Last, thanks for pointing me here. I read many of your articles and have thought similarly about many of the issues you write about.

As far as a theory of consciousness, I think you have accurately described a way to measure such an intangible subject. I have often thought of consciousness in a similar scope, but from an information-processing approach.

Everyone is born with a similar capacity to learn and evolve their own consciousness, assuming they are interacting with the world at large and not tied up in some dark room. Surely such a person would struggle greatly when released into a world of things they have had no interaction with.

For each option that is available to a self-aware individual, there must have been some foundation of learning and information processing to make that option available. The person sitting in the dark room all their life has had no chance to develop a portfolio of options. That is why I believe a good metric for consciousness is memory and information processing ability (not unlike a computer). If you can measure the amount of information that is captured and processed by an individual on some scale of time, you have a direct measure for intelligence and consciousness. This idea is not mine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory), but I find it to be extremely elegant.

So now we can measure the conscious ability of all creatures on some scale. However, I think this can be extrapolated even further. Take, for example, the extreme example of a rock. A rock has no active information processing capability. It has no brain, no nervous system, no cells, and for our general purposes is completely inanimate and illiquid. However, even the rock contains some information about the universe, which is has gathered simply by existing and taking up a portion of space. A crystal, for example, contains information about chemical structures. Again, this is a form of passive information processing and has little to do with what you are discussing. I simply want to point out there there could exist a spectrum from the information that an inanimate object contains all the way up to something that is actually capable of processing information actively; a conscious.

That is a little off point, however. You bring up in other posts how our individual conscious are evolving into a more unified meta-consciousness. The appropriate question to ask now is how should we categorize this meta-concious? Is it simply another tool or extension of ourselves, or could it even be listed as a higher-level conscious on the spectrum of information processing? If so, where does this put ants? Should we consider the ant on the conscious spectrum and the colony higher on the same spectrum?

Thanks for reading.