“Ah, sure. Some might argue that the ant colony is conscious, not the ants. But for direct evidence look at our own brains and consider the two hemispheres, which are largely independent but coupled via the nerve fibers of the corpus callosum. You can do the Wada test, which I’ve seen done by the way, where one hemisphere is shut down with anesthesia but the other is not. It’s eerie. Spooky . . . I saw one test where the left was shut down and the right hemisphere remained. The right hemisphere couldn’t talk to me, only grunt and whistle and sing. The man was a construction worker who they were considering for brain surgery. Epilepsy. Didn’t talk much. Stoic, everyone said. But once the right hemisphere was alone and in control he seemed so happy, so alive, rhythmic . . . I played him music and the man, or rather, his right hemisphere, danced in the chair, waving his arms about. So within this man was this incredibly cheerful nymph-like child, humming to itself, inviting me to dance. And I watched as the anesthesia wore off and that childlike musician was subsumed as the other hemisphere gained consciousness and the man became a stoic construction worker once again. I asked him if he could remember it. He said no. See, a consciousness abhors other consciousnesses. It eats them. Subsumes them, I mean. There’s some law of the universe, some consequence of the nature of consciousness itself, which entails that a consciousness subsumes those that it is composed of. Like soap bubbles. Press two bubbles together and they merge into one. Pop a big bubble and you’ll get a bunch of smaller bubbles—but in what sense did they exist before the big bubble was popped?”

“You planned to do this with a network of monkeys. But let’s say then you have a network of humans instead. Or an entire civilization . . . our civilization, if you will. And you couple them more and more. What will happen if you project that into the future? Feel free to speculate wildly.”