Collective Means Conscious

What is the nature of consciousness? How and why did it arise? What is the source of subjectivity as a key aspect of consciousness? The short answer to all three questions is collective behavior. This study presents the collective theory of consciousness, which views consciousness as collective or shared knowledge that coordinates collective behavior. These findings demonstrate that any collective or collective organism, including plants and even bacterial colonies, possesses subjective experience. I explain that subjectivity is not a property of an organism, but an attribute of any collective action. To perform a collective action, the collective’s members must communicate their readiness. The combination of these signals represents the collective attitude towards the action. This signal evaluation underlies intention and serves as a source of subjectivity in nature. I show that the initial forms of subjectivity and intentional behavior arise in multicellular systems and develop into more complex forms through the process of integrating multicellular organisms. This means that consciousness did not miraculously arise in complex organisms. Instead, complex organisms emerged from the integration of cellular collectives that exhibited conscious, intentional collective behavior.