Abstract- Political philosophy and the evolution of conciousness.

My favorite division of governing philosophies is that they either favor the individual or the whole. The way I see it, both are extremes. Rule by the masses is mob rule. It seems that the more people collaborate, the more communication breaks down and clear purpose is lost. Communism/socialism are good examlpes of this. The other end of the spectrum favors the individual, and tends to be very competetive. The extreme can be a very primal, law of the jungle, might-makes-right tendency toward violence and cult of personality. Fascism, in other words. Democratic stuctures tend to oscillate somewhere between the extremes of individualism and collectivism. Social evolution is the result of the interplay between the self and the collective.

I see us as individual components of a greater consciousness, partially conscious ourselves, and desperately trying to form new synapses between our minds in order to create greater processing power with which to collectively analyse the data detected individually by our physical senses (which are groups of individual cells working collectively, the cells being groups of individual atoms working together, etc.), in order to create a collective consciousness. We have subconciously recreated this process in computers, our darling progeny. The individual physically senses stimuli, the impression of which is sent via the nervous system to the brain, which, like a CPU, processes and analyzes the impression of the data.

This forms the basis of individual consciousness. But all individuals are part of a group. A network. They tend to communicate thier individual analyses to each other to form a dynamic group consensus. And, of course, groups interact with other groups. An InterNetwork. A sort of super organism.

I would define conciousness as awareness of: the self, the universe outside the self, and the interaction between the two.