Let’s Get [Meta]physical: Distributed Consciousness Theory

     I’ve been delaying doing this piece because the topic is so broad and involves so many branches that I didn’t know how to, well, skin it down to one article. See, I have to touch on things like why rational people believe in religious ideas, and that we perceive more than we think we do and draw conclusions from that which may well be distorted – which in fact simply must be distorted – by the filter of this thing we call consciousness. I have to cover how humans, a very social Great Ape, have always needed to feel “seen”, to be validated by outside approval, and how the brain looks at everything at least twice (input, interpretation, new filtered input) before we even get the chance to think about it but we’re only directly aware of the last bit, and how this could result in a feeling of being “watched” which might account for why true un-self-consciousness, true freedom of thought and action, only exists for us as a transcendental, mystic-seeming state, itself interpreted variously both by those who experience it and those they try to explain it to. See, I think religion is neurological, not the other way around, but I also think there is a great deal more… connectivity… than we understand, making consciousness more like a tapestry, a chorus, a perpetually mutating work of art, than a bunch of isolated units all bouncing off each other in a void. (Please note that I said I think, not I believe. A conscious decision to adopt this interpretation right now. This is merely my Most Useful Model, it serves me well, and I haven't seen a reason to abandon it yet.)
     Oh look – I guess I did just talk about all that. Neato! So with that out of the way, now I am going to talk not about why I think this is a true model but why I think it is a helpful one. As with all the constructs I live by, this one is completely vulnerable to real-world scientific discoveries because I can’t imagine living any other way. Grimly determined self-delusion or limitation may be humanity’s favorite coping mechanism, but it’s never been something I could imagine wanting to try my hand at. Luckily for my sanguinity, so far science seems to be backing this one up instead of taking it to pieces.

     Distributed consciousness is the current buzzword for the theory that instead of being limited to one simple timeline of a reality, our consciousness is actually distributed across multiple or even infinite cosmoses. Some people (since we don’t know) picture a Rick and Morty style assemblage of different iterations of each of us, all living different lives in wildly varying cosmological constants. There's lots of fiction about it working that way. Different wholly independent, discrete versions of us all, as it were. Others have this view of it being more like an over-mind composed of multiple pieces scattered throughout these universes, and that’s the one that sort of “feels right” to me. Does that mean that that’s the right one? Absolutely not. Probably, the way physics works, there isn’t even a “right one”. All of this is just pictures made in the heads of meat-monkeys stuck to the surface of one rock, after all. But it's the model I use to help me feel a sense of, if you will, “greater purpose”, or “meaning”, to what is actually just a brief biological process adrift in space. As a human, I do need that notion to function optimally. Am I “right”? That is in this case actually meaningless – unless it’s proved wrong, at which point it becomes an opportunity to understand things better and shed unhelpful constructs.
    Thus – I shall now describe, for the first time publicly and concretely, my own personal instead-of-religion model and why I find it beneficial.

     In this construct, each of us does indeed “live” in multiple “universes” (infinite? I don’t know. Maybe. What it “feels like” is either a limited number or that each of us can only “tap into” a more locally interpretable section of it all, but if I start believing stuff just because it’s what it “feels like”, that’s just religion all over again). Each iteration is born with a brain or other interpretive organ specialized to the universe, cosmos, realm, level, world, what have you in which it lives. However – and this is the key bit – it’s all the same person. Same as you don’t actually experience what your liver or your mucus membranes do all day, they’re still a part of you. Maybe there are cosmoses wherein the parts of us living there can “see” “us” in ways “we” cannot use to “see” “them”, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter though (although I sure can see it being handy!) because they're all the same person. I am all the same person.

     Death is probably, in this model, not an end to consciousness because the whole just gets smaller and more concentrated… but will there ever be a “last one” or are we truly infinite? I doubt we’ll ever know the answers to questions like that, nor discover, should this all accurately describe a part of how it all works in the first place, how much concrete information could make the transfer. Have “I” already melded with, or however it should be imagined, other elements of my very self as they died in their own semi-isolated continua? Well, in this model, probably lots. I might be doing it right now. If the me writing this article dropped dead this second, and this was all “true”… would it notice? End up in a panic in a new way to interpret things until absorbed into the local way of being? Would the “living” one[s] feel it and if so, how are we interpreting this? Beats the hell out of me, and, while fascinating, totally unimportant for application of my model.

     So why is it that applying this construct to my life seems to me more useful than others, or than doing nothing? No, it’s not because it relieves some death-fixation desperation where I have to know I’ll live on after death in some way. That kind of thing has nothing to do with it and I certainly don’t waste time worrying about it. I mean, I kind of hope I do go on somehow, I love experience, but if I don’t it’s not like I’d know about it. No, it’s just a motivator to try to, as the trite saying has it, “be the best that I can be”. Why? Well, models are helpful so let’s break it down into a model of the model.

     Picture a cube farm. A vast climate-controlled space full of cubes full of people sitting at computers, working. Although some of them suspect there might be a room, be other cubes, be other people, they have no direct perception of them. Can’t see them, can’t hear them. Just once in a while, though, a brief scent or puff of air hints at something, so sometimes, one or another of them wonders, but can’t investigate directly. They only know about other people they can contact through their computer screens, a whole society through that portal, one in which they live and work from the cube, each of whom is in a cube in another farm, but doesn’t know it because they only know about the people through their screens.

     The work of the functionaries in the cubes is the continual maintenance and updating of a piece of software which controls the health and well-being of, you guessed it, the people working in the cube farm themselves. Each person has a completely different version of the software, which works in different ways and upon different pieces of hardware, but the goal is to make sure the united results of the output create a good environment. For everybody.

     But none of these workers know that “everybody” exists. Each, barring some inklings and philosophical musings, thinks its cube is the whole farm. All they know is that when they do certain things changes occur – but oh so often, there seems to be some kind of “outside influence” changing their output into some distortion of what was intended by the time it gets back to them in the form of effect.

     Let’s say for the sake of example that they're controlling the oxygen content of the entire cube farm. Each person wants oxygen and if they see the oxy levels dropping (perhaps because a process in another cube temporarily requires more than others) they will try to find a way to hoard it, to suck more into their own cube – which in this case, unknown to them, reduces the amount going into the atmosphere as a whole, causing more hoarding because they can only detect local effects, and hey presto, you have a very unbalanced system in which very quickly some have lots of oxygen and some very little but the general supply is virtually nonexistent.

     Or say some kind of contaminant got in; unchecked, it could spread to all of the cubes, but no individual programmer is going to say hey, let me hold some of this or try to neutralize it, because s/he doesn’t know there are other cubes to protect. In the end, as it was forced back out of or shunted away from each cube and recycled into the general air supply, the entire atmosphere would become lightly suffused with it (or thickly or increasingly, if the source of the contaminant were still producing). People wold start thinking in terms of inevitability, of filters and tolerance and armor.

     So you get it – without knowing it, they're all actually trying to do the same thing but some are suffering and some hoarding, etc. So, well, in my model, that’s us. Each of us, not society. Emotionally, psychically, spiritually, whatever. The more each of the parts of us living across these time/spacelines works toward the greater good of the whole, the more each of us benefits. Because there is no each of us. Again, in this model, these are all the same person. You are all the same person. If ¾ of you is depressed, whether or not there are good reasons for that locally, well, you’re gonna feel depressed. If, however, ¾ of those feeling depressed try to focus on self-care, the whole organism, the whole person, is going to benefit. Toxic contaminants creep in all over the place: rage, despair, greed. Fear. If we keep shoving them away or letting them win or cultivating them or disguising them as other things or ignoring them, the greater whole becomes more ill, but if we practice healthy management of these things the entire person becomes more capable. The cascade point in either direction is obviously reached quickly.

     And that’s really all there is to it. That’s why this version of distributed consciousness keeps me going, keeps me trying always to improve how I deal with intimidating life circumstances and mental health problems like despair and fear, trying to learn and see and interpret as much as I can with as wide-open a mind as I can manage. It’s helpful to me to imagine a “greater” form of myself capable of gravitationally dragging “me” into “its” sicknesses while I work to make the healthy parts weightier. And you know what? Doing this automatically influences society too, all those other panicked and confused distributed consciousnesses packed into so many beautifully unique meaty brains. The more healthy the people, the healthier the world.

     So there you go, that’s what this kooky mammal uses instead of other superstitions, at least for now. Make of it what you will.