What comes after consciousness?

On Sean Carroll's blog, Cosmic Variance, he posted an article about consciousness and at one point asked the most interesting question: "What's next after consciousness?"

In our universe, one of the most surprising things is emergent behavior. It's a term science uses to describe something complex and completely unexpected emerging from simple inputs. In other words, looking at the ingredients, you'd never have thought you'd see this behavior.

Consciousness is emergent behavior. Looking at brains and what they're made of, and the tasks that brains were built by evolution to accomplish, you'd never have suspected that consciousness would arise. The ingredients are wet, gooey brains, made of simple substances -- not the sort of substrate you'd think could produce a Mozart or an Einstein. Consciousness is emergent behavior, writ large.

So the question Sean poses is: what emergent behavior will come next? We ourselves are the fertile ground here. Will we create something exponentially greater than ourselves? Will we join with our technology in a way that so changes what we fundamentally are that we can't even imagine the result? Will this new being possess something beyond consciousness? What would that be?

It's an intriguing question. I'm glad Sean brought it up and I've already tucked away a short story idea based on it. And book 3 of The Worlds grapples with just such an idea. To my mind, it's the most exciting question we can ask.