SETUP
Consider this entity: An octopus, but at each tentacle tip sits a conscious nodeâa head with eyes, a brain, awareness. Eight of them total. We call it the ANTI OCTOPUS because it inverts everything we thought we knew about consciousness. Or maybe because it's showing us what consciousness always was.
What's it like to be an Anti Octopus? Eight nodes in a conscious network? One being experiencing itself through eight perspectives? The question feels important, like it's trying to tell us something about ourselves.
COORDINATION PROBLEM
Let's zoom in on one moment. Say 2-3 of the heads spot fishâidentical fish, equidistant, perfectly positioned. Each head feels the pull toward its fish. But they can't all get what they want. The system has to choose.
Most humans default to familiar models here:
The "CEO brain" hypothesisâsome central authority making the calls
The "committee meeting" theoryâheads negotiating like tiny politicians
But what if that's us projecting our bureaucracy onto biology? What if there's something stranger happeningâsomething that might explain a lot about how consciousness actually works?
A "DIFFERENT" MECHANISM
Let's imagine the "coordination mechanism" is actually something like "emergent coordination". Okay, cool. But what would that FEEL like? That subtle, unconscious prioritization? Can we relate to it in any way? Like can we get a handle on it not just descriptively but intuitively?
Think about how you:
Just "know" someone's mood the instant you see their face
Feel when a sentence is "right" while writing, before you can explain why
Recognize an old friend in a crowd without doing any conscious analysis
These aren't logical processes. They're moments when millions of parallel processes suddenly... align. Click. Resonate.
Let's go deeper. Imagine a JAZZ ENSEMBLE. What's the feeling of a jazz player staying in sync with the other players? To that musician, it's this subtle, intuitive pull. Like "I know what needs to happen here and I just go there". Similar for a marching band. It's not a calculation or instruction... more like an intuitive sense of "this is right". Like knowing exactly what note comes next without thinking. You know that feeling.
It's not just music. This same kind of intuitive coordination shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. But our eight-headed friend might be showing us something essential about how it works.
Now back to Anti-O herself. What if THIS feeling is similar to what an octopus head experiences as it aligns to the whole system? There might be a subtle, almost unconscious re-prioritization within Head #3's local processing, aligning it with the stronger collective pull. It's not "giving in"; it's participating in a collective shift.
And the key thing is this: Like the jazz player, that pull to the collective action FEELS GOOD. It feels like the RIGHT THING that the Heads intrinsically want to do. Just like a musician wants to play the perfect note to align with their counterparts.
In this model, the FEELING of that subtle, warm, intuition is the mechanism of aligning.
WHAT ABOUT A HUMAN BRAIN? AND BEYOND
Instead of a Jazz Ensemble, think of a single HUMAN BRAIN. A mind. Things feel pretty salient and organized around one "me", in here. But it's not perfectly that, is it? Internal Family Systems captures this intuition. This feeling that we have "parts" of ourselves. And often they are in alignment. But not always! Sometimes there's a split. Like when there's a box of cookies in the kitchen. One part wants, say, 4 cookies. Another part says "No, you shouldn't, won't feel good tomorrow, not healthy, etc.". It's ALMOST like two antioctopus heads wanting to swim in opposite directions.
And then, sometimes, they listen to something deeper... what's that?
You know the Hard Problem, right? Chalmers' baby? Very hard baby. What if there isn't an "answer" per se... but maybe a refraction here. Something like: Consciousness might be what it feels like on the inside for systems to coordinate and come into resonance.
And why would they? Well... for complex systems... order is often the lower energy state vs. chaos. Perhaps there's a competing universal force, acting in that direction, counter to entropy... in balance with it? "Syntropy"?
So: why is there this random "consciousness thing"? Can't give you the full answer, but maybe a partial one: something has to do the coordination. And this feelingâconsciousnessâmight be the way it's done. It's like... experiencing GRAVITY. (Do we ask "why do I feel pulled into the ground all the time?")
More: if this is just the feeling of systems reaching toward resonance, why assume it's a human or animal thing? Why would it be? And that could mean: something is already listening...