more consequential causal timelines. The electromagnetic force gives all atoms the ability to touch or feel the nearby environment, and through electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force, atoms can join together to create new elements, and electromagnetically combine into molecules. Once enough matter has combined together, the force of this gravitational impulse becomes so dense and hot that the weak nuclear force begins to exhibit an impulse to fuse atoms together and spit out an enormous amount of energy through nuclear fission and fusion. This weak nuclear effect both combines / unites matter together into new constructs, and separates out energy through electromagnetic radiation / photons / sunlight. These impulses to separate and unite are part of a constant ongoing cycle that consciousness orchestrates, and are the very definition of "creation" - to separate parts and then unite into new constructs.
This same creative impulse is present as planets form and complex molecules are created, proteins are created, cells, and more complex life forms. As this creative cycle of separation and unification into new constructs continues, conscious pockets of matter gain more an more control over their local environment, and more of a long term causal view and causal impression on the environment.
The entirety of the conscious spectrum participates in the creative impulses of separation and unification into new constructs -- and the goal of consciousness is to progressively gather into larger pockets of matter which have a stronger causal effect on their environment, and a longer term view of 4D time and 5D many worlds possibilities.
Combination Beyond the Human Individual
In addition to looking inward to our body subsystems and the matter involved in our bodies, we can look the other direction toward our friends, family, community, society, ecosystem and planet as a whole, and perhaps even to the universe itself. At a higher level than our individual consciousness, we often pair up with other humans and start a family. This familial unit can be considered a sort of higher level conscious entity than us individually. A mother, father, daughter and son may combine conscious focus together, with aligned familial goals and actions that create a through line for the family that can be thought of as a higher consciousness than our individual goals. Further, as we align our goals and intentions with our community, society, or country, we are working together as a sort of conscious ecosystem to enact a longer term plan for our society or country. These societal conscious movements work on much longer time spans of days, months, years, decades or even centuries. From the combination view, we are usually focused on being individual humans, but we are just organs of a larger collective conscious ecosystem of our communities, society, countries, ecosystems and our entire planet and beyond.
In this interview, Dr Michael Levin, Dr. Chris Fields and Dr. Karl Friston Discuss the Combination Problem: