Human consciousness, whether you take a materialist, idealist, spiritual, theistic, or transcendentalist, position on it’s nature and origins, is clearly our species core capability. Without awareness of our own existence nothing can be said. The other primary component of individuality is the boundaries that make entities appear and function as a distinct living form of some kind. These boundaries are not solid and absolute, they are semi-permeable. Without awareness and the intuitive knowledge that we are aware, the existence of any individual living entity, made real via semi permeable boundaries, is meaningless.

Human consciousness, whether you take a materialist, idealist, spiritual, theistic, or transcendentalist, position on it’s the nature and origins, is obviously our species core capability. Without awareness of our own existence nothing can be said. The other primary component of individuality is the boundaries that make entities appear and function as a distinct living form of some kind. These boundaries are not solid and absolute, they are semi-permeable.
Without awareness and the intuitive knowledge that we are aware, the existence of any individual living entity is meaningless. The boundaries that form human individuality are semi-permeable allowing for the flow of shared substance into and out of the individual.

The nerve cell body has extensions called axons and dendrites. This capability enables the cell to bring information to it from other cells and transmit information to the other cells with which it has made a connection. In the macro human sense we function in these two ways and we are conscious our own existence and functioning. We could call this ability the capability of the synapse, the tiny space between the end of a dendrite or axon and the other cell it is exchanging information with. It is the space between that allows consciousness which allows choice.

It is imperative, now that high levels of extra-biological power are a persistent feature of human life, to move our social organization, and our systems that express our social organization, farther away from the primate (rigid, male centric, violence ordered, social hierarchy), and more toward the male/female pair bonding form of social organization created through our evolutionary split from the primate species.

Extra-biological force is wholly beyond the bounds of the biological individual and therefore can not be passed via sexual reproduction to offspring then becoming part of the process of evolution of our species. This makes extra-biological power a public good passed on through cultural means. Culturally we have related to extra-biological power as if it were privately held, like the large teeth and good reflexes of an alpha male in a troop of Chimpanzees, and passed to the offspring of the well endowed. Capitalism applies the reproductive impulse to our cultural systems that manage extra-biological power and that will have to change if we are to collectively survive our creation of extra-biological power.