I have had something nudging away at me for quite some time, in thinking about biology I have some new thoughts about consciousness and how the two are so intimately related.

From a scientific standpoint, why does life exist? There is no reason, life is the result of a random chemical event.

Who are we as people? We are the result of billions of years of evolution, comprised of billions of cells

Why do we exist? We exist as an evolutionary organism created by cells in order to increase the cells chances of survival. So in essence, we exist - to keep the cells which comprise "Us" - alive.

From a scientific standpoint our purpose is clear, we were created to help a society of trillions of cells survive.

---------------

Now lets apply this same thought pattern to something else shall we? I think you may begin to see what I saw.

Why does society exist? Society exists as a means to increase ones chances of survival by means of specialization and co-operation. The interesting thing is, both individual humans and singlular cells are very similar. Humans are specialized in society, cells are specialized in your body.

Now if you wanna see something to really get you thinking, look at it this way. There are all kinds of cells in your body, neurons, muscle, fat, etc. There are also all kinds of people in society, managers, workers, scientists, politicians.

The neurons can be thought of as the politicians and administrators who decide what direction society will go in. You can even go further than that, looking at how different areas of decision are divide amongst different people. Then those decisions are passed onto hundreds of others, until you have thousands or even millions of people doing the objective of one persons decision.

Now there is one tricky part. In most societies, they have moved away from an agrarian society where everyone had equal say (more similar to the human brain) where as now it is a hierarchy.

You even see functions such as apoptosis in society where cells are destroyed that do not fit in with the design of the dna. The equivalent to cell apoptosis would be criminals in society.

So what I am saying is, we may already be in a singularity of our own design. Oblivious to the larger organism we have created. While we may not be fully connected like cells. Do we not share food? Do we not work together as a society for goals set by others? Do we not punish those who do not fit in with the rules of society? Do we not specialize in a certain field?

Maybe we have created a multi body organism, rather than a multi cellular one. Think about it, we live in cities, all together. Cells live in bodies, all together. Were much more similar than what first appears. Once you have something like say a moving city, prehaps on water or in space, then you would have a multi bodied animal. Right now, the "stand-still" nature of cities is similar to a plant.

As you can see, we may very well already be pieces of a larger whole.

Interesting observation.

Three days ago I purchased "The Wisdom of Crowds, Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economises, societies, and nations by James Surowiecki, Doubleday Press, 2007.

His ideas are very similar to your observations Maximus242.

Does that imply that the citizens of the USA were wise to re-elect George Bush? Maybe in the hindsight of history, say, 20 years in the future, he will be recognized as a statesman and a genius. Not!

hahahaha

A crowd where flexible and fast communication and open info flow is present is much more wiser than e.g. CIA as a closed organization with high level of secrecy (that what he mentions in the book and brings examples). Such crowd systems are more secure and wiser rather than closed and less numerous systems with lower level of info exchange. So he points that the open society is much more healthy and wise than a closed system. That what he accentuates. When bugs start to eat the tail of a brontosaurus (closed organization) it gets info about tail eating too late as its cells transmucate info to the brain and to each other too slowly and with restrictions, in contrary a group of free birds can survive better (some sort of chaotic brain). Actually I guess his work somehow is related with the consciousness singularity concepts, some terminological elements can be traced all throughout the book. He brings very nice examples. An interesting book.

I should add that only such a guy as Bush could make the US vector very sharp and with goat persistency wipe off Taliban, Baas party and the other enemies of Freedom. He has many shortcomings but you should not underestimate to such an extent the President of your country even if he is less educated than you and other guys leaving in costal regions of the USA are. So, historically, it may turn so that his aggressive counter reaction against terrorism somehow saved the world from more dangerous developments. Sometimes if you want to defeat a dragon you should emerge from emptiness another one. Certainly the foolishness of the Republican Party is reaching to its apices, but you always can establish new guards of your security and prosperity and vote for other people. And I have no doubts that Democrats will overrun Republicans during comming elections.