Yoogurn’s money making

I’ll answer for Pam (author of this article).

With regards to your comment about the “Gaia Consciousness”, heck man you could be right! There is a school of thought that the deep human consciousness and awareness arose from the interconnectivity of our senses and brain power all over our body. With 85 billion neurons all being able to communicate with one another, it provided the sufficient environment for true sentience to arise.

Perhaps with the rise of the internet, all apparently-separate human minds will connect, and develop a deeper consciousness like you are suggesting! Imagine 10 billion human brains interconnected all over the planet. What would we call ourselves? This definitely ties in with the oneness of the other article.

Thanks again for the comment Mike! If you ever want to write a piece for Sustainable Balance, I would love it! I’m serious!

It’s also really cool to think about the implications regarding consciousness. Here’s a fun thought experiment: Let’s pretend that very early organisms had some form of consciousness. Consider two organisms. Larry has a cool flagella that lest him motor around; while Jane repels predators by emitting a funky chemical. At first, Larry and Jane are both floating around in the primordial soup. Eventually they bump into each other, and they find that they survive better together. Larry doesn’t mind Lanes “perfume” and is good at catching food. Jane always eats Larry’s leftovers, and provides him some protection. Eventually, Jane’s cell wall grows to surround Larry and they become a single organism, now with a single consciousness.

Now, we are composed of billions of such symbiotic relationships, with highly specialized cells for specific tasks, but we see ourselves as a single entity, a human. But is this sense of “singleness” a true reflection of reality? Humans have a consciousness. Does each cell have one too? What about the microbes living inside us?

Now, let’s stretching our thought experiment to bigger scales. The symbiotic nature of a single human being can be extended to the entire global ecosystem (Gaia). Each person (and every living thing on earth) is a component of Gaia. As individuals, we are not aware of any “global consciousness,” just as our individual cells and microbes are not aware of our own consciousness. But does a global consciousness exist?

Here’s a fun idea! Our nervous system is composed of highly evolved cells that organize the functioning of our bodies. Our species is “highly evolved” and is beginning to organize and control the functioning of the entire global ecosystem. It is not unfathomable that we are becoming the “nervous-system” of the earth. And that in the future, a single “Gaia consciousness” will emerge from our collective intelligence. We will be as cells within the living Earth.

Sorry for the crazy long comment; I just really like thinking about this kind of thing. Notice that this also ties nicely into your post on “oneness.”