I love talking about this stuff haha. listening to a great podcast atm by Lex Friedman, i rarely listen to him but my friend reccomended me this when discussing these very topics recently https://open.spotify.com/episode/42reDLEDzQicUmzmDpXjYK?si=588a1cf9203b4aaf Michael Levin: Biology, life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis, and Xenobots Alot of talk about consiousness. A quote i appreciated, "We are just a bag of nuerons. All intelligence is collective intelligence". Lef Friendman introduces Levin saying that he along with another scientists whom he found him through, had him consider just how much we can learn about AI from biology, but also how much we can learn about biology via AI. They talk about alot in this episode, very interesting, a large part of it is kind of describing how organisms coalesce into larger super organism(like the human body is a super organism of a ton of cells). People like me who believe the Earth(and higher macrocosms) are super organisms in which we are tiny cells of love alot of the stuff being talked abt in this podcast haha. A big point of it is that we ourselves as humans have no central consiousness from a biology perspective, even our nervous system is just a collection of cells. I think Gaia, Earth, can be considered concsious. Species are various tissues, plants and cytoplankton are the lungs, fungus and bacteria the digestive track, humans can be considered the brain - as we direct and organize the earths resources, and control the other "tissues"/species. however, we have grown cancerous, by all definitions, as the Earths brain, reproducing and growing at an unsustainable rate, cannablizing the other tissues/species. Will Humans go in remission? Or will gaia allow us to destroy it in a cancerous manner?