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You do make a good point, and what you suppose is entirely possible, but personally I don’t agree with this interpretation:
…isn’t it a little too self aggrandizing to think that we have a near infinite layering of consciousness beneath us and then it just stops at our level of awareness?
Nah. I think the perspective that our awareness is the “top” is what lets us make the best of ourselves. If everyone’s attitude was “well, I’m no better than a pancreas, so fuck it” we’d all be lazy and depressed.
Still, though, I think it’s an interesting observation.
I find it hard to imagine being conscious but unable to control any part of your body as anything but a terrible nightmare. Shut-in would suck, higher consciousness or not.
All things are a little bit alive/conscious even innanimate things like vibrating guitar strings, grains of sand blowing in the wind, and photons of light traveling the cosmos. They aren't quite as conscious as say a living organism but they still in experience things and interact with the rest of reality. They may even have a meager ability to feel emotion after after a few billion years of existence, you never know. microorganisms almost certainly do have basic emotions like hunger, relief from eating, and a instinctual fear of death/getting eaten, though a scientist would argue against such an idea till they were blue in the face. Your individual cells are also alive and experience a whole unseen life individually, they are a little bit conscious though not as conscious as 'you' as a whole.
Psychadellics can allow your consciousness to expand and telepathically connect with the universal conciousness of reality from which all other conciousness is ultimately born from and returns to, sometimes called the godhead in daoist philosophy but I think of it as a paradoxical being both an individual that split split itself into countless parts to go through every aspect of experience seeing through the eyes and feeling the feelings of everything in reality. Every conciousness in reality also harmonizes and comes together to form the godhead, the universal conciousness.
I'm a scientist and I agree with the statement that most if not all organisms have emotions and some degree of consciousness.
There is no evidence to support this, though
The big issue of the scientific method is that it throws away all truths that cannot be falsifiable, riggerously tested or measured. Or to put it simply, not everything that is true has a gaurentee to be proveable. There are some truths which no system of logic or experimentation can definitively determine the validity of. Mathematicians already had to deal with this existencial crisis of limits to provability with Gödel's incompleteness theorem. If absolute knowability is already screwed in the purely theoretical world of abstract logic, there is most likely an equivalence in the physical sciences. They are two sides of the same coin after all. There is most likely no theory of everything, not even of just physical reality, and never will be.
There are parts of human experience and more generally reality itself that science will forever denounce because they are non-physical and non-falsifiable. Unfalsifiability doesn't make the experiences any less real or true in the eyes of reality, just unprovable by the standards of the scientific model.
I was always a big fan of science, even as a kid. The universe facinated me and I always wondered why things work the way they do. Now I see its limits as well as the inherent flaws and biases that exist within the scientific community.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I think that the scientific method is invaluable. I also think that it will never be complete because it is mostly quantitative while consciousness is qualitative (qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience).
For as long as science keeps subjective experience out of the equation (which by definition it kinda has to) then I also don't think there will ever be a theory of everything.
What kind of organism would want to wage war on itself? Kill and mame other "cells?" But while there may be the possibility of an emergent world consciousness, a "hive mind" if you will, I'd imagine it'd be a slow processing one.
This seems to just be rehashing the logic of simulation theory without considering that most of those levels of consciousness are not capable of reflection remotely similar to what we experience even just to consider this question.
We're all yeast.