Very thought provoking post. I have had the experience of being an observer to the act of my dreaming, and noted that there were several of me present during that event. The dreamer, the dreamee, and the observer.
There are some presently insurmountable hurdles of nescience that prevent us from really understanding your questions and MMM from making a product, or at least making the product they claim they make. First, cognition isn't solely something that happens in brains. Lots of single celled organisms have some form of consciousness, make decisions, and learn from experience. Some of them also participate in human consciousness, from their ecosystem in our guts. There are plentiful neurons in the gut, BTW, probably as many as are in our heads.
Our brains are not where our consciousness comes from. We actually have no idea what consciousness even is. My experience of observing me dream shows that our intellectual activity and experience of being the person we are doesn't stop when we're unconscious, as we are when we sleep. Whatever we're talking about, consciousness, then, is the wrong word for it. While brains have something to do with our thinking, we don't really know the full extent of what that interaction is. All we do know is that brain activity occurs during specific kinds of cognition. What that activity actually represents in our actual mind isn't something we can specify based on simply detecting some kind of activity.
Approaching life as if it was simply chemical devices is probably an error. We have all sorts of theories as to how we got where we are, but we don't actually know jack. Physicists have been sat down hard lately as the James Webb telescope reveals cosmic structure that isn't explicable through the big bang theory, nor any other extant theories I am aware of (there certainly could be many I am not aware of, as I am aware of dozens of cosmological theories).
As perplexing a problem as explaining galaxies having formed after only a couple hundred million years is, it's less perplexing that we don't even have a word that well characterizes thinking, cognition, or consciousness, don't know where it comes from, whether it's even something limited to living things, and much more.
Hubris is a curse. Thinking we know what's really going on when we are so infinitesimally tiny, when we can perceive only a tiny fraction of the reality we are part of, and have very little idea of what the rest of reality is (we still suspect that most matter and energy is something we cannot see and haven't detected except indirectly), is sheer conceit and madness.
Plato said 'All I know is that I know nothing.' That humility is the only useful basis for wisdom, and we're not much better informed than Plato was today.
Thanks!
Wow, I love how you describe the experience of dreams. The dreamer, the dreamee, and the observer. I have honestly never thought about it that way. But now that I think of it, it is fucking mind blowing.
Also loved the Hubris is a curse para. I mean it's so true. There is so much we don't know that we don't know. We are still explorers of what reality really is. What all mysteries await us in the universe, on the earth, in the atoms and even within our own cells, we have no clue. I have goose bumps even as I type it. There is so little time in life and there is so much to explore and learn.
Thanks for this thought provoking and enlightening comment.
It is our great and good fortune to be approaching the shores of such vast and undiscovered country.