It is as likely that the autonomously self-propagating patterns of information and energy processing (of which consciousness is an instance or manifestation) are ubiquitously distributed; such that (what we experience as) intelligence, consciousness and the self-inflective logic of embodied complexity in life are indeed “everywhere”.
It is not that what we are is anything radically other than an adaptive instance of the progressive encoding of information in shorter and more powerful “programs” or algorithms (i.e. Kolmogorov Complexity). Consciousness is not a difference of kind, but of degree: what goes on between our ears is a spectacular – yet general – refinement and distillation of the same processes, symmetries and autonomously self-propagating information abstractions that occur outside our craniums.
Our greatest source of confusion in this (endless) debate seems to be a culturally-reflexive and psychologically narcissistic belief in some kind of superior or privileged difference and functional “specialness” in human (intelligence and) consciousness which blinds us to the possibility of discerning the core symmetries and principles by which these systems function.
Context: Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff review – a new science of consciousness
