[HN Gopher] Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?
___________________________________________________________________
Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?
Author : kull
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-04-01 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| monero-xmr wrote:
| It's obvious to me that the universe was intelligently designed.
| For exactly the reasons the author states, it's simply too
| perfect and conducive to life.
|
| If you have 10 minutes watch this video of a cardiac surgeon
| whose patient had a near death experience:
|
| https://youtu.be/JL1oDuvQR08
|
| The most arrogant thing I could possibly imagine thinking, is
| that I know all of the mysteries of the universe and what happens
| when we die.
| wk_end wrote:
| Given that the universe is unfathomably vast and almost all of
| it is extraordinarily hostile to - and so far as we know,
| entirely devoid of - life, I can't say I agree.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| >it's simply too perfect and conducive to life
|
| Conducive to life _as we know it_. Every 'version' of the
| universe and every little difference would lead to a different
| kind of life. And in all of those scenarios you would say the
| same thing. "Look how much it's conducive to us!".
|
| The smaller context is people saying that earth is the perfect
| difference to support our life, therefore it must be god that
| put it there! If the earth was much closer like mercury, there
| would be no life to say that "well, we weren't placed in the
| right place- no god".
|
| >and what happens when we die
|
| It's more arrogant to think that you are more than a biological
| machine. Stab someone in the head with an icepick and they will
| be brain damaged and possibly even have a different
| personality, memory loss etc. So when that person "dies" you
| think what.. their conscious magically lives on? Which one, the
| one before being stabbed or the damaged one?
|
| Does every other living being on this earth move on to
| something else? Humans aren't special. We are animals no
| different than anything else on this planet.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I hold that both of your positions lack basic metaphysical
| sophistication. I also submit that one source of potential
| error is a shared, but discredited metaphysical stance.
| However, if you have a sincere and humble interest in this
| subject matter, one open to correction, I would recommend
| "The Last Superstition"[0] as a starting point. There is no
| point in running in circles, because you can examine your
| presuppositions to discover the sources of your errors. And
| once you do so, you will see the intuitions you have absorbed
| through various cultural sources contain very serious errors.
|
| [0] https://a.co/d/2qTcFlw
| FredPret wrote:
| The only conclusion we can draw from your observation of a
| really-nice-to-live-in universe (and almost all of it isn't) is
| that we can create a simulated, even nicer-to-live-in universe
| in our havitable corner of it and run some AIs in it.
|
| If there's a creator, then this creator fellow must live in an
| even bigger, nicer universe within which ours exists. Now,
| where does _that_ come from?
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Parts of the cosmos for sure are and there's no need to look very
| far for it - for example the part that forms me writing this
| right now is, in fact, conscious.
| delichon wrote:
| If the cosmos is conscious in the way that we are and the speed
| of light proves to be a limit, then its thoughts would take
| thousands or millions of years to process. It may be compelled
| to leverage entities with cogitation components within light
| seconds of each other for fast thinking. The Thinking, Fast and
| Slow paradigm could be built into the shape of the universe.
|
| If the slow thinkers seek to constrain the fast thinkers we may
| get away with a lot before they catch up.
| spacephysics wrote:
| Not at all qualified to mention this, as a googler wouldn't
| quantum entanglement be a counter example to faster-than-
| light travel?
|
| So we're still within the speed of light limit, but
| information can be "passed"
| itishappy wrote:
| No. Entanglement does not allow information to travel
| faster than light.
|
| You can instantly know the state of another particle by
| measuring it's twin, but you can't do anything useful with
| that info until you share the results of your measurements
| (at the speed of light).
|
| https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/8638/f
| a...
|
| https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15282/quantum-
| en...
| xeromal wrote:
| So I'm a luddite but this to me is profound.
|
| >If the cosmos is conscious in the way that we are and the
| speed of light proves to be a limit, then its thoughts would
| take thousands or millions of years to process.
|
| Thanks for sharing.
| fy20 wrote:
| > then its thoughts would take thousands or millions of years
| to process
|
| This reminds me of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy",
| where pan-dimensional beings waited 7.5 million years for
| their first super computer to tell them "42". Then they
| constructed another super computer, Earth, to find the
| question.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| I'm trying to understand what you're saying here.
|
| If the speed of light is a hard limit, leveraging localized
| cognition would not be useful at all. The localized cognition
| would only be able to ponder things it observes or
| experiences, that is, it can't ponder whatever the conscious
| universe wants it to, so the universe has to create it where
| it needs it, and then it can't use this cognition anywhere
| else because again, the speed of light. It really gets us
| nowhere.
|
| I think though probably this "consciousness" of the universe,
| if it exists, is apparent and localized, but not bound and
| distinct locally, if that makes sense.
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| I think this is just a restating of Decartes cogito. A lot of
| theory of mind exists to improve upon limitations of that logic
| cheeselip420 wrote:
| We are the cosmos. So of course.
| crunchycensus wrote:
| This is a lot of working backwards. I find this interesting but
| ultimately not compelling. I see a lot of: "If things were
| different than the way they are, they couldn't work they way that
| they work!"
| cowsup wrote:
| Agreed, I find lots of these "what is the universe?" questions
| fall apart, due to the fact that humans aren't great at
| figuring out what we don't know. Just a thousand years ago, our
| smartest minds had a very different idea of what "space" was,
| how our solar system behaved, and even the shape of our planet,
| but it made sense to them at the time with the technology they
| had, so it's hard to mock them.
|
| For us to theorize that which we cannot hope to ever understand
| makes us no different.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I generally agree, though one small caveat - the shape and
| even size of the Earth was pretty well known to scholars
| since ancient times, at least since the 3rd century BCE, both
| in the Hellenistic world and in India.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Let's hope so.
| asdff wrote:
| There are a lot of compelling theories out there for the
| purpose/true nature of the universe. We are probably orders and
| orders of magnitude too small ourselves to fully grasp the
| complexity, like how one of our skin cells don't understand how
| the body works but coupled into an entire multicellular organism,
| we can now read an anatomy textbook.
|
| Despite how little we are capable of understanding at such a
| scale, I still think its fun to postulate what might be the
| utility of all this reality. For example, in the cloudflare HQ
| there is a wall of lava lamps, which are imaged and used to
| establish random seeds. Perhaps our own universe be another's
| wall of lava lamps, generating a random seed?
| edgyquant wrote:
| I've always had thoughts like that. Like what if we were just
| some gods classification algorithm and the universe is the data
| being fed into the algorithm.
| groestl wrote:
| > like how one of our skin cells don't understand how the body
| works
|
| And how surprising would it be if, in one of our skin cells,
| there would be a life form that, through their scientific
| advancements, actually understands how the body works :)
| card_zero wrote:
| > too small ourselves to fully grasp the complexity
|
| Size has nothing do with ability to understand things, so this
| doesn't make sense.
| edgyquant wrote:
| It matters very much when it comes to perspective. The
| posters point is spot on so unless you have some counter you
| should just delete yours.
| card_zero wrote:
| Perhaps I don't understand the point. "Perspective", you
| say? I'm thinking that, for instance, a very very large
| rock does not have an advanced ability to understand
| things, whereas David Rappaport had a psychology degree.
|
| (Extra bits edited in follow:)
|
| I detect another implied point, which is that there are
| levels of ability to reason. That is, by analogy with
| cells, which are dumb, inside a human, which is smart, the
| supposition is that humans are _relatively_ dumb components
| inside a universe which is _super-smart_. This relies on
| the concept of _super-smart_ having a meaning. (It also
| implies that the cells are less than totally dumb.) Then
| humans are somewhere on a sliding scale between totally
| dumb and infinitely smart. But I see no reason to make this
| supposition that such a scale exists or has any meaning. So
| far as I can see, there 's only one kind of reasoning and
| it doesn't have levels.
|
| I guess there's things like squirrels solving puzzles to
| get nuts out of a container. But I think that's a different
| function from understanding stuff.
| asdff wrote:
| Our intelligence is limited to our scale. David rappaport
| is intelligent enough to get a psychology degree because
| for his ancient ancestors that intelligence allowed for
| survival in the premodern environment. Yet it is still
| scale limited. Ancient humans see a buffalo that could be
| killed for food or a rock they can hold in one hand and
| use as a tool, but they are blind to things they might
| also see that aren't at the human scale level. E.G. that
| rock is coated in bacteria, can a premodern human see
| that and understand it? Nope. That rock also tumbled down
| a mountain side. Does the premodern human see the rock
| and immediately understand how tectonic plates or erosion
| work? Nope. Do we modern humans even fully understand
| these things today? Not really.
|
| We have managed to hack our own limited intelligence by
| using collective memory so we aren't starting from zero
| every generation, but we still aren't naturally inclined
| to come up to things we readily understand at our scale
| and grasp what they might represent on much smaller or
| larger scales than our own. Even for people trained in
| these fields it is extremely challenging due to the
| problems with scale and our frame of reference. We had to
| develop things like microscopes and telescopes to take
| objects small and large and either magnify them or reduce
| them to something we can actually begin to make guesses
| about at our scale.
| card_zero wrote:
| Right. So that _is_ about perspective, in the sense of
| ability to observe things.
|
| This seems separate from capacity to understand them,
| after gaining the ability to observe them.
|
| I'm not convinced by the second part, about human
| knowledge becoming too gnarly for humans to cope with
| except by group effort. This a breadth vs. depth
| question, but depth is the winner over time I think.
| titzer wrote:
| Size is related to the capacity to build computational
| processing elements; storage, working memory, logic gates.
| You can't serve YouTube from a pocket calculator.
| card_zero wrote:
| OK, but that doesn't have anything to do with the ability
| to understand things, either. You only need enough elements
| to perform whatever the unknown algorithm is that allows
| understanding. There's no reason to suppose a series of
| progressively superior understanding-algorithms that
| require more and more components.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| There are very, very, very, many "highly educated" people who
| think that human beings are incapable of grasping the vast
| scale of the cosmos.
|
| I don't know if they mean "everyone", "everyone, except, of
| course, me", "everyone and isn't it a shame that they don't
| even realize it?", "everyone who isn't specially educated".
|
| I am perfectly capable of internalizing and understanding a
| billion, trillion, or even quadrillion of something-- be they
| meters, light years, number of atoms of something, or grains
| of sand, thank you very much.
| tflol wrote:
| the lava lamp bit reminds me of this episode, which actually
| did influence my perspective
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ricks_Must_Be_Crazy
|
| > In the episode, Rick and Morty go inside Rick's microverse
| car battery, an entire verse that generates electricity to
| power Rick's car, unbeknown to the citizens of the microverse.
| Zeep Xanflorp, a scientist in the microverse, creates his own
| microverse, thus stopping the flow of energy to Rick's car.
| fooker wrote:
| Are you conscious?
|
| Is a human picked at random?
|
| Are cats conscious?
|
| Is GPT4 conscious?
|
| Is an earthworm conscious?
|
| Is a venus fly trap conscious?
|
| Is a avocado tree conscious?
|
| Is a single human cell conscious?
|
| Is a plant cell conscious?
|
| Is a shortest path algorithm implementation conscious?
|
| I think we'll get considerable variation in the answer of these
| questions if you ask a hundred smart people. Given that, we are
| probably unqualified to answer "Is the universe conscious?"
| danbruc wrote:
| Before we can start to really answer those questions, we first
| have to nail down what being conscious means. If we had a good
| understanding of what being conscious means, it might become
| relatively easy to look at something and assess if it meets the
| criteria or not.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| We don't need to really nail it down. See my above comment.
| We have a good working understanding of what consciousness is
| in terms of practical behavior and in terms of the associated
| neural activity. That is definitely a reasonable basis for
| further study.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Wow, just _whoosh_. We have data on the behavior of nervous
| systems, and we have correlates with states of
| consciousness, not even close to what the GP was talking
| about.
| scarmig wrote:
| How would you evaluate whether other entities with
| sophisticated information processing behaviors are
| conscious or not? Just outright rejecting anything that
| does information processing on a substrate very dissimilar
| to ours?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| What substrate is the universe using and what is it
| modeling
| scarmig wrote:
| I'm not defending panpsychism; I'm pointing out that a
| hand-wavey argument that "consciousness is just something
| that arises from nervous systems that are ours or very
| similar systems" doesn't explain or justify itself.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| In my experience smart people are pretty dumb. In seriousness,
| though, its hard for me to believe that there would be a lot of
| variation in this among neuroscientists, who I would expect to
| answer yes only to humans and animals.
|
| Like consciousness isn't exactly as big of a mystery as its
| made out to be. To begin with its a genuine observable
| phenomenon in an informal way: we identify people as conscious
| more or less unambiguously, at the very least. Consequently, it
| can be studied at least at that level of specificity. From that
| point of view we have very strong evidence that consciousness
| is very tightly correlated with ongoing neural activity in
| certain architectures. From there I think we can begin to
| reasonably put pretty solid answers to the above list,
| particularly if you allow levels of consciousness to come into
| it.
|
| My major point is that people love to cavalierly assert "we
| know nothing about consciousness whatsoever, anything goes,
| frankly" but I think that pretty radically oversimplifies and
| undersells what we do understand.
| fooker wrote:
| Your answer has the prejudice than only people and animals
| can be conscious.
|
| I don't disagree, but that instantly makes the answer to the
| question "is the universe conscious" negative. Also AI, which
| currently is significantly more capable, at least in
| mimicking consciousness, than most animals.
| fooker wrote:
| Rephrasing this: What would it take for something not
| categorized under animal to be considered conscious in your
| book?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I don't have that prejudice. I'm entirely open to the
| possibility that AI or other stuff could be conscious. In
| fact, I'm decidedly of the opinion that consciousness isn't
| magic and shouldn't be expected to be confined to specific
| arrangements of material per se. However, I am saying that
| we know quite a lot how brains work and how that relates to
| the observable phenomenon we bundle under the word
| consciousness and that knowledge allows us to say with some
| degree of certainty that a rock isn't conscious in any
| usefully descriptive way. I also believe that, despite
| their sophistication, language models aren't conscious
| because they specifically lack a lot of the sorts of
| structures which underly consciousness, which seems to me
| to be a specific kind of thing having to do with brains and
| language models don't need most of the circuitry that
| underpins consciousness because their training apparatus is
| external to the neural network. But I'm prepared to be
| wrong about this.
|
| I simply object to the bald hand waving away of decades of
| neuroscience research and philosophical work with the
| suggestion that consciousness is a big question mark. It
| isn't, and I tend to think people who assert that are more
| interested in mystifying things than in clarifying them.
| fooker wrote:
| >decades of neuroscience research
|
| Could you point to some credible neuroscience research
| that mentions consciousness? My impression was the word
| consciousness is a taboo in those circles, much like AGI
| is in in machine learning research papers.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Consciousness is observable huh? By rights you are a
| philosophical zombie, and only your passing resemblance to me
| - who I know from first principles possesses consciousness -
| gives even an inkling that you possess actual consciousness.
|
| You are suffering from the a little knowledge is a dangerous
| thing trap. This rabbit hole goes much deeper than you think,
| you just haven't developed awareness to recognize that yet.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| The simplest explanation of consciousness is that its a tool to
| build an abstract world model including fellow humans turned
| back on self.
|
| You cant drive the entire network because that is an
| interactable problem so you model it like a fellow human and
| either feed broad input to it or sanctify decisions already
| made as part of the theory of "I"
|
| I dont think gpt4 individual cells nor the algorithm can be
| said to have a subjective experience. I specifically doubt that
| the plants have one insofar as there doesn't appear to be a
| structure capable of building a model.
|
| The boring answer that only the cat and the human are conscious
| seems like the correct one.
|
| Polling a random sample of the population doesn't seem like a
| useful way to get at truth.
|
| Since the universe isnt an actor building a model of a larger
| world I don't see how it could be conscious. If there is no
| other there is no I.
| fooker wrote:
| In your book, what would it take for something other than a
| human or animal to demonstrate consciousness?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I would be tempted to imagine it might be conscious if it
| merely acted as if it had motive and a model of the world.
|
| At first blush chatGPT seems conscious for instance.
| fooker wrote:
| I think by that definition you can argue that all the
| entities I mentioned in my original comment are
| conscious.
|
| There is no way to quantify how expressive your model of
| the world has to be, or what mechanisms you have to act.
|
| For example, a single neuron in an artificial neural
| network has a model of the world (it's weight), and can
| act by producing different outputs for different inputs.
| DFHippie wrote:
| If all your attention is temporarily focused on something
| external to yourself, an onrushing train, say, are you
| temporarily not conscious?
|
| People typically distinguish self-awareness from
| consciousness. It is not clear that they should, or
| shouldn't, but they typically do. They say consciousness is
| not facts but qualia, the sensation of the facts. A
| spreadsheet full of information can contain facts that
| differentiate blue from red. We hypothesize that a
| spreadsheet has no sensations, hence no qualia, hence no
| consciousness. We cannot actually operationalize this. We say
| a paramecium and a stone have no qualia, but this is more a
| hypothesis than a fact.
|
| I think panpsychism in its essence is accepting that qualia
| are something and that the imagined boundary between things
| that have qualia and things which don't is established only
| by hypothesis and tradition. In the interest of not
| multiplying entities beyond necessity, we dispose of the
| boundary.
|
| I am not a philsopher, so I don't really know what
| philosophers say.
| krunck wrote:
| > He contends that the universe is just too perfectly perfect to
| be an accident.
|
| If it wasn't maybe he would'nt be here to ask the question.
| conesus wrote:
| The universe may be as great as they say. But
| it wouldn't be missed if it didn't exist.
|
| -- Piet Hein
| ricksunny wrote:
| Boltzmann brain: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
|
| Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (1x08) actually had an episode on
| this:
|
| https://screenrant.com/strange-new-worlds-boltsman-brain-sta...
| hydrolox wrote:
| the thing with the Boltzmann brain is that, even though it
| sounds compelling (in a philosophy thought experiment / random
| thought kind of way), I think there's one main criticism that
| shuts it down. If the brain is having all these
| experiences/thoughts itself, it came up with the idea of a
| Boltzmann brain, and the laws of physics, and logic, etc. So
| therefore, the laws of physics that Boltzmann brain is using
| the justify the Boltzmann brain are completely made up by it,
| and can't really be used as a valid argument.
| digging wrote:
| I don't think that's as strong an argument as you're
| presenting it. If anything can exist, and if randomness can
| exist, it's simpler for a Boltzmann Brain to exist than for
| our actual universe to exist. The exact laws of physics that
| _the Brain has imagined_ don 't actually matter and they
| don't have to match the physics in the universe that created
| the Brain. (It doesn't have to be a literal human brain.)
| InternetPerson wrote:
| That's why Boltzmann brains are a problem. If a theory
| predicts the appearance of Boltzmann brains, then that theory
| is (arguably) self-defeating.
|
| For example, let's say you tell me your theory of the
| universe. And then I say, "Wait a minute, doesn't your theory
| lead to an infinite stretch of time where random brains can
| randomly spring into existence?"
|
| If you say, "yes", then I'd say, "If your theory is true,
| then I'm probably just a Boltzmann brain, and this whole
| conversation is just a figment of my imagination."
|
| I would assume that I'm probably a Boltzmann brain because
| the number of Boltzmann brains that ever exist will be far
| larger than the number of human brains that ever exist. Even
| if it takes a zillion years for a Boltzmann brain to appear,
| it will happen zillion times, over an infinite stretch of
| time.
|
| Sean Carroll discusses this in much more depth in "Why
| Boltzmann Brains Are Bad" [1]. In the paper, he argues that
| "the theories that predict [Boltzmann Brains] are cognitively
| unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably
| believed."
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00850
| sixQuarks wrote:
| The article is quite ridiculous for stating that the alternative
| theory of a Multiverse is sloppy. It didn't really give a reason
| why it's sloppy. The Multiverse theory is an elegant and simple
| explanation for why everything seems to be so fine tuned.
|
| What's more sloppy of an explanation - that the cosmos is somehow
| conscious and directed life to appear, or that there is an
| infinite number of universes?
|
| Looking back at the history of science, when we first thought
| that the earth was the center of the universe, then found out
| that the sun is, then found out that the sun is only a small part
| of a huge galaxy, then to find out our galaxy is just a spec
| Within hundreds of billions of other galaxies. Doesn't it make
| sense that the next step is to discover there are multiple
| universes?
| hscontinuity wrote:
| "Doesn't it make sense that the next step is to discover there
| are multiple universes?"
|
| That depends. Multiple universes don't explain causation. For
| example if you assert that all things present in the material
| world you live in (right now) at some point transcended
| existence in thought only to a material form (the planet didn't
| build concrete, we did) - how does this fit through entropy in
| a multiverse? To assert that in a multiverse the causation is
| defined by tuning, the existence of a universe in contrast to
| that which we are currently experiencing brings no causation
| from one to another. To me, this implies that a 'multiverse' is
| likely not the case; rather - dimensionality within the
| universe we experience is much more likely the case for a
| unified cosmos, given the fine tuning.
|
| As Tesla would say, to understand the world you have to
| understand frequency and vibration. Such as, matter is able to
| exist in multiple form with the same building blocks, thus
| extra dimensions would posit why this is possible across
| relativistic time by the observer. We're bound by our dimension
| and other dimensions are not.
|
| You and I experience in 3D - but what about other organisms,
| perhaps they have attained an experience of our cosmos in other
| dimensions.
| praptak wrote:
| That's not very different from Berkeley (everything is God's
| mind).
|
| Also we cannot even tell for sure if other people are conscious.
| suby wrote:
| I think it's unlikely for consciousness to exist in stars or in
| any population of thing which isn't subject to natural selection
| / evolution. It seems to me that it arises due to giving a
| competitive advantage for the population in question.
| 4rt wrote:
| I always thought self-awareness would only evolve relative to
| how social the beings are.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Can anyone asking this kind of question define "conscious"?
| x0n wrote:
| The scourge of "intelligent design" comes in many forms.
| nico wrote:
| If panpsychism is right, consciousness is part of the fabric of
| the cosmos, you just can't separate consciousness from it. Does
| that mean that the cosmos is conscious itself, and what does that
| mean? I'm not sure, but it's pretty fascinating to think about
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, and if certain Ancient Greek beliefs are right, thunder
| is smithed by the god Hephaestos in his forge under mount Etna
| for Zeus to throw at his enemies.
|
| Is there any reason whatsoever to believe either of these?
| nico wrote:
| > Is there any reason whatsoever to believe either of these?
|
| Not a reason, but there are many people that have had
| experiences that align with panpsychism
|
| It's not necessarily something that you have to believe, like
| a made-up story. Instead, it's something that you can
| experience for yourself (either through yoga, meditation,
| breathing, psychedelics or other forms of attaining different
| states of consciousness)
|
| Edit: (can't reply to the reply) @tsimionescu it seems you
| just want to contradict whatever I say, that's your personal
| opinion. If you want a reason, you can come up with a
| thousand different ones. I'm not trying to convince anyone of
| anything, just offering a point of view for a, hopefully
| interesting, conversation
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You're giving a (very weak) reason - personal experience
| while in altered states of mind. Of course, people doing at
| least some of these practices also personally experience
| all sorts of other false things, many which they themselves
| don't believe when outside the altered state, such as vivid
| hallucinations.
| randogeek wrote:
| The author should brush up on his history. This is panpsychism
| and it is a very old idea, going back to Spinoza. Einstein was a
| adherent of that idea as well, in his own way.
|
| As to it's truth of it, that's somewhat above my pay-grade.
| fidrelity wrote:
| Goff being one of the most popular modern panpsychists you're
| save to assume he's aware of its history.
|
| I guess he uses the term less these days because it's too
| easily dismissed as something esoteric.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| In fact, Einstein declared having this religious-like reverence
| for the "mysterium tremendum" - what scientifically minded
| person doesn't after all? The Numinous[0] - which Spinoza and
| Kant also addressed in their respective works.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous
| harel wrote:
| I suppose on a purely philosophical aspect it's as plausible as
| any other explanation of Gods that we came up with. If I continue
| this thread on a (pseudo semi baked) science and more philosophy,
| I could "argue" that us being made from particles of the
| universe, combined with the idea of particles being entangled and
| sharing "existence", are in fact "The" consciousness of the
| Universe and our feeling of Oneness is indeed on the particle
| level.
|
| But I'm not that smart so I won't even suggest such outlandish
| ideas. I do dig the idea though, that the Universe is conscious.
| It's got more sense to it than a pretty angry all powerful being
| that is totally dependant on the belief and faith of some meat
| bags on a blue planet.
| thelittleone wrote:
| Perhaps consciousness is an attributeless void where being
| aware of it is possible but describing it is not.
| harel wrote:
| Or maybe it's a n-deep attribution model where consciousness
| is being aware of being aware of one self...
| titzer wrote:
| The arguments to fine-tuning are utterly remedial. I can't
| believe that no one in their orbit ever brought up the anthropic
| principle [1]. We are _not_ randomly distributed over possible
| universes; we are embedded in a universe that is by definition
| capable of supporting our existence (and indeed giving rise to
| it). It doesn 't matter how stupidly improbable it is. Observer
| effect is off the charts!
|
| Second, in evolution, the entire chain of reproducing life forms
| from the first replicator to now is a series of stupidly
| improbable happenings. But it's not just that they're stupidly
| improbable _all in a row_ (i.e. multiplied together), but they
| are one by one and selective; lots of stupidly impossible things
| were tried (read: bad mutations), and they all died out. We 're
| left with good stupidly improbably things, one after the other.
| Evolution of life forms is governed by a tuning process (copy,
| mutate, select), why couldn't universes also be?
|
| Who writes these kinds of articles? None of the ideas posited
| here are new, and in fact, they've been argued over for decades,
| sometimes even centuries. I find it hard to believe the proponent
| of these ideas is ignorant of the most basic criticisms.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
| User23 wrote:
| The anthropic principle has equal explanatory power to "because
| it did." Making up a story about a cosmic crow shitting out the
| universe has equal explanatory power and it at least offers a
| reason.
|
| And obviously we know the crow shit it out because if it didn't
| we wouldn't be here!
|
| Also you failed to explain _why_ the universe is organized such
| that random processes exhaustively explore the state space of
| potential configurations such that you're here to say it did.
| Why was there a quantum field to be in a vacuum state to begin
| with? Or whatever the leading explanation for the beginning of
| the "lol so random" cosmology is.
|
| Remedial indeed.
| titzer wrote:
| The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is
| absolutely unique. The space of possibilities is larger than
| the number of atoms in the universe. And yet there is no why
| for the wrinkles on the back of your hand. Nothing chose it.
| Nothing is perfect about it. Not every improbable thing was
| chosen.
|
| The anthropic principle doesn't explain a goddamn thing! It
| rejects the notion that we need an explanation for some
| things, because they could as well as been randomly chosen
| and we'd still be here all the same with absolutely no _why_
| whatsoever.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| > The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is
| absolutely unique.
|
| It also solve zero real-life problems, but the presence of
| structures like DNA and self-replicating cells does solve a
| problem, i.e. they fit inside something much larger than
| itself, requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples
| of luck to have been created.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Also you failed to explain why
|
| Simply: Reality doesn't have "why"s. Reality has forces and
| fields or equivalent systems.
| User23 wrote:
| Where did forces and fields or equivalent systems come
| from?
|
| If your answer is some variant on "just because" then you
| don't have a better theory than some kind of necessary
| causality or contingency, in fact you have a mere absence
| of contemplation altogether.
|
| I never imagined "don't think about it" as being the
| metaphysical basis of the scientific enterprise though and
| it's hard to imagine science getting as far as it has if it
| were.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| It's absurd and frustrating. This is something I wondered about
| as a child and subsequently immediately realized we are
| observing from a biased perspective. It's not as though we have
| millions of independent universes to look at and they're all
| perfect for the formation of life.
| pvg wrote:
| _None of the ideas posited here are new_
|
| That's comes with the 'general purpose nerd messageboard'
| territory, it's in some way true for almost everything posted.
| It's got lengthy caselaw:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| corry wrote:
| While I don't disagree with your reaction to the article in
| question...
|
| "[The atrophic principle] tends to be invoked by theorists
| whenever they do not have a good enough theory to explain the
| observed facts." - Roger Penrose
|
| Isn't the anthropic principle just the most recent god-of-the-
| gaps argument - i.e. a de facto mystery explanation of things
| we can't otherwise explain...?
|
| I suppose that (to me) if or when the multi-verse theory
| becomes a falsifiable theory AND is empirically validated, then
| awesome we have the explanation pre-baked (the anthropic
| principle).
|
| But until then, there doesn't seem to be grounds to say it's
| 'remedial'.
|
| But curious for your thoughts, it's not my area of expertise
| beyond a layman's interest.
| tonybeltramelli wrote:
| "Consciousness is the universe experiencing itself"
| fsiefken wrote:
| Critiques:
|
| ## bernardo kastrup https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2020/07/the-
| irony-of-philip-...
|
| ## joshua farris https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-missing-
| subject-a-cri...
|
| ## edward faser http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/07/problems-
| for-goffs-p...
| abetusk wrote:
| Ha! I think Lem had this idea 50+ years ago, with some scientists
| claiming that the universe was conscious and filling out
| consistent scientific theory as our tools got better. I can't
| exactly remember but I think it was near the end of "His Masters
| Voice" [0].
|
| As I remember it, this was Lem's way of critiquing this type of
| theory and scientist because of its absurd and unfalsifiable
| nature.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)
| everdrive wrote:
| There seems to be a very mystical branch of consciousness theory.
| In my opinion, it is completely misguided. Consciousness, as far
| as I can tell, is a specific evolved mechanism, and like the eye,
| has probably convergently evolved to serve different purposes.
| (mammals & birds --> primarily for child care, and then later for
| social dynamics. Squids --> no idea!)
|
| In some sense, the search for consciousness where it doesn't
| exist feels like a misfiring of the human need to personify.
| People were afraid of robots long before there was any chance for
| them to possess AI. When people dreamed about space, they
| primarily dreamed about encountering other conscious beings. In
| other words, if a dog could think about other planets he would
| wonder how they smell. Not because that's an inherently
| meaningful question, but because that's the question that aligns
| primarily with their interests. It's the same with people: we
| look for consciousness everything, and assume that other things
| have more value if they can be thought of as conscious.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Is there a useful definition of "consciousness" that is
| empirically testable with some sort of instrument such that you
| can point it at a squid and say "yep, that one has
| consciousness!" ?
|
| I ask because I've never heard such a definition nor has anyone
| actually ever told me what the instrument is that detects this.
| Until then, I figure there's no such thing as consciousness...
| it's just what superstitious monkeys say now that they feel
| silly talking about "souls" which is the old word that used to
| be used for this superstitious concept.
| everdrive wrote:
| In my mind, this is part of the mysticism of the movement. If
| you define a word widely enough, then anything can fit. I
| hate to invoke this, but this often feels like a Motte &
| Bailey argument. If you want to call "God" the energy which
| started the big bang, you're sort of smuggling
| personification into something which really bears zero
| resemblance to traditional religious ideas. And so it is with
| consciousness. If we define consciousness widely enough so
| that a planet, galaxy, etc, could be considered conscious,
| then we've smuggled a familiar and personified concept into
| an arena where it doesn't really apply.
|
| A great example would be trees: trees "sleep", they
| communicate with each other. They have immune responses, they
| mate, etc. But there's no coherent reason to think of trees
| as conscious, unless you just stretch the definition outside
| of its common meaning.
| altruios wrote:
| Isn't that precisely the argument to extend the definition
| of consciousness, our own human bias on what is conscious
| colors what we define as such.
|
| If the 'universe' is conscious, every cell in your body is
| as well... and well... they are alive - and they do make
| 'decisions' that end up keeping (royal)us alive that look
| intelligent from an outside perspective... which is about
| the same perspective a large (zero-g evolved) kaiju would
| have of us {small pieces of a whole that do seemingly
| intelligent things to benefit the group-entity}...
|
| if we don't consider what we are made of as conscious
| material - from where does consciousness arise from? ...and
| until we have a clear answer, maybe it's a sliding scale
| and everything is some degree of 'awareness'?
| everdrive wrote:
| I understand the argument you're making, but it feels
| misguided in my opinion. Other things don't need
| consciousness to be valid -- and more importantly,
| consciousness is not an inherently positive thing which
| needs to be extended other things. Ideally, consciousness
| is specifically defined such that we can draw relatively
| clear boundaries between what is conscious and what is
| not.
|
| In any case to answer where consciousness comes from,
| consciousness arises from the brain. You can test this
| with anesthesia, which is markedly different from sleep
| in that it does remove conscious experience. Although I
| agree it would be hard to pin down exactly what spectrum
| of animal is, or is not conscious, I think the extremes
| are pretty obvious. Obvious, unless, you're trying to
| extend consciousness to anything which could sense and
| react to its environment. If you want to call that
| consciousness, that's fine -- the human experience of
| having a distinct identity which can feel self-conscious,
| proud, content, anxious, etc -- is then something
| different entirely.
| DFHippie wrote:
| But if you say consciousness is "a specific evolved
| mechanism, and like the eye, has probably convergently
| evolved to serve different purposes" then you must have
| some notion what this mechanism is and what it's purpose is
| so you can say, "See, here is consciousness. It helps this
| organism achieve the expected purpose." I think this is
| what NoMoreNicksLeft is getting at.
|
| I believe the typical (mis)understanding proceeds like so:
| "I am conscious. I not only know things, but I have a
| sensation of knowing them. This (computer/animal) reacts to
| things in such a way that it demonstrably knows them in
| some sense, but it has no sensation of knowing them. Now
| what is this wonderful thing that distinguishes me from it?
| How did it come to be? What purpose does it serve?"
|
| One purpose the concept of consciousness serves is that it
| gives a special ethical status to its possessor. The
| conscious being needs to care about other conscious beings
| but can treat those beings without consciousness as tools
| or resources.
| everdrive wrote:
| >then you must have some notion what this mechanism is
| and what it's purpose is so you can say,
|
| My intuitive sense is that consciousness is present in so
| many mammals precisely because mammal young require so
| much care after birth. ie, it is beneficial for a mother
| to have differentiate between her own consciousness and
| the consciousness of her children. And, to care for her
| young and possess an intuitive sense for the needs of her
| young. It feels like this trait, once bootstrapped, could
| find other evolutionarily-beneficial behaviors, such as
| hunting in packs, building cities, or forming competitive
| social hierarchies. (you can't really have social status
| without consciousness)
|
| To be clear, I'm not a biologist, and for sure I could be
| wrong here. I think the general principle holds though --
| if a species of animal possesses a trait, then that trait
| either currently or previously conferred some
| evolutionary benefit. It's easy enough to think of what
| those benefits could sensibly be, and of course more
| difficult to actually go ahead and prove it out.
|
| >I believe the typical (mis)understanding proceeds like
| so: "I am conscious. I not only know things, but I have a
| sensation of knowing them. This (computer/animal) reacts
| to things in such a way that it demonstrably knows them
| in some sense, but it has no sensation of knowing them.
| Now what is this wonderful thing that distinguishes me
| from it? How did it come to be? What purpose does it
| serve?"
|
| I think that's a really fair characterization, but I also
| think that this "feeling of what happens" does
| characterize consciousness. 1) this means that an AI
| _could_ be conscious, but it would probably also need to
| have been programmed to sense input and also have some
| sort of identity. 2) if we don't believe that
| consciousness is a "feeling of what happens," but instead
| is just a response to external stimuli, then I would
| think consciousness is just synonymous with "living
| things," and there's no point in having a separate
| concept for it.
|
| >One purpose the concept of consciousness serves is that
| it gives a special ethical status to its possessor.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that
| "from the perspective of the conscious being, that person
| themselves puts more value on themselves or other
| conscious beings?" -- or, are you saying that "conscious
| beings _should_ put more emphasis on other conscious
| beings, and therefore it's important to extend
| consciousness other things?" I think in either case, I
| would say that this bias towards other conscious beings
| is just sort of an in-built human bias, and isn't
| particularly important when it comes to scientific
| understanding of consciousness. (from a moral standpoint,
| I concede it could be important.)
| metabagel wrote:
| Perhaps, trees have a very muted consciousness. Perhaps
| every living thing is conscious at some level ranging from
| nearly zero to far in excess of human consciousness.
| everdrive wrote:
| I think this just redefines consciousness to mean "things
| that are alive." This may be a fine concept, but it is
| not what people commonly mean by consciousness. I
| strongly suspect that people who want to extend
| consciousness to all living things (and beyond) do some
| from a _moral_ perspective -- they want to connect people
| to all living things in some moral and spiritual sense.
| And they want to remove the historical moral hierarchy
| whereby mankind has placed himself at the top of
| creation.
|
| I have no interest in the antiquated view that man is the
| peak of creation. However, extending consciousness to
| everything seems to be a spiritual act, and quite
| distinct from determining a scientific definition of
| consciousness.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| My view on this is that the mind is the instrument that
| acknowledges it's own existence. "I think therefore I am" and
| all that. I findnit funny, we all walk around absolutely
| certain of our own existence, very much aware of it, and then
| question that this is even occurring. I'm satisfied that I've
| identified consciousness with 100% certainty by simply
| noticing it in myself, even being able to notice it is proof
| that it's there. And heuristically I presume others with form
| similar to mine have done the same thing, I think that's a
| safe bet to make.
| a13o wrote:
| We never bothered to define consciousness with any scientific
| rigor, so why not? It's common for things that are everywhere, to
| also be nowhere at all.
|
| Could the cosmos, in fact, be smurpity-badoingo?
| dgoodell wrote:
| Why is it so hard for people to understand that you can't have
| productive discussions about things that you haven't solidly
| defined?
| metabagel wrote:
| We know what consciousness is. It's our self-awareness.
|
| We don't know where it comes from our how to test it, because
| each individual can only observe their own consciousness.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| All we know is that we have it because its not about what
| the word means. It's about how we apply the category of
| "conscious" to things. It's a way of either distancing or
| bringing ourselves closer to things.
|
| We might as well just ask "Is the universe like us?"
| ethanbond wrote:
| > We know what consciousness is. It's our self-awareness
|
| Not really. There are plenty of disorders that destroy a
| person's self-awareness but appear to leave a fully
| conscious person there anyway.
| noncoml wrote:
| What I like to ask about consciousness is to identify the
| step in the chain of organisms or matters where we jump from
| not having consciousness to having one.
| postmodest wrote:
| Could Pet Rocks Be Conscious?
|
| I mean, really. I feel like having a method of sensation and an
| ability to react to those sensations is a fundamental basis for
| "consciousness" and if you can point to the sun or the Local
| Cluster's sensory apparatus, I may listen to the rest of your
| (the Editorial You, not the commenter this reply is attached
| to) argument.
|
| Otherwise, we're just pointing at complex things and saying
| "does haz Conscience lol?"
| atlantic wrote:
| Avicenna argued otherwise. Have a look at his "floating man"
| thought experiment for how consciousness can exist detached
| from any sense experience.
| proc0 wrote:
| Arguably science is not able to define consciousness because of
| the subjective nature of it, and how the aim of science is to
| remove subjectivity from its observations and conclusions.
|
| On the other hand, religions have been studying consciousness
| for thousands of years, and indeed it is not something that can
| be verified by science.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The most fundamental argument for panpsychism is that it obeys
| Occam's razor FAR better than the "emergent animate matter"
| hypothesis. Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its
| state by conscious choice, which we already know happens, so from
| the perspective of Occam's razor we would actually need to
| explain why it DIDN'T happen for non-animal matter.
|
| Additionally, if we go with the emergence hypothesis, we have to
| explain the mechanism by which permutations of the states of
| matter can create a new dimension of "feeling" and "awareness"
| where one did not already exist. That's a tall order.
| RaftPeople wrote:
| > _Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by
| conscious choice, which we already know happens_
|
| Can you clarify what we "already know happens"?
|
| Even for humans, it's not clear that "conscious choice" exists
| and causes changes in state, because we don't know what the
| mechanism is that can cause a state change other than state at
| time T-1.
| peddamat wrote:
| Isn't it assumed that everything is deterministic apart from
| what is done by the somewhat magical, "free will"?
| interstice wrote:
| If by assumed you mean hotly debated, yes
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Not since we were forced to accept quantum physics.
| digging wrote:
| No - quantum uncertainty gives us the assumption that
| everything is fundamentally random and nothing is
| deterministic, unless we assume a meta-determinism (or
| superdeterminism) whereby fundamentally random outcomes are
| actually predetermined.
|
| How does that relate with the _experience_ of decision
| making? That 's a complete unknown. But the simplest
| explanation is that free will is simple, once we define it
| as "the experience of making a decision" instead of the
| traditional, nonsensical definition of "the act of making a
| decision that is _fundamentally independent_ from prior
| events ". Usually free will is framed as "choice vs
| slavery", which is a useless definition because choices
| can't be made in a vacuum.
|
| In other words, of course we have free will: We feel like
| we have free will, and free will is simply the feeling of
| having free will. Conscious decisions (if those even
| exist!) are physical processes just like everything else in
| the universe.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Starting from evolution as the cause for the fact that our
| physical bodies present sensation to our awareness, I have to
| assume there's a reason for that to happen.
|
| The obvious answer is that pleasure, pain, ideas, memories,
| etc. all exist to drive the behaviors that are advantageous
| in evolution.
|
| It's possible that there's a deterministic set of gears in
| how sensation drives behavior, but the role of experience in
| driving physical action would be at least one of those
| components.
|
| So if we take evolution as the cause of life as we understand
| it, then consciousness is at least a component of physics
| itself.
| itishappy wrote:
| > Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by
| conscious choice, which we already know happens...
|
| Do we know this?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You chose to type a reply to me right? I guess you could
| assume that you are compelled and your free will is an
| illusion, but honestly that view is shit.
| lxgr wrote:
| You might like one more than the other, and one even might
| cause you to experience a better (more optimistic, agency-
| ful etc.) life than the other, but there's absolutely zero
| empirical proof either way.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If there is equal evidence for two hypotheses, but one
| resonates with your personal experience and causes you to
| live a better life, what could possibly possess you to
| take the disempowering view?
| lxgr wrote:
| Practically leading my life as if I had free will and
| being convinced I actually do have free will - despite
| zero evidence either way other than my senses and my
| reasoning, both of which regularly fail/deceive me in all
| kinds of situations - are two very different things.
|
| There's of course also a variant of Pascal's wager in
| here, except that this one is logically sound, in my
| view: If there is free will, why not make use of it? And
| if there isn't, my beliefs aren't my choice anyway.
|
| And just like from Pascal's wager, we can't derive any
| actual information about the nature of the universe and
| our conscious existence in it from that line of
| reasoning.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The main point of disagreement I have with this is that I
| don't think the notion that your senses and reality are
| not always perfectly in sync implies that your perception
| of free will is false. There's a lot of approximating
| that goes into taking sensory input and generating an
| experience, that doesn't invalidate your experience of
| making decisions.
|
| Also, your doubt in your own free will isn't free, it has
| a cost. Is that doubt serving you in some way to offset
| that?
| lxgr wrote:
| That may well be the case, but it feels deeply
| epistemologically wrong to me to say "I am certain about
| X" just because being certain about X might come with
| certain psychological advantages. Not much good follows
| from that line of reasoning applied to many other issues.
|
| I also don't think "it's quite plausible that there is
| free will but I'm agnostic about it" is a particularly
| harmful position to have.
| itishappy wrote:
| I'm a lot more confident in my own consciousness than I am
| of the universe's, but to be honest I'm not entirely
| convinced of either.
|
| I think the bit that's throwing me is the jump from "we
| know that consciousness exists" to "therefore the universe
| as a whole must be is conscious" but I bet I'm
| misinterpreting this somewhat.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| Not who you're replying to, but I'll take a crack at this
| and share my ponderings on this topic.
|
| Let's take for granted first that you're convinced of
| your own consciousness. You're more confident in it you
| say, though not thoroughly convinced, so let's start
| there. So in light of the fact that you are not simply a
| being inside the universe, but an integral, inseparable
| part of it, is you observing the universe not the
| universe observing itself? This might not be "the entire
| universe in totality is a big, pondering mind" but it at
| least means, again given that you are conscious, that the
| universe is at least as conscious and aware as you are.
|
| If you're not conscious then there's no starting point
| from which to even begin this line of inquiry.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| You believe in an actual free will? What's your view on
| compatibilism?
| stvltvs wrote:
| > that view is shit.
|
| Do tell. I also have strong views about free will, but
| opposing views are worth more than an offhand dismissal.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| It's disempowering and does not resonate with our
| conscious experience, and given there is no more evidence
| for it than the opposite view, I find the idea that
| someone would choose a world view that tends to cause
| depression and fatalism to be absurd.
| stvltvs wrote:
| There's another option: the Skeptic's choice to withhold
| judgement when there's not enough evidence.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| That is a choice that entertains both notions. The
| problem with that is that entertaining the notion that
| you are a powerless observer of the universe who must
| abide surfing the waves of fate with no agency is soul
| crushing for most people. If that choice isn't bringing
| you some power in some other way, why make it?
| ajross wrote:
| > The most fundamental argument for panpsychism is that it
| obeys Occam's razor FAR better than the "emergent animate
| matter" hypothesis.
|
| Meh. Seems to me like this is just dressing up the anthropic
| principle in clerical robes. The scare quotes around the
| "emergent animate matter" strawman sort of give the game away.
| There is no such "hypothesis". "Animate matter" is an
| observation, how it emerged is a question, and a difficult one.
| But declaring "Because Panpsychism" doesn't constitute an
| answer any more than "In the Beginning..." did.
| notahacker wrote:
| yeah. It's "some parts of the universe that could replicate
| much more if they have consciousness developed consciousness"
| vs "the universe was conscious all along, and so it ensured
| that other small fractions of it had selection pressures to
| develop consciousness", and I'm not sure the second
| explanation is more parsimonious...
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Not at all. The anthropic principle is sort of going in the
| opposite direction in fact, as it presupposes all these
| conditions on consciousness then waves a magic wand over all
| of it because we happen to be able to observe and reason, so
| of course those conditions were met, end of story, yawn.
|
| Panpsychism says that it doesn't matter how life evolved,
| because the universe is aware as a matter of fact, so the
| particulars are unimportant, just the ability to encode,
| store and transmit information so complexity can develop over
| time.
| yongjik wrote:
| > we have to explain the mechanism by which permutations of the
| states of matter can create a new dimension of "feeling" and
| "awareness" where one did not already exist.
|
| You mean, like a newborn baby? That's not a "tall order,"
| that's an everyday affair.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| A newborn baby is an example of physics at work, rather than
| an underlying physical law.
| bdamm wrote:
| The newborn baby is "just" an assembly of atoms and
| molecules. What is it about this particular assembly that
| makes it so special? That's the key question. It might very
| well turn out that there is something very special about
| animate life forms that can only exist inside animate life
| forms - particular arrangements of molecules, or perhaps a
| heritage that encodes some quantum states we don't
| understand, or some feedback loop inside of the baby's brain,
| or maybe all of it; and these things don't exist inside of a
| rock or a star or a galaxy (beyond, of course, all the babies
| that exist inside the galaxy, and outside of the question,
| did the galaxy will the babies to exist, and is a baby an
| expression of the galactic sensory apparatus?)
| gradus_ad wrote:
| It's important to distinguish choice/will and consciousness.
| Conscious experience can happen in an entirely deterministic
| context..they are orthogonal concepts.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Sort of, but then philosophers have certainly discussed the
| topic of why would there be conscious experience if it didn't
| serve any function. It would be cruel irony if consciousness
| was a vestigial appendage of the cosmos, an unempowered
| observer. Not a proof of anything just something to think
| about.
|
| For me, the real driving idea is that what we call physics is
| the aggregate behavior of conscious entities making choices,
| rather than being this framework that consciousness can
| "override" or worse, something that consciousness is forced
| to sit and observe. That idea simplifies a lot of the
| mysteries for me.
| a_cardboard_box wrote:
| I think the best argument for consciousness having an
| effect on the physical world is that the physical world
| contains a formulation of the hard problem of
| consciousness. If consciousness doesn't affect what words
| get written, then no discussion of consciousness is
| actually about consciousness.
| Scarblac wrote:
| If absolutely everything is conscious, how come we can go
| unconscious after a knock on the head?
|
| How come chemicals like alcohol can change our consciousness?
| Or adrenalin?
|
| How is it that the only consciousnesses we are aware of happen
| to be located in exactly one human body, rather than say only
| the upper half of one, or fifteen humans, or any other
| subdivision of the universe's matter? Why is my consciousness
| not shared with other people's?
|
| To me the hypothesis "human bodies produce consciousness,
| probably by some mechanism that's shared by lots of life but
| not necessarily all" is a lot simpler.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You don't know that we're unaware when "unconscious" just
| that we're unresponsive, and we don't have memories of that
| time. There is evidence that the senses are still active and
| a lot of brain activity continues.
|
| There is evidence that the human brain contains many
| consciousnesses, just look into research on split brain
| studies. I'm sure you've had the feeling of being aware of
| what was going on but feeling powerless to stop your
| behavior, as if you were a passenger in your body, at some
| point in your life, maybe there's more to that than we want
| to believe.
| layer8 wrote:
| Panpsychism requires that we have a solid grasp on what
| constitutes consciousness, and we don't. How would you falsify
| panpsychism? What testable predictions does it make?
| ethanbond wrote:
| How do you falsify the claim that all living humans are
| conscious? Or that none of them except you are? Or that _you_
| are not conscious?
|
| This is an inconvenience for every theory of consciousness,
| isn't it?
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm criticizing panpsychism as a theory of the universe,
| not as a theory of consciousness. But even as the latter,
| neither does it explain much of anything, nor does it make
| any useful predictions I'm aware of.
|
| Personally I don't make the claim that all humans or even I
| myself are conscious, because I find the notion of
| consciousness to be too ill-defined.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| That is something we can certainly disagree on. I would
| hope given your fist-hand experience of the universe you
| would at least posit that you yourself are conscious :)
| kouru225 wrote:
| In the first volume of Masks of God, Joseph Campbell points out
| that you can break all creation myths down to 3 categories:
| Creationism (where there is a god that created the universe),
| Animism (where the universe itself is alive), and
| Participationism (where the universe is the result of some
| interaction).
|
| He then points out that if you ask random children to make up the
| story of how the universe was created, the story they tell you
| will (essentially without fail) fall under one of these 3
| categories, and you can also categorize which one the children
| tend to favor based on stages of development. Very young children
| tend to favor animism and participationism, while older children
| (who are becoming more self-aware of their dependence on their
| parents) tend to favor creationism of some kind.
| m463 wrote:
| what if the universe was never created, and always was?
| digging wrote:
| Doesn't that fall under participationism?
| noncoml wrote:
| We would have to come up with a better
| explanation/understanding of time in order to make this
| argument logical.
| stvltvs wrote:
| Joseph Campbell was not an expert on every creation myth ever.
| His ideas had large cultural blind spots, and he was prone to
| over-generalization. A sibling comment pointed out an exception
| that doesn't fit into the assumptions behind Campbell's leading
| question to the children.
| b450 wrote:
| > Goff knows what he's proposing sounds "extravagant", but, he
| says, new ideas always sound extravagant, especially in the West
| where we're "trained" to be sceptical of anything that smacks of
| religion. We don't often think of our "secular bias".
|
| > He cites Occam's razor - the idea that the simplest explanation
| is usually the best. What makes greater sense to you - the God of
| the Bible or one of the other world religions, the
| meaninglessness of an atheistic universe, a multiverse, a flawed
| designer god, or a conscious universe? Perhaps, none. Perhaps, it
| all seems nonsense to you. Perhaps, humanity will never find an
| answer.
|
| > "Why believe in a supernatural creator that stands outside the
| universe if you can just attribute consciousness and intention to
| the universe itself? The physics just gives us the maths, there
| must be something that underlies the maths. I argue it's a
| 'conscious mind', and strange as that may sound it's no less
| extravagant than the other options."
|
| What the heck, man. I'm really not qualified to comment on the
| whole fine-tuning argument, as suspect as it seems to me, because
| I don't know a lick of physics or anything about the calibration
| of the universe's variables or whatever, but to excuse the leap
| made here with "Occam's razor" is simply incredible to me.
|
| Can we not agree by now? Minds evolved. Their evolutionary value
| is obvious. Someone shared an amazing article on HN recently
| about chemotaxis in E. Coli recently. It's an incredible
| illustration of how, from the _obviously purely physical_
| nanomachinery of the cell, there seems to emerge a creature with
| genuine "interests" - that is attracted and averse to things in
| its environment according to their survival value, and even
| possesses a "memory" and other seemingly proto-mental capacities.
|
| So now we have this Goff fellow positing a minded universe as an
| explanation for fine-tuning. And it is meant to serve as an
| explanation in that minds have "certain goals and aims". But the
| "goals and aims" of minds are explained by the fact that they are
| the products of natural selection. In a meaningless physical
| universe without values, values will be manifest within the
| perspective of creatures created with implicit imperatives
| (reproduction, homeostasis, survival, whatever we want to say is
| being selected for). The idea that the whole universe has a mind
| which has values (goals, whatever), values which in turn serve to
| explain fine-tuning (it's just what the universe wanted!), seems
| to me to be insane, because where the hell did that mind come
| from, why does it have goals, why are its nature and provenance
| it so radically unlike all the evolved minds that we actually
| know exist? Occam's razor???
| teekert wrote:
| "Theoretically, it's clearly no more outlandish than the idea
| that a supernatural, all-powerful, all-knowing and omnipresent
| creator God formed the heavens and the Earth on a whim, and
| breathed life into inanimate clay bringing forth man and woman."
|
| If this is the measure of outlandishness, it's super outlandish.
| Unless you were indoctrinated starting at a young age of course.
| In any event, to me it's a dismissing argument.
| timwaagh wrote:
| Do pigs, in fact, fly?
| metabagel wrote:
| I rather think that there is a common consciousness which our
| brains focus into individual local manifestations of
| consciousness in a way similar to how a lens focuses light.
| mo_42 wrote:
| What evidence supports your thinking?
| metabagel wrote:
| It's just a feeling that consciousness has to derive from
| something, and there may be a conservation of consciousness
| similar to the conservation of energy.
|
| It also might explain how there seem to be different levels
| of consciousness. In a lower level of consciousness, the
| brain is acting like a poor lens.
|
| I think we don't know what consciousness is, but I posit that
| it is something more substantial than a bunch of
| electrochemical reactions, although it seems like
| electrochemical reactions are necessary for its existence as
| far as we can tell.
| coldblues wrote:
| Sounds like Open Individualism
| visarga wrote:
| No, consciousness requires
|
| - a purpose - why would the universe need it?
|
| - a mechanism - how would learning occur?
|
| - a source of learning - that is the environment, what is the
| environment of the universe? doesn't make sense
|
| What I think are good signs for possibility of consciousness:
|
| - a self replicating agent, with the ability to perfectly copy
| and multiply its code
|
| - limited resources, leading to competition
|
| - other agents, forming a complex environment based on
| cooperation and competition
|
| Why is it necessary to have many agents? Because evolution is a
| blind, open-ended search. The more attempts the faster it goes.
|
| Consciousness makes sense for agents who have to navigate complex
| environments to survive. It needs to be localized, subjective,
| the universe would not have that property.
| ebb_earl_co wrote:
| This is good reasoning, but from where did you get the
| requirements? After having read Annaka Harris' "Conscious" and
| Philip Goff's "Galileo's Error", it seems plausible to me (and
| the most logically simple resolution) that panpsychism explains
| the universe.
|
| I.e., in the vain search for the place to draw "the line"
| between what animals or systems are conscious and which aren't,
| (viruses? Amoebas? The smallest insect?) what if consciousness
| can be seen as a property of existence? Then, clearly,
| different systems (such as humans) have wildly different
| experiences (a.k.a. contents of consciousness) than rocks or
| shrimp or trees etc., but if you take Thomas Nagel's phrasing
| for this--that if there is something it is like to be a rock or
| a shrimp or a tree, then that is conscious--then it seems to me
| that there IS something that it is like to be the cosmos.
| lxgr wrote:
| I think you're mixing up intelligence (i.e. having a model of
| self, being able to learn and all of that) and consciousness
| (having qualia) here.
|
| In a non-panpsychic universe, p-zombies might well have a model
| of self without being conscious.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| I would argue that consciousness doesn't require a purpose. I
| woke up here, what was my purpose? If I don't decide that
| purpose, what does? How is that thing able to give me one and
| not be conscious in some way? Evolution has no purpose other
| than it's own continuation, which is interestingly also the
| only purpose I was born with. I'd say purpose is innate to
| consciousness, emergent with it, but not a precursor. The
| universe doesn't need me here.
|
| Does the process of evolution "learn"? I'd say empirically yes
| it does, but there's no organ or part of it that does the
| learning, learning is just innate as well. The system learns
| and the evidence of what it has learned are apparent in it's
| form.
|
| Go down the list, evolution, the biosphere, meets all these
| criteria except for replication. It hasn't replicated, but it
| does appear it is learning how to do so. So is the biosphere
| conscious in it's own way? I don't know, but either answer is
| problematic for your set of axioms, so I don't think they're
| correct.
|
| So let's get a little more curious. If I'm conscious, and I'm
| part of the universe, does that mean that the universe is
| conscious? And if so, was it conscious in some way before I
| opened memy eyes for the first time? On the first question I'd
| argue yes, it is conscious _at least_ to the degree I am and
| with awareness at least as far as mine goes, seeing as I 'm not
| merely inside the universe, but am an inseparable part of it.
| Further, though I don't know for certain if there are other
| conscious beings in the universe, I observe several around me
| that appear to have the same form and behavior that I have, I'd
| wager that my parents and such are also conscious, so the
| universe probably has a consciousness beyond just mine. On the
| second question, it's not so straightforward, but considering
| that this consciousness that I have comes from something in the
| universe I think a "yes" to this one would be more likely to be
| the right answer than a "no". It would appear that some
| constants, rules, traits of the universe not only allow for
| consciousness, but select for it via convergent evolution.
| There is, at the very least, something fundamental about the
| universe that emerges as consciousness somewhere inside it.
| entropyneur wrote:
| I am conscious. What's the purpose of me having consciousness?
| As far as can tell I could have functioned the exact same way
| without experiencing anything whatsoever.
| proc0 wrote:
| As you point out, that list is only necessary for the evolution
| of consciousness (perhaps) but it is not a requirement for
| consciousness itself.
|
| From a functional computatoinalist POV, consciousness just
| requires information processing. People who meditate a lot can
| attest to the fact that conscious experience doesn't even need
| a self, it doesn't need thoughts, purpose or anything else.
| Consciousness is just raw awareness (meta-awareness)... however
| since we know the brain is processing information at some
| capacity (i.e. search Phineas Gage), then consciousness is
| something like the running simulation of reality being
| processed by the brain.
|
| Joscha Bach, Max Tegmark, are two good sources for this
| perspective.
| 0xcrypto wrote:
| My only concern with such articles is the use of "god" and
| "religion" which only gives the majority of humanity a reason to
| pray more and kill anyone who disagrees.
|
| Conscious or not, why can't we just continue calling it the
| universe and continue studying it as usual?
| jimnotgym wrote:
| >"Imagine tossing a coin 70 times and getting heads every time,
| or rolling dice and getting six every time. Nobody would say
| that's a fluke,"
|
| No I would say it was a trick. A Derren Brown type trick [0]. I
| started reading thinking this cosmos bloke was an amazing
| benefactor, and ended thinking he was scamming me.
|
| [0]: https://youtu.be/XzYLHOX50Bc?si=uCQUBl65fsEyehJb
| netsharc wrote:
| If "the universe" not getting 70 heads (e.g. if that one
| constant is not 0.007) mean we don't exist, then, the fact that
| we exist means the universe got 70 heads, yes, by chance...
| hscontinuity wrote:
| Why are humans so often seeking to bind clarity about our
| universe behind a non-connected ideology? Meaning, outside of
| theism we find ourselves in a scientific endeavoring; and both
| sides agree at some point connectedness among 'life' rang
| unshakably true - via faith and via experimentation. However we
| skip right over most of that in seeking truths in complex detail
| - when - it would make much more sense to me to find the simple
| truth in reality.
|
| I see the world (Earth, specifically, then my perception of it,
| and ultimately the cosmos behind that) as inherently connected at
| the most basic of levels. Science has shown us that much of the
| physical world that we can interact with is uncannily common in
| structure - we and stars are essentially made up of the same
| basic materials - as is everything else in the cosmos.
|
| So why then, do we concede a connected cosmos at its core (basic
| building blocks) and instead seek to dissect this basic cosmic
| connection - via theism, or reality, creationism or intelligence
| on cosmic scale?
|
| To me, if everything you can see and touch and interact with was
| at one point basic building blocks of all things, why would
| consciousness be different?
| Dansvidania wrote:
| Or, there are infinite universes and what we see is the only
| universe that can be seen (because in most other infinite
| universes the goldielocks are not locked and there is nobody to
| see them) ?
|
| Kind of a weird survivorship bias?
| rpmisms wrote:
| As good a time as any to mention Chris Langan's CTMU, which
| posits that the universe is a self-generating concept-cum-
| reality.
| binarymax wrote:
| Of course. It's turtles all the way up.
| smeej wrote:
| This entire article reads like an April Fools joke. It can be
| summarized, "I can't understand the mind of the God I think
| exists, therefore there must not be one, even though all the
| evidence points to willfulness behind what I _have_ managed to
| understand. "
|
| The level of arrogance here is absolutely laughable. I would
| strongly recommend even a high school level theology class to
| this poor philosopher before he hurts himself.
| netsharc wrote:
| Douglas Adams;
|
| > This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning
| and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in --
| an interesting hole I find myself in -- fits me rather neatly,
| doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been
| made to have me in it!'
| paulddraper wrote:
| See the Anthropic Principle [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
| untech wrote:
| I didn't like this article at all. Maybe I am missing something,
| but the thesis seems just too shallow, borderline
| pseudoscientific.
|
| The main argument is "fine-tuning": the fact that global
| constants in the universe are in an optimal state for existence
| of complex matter and, by extension, humanity. For me, the
| simplest explanation is the anthropic principle, or survivorship
| bias. If the constants weren't optimal, we wouldn't be able to
| make this observation.
|
| The article barely touches this obvious explanation, and uses
| weak "multi-universe" theory. And refutes this strawman in a
| weird, in my opinion demagogic way (see for yourself).
|
| Also: this line of thinking doesn't refute creationism! The only
| argument against creationism was made against omnibenevolent god,
| so creationism was also strawmanned.
|
| I regret that this article has gained so much attention on HN.
| coldblues wrote:
| I believe consciousness is on a spectrum of self-awareness. It
| just exists, perhaps even without evolutionary need. Even if you
| act mainly on instinct or even purely you could still very well
| be conscious.
|
| You will continue to exist as long as conscious life is able to
| propagate. For me, it makes sense that a state of nonexistence
| can't exist. Your consciousness is not unique, it's only a
| physical phenomena, thus it can be replicated, and it doesn't
| even have to be exact, after all, you are the ship of Theseus.
| When you make a clone and kill the original, the clone is the
| original, exactly. Like waking up from a dream, to suddenly being
| teleported somewhere. When you go to sleep, why don't you wake up
| as a rabbit? Who says you don't? Consciousness so far can only be
| examined from the outside but this does not deny our subjective
| conscious experience. I believe that when you die you will just
| move on, not as the same person, but as another conscious being.
| Eternal life. Essentially immortal, but you lose everything, and
| you're unaware of it. Even if 5 million years have to pass, you
| will just wake suddenly wake up.
|
| I also believe consciousness is not quantifiable, but shared, and
| you just have a narrow perspective at a time. When you die I'd
| say you don't even have to wake up as a newborn, you could just
| spontaneously be another person, as long as there's no other path
| of continuity.
| fredski42 wrote:
| This view resembles the Buddhist viewpoints somewhat.
| lxgr wrote:
| > When you make a clone and kill the original, the clone is the
| original, exactly.
|
| But what if the original lives on? What if you ship-of-theseus-
| like swap half of the clone's and the original's brain?
|
| > Your consciousness is not unique, it's only a physical
| phenomena,
|
| We have zero evidence for that - but then again, there's also
| zero evidence for people other than yourself being conscious in
| the first place, although there are compelling arguments.
| beryilma wrote:
| Oh, please. The ramblings of a philosopher does not make it so.
| These people who have no understanding of physics hear the
| phrases like "dark energy", "fine tuning", and "non-locality",
| then make up mystic, anthropomorphic theories about the universe.
| He is just an educated version of the "water has memory"
| people...
|
| > "Once you pass a certain point of improbability, it's no longer
| rational to say it's a fluke. If people break into a bank and
| there's a 10-digit combination for the safe and they get it the
| first time, nobody would say 'oh, they just guessed it'. That's
| too improbable.
|
| > "So the alternative is that this isn't a fluke, that the
| numbers in physics are there because they're the right numbers
| for life. In other words, there's some kind of 'directedness'
| towards life at the basic level of physics."
|
| Doesn't Bayesian posterior probability already explain such
| situations? Asking if something is a fluke after the fluke has
| occurred does not make it a result of some divine intervention.
| Similarly, saying the universe is too finely tuned (as a result
| of consciousness or God or something similar) is asking the
| question post the improbable event: if the universe was not
| finely tuned, we would not be here to ask the question in the
| first place.
| mistermann wrote:
| > These people who have no understanding of physics hear the
| phrases like "dark energy", "fine tuning", and "non-locality",
| then make up mystic, anthropomorphic theories about the
| universe. He is just an educated version of the "water has
| memory" people...
|
| Where did you learn these _suspiciously specific_
| neuroscientific facts from?
|
| I think this philosopher dude isn't the only person in this
| thread who has rather ambitious ideas about how things work.
| amai wrote:
| Isn't that the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism ?
|
| "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself" (Carl Sagan)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related, maybe:
|
| _Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858941
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Anyone else starting to get a feeling that whether something is
| conscious, or even studying consciousness matters at all in a
| practical sense.
|
| More of just a nerd snipe or red herring to waste time on.
|
| Like working to understand consciousness probably won't actually
| advance building an GAI in any meaningful way.
|
| Nor will it be the driver of how we interact with our
| surroundings be it rock, dirt, tree fish, dog, human, robot or
| universe?
| Scarblac wrote:
| There may be an ethical element, we try not to hurt animals but
| don't care about crushing rocks.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Yes, but I'm actually starting to think that consciousness
| isn't the real reason for this.
|
| Like I may still believe that hurting a robot is immoral even
| though its not "conscious".
|
| I think what I am trying to explain is its not really the
| conciousness part that matters the most.
| ethanbond wrote:
| You don't think "is dog conscious" is relevant to how we treat
| dogs?
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Yeah I actually don't.
|
| If we learned that they where less conscious or even not
| conscious. I don't think I would want to treat them worse
| because of that.
|
| What I am really saying is I don't think we love our dogs
| because they are conscious. Its everything else that matters.
| paxys wrote:
| Nothing beyond food and shelter and reproduction matters in the
| practical sense, yet we are out here breaking apart atoms and
| launching rockets. The pursuit of knowledge is never a red
| herring.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| I guess I didn't quite explain properly.
|
| I think that the question of conscience is actually not as
| relevant in the context of the problems it gets brought up
| in.
|
| Like morality or artificial intelligence. And in these
| contexts whether something is conscious or not doesn't really
| have a practical application nor should it affect the way we
| react to things.
|
| Like still not "hurting" "unconcious" things even though the
| logic would have you say it doesn't matter.
| layer8 wrote:
| I recommend reading Sean Carroll's _Consciousness and the Laws of
| Physics_ : https://philarchive.org/archive/CARCAT-33.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| This would be a serious problem for me. I would no longer be able
| to eat moon rocks, as a vegan.
| abhiyerra wrote:
| It is funny that the title of the article is a "new 21st century
| religion." The Hindu conception of Brahman
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman) is basically this. We are
| in Brahman, and Brahman is in us.
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