Chapter 3: From Bands to Billions

Take a sip of water.

Feel it cool your throat, enter your body. Simple, ordinary, forgettable. Now trace this water's journey. Before it flowed from your tap, it rushed through miles of pipes maintained by workers whose names you'll never know. Before that, treatment plants—massive concrete and steel facilities humming with pumps and filters—removed invisible dangers. Chemical engineers tested it, adjusting mineral levels. Electricians kept power flowing to the pumps. Plumbers repaired midnight breaks in freezing weather.

Further back: rain fell on protected watersheds, filtered through soil and stone. City planners decades ago fought to preserve those watersheds. Engineers surveyed elevations, designed gravity-fed systems. Construction crews blasted through mountains, laid pipe across valleys. Thousands of people across a century collaborated to bring you this sip of water.

Open your awareness wider. Someone is picking coffee beans on a mountainside you'll never see. Someone is maintaining power lines in weather you'll never experience. Someone is writing code for systems you'll never understand. Someone is teaching children you'll never meet. Right now, as you read these words, millions of other minds are laboring, creating, maintaining the invisible architecture that makes your life possible.

How many hands touched the threads that weave your life? How many minds contributed to this moment? The number staggers comprehension—millions, perhaps billions of people, most long dead, have cooperated to create the ordinary miracle of your morning.

This is what we never notice: we live inside the most complex cooperative system ever created on Earth. Not by design, but by emergence. Not through central planning, but through countless acts of coordination. Somehow, consciousness recognizing consciousness (Chapter 1) and minds sharing meaning through language (Chapter 2) have scaled into a planetary nervous system that coordinates eight billion people.

But here's the vertigo-inducing truth: no one understands it all. No single mind comprehends the system we've created together. We're like neurons in a global brain, each playing our part without grasping the whole. The collective intelligence we participate in transcends any individual understanding.

How did we get here? How did small bands of primates, limited by the same cognitive constraints as our chimpanzee cousins, create civilizations that span continents? What transforms a species that should max out at 150 meaningful relationships into one that cooperates by billions?

The answer isn't what you might expect. It's not our large brains or our clever tools or even our language—though all these play roles. It's something more profound: we learned to trust shared realities more than personal relationships. We discovered how to cooperate through imagination.

Building Understanding

The Dunbar Number

Robin Dunbar's breakthrough came not in a laboratory but in the African sun, sweat dripping as he watched baboons for hours. Hour after hour, day after day, he observed their grooming rituals. One baboon meticulously picking through another's fur, removing parasites, smoothing tangles. Grooming and being groomed. The activity seemed purely hygienic until Dunbar noticed something that made his pulse quicken.

The baboons weren't grooming randomly. They had favorites, allies, social networks. And grooming was their Facebook—their way of maintaining relationships, building alliances, trading favors. A male might groom a female to gain mating access. A low-ranking female might groom a high-ranking one for protection. Grooming was social currency in a fur-covered economy.

But here's what set Dunbar's mind racing: grooming takes time. You can only pick through one friend's fur at a time. With just so many hours between sunrise and sunset, between finding food and avoiding leopards, there's a mathematical limit to how many relationships you can maintain. Time becomes the bottleneck for social connection.

Then came the insight that changed everything. Dunbar gathered data on dozens of primate species—their average group sizes, their grooming time, their brain sizes. When he plotted neocortex volume against group size, the correlation was so strong it took his breath away. Bigger brains, bigger groups. The relationship was precise, mathematical, almost eerie in its consistency.

With trembling hands (as he later recounted), he applied the formula to humans. Our massive neocortex, that evolutionary extravagance that makes our heads so large that human birth is dangerous, predicted a group size of about 150. Not a rigid limit but a cognitive sweet spot—some people manage 200 meaningful relationships, others struggle with 100. But the pattern was clear: we have a biological constraint on social connection.

Military companies throughout history: Roman centuries (100-120), modern infantry (120-180). The Hutterites, those austere religious communities, had discovered through centuries of trial and error that beyond 150 people, "things get awkward." They split communities that grow larger, building new settlements rather than expanding old ones.

W.L. Gore, who invented Gore-Tex fabric, built a business empire on this insight. When Bill Gore noticed that his factories lost their family feel around 150 employees, he made a radical decision. No facility would exceed that size. When orders increased, he didn't expand—he built another factory in the parking lot. Productivity soared. Innovation flourished. People knew each other's names, children, problems. Work felt personal because relationships were personal.

But we modern humans inhabit cities of millions, work for corporations of thousands, claim hundreds of social media "friends." Have we transcended Dunbar's number?

The research says no. Track actual interactions rather than claimed connections. Facebook users might have 500 friends but actively interact with about 150. Twitter users with thousands of followers meaningfully engage with around 150 accounts. Phone records show people regularly call about 150 contacts. Our technology expanded our reach, but our brains remain stubbornly primate.

Daily Practice Seed: Today, notice the difference between your 15 (who you'd call in crisis), your 50 (who you'd invite to a big party), and your 150 (who you'd recognize and greet warmly). Feel how your attention and care naturally organize in these nested circles.

The Agricultural Revolution

Twelve thousand years ago, in the foothills of what's now southeastern Turkey, a woman knelt by a stream. Let's call her Asherah—naming her for the ancient mother goddess seems fitting. She noticed something odd—where she'd spilled seeds from her gathering basket moons ago, wheat now grew thick and golden. Not scattered like wild wheat, but clustered.

Asherah wasn't thinking about changing the world. She was thinking about her aching back, tired from walking miles to find scattered wild grains. What if she could grow food here, near water, near shelter? She gathered the fattest seeds and pressed them into the dark earth with her thumb.

That simple act—thumb pressing seed into soil—changed everything.

Asherah's great-great-granddaughter Miriam inherited fields instead of foraging grounds. But look at Miriam's skeleton, preserved in ancient soil, and you see the price of progress. She stood a full hand shorter than her hunter-gatherer ancestors. Her teeth, meant for varied diets, rotted from grain's sticky starches. Her knee joints, worn from kneeling to grind grain hour after hour, tell of repetitive labor unknown to mobile peoples. Her spine, compressed from carrying heavy loads, speaks of burdens her ancestors simply left behind.

The paradox cuts deeper. Hunter-gatherers worked perhaps twenty hours weekly to meet their needs. Farmers labored from dawn to dusk. Foragers enjoyed varied diets—dozens of plants, seasonal fruits, occasional meat. Farmers ate mostly grain, courting malnutrition. Mobile bands left their waste behind. Settled farmers lived in their own filth, breeding diseases that killed their children.

Why would anyone choose this harder life?

They didn't choose it—it chose them. Agriculture is a trap that springs slowly, sweetened with initial abundance. That first harvest must have seemed miraculous. So much food! Enough to feed more children. And more children meant more hands to work fields, allowing bigger harvests, enabling more children...

Daily Practice Seed: When you eat bread today, hold it first. Feel its weight. This is what anchored humanity to place—the promise of grain, the chain of seasons. Notice how even now, ten thousand years later, your life follows agricultural rhythms—work weeks, weekends, vacations echoing planting, tending, harvest.

Within generations, population exceeded what foraging could support. The path back had closed. Like consciousness itself, which can't unknow what it knows (Book 1), agricultural societies couldn't return to innocence. They could only press forward into complexity.

But this trap forced cognitive revolution. Foraging lives in an eternal present—eat what you find, move when it's gone. Farming demands temporal consciousness. Those seeds you're desperately hungry for today? Eat them now and starve next winter. Plant them and feast next fall. This simple calculation—present suffering for future benefit—rewired human consciousness. We became the animal that sacrifices today for tomorrow.

New social challenges emerged like weeds in the first gardens. Mobile bands solve conflicts simply—walk away. But farmers are chained to land by investment, by the sweat mixed into soil, by ancestors buried beneath fruit trees. That field Asherah's descendants cleared and plowed and fertilized with their own waste represents generations of labor. You can't just leave. You must learn to live with difficult neighbors permanently.

Daily Practice Seed: Next time conflict arises and you can't simply leave—at work, in family, with neighbors—recognize the ancient challenge. You're navigating the same social pressure that created civilization: how to cooperate with people you're stuck with.

The Urban Explosion

If agriculture was humanity's first trap, cities were the second—but what magnificent traps they became.

Walk through the ruins of Çatalhöyük and breathe in the ghost of humanity's first urban experiment. Nine thousand years ago, this patch of Turkish plain housed up to 8,000 souls—more humans than most had ever seen in one place. Close your eyes and resurrect it.

No streets. Houses built wall-to-wall like honeycomb, entered through holes in the roof. You walk across your neighbor's ceiling to reach your own home. The smoke from 8,000 hearths mingles in the air. The sounds—babies crying, couples arguing, children playing, dogs barking, craftsmen hammering—never stop. Privacy hasn't been invented yet.

The sensory assault would have overwhelmed minds evolved for space and quiet. In a hunter-gatherer band, you might go hours hearing only wind and birds. Here, human noise never ceased. The smell of so many bodies, so much waste, so much life packed dense as spawning salmon. Your consciousness, evolved for small groups with plenty of space, would drown in the flood of social information.

Anthropologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Çatalhöyük, found evidence of the psychological strain. Skulls show stress markers. Violent deaths increased compared to earlier settlements. Yet they persisted for over a thousand years. Why endure such pressure?

Because cities are magic. Not supernatural magic, but the magic of collective intelligence emerging from density. Watch what happens when specialists cluster. The woman who spends every day making pottery discovers that adding crushed shells prevents cracking. She tells the woman who trades her pots, who tells the woman who gathers shells. Within a moon, every potter in the city knows the technique. Innovation spreads like fire through dry grass.

In scattered bands, that discovery might take generations to spread, if ever. In cities, knowledge moves at the speed of gossip. And gossip, as Dunbar discovered, is what human language evolved for—social information transmission that replaced grooming.

Daily Practice Seed: In your next crowd—subway, concert, busy street—don't retreat into your phone. Feel the urban pressure your ancestors first experienced at Çatalhöyük. Notice your consciousness working to filter, to protect itself from overload. You're experiencing humanity's first great experiment in density.

Yet should we call this progress? Anthropologist James C. Scott argues that early states were "fragile and liable to collapse" because people kept fleeing back to mobile life whenever possible. States had to build walls not just to keep enemies out but to keep farmers in. Taxes, conscription, and epidemic diseases made settled life miserable for most. The glorious civilizations we admire were built on the bent backs of people who, given choice, might have preferred the forest.

Even today, this question haunts us. We've built a global civilization of unprecedented complexity, but are we happier than our hunter-gatherer ancestors? Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called foragers "the original affluent society"—not because they had much, but because they wanted little. They worked less, played more, enjoyed better health, and lived more egalitarian lives than most humans since.

But there's no going back—not with eight billion people, not with the knowledge we've accumulated, not with consciousness that has tasted what collective intelligence can create. The question isn't whether to return to bands but how to build wisely at scale. Can we create systems that serve human flourishing rather than grinding humans into servants of systems?

Consider what this means for consciousness itself. In Book 1, we explored how awareness can be focused or diffuse. Cities create something unprecedented—millions of focused awarenesses coordinating through shared systems. No single mind grasps it all, yet the whole functions. Like your body's trillion cells (Book 2) organizing into one experiencing being, cities organize thousands of minds into super-organisms.

But is this mere metaphor? When a crowd panics, moving as one organism fleeing danger, when a protest march finds its rhythm and thousands breathe as one, when a sports stadium erupts in synchronized joy—are these glimpses of genuine collective consciousness? Indigenous traditions have always known that groups can achieve shared awareness through ritual, dance, ceremony. Modern research on "collective flow" in teams, orchestras, and even corporations suggests that groups can enter unified states where the boundary between self and collective temporarily dissolves.

Perhaps scaling human cooperation isn't just about transcending Dunbar's number but about discovering what emerges when consciousness networks with itself at larger scales. Not just many minds thinking alike, but something qualitatively new—a form of awareness that exists between and beyond individual consciousness, yet includes and transcends it.

The Stories That Bind

Reach into your pocket or wallet. Pull out any paper money. Hold it up to light. What gives this processed plant fiber the power to command real goods—food, shelter, labor?

The answer reveals humanity's deepest magic. Not the magic of fantasy stories but the magic of shared reality creation. This paper is worthless...unless we agree it has worth. Its value exists purely in collective consciousness, maintained by mutual belief. Tomorrow, if enough people stopped believing, it would revert to fancy paper. History is littered with currencies that suffered this fate—Confederate dollars, Weimar marks, Zimbabwean trillions.

Yet while the belief lasts, it's as real as gravity. More real, in some ways. Gravity you can't escape, but you also can't strengthen it by believing harder. Money's value fluctuates with collective confidence. When trust is high, economies soar. When trust collapses, so does the currency. We're not just observing economic forces—we're participating in collective reality creation.

Yuval Noah Harari illuminated these "imagined orders," but calling them "fictions" misses their profound reality. They're more like collective agreements that become real through practice. Like consciousness itself (Book 1), which can't be touched yet undeniably exists, these shared realities live in the space between minds yet shape the physical world.

Consider the invisible architecture surrounding you:

Nations exist nowhere in physical reality. The bedrock doesn't change at borders. Rivers flow oblivious to sovereignty. Yet people die for these invisible lines. The consciousness that knows itself as "American" or "Japanese" or "Nigerian" is shaped by stories so deep they feel like identity itself. Benedict Anderson called them "imagined communities"—imagined because you'll never meet most fellow citizens, yet community because the shared story creates real bonds.

Corporations achieve something even stranger. Google has no body, Apple no location you can visit (headquarters are just where employees gather), Amazon no physical existence. They're patterns of agreement, shared stories about "legal persons." Yet these bodiless entities employ millions, serve billions, shape how humanity communicates, learns, trades. We've created invisible beings and granted them real power.

Human rights beautifully illustrate how shared agreements create reality. No instrument can detect the "rights" humans supposedly possess. They're not encoded in our DNA like eye color or emanating from our atoms like heat. They exist because enough people believe humans deserve dignity and—crucially—act on that belief. The belief without action remains mere philosophy. The action without shared belief remains individual quirk. Together, they create new realities.

Daily Practice Seed: Throughout today, notice every shared reality you navigate—property lines, business hours, traffic patterns, social norms. Feel how these agreements shape behavior more powerfully than walls or chains. You're swimming in an ocean of collective consciousness made manifest.

Indigenous wisdom keeper Tyson Yunkaporta warns against seeing these as mere abstractions. In Aboriginal Australian thinking, the land really does change at territorial boundaries—not the geology but the consciousness-field, the web of relationships and responsibilities. The stories aren't separate from reality but part of it, like the quantum field that underlies matter (Book 2).

This is how humans transcended Dunbar's number. I don't need to personally know everyone in my nation, religion, or economic system. I just need to share stories with them. If we both believe in the same constitution, god, or currency, we can cooperate without ever meeting. The story becomes the relationship.

The Cooperation Paradox

The same forces that unite us can divide us—a truth written in blood throughout history.

Primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy spent years in the scrublands of India watching langur monkeys, documenting something that shattered comfortable assumptions about cooperation. Male langurs, when taking over a troop, systematically killed nursing infants. The mothers, no longer lactating, became fertile again. Infanticide as reproductive strategy.

This darkness lurks beneath cooperation's bright surface. The very mechanisms that bond groups internally—shared identity, mutual trust, collective resources—create boundaries that can become battle lines. We cooperate best when competing. The consciousness that recognizes itself in group members can blind itself to consciousness in outsiders. The stories that unite "us" define themselves against "them."

Feel this paradox in your own nervous system. Remember when your team—sports, work, national—faced rivals. Didn't internal bonds strengthen? Didn't petty differences dissolve? That surge of unity, that dissolving of ego into group identity—it's intoxicating. And dangerous.

The archaeological record darkens as settlements grow. Anthropologist Lawrence Keeley documented the shift. Among mobile hunter-gatherers, violent death rates are actually quite high—but it's mostly individual conflicts, murders of passion. Agricultural settlements show something new: organized massacre. Mass graves with embedded projectiles. Entire communities slaughtered. War had been invented.

Daily Practice Seed: When you feel us-versus-them emotions arise—in politics, sports, any group identity—pause. Can you maintain your bonds while still recognizing the consciousness in "them"? This is advanced collective intelligence, the skill our species desperately needs.

Why does cooperation so often create its own opposition?

The answer lives in your own nervous system. Remember the last time your team faced rivals—in sports, business, politics. Didn't you feel internal bonds strengthen? Didn't petty differences dissolve in the face of external challenge? That surge of unity, that intoxicating dissolution of self into group—evolution shaped us to find it irresistible. And dangerous.

Game theory offers additional insight. Groups that cooperate gain advantages—better resource acquisition, stronger defense, accumulated knowledge. This creates evolutionary arms races. If neighboring villages can field twenty warriors through agricultural surplus, you must match them or risk absorption. Cooperation becomes compulsory, spreading like a contagion that transforms all it touches.

But Indigenous peacekeeper Patricia Anne Davis suggests a deeper dynamic. When we define ourselves by what we're not, we create the very divisions we claim to transcend. The Navajo concept of hózhó—often translated as harmony or balance—points toward identity through relationship rather than opposition. You know who you are not by excluding others but by understanding your place in the web of connections.

Yet humans have also transcended the cooperation-conflict trap, though never permanently. Trade networks create mutual dependence—why destroy your customers or suppliers? Intermarriage blends populations at the most intimate level. Cultural exchange softens boundaries as foreign becomes familiar. Slowly, fitfully, larger circles of cooperation emerge.

The European Union embodies both promise and peril. Nations that spent centuries perfecting the art of killing each other now share governance. French and German youth—whose great-grandparents died by millions in trenches—backpack freely across borders that once required armies to cross. It's unprecedented in history.

Yet watch it strain. When economic pressure builds, old stories resurface. "They" are lazy, corrupt, different. "We" are industrious, honest, betrayed. The consciousness that expanded to encompass former enemies contracts again. No achievement is permanent. Every generation must choose cooperation anew.

And now digital technology scrambles all the patterns. We create instant global communities around shared interests while becoming strangers to physical neighbors. We're more connected than ever yet lonelier than ever. Social media promises to transcend Dunbar's number but delivers what researcher Sherry Turkle calls "alone together"—the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. We mistake the dopamine hit of likes for genuine recognition, the buzz of notifications for real connection.

Yet these same tools enable coordination at unprecedented scales. The Arab Spring, climate strikes, #MeToo—movements that would have taken decades to build now emerge in weeks. Wikipedia proves that strangers can collaborate to create something rivaling the ancient Library of Alexandria. Open-source software shows that cooperation without hierarchy can build complex systems. Perhaps we're not transcending human nature but discovering new expressions of it.

Developing Practice

Living Between Scales

You are a scale-shifter, though you rarely notice it. This morning you might have awakened in intimacy—partner's warmth, children's needs, the irreplaceable texture of close relationship. Then breakfast, perhaps alone or with family, operating at the scale of personal care.

Step outside and the scale expands. Neighbors to nod at—the 150 of community recognition. Drive to work navigating infrastructure built for millions, following rules internalized so deeply you forgot they're agreements. At work, professional relationships—friendly but bounded, warm but not intimate. Lunch with close colleagues shrinks the scale. Afternoon meeting expands it.

Each scale-shift demands different consciousness. Intimacy requires vulnerability, presence, the full depth of feeling. Professional relationships need clarity, boundaries, sustainable energy. Urban navigation demands pattern recognition, anonymous cooperation, emotional filtering. Digital interaction—that strange new scale—needs conscious boundaries lest it consume all others.

Modern malaise often stems from scale confusion. We hunger for village-scale recognition in city-scale environments. We bring workplace efficiency into intimate relationships. We expect digital "friends" to provide deep support. We exhaust ourselves trying to maintain intimate connection with hundreds.

Daily Practice Seed: Before each transition today—home to work, meeting to meeting, public to private—pause. Feel what scale you're leaving and entering. Consciously adjust your energy to match. Notice how this prevents both overwhelm and disconnection.

Creating Cooperative Culture

While humanity's large-scale systems often seem beyond individual influence, every interaction shapes the cultural field around you. Like consciousness affecting quantum systems through observation (Book 2), your way of being affects social systems through participation. You're always creating culture—the question is what kind.

Start with conversation. Notice how often it becomes subtle competition—waiting to speak rather than listening, topping stories, displaying knowledge. Anthropologist Helen Fisher found that even flirtation often involves competitive display. But what if conversation became collaborative investigation?

Try this: In your next social interaction, become curious about making the other person brilliant. Ask questions that help them think. Build on their ideas rather than pivoting to your own. Celebrate insights they didn't know they had. Watch how this transforms the energy. You're creating a local field of collective intelligence.

Daily Practice Seed: Count competitive versus collaborative moments in your next group interaction. Without judgment, just notice. Awareness itself begins shifting the pattern.

The Future of Cooperation

As we prepare to explore how human consciousness creates entire universes of meaning through culture, pause to feel the extraordinary moment we inhabit. We stand at an inflection point in the human experiment.

For the first time in history, we face challenges requiring planetary cooperation. Climate change, artificial intelligence, global inequality, potential pandemics—none respect borders. They demand collective intelligence at scales we've never achieved. Can a species that evolved for small-group cooperation organize at planetary scale without losing soul?

Indigenous wisdom keeper Pat McCabe suggests the answer lies not in transcending our limits but in honoring them while building bridges. Like mycorrhizal networks that connect forest trees (preview of Book 4), we might maintain local roots while sharing resources globally. The internet offers infrastructure. What we need is wisdom.

The same consciousness that recognizes itself in another's eyes, that shares meaning through arbitrary sounds, that cooperates through shared stories, now faces its greatest test. Can we create stories that unite without homogenizing? Can we organize without dominating? Can we become a species that thinks together while honoring difference?

You're not observing this experiment—you're part of it. Every choice to compete or collaborate, every story you strengthen or challenge, every scale-appropriate connection you make, adds to humanity's collective learning. We're all neurons in an emerging global brain, still learning how to think together.

Finding Connections

From bands to billions, we've traced how human consciousness transcended its biological limits through shared imagination. But humans aren't the only species experimenting with collective intelligence. As we'll discover, the natural world thrums with cooperation, competition, and communication in forms both alien and familiar.

The principles we've explored—recognition enabling cooperation, communication coordinating behavior, shared realities organizing groups—appear throughout life in stunning diversity. Bees dance directions. Trees share nutrients through underground fungal networks. Bacteria coordinate through chemical signals. The creativity of consciousness organizing itself seems limitless.

In the next chapter, we'll explore how consciousness doesn't just cooperate through shared stories but creates entire universes of meaning through culture. Ideas will reveal themselves as almost living things that evolve, spread, and shape us in return. Art, science, religion—all the ways humans make meaning together—await our investigation.

Opening Questions

We began with a simple recognition: your morning exists through the cooperation of millions. We traced humanity's journey from small bands where everyone knew everyone, through the cognitive revolutions of agriculture and cities, to today's global systems that no single mind can grasp.

We discovered that humans transcended Dunbar's number not by evolving bigger brains but by creating shared realities—money, nations, laws, rights—that enable cooperation beyond personal relationship. These aren't mere "fictions" but collective agreements that become real through practice, as real as the consciousness that creates them.

We confronted the shadows of scale—how cooperation often breeds conflict, how abstractions can disconnect us from immediate reality, how the same capacities that unite can divide. Yet we also glimpsed possibilities for transcending these ancient patterns.

You are consciousness participating in the most complex cooperative experiment ever attempted. Right now, as you read these words, you're connected to farmers in distant fields, programmers in sleepless cities, teachers shaping future minds, ancestors who preserved knowledge, descendants who will inherit what we create together.

This isn't metaphor but reality. Your breakfast required global coordination. Your technology crystallizes millions of hours of human thought. Your language carries the innovations of countless speakers. You've never been separate. You've always been held by webs of cooperation too vast to see.

Yet for all our sophisticated systems, we remain the same primates who evolved in small bands. We crave face-to-face connection, struggle when groups exceed our cognitive capacity, and bond through the same social grooming that united our ancestors. Understanding both our limits and our possibilities helps navigate this tension.

As you move through your day, carry this awareness. Feel gratitude for the invisible cooperation supporting you. Contribute consciously to the systems you depend on. Create connection at whatever scale nourishes you. Challenge stories that divide while strengthening those that unite. You're both neuron and network, individual and collective, ancient primate and global citizen.

The exploration of collective intelligence continues. From cooperation through shared agreements, we turn next to how consciousness creates entire worlds of meaning through culture—not just stories but forces that shape us, not just ideas but living realities that evolve and spread like organisms. The adventure deepens.

Next: Chapter 4 - The Cultural Universe. We'll explore how human minds don't just communicate through language or cooperate through shared agreements but create entire universes of meaning through culture. Ideas evolve and spread like living things, collective intelligence manifests through art and innovation, and consciousness expresses itself through infinite forms of human creativity.