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Comment by meroes | Hacker News Reader

Sure maybe from a philosophical point of argument consciousness trumps all and physical existence and objective external reality should be viewed through that lense. But every single particle has a worldline tracing back to the Big Bang, where there were no conscious beings present yet. Only until the universe cooled and became less dense did consciousness become possible. So can consciousness really claim supremacy over external reality. To do so would require retroactivity or bootstrapping. Unless you accept the idea of a timeless universe where no point on a worldline (or collection of worldlines) is privileged, and now is a statistical reality more than anything in that there are more collections of worldlines with consciousnesses when the universe is relatively evenly made up of dark energy and regular matter+energy (highest amount observers compared to much closer or much further from Big Bang).

The flow of time may be a subjective illusion.

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Conscious beings not being present does not mean that consciousness is not. This article basically asserts that your cognition of yourself as "conscious of the world" (as you imply here) may be inverted. The big bang may actually be the birth of consciousness, which we, as human beings, are gradually becoming more conscious of.

I took issue with this part:

>In the same way, if the universe is to actually exist, its properties can’t be exclusively relational/dispositional

People who believe the mathematical universe hypothesis would take issue here (I'm not educated enough to make a full opinion but I know they would oppose this quote). They would say the universe is entirely relational - it's all one set of mathematical relations. Max Tegmark is one such person and he explains consciousness and self awareness as arising out of evolution (being aware and not a slave to sensory inputs can be beneficial), and subjective reality and the flow of time are just subjective/conscious illusions. Albeit he doesn't give a mechanism for consciousness to form in the brain, but no one has yet.

There is absolutely no evidence to support that claim, nor is there any plausible reason to believe it.

There is absolutely no evidence to support any claims at all regarding consciousness, in any direction.

We know literally zero about the natural basis for consciousness -- and I mean zero -- and so that claim (better known as "panpsychism" if you want to research it) is pretty much as plausible as any other at this point. And it's been taken pretty seriously by a great number of scientists and philosophers over the centuries.

It has no more plausibility than there being a giant pink dragon in my garage.

If I understand this article correctly, what you and I consider to be the 'Big Bang' is itself an event filtered through the lens of our consciousness.

The big bang, the time that has passed since them, even the concept of time, are not in fact reality but rather the interpretation of reality made by our consciousness.

There is no argument that there is a fundamental reality that predates consciousness, but our problem is that everything that we view as 'reality' is just the subset of that true reality that is filtered through our consciousness.

What we perceive as reality starts with consciousness as its fundamental building block, because everything we have discovered has been built upon that foundation.

> The big bang, the time that has passed since them, even the concept of time, are not in fact reality but rather the interpretation of reality made by our consciousness.

I think that is very reasonable/likely

>There is no argument that there is a fundamental reality that predates consciousness, but our problem is that everything that we view as 'reality' is just the subset of that true reality that is filtered through our consciousness.

See to me the article was saying a fundamental, consciousnessless reality isn't possible when it stated everything can't only be relational (the spreadsheet example) - there must be some initial value/setting, i.e. consciousness.

> Only until the universe cooled and became less dense did consciousness become possible.

I'm not sure that statement must be true. There seems to be no reason that consciousness wasn't possible before or during the big bang.

> tracing back to the Big Bang, where there were no conscious beings present yet. Only until the universe cooled and became less dense did consciousness become possible.

This view neglects that matter responds to magnetic fields which surely existed prior to the big bang and could have been vibrating until a resonance or similar event triggered the matter to expand. There is an idea that expansion and contraction are an oscillation of their own; seems logical, but I can’t prove it.

Thanks for the response. I'm not a physicist but we can't speak of before the Big Bang usually. But you are right fields could have existed before neutrons and protons formed. As far as we know, consciousness requires protons, neutrons, and electrons, among other objects, and those were not present or in the right arrangements right at the Big Bang, so I think my argument still holds.

This is an ontological problem only. The goal here is to solve the problem of that we can't find a rational basis for knowing. If the physical world has primacy then you have to figure out how to solve the irreconcilable perception problem. It makes the philosophy easier to say conciseness is first. I don't understand why we need to have an absolute basis for knowledge as long as our approximations for knowledge are so astoundingly useful.

But then why is this in a Psychology posting and not a Philosophy one if it's just about ontology?

Its a philosopher writing in a psychological venue.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/experts/sharon-hewitt-raw...

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