I am extremely scientific and I believe in god. Not quite Spinoza's, more of a pantheistic view.
If you think about it, the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it. And it's learning about itself.
If you think about it, 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.
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.
Ok, too much Ghost in the Shell for now. :)
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.
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.
*Solipsism notwithstanding
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.
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.
Not necessarily. Anthropic Principle.
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.
Only logical conclusion: God is a manicurist.
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.
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.
And here we are.
https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/wp20140801/who-made-...
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.
How do you feel about this?
Perhaps this is why God would make a universe with 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.
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).
I don’t see how assigning a (culturally loaded) label to an unprovable hypotheses could possibly be useful for figuring out anything objectively true.
Also, not particles, but fields, actually.
Why are there fields?
It's turtles all the way down, and it fundamentally comes down to "why something rather than nothing"?
Nothing has no potential to create anything because it's literally nothing. It can not have potential.
So where do these crazy forces, fields, the quantum observer effect come from, out of nothing?
We will never find an answer to that question because it is literally unanswerable.
Then putting the "god" argument over the table seems either lazy or antropocentric.
The correct answer (as from today), it's "we don't know". You don't need to put any god, "energy" or whatever myth you know over ignorance.
You can substitute "universe" for "god" and still get the same level of meaning (or lack thereof). Why do we have a universe instead of no universe?
Sometimes the more accurate, if less precise, answer is simply "I don't know" rather than "therefore it must've always been and always will be".
Beginnings can only exist if time is happening.
This is perhaps more similar to Spinoza's conception of god than you suspect.
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.
Hell of a leap. I subscribe to the notion the consciousness is a illusion via chemical whatever and the universe doesn't give a damn anyway.
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.
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!
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'?
The illusion is here might as well go along until it stops
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.
>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.
How do you know that something exists?
"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.
>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.
What a ridiculous strawman.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
Hearing one of what?