> If you think about it, the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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!
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?
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.
Hearing one of what?
> 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.