> the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it. And it's learning about itself.
Yes, thank you for stating what some might consider a tautology or frivolous fact, but is actually, utterly profound.
Generally, people have no trouble believing that they, themselves are conscious. But what part of them is conscious? All of it? Their toes and fingers? Clearly not...they are mechanical, I/O devices with just nerves, no brains. Same for most of you: your organs, muscles, tissues, blood. Not conscious. But what about your brain? Is it all conscious? Is the tiny part of your brain devoted to audio processing conscious, with a little person who speaks English inside? Clearly not. There are lots of mechanical parts. Is there then some "special" part of your brain that is the consciousness, and the rest is not conscious? Or is just the sum of the brain's parts conscious? Either way, it doesn't matter, it's the same principle; we ascribe a property of a part of a person, consciousness, part of the brain, to the whole person--we regard a person's hand or face with the reverance we regard for their brain, their face thinks and their hands feel with the full power of their consciousness.
So, too, the universe thinks with parts of itself, human and animal brains...
Every time I ponder this I arrive at Gaia. How can we deny that nature is conscious when it is so full of conscious things! Look at all the wondrous brains around! In animals, in insects, and now we see plants sense and respond to stimuli. All these pieces are conscious, and we must conclude that the sum of the biosphere is a conscious thing. It is truly a superorganism, a pan-organism.
Two thoughts. First, consciousness may exist by itself, e.g. is a book that describes itself in a complex enough way conscious? It wouldn’t even require the flow of time or a reader, but once you read it, it’s clearly self-aware. That’s a hard notion of consciousness.
Second, the easy, down to earth answer to “what is conscious” (iow, where do “beings” end) is where a structured perception ends. Your hand is a part of you because of a broadband link to it. It ends at the skin and hair. Lack of signal and control separates you from everything else. Organized groups have much less bandwidth and while still “pan-“, that’s much lower level of consciousness. Sometimes they synchronize well enough, but that’s just a correlation.
This is a very interesting line of reasoning, particularly the "high bandwidth connection" kind of criteria. Our native five senses can be augmented with high-capacity links to all kinds of sensors and actuators. Where is the boundary when we can plug things into our brains with as much bandwidth and precision of control as our native limbs? Cyborgs...
The lit I've come across on the subject of consciousness broadly likens it to something illusory (much like identity), not a thing in itself. I don't imagine a machine is capable of experiencing what could be described as being "thrown into the world". The high self-awareness bringing up the question, "why am I in this body, rather than some place else? How is this special unique experience of now-ness selected for what it is, could it have been otherwise?". Watts nitpicks this idea and says we are "born of the world", not thrown into it.
The most fluffy unscientific notion I could entertain is that consciousness is tapped into, like a well. But I lean toward it being a complete illusion.
Every time someone brings up consciousness I like to bring up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8. Split brains imply some very interesting ideas around of consciousness.
> If you think about it, the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it
This seems like quite a leap. Parts of the earth are conscious, so is the earth conscious? Parts of the universe are alive, so is the universe alive? Every member of my family is conscious*, but I wouldn't say that "my family" is conscious.
The natural problem is drawing the line between which parts of you are conscious and which parts of you are merely the portion that surrounds the consciousness. Is merely your brain¹ conscious? The whole body? The brain+(not-brain body) system is conscious but the distinction isn't all that different from the brain+(not-brain body)+(not-you Earth) system being conscious.
I have to say I started with thinking that clearly containment vs. identity are separate but now for this question, I find myself confused. I bet someone has thought up this notion of what a being is already. If anyone has the keywords that will let me quickly search up the appropriate concepts in a dense fashion (i.e. without lots of unrelated stuff) I would be appreciative.
¹ Or whatever nervous system subset you find suitable, m.m.
If you spend a lot of time paying very close attention to all of the minute sub/unconscious actions of your body as you go throughout the day, you have these weird epiphanies that your consciousness is just a passenger barking orders to a meat machine with a mind if it’s own.
Do this long enough and you’ll experience episodes on non-verbal communication with whatever is at the helm. For me it occurs when I get stuck in thought and my body sort of involuntarily feints an act to remind me what I was doing before my mind wandered. It’s only happened to her three times in my life, probably many times before I realized it the first time. It’s subtle, but really weird. And probably just a product of my imagination, but that’s been my experience.
I've never heard this before but I think it's reasonable. Imagine if you were simulating the universe in a computer and a creature within your simulation achieved consciousness. I think it would be fair to say your simulation had achieved consciousness, even if 99.999...% of the processing power was spent simulating the rest of the universe "unrelated" to the conscious part.
The interesting thing is everything is required as it happened for the universe to become conscious in the form of humans. E.g. supernova that generated the right heavy metals to stabilize the protein complexes that let our brain function.
Would love it if we could test other universes with different alpha constants to observe their conscious creatures. Maybe they would be human’ and human’’ etc :)
The universe is a system. We a part of that system. So any traits we have are inherently traits that the universe has, even if parts of it don't share it. A human has a hand, the hand is part of the human, but the rest of the human is not necessarily a hand.
> The universe is a system. We a part of that system. So any traits we have are inherently traits that the universe has
I don't know how you can substantiate this. I am left-handed. My wife is right-handed. These are attributes of us as individuals. What is the handedness of the city we live in? I would reject the question outright since I don't think that traits attributed to parts of a system necessarily can be attributed to the system itself.
Syllogistic errors 101. Your ruthless logic tells us a (normal) human has one nail and five fingers, is made of keratin and is not conscious. Ergo, the universe has one nail and five fingers, is made of keratin and is not conscious.
your family might not be on our human plane of conciousness
but, a family might make decisions to prolong it's lifespan and reproduce itself. like the parts of our bodies, stomach, brain, eyes work to achieve these goals for ourselves, the family members likewise engage in similar decision making in it's own self-interest.
it can engage and interact with society as a unit, though it is comprised of distinct actors.
I don't believe in any particular god but I do think that the universe and our experience is ultimately unexplainable. So science can never have these answers therefore I am open to theistic arguments but ultimately even these arguments are unsatisfying because it just moves the level of unexplainability up one more level... who created god?
That is why whatever that "thing" is, that's full-stop. That's why we refer to it as god.
It requires no explanation, it must be. It's sort of like asking "why do we have something instead of nothing?".
Because apparently that's the way it must be.
That sounds crazy to scientifically-minded people, myself included, because we want answers to everything. But the turtles will go all the way down until you just decide that there is a "god", whatever that is, and it is necessary.
Is is clear in the Bible that God does not exist in physical form. In the heavens, according to the Bible, he does not even exist in the same form as angels. At one time, Jesus was described in his human form, as "a little lesser than angels". Just a little? I guess it doesn't make sense for Angels to be in God's same plane of existence, then.
I think that 'time' is a part of this universe and that God is an observer that exists outside of it all. This makes sense, because of his ability to accurately tell the future in specific detail. But in the Bible, we see that Angels are restricted and bound by time. God is not. Probably God created time. Therefore to ask 'Who made God?' in his plane of existence, would require us to understand what existence is like without time.
I can imagine a block universe with time as just an axis. Then our universe can be just an object sitting on god’s table. But ultimately this still does not provide any answers.
To get more answers (not necessarily 'any' though - I think you may have overgeneralized there), we would need to understand this mode of existence. I am thinking like this: what does existence look like without time? For example, a table is of no use to someone who has no timescale to do anything at that table. The word "created", is even more curious, as it has no meaning. Like a painting, in a plane like this, everything "just is". Immutable. Confusing to me. I'll admit, I'll never understand the full meaning of something that exists outside time.
Perhaps this is why God would make a universe with time.
> Like a painting, in a plane like this, everything "just is". Immutable. Confusing to me. I'll admit, I'll never understand the full meaning of something that exists outside time.
Correct, that's my initial comment said things are this way because it "has to be".
Our minds can not grasp the concept of what being "outside time" even means.
Again it fundamentally boils down to "why something rather than nothing". Clearly, it is because it "has to be". Because we have something, and that by definition can't come from nothing.
Pondering about these thoughts of the whole concept of "has to be" admittedly has kept me up some nights.
That's why I say it is unsatisfying and the universe is ultimately unexplainable because either there is this final "god" and we are incapable of understanding it or there is not and there is infinite levels and we are incapable of understanding it also.
Bullshit, please. Prove it or GFTO with that nonsense. Science is found on evidence, not on "what if...s" .
If you told me that an ARM Cortex A9 is faster than a current i7, and then you put the excuse of "God made it" argument over the table you would look like a lunatic.
With the Universe origins is the same. Replace "God" with "Santa" and the argument gets equally ridiculous.
I went through this same phase, at one point I declared myself an atheist, mostly because it was an easy way to give the middle finger to my Catholic childhood indoctrination.
But then I decided to dig a little deeper, and there is more to it than thinking "god" is the same as "the Easter bunny".
Good luck trying to figure out why something exists and not nothing (and we're not talking about quantum particles popping into existence in a vacuum, those are "things" ... that's not nothing).
Assuming God is created would be to assume that God is bound by some kind of time. If God exists outside of time, his 'creation' is an irrelevant question.
> the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it
Getting some GEB vibes here (Is the anthill conscious?) but I do think that characterization is a bit off.
I tend to think of it from a different angle, considering philosophies about identity; namely, the laws of physics that make the universe tick outside of us are the same laws of physics that govern how we behave individually. There's undoubtedly some fuzzy boundary between what we consider "me" vs "not me", so it's not necessarily wrong to say that consciousness is a product of the universal laws and governed by them, while also simultaneously being something that isn't an inherent property of the entire universe.
In other words, it seems weird to say the universe is conscious (similar to how it might seem like a stretch of imagination to be talking to an anthill), but it seems perfectly reasonable to say that the mechanisms that make universe what it is give rise to consciousness, individuality and relative perspectives, despite all of these things being governed by fundamentally absolute laws.
Because, thinking the existing of subjective experience
that is any way special is just societal programming that claims that humans are special and important in the universe.
If you step away from the bias, there is no reason to think our consciousness is anything special. Who cares about subjective experience, it all disappears into the void when those chemical reactions stop.
> Because, thinking the existing of subjective experience that is any way special is just societal programming that claims that humans are special and important in the universe.
This has absolutely nothing to do with humans, or even this planet. I have no "bias".
We have trillions of stars in trillions of galaxies.
I was talking about consciousness, zero to do with "societal programming". If you don't want it to be about humans than make it about planet X that is orbiting star Y in galaxy Z that has also evolved conscious beings.
You don't think existing at all as a conscious entity in a vastly enormous, complex and strangely beautiful universe is "any way special"? We'll have to agree to disagree on that one!
Subjective experience can both be something real and also not something special in some magical sense.
If subjective experience were really just an illusion, why would you care about what happens to yourself - hell, why would you even have a concept of 'yourself'?
All he’s saying is that as a subset of the universe, whatever words you want to apply to describe your subjective experience, apply equally to the universe, since you are part of the universe. Not sure what “special” has to do with it
In short, if Universe will exist forever (no matter its heat death, the Boltzmann Brain also works under those conditions), then all configurations of matter (locally) will appear over its "lifetime" infinitely many times.
Consequently, you with your subjective experience and memories could have been created a picosecond ago by "random" motions of matter, without the need for them (ie activities leading to memories) to occur, and without thoughts being previously processed.
As strange, as it sounds, the argument is actually solid, though hard to grasp in the first moment for those who haven't encountered it yet :).
PS: This also means that 'cogito ergo sum' is too strong of a statement. Just saying "something exists" (as in, "why there's something rather than nothing") seems sufficient.
Eh. This seems like a very "Load State" kind of way of looking at things. That doesn't preclude a kind of higher-order logic which generated this state, and from within the state, there would be no way to tell. So time isn't stored sequentially, so what? The illusion of continuous subjective experience is tantamount to it.
If I'm actually a Boltzmann Brain, all my memories are a lie and I just exist for a picosecond, then Boltzmann Brains can experience subjective experiences, so what?
>This also means that 'cogito ergo sum' is too strong of a statement. Just saying "something exists" (as in, "why there's something rather than nothing") seems sufficient.
What's the philosophical difference between your subjective experience of existence and a 90s-style power-on-self-test?
"I am on. I can tell that I am on. I dunno what I think once I am off." Same could be said of man, machine, consciousness, whatever.
What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
Huh? Subjective experience is about whether the machine experiences the power-on-self-test, not about what it emits externally. Animals, machines or even rocks might all be conscious, but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.
>What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthropomorphizing all the crap around them just to make themselves feel special.
> but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.
Yeah, exactly. We haven't developed a good enough Turing test -- for machines, people, or gods.
> What a ridiculous strawman.
I don't believe is a strawman as much as you think it is. A lot of arguments for consciousness derive from the desire for humans to be special, which is in turn derived from Abrahamic cosmology that places us directly beneath their God.
While I can see where this idea comes from, it seems a bit... self-defeating in a way? At least pragmatically speaking, there's an obvious difference between your point of view and that of the universe: if it's all a big illusion, then presumably there's no point in pursuing anything since it's all inconsequential anyways. And yet here we are clacking on keyboards sending electrons into a mesh of wires and circuitry for some reason. The universe may not care about you, but the implication is that you don't necessarily care about what "it" thinks either, but you definitely care about what you as an individual think.
And in a similarly clinical view of the universe, it doesn't even make sense to anthropomorphize it in the first place, since there's no evidence that the universe has the capability or inclination of empathizing with a human. That leaves us with things that actually are anthropomorphic (other people), and I'd posit that societies are a pretty good example of a complex interaction between many things that are presumably on autorun, and yet are able to work together towards some commonly aligned purpose that has collective meaning on some level higher than just chemicals interacting in particular ways.
It means that consciousness nothing special/supernatural. There is no soul, there is nothing but chemical reactions that manage to create something that is able to claim "I think therefore I am"
The illusion is the fact that we claim that we are able to "experience", but I think that its all just layers of GOTO reactions that create something that think its special. Much like how a program isn't considered conscious, but its very likely its because we haven't dug deeply enough into the layers of shit that is required to make a self-aware computer
We as a species may lack the mental faculties to truly understand the mechanisms by which life evolved the ability to analyze and reason about its surroundings and itself.
We lack the scientific tools to properly differentiate or falsify "consciousness" from any other sufficiently complex phenomenon. We can't tell whether it's an emergent phenomenon arising out of a particular arrangement of energy and matter, or whether it requires some input that we cannot currently observe/measure, or something else entirely. We don't know whether we can create consciousness from its constituent parts, or if it even has constituent parts. We don't know if there's a finite supply of it in the universe, we don't know if it's a dimensional thing, we don't know how it interacts with other forces.
We do know that it appears as though we have much more agency than a rock, yes, but it's a matter of degree how much more when we compare ourselves to other lifeforms, primates, dolphins, elephants, ravens... or other people. We don't know if certain members of our species are "more" or "less" conscious. We don't fully know what happens to consciousness during comas or brain death or dream states or sleep.
It's just an ambiguous term that we apply to the "state of human information processing that we can't really explain". Substitute "ambiguous" for "illusion" if you prefer, but it could also very well be an illusion the same way centrifugal force is a pseudo-force, i.e. the measurement of consciousness depends on some reference frame that we don't know how to use yet.
It's entirely possible that consciousness is NOT an illusion, that it is indeed a special "thing" in the universe, but we can't prove that with the science, language, philosophy, and possibly mental capacity that we currently have. Maybe one day we will. Maybe not. But it's premature to assume we understand anything about consciousness in the philosophical sense.
Why are you concentrating on individual animals, where herd behaviour of them can not be explained by behavior of individual. Same applies to people - there are enough of examples in history of groups of people believing in God and his plan and that belief has led to catastrophic consequences for tribes and even nations...
For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct.
I don't understand what you're trying to point out. That groups of things can have behaviors that lone individuals don't exhibit? Yes, that is true, whether at the atomic level or the cellular level or the family level or the population level or the species level or the ecosystem level... it's very fascinating, to be sure, but in what way does that prove or disprove any sort of god? It's just the same Watchmaker argument, i.e. that complexity requires a maker, which it arguably does not. Complex behaviors, even flock behaviors, can evolve from the sum of its constituent parts. A pinball machine with eight balls in play will react very different from one with a single ball or no balls, but nobody accuses the pinball machine of being sentient (or if they did, I'd really like to play that machine).
> For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct.
Yes, and? I wouldn't worry about it too much... you'll likely die from something far more banal, like plain old climate-change-driven political instability, North Korea, the next anti-vax movement, etc.
the universe could be considered to have achieved consciousness through humans (and possibly other life forms), but the only known consciousness is those lifeforms outside of those lifeforms there is no known trait of consciousness, its going to be a very transient trait of the universe as well, the universe will only have it for a blink of an eye.
If you think about it, the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it. And it's learning about itself.