Here's the general idea, the details of which I will need to return in order to spell out the argument adequately.
The Chinese Language Room thought experiment has been a strong argument against distributed consciousness. On the pro side, there is the fact that our left brain and right brain seem to be separate loci of consciousness but when united have a sense of a unified consciousness.
The idea is this. The contributing parts will believe that it is Itself that is conscious of the awareness that is held by the whole.
In the Chinese Room, were it to happen, the clerk running the file cards would be aware that he understands that "this output" really means the thing it's supposed to mean, even though he doesn't have the first hand knowledge of each of the other parts.
When your team wins, it is you who win.
When a small town in rural Uzbekistan, say, was part of the USSR, the people there were able to say that it was part of one of the world's great historical and present day Super Powers, political movers and shakers. But now it's just a little town in an overlooked little country.
When a man or woman are single, unattached but flirting and moving toward marriage, they have their whole lives held individually in their minds individually. But when they marry, if it works, they will go through the long and arduous and painful process of letting go of the substance of what represented their individual aspirations and relationships--forsaking all others, say--for better or worse--and counting as one's individual success and failure the success or failure of the whole marriage and all the parts thereof. When they marry, they have their history or "self-consciousness" surgically excised, so to speak; and it will be a long time before they are able to replace the old with the new--if it ever actually happens.
A little toe has no real consciousness, but should you stub the toe, the toe will, in a sense, cry out in pain. The whole unified consciousness of the self will attribute the awareness of the toe--the pain--as an awareness of the whole.
No man is an island.
Should the SETI project find something, it will be all the SETI parts who rejoice.
Go Team! Be True to Your School. Stand By Your Man. We are Family. Jeremiah went into exile along with the rest of Israel under judgment. When Roe v Wade or the Dred Scott decision was instituted, we all in the United States were aware that we were part of the country that had abortion of our unborn children at will and the legally enforced slavery of our fellow man. It is and was not possible to claim that one has the moral high ground and that these horrific things were not part of oneself. Abortion and slave hold were something that one is doing, being a part of the whole. The only way to escape that awareness would be to somehow! detach oneself from the whole, by leaving, or by an intellectual emotional withdrawal which can only be partial at best. And when one prays, one can never say, "those people out there who hold slaves" or "those people out there who put to death their living children," because it is the action of oneself as part of the unified system.
This is why divorce and civil war and amputations and exile and solitary confinement are so horrendous. It's not a technical matter, it's an attack on the unified consciousness.
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