Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

I used to think the question that should preclude this one is if the universe is even able to host a simulation of itself, but given that we know it is probable we live in a perceived reality that not only is separated from what we think as objective reality, that this perceived reality is, for the sake of survival, a much simplified version of the objective reality, then it isn't impossible that a base objective reality might harbor countless simulations not unlike the one we possibly live in.

This is however an interesting experiment in a way to guide moral decisions when we encounter technological leaps, like if we ever develop the capability of producing an ASI. I don't think, however, that these considerations are falsifiable, because we can't just "break out" of our possible simulation to see what is what. What might that even mean? Would we be able to tell if we broke out of our simulation? It breeds all sorts of speculations that at the end of the day adds very little to the overall discussion.

What I personally think is that there is something to be perceived and explored ousite of the realm of human concern, in the silence of the absence of the endless chatter of the cognitive consciousness, that is hard to experience and hard to describe, even though it is accessible to everyone, maybe in the form of a question, like "what is really keeping you from experiencing the dharma body of the Buddha?".

I know this is all really esoteric and mystic, but I am really trying very hard to maintain a certain level of philosophical scrutiny here, if only whoever reads this might give me the benefit of the doubt. All in all this is my take on the subject and I hope I don't disappoint you too deeply.

Doing it straight from meditation is quite advanced, takes decades but can be achieved for many in weeks with binaural beats that trigger the brain to get into theta state with a frequency following effect.

I don't really care about proving this to anyone else. My main reason is to try to talk to my daughter I lost last year. Been really hard...

And this very much does matter for certain arguments about consciousness. If qualia are separate from thoughts but only through an accident of our own human minds' construction, then all arguments that rely on qualia to argue consciousness must be un physical (Chalmers likes these a lot) are obviously invalid.

So if your comment is not about knowledge but only experience then all you are saying is a simple tautology, ie the only way to experience something is to experience it.

This really doesn't hit on the nature of experience or how it is similar or different from knowledge.

Could a memory of an experience be implanted? Yes, such things happen. We experience imaginary things in dreams as well.

It seems problematic to conflate experience and knowledge, which you seem to be doing even while admitting they are different. You seem to argue that experience is a truer form of knowledge but I would push back and argue they are tangential.

What you are doing is the very behavior that makes HN a toxic place and why so many end up avoiding discussion

You can’t control your emotions regarding an online conversation so you lash out and have a meltdown like a toddler, blindly downvoting someone that won’t agree with you

In my first reply to you, I wrote that at this point we don't have any candidate explanations for consciousness. Instead, we have various beliefs about what form such an explanation might take (panpsychism and emergent physicalism are both of this type), plus the beliefs that no such explanation is possible, or that consciousness is some sort of illusion or delusion, or even that it simply does not exist. None of them have reached the point where one can apply Occam's razor to pick a winner.

> We posit the existence of... the state of existing absent qualia.

What do you mean here? In general, what would the state of existing absent X mean?

> The whole problem is that we can't get to grips on what it is we are explaining. We can't even start.

Given that you believe this, it seems inconsistent for you to consider panpsychism to be an idea that could lead to an explanation, let alone the only one that could succeed...

> Occam's Razor says this: only seek an explanation for things for which [we?] have evidence.

...and as this is what you think Occam's razor says, it seems inconsistent for you to pick panpsychism on the basis of Occam's razor, given that you have just said we can't even start to get to grips on what it is we are explaining.

Turning now to your new points, I'm not sure what you are saying here, but your primary concern seems to be an ethical one. The impression I get is this: firstly, you deprecate the way a presumed absence of a soul in some things has been used to justify treating them in ways that should be regarded as an unethical way to treat humans. Secondly, you see science's presumption that not all things have consciousness as being used to substitute for the presumption that not all things have a soul in an equally-deplorable version of the above ethical argument, which, if anything, is worse, on account of it being notionally a scientific argument.

If I am close to understanding your position, then this is not really anything to do with Occam's razor - it seems that you are reaching for it because you want a reason for everyone to believe in a proposal that you feel has better ethical implications than the alternatives. If that is so, then I think we should just agree to disagree over whether this is an effective way to approach either consciousness or ethics.

There is, however, something still to be said about the specific arguments presented in your final paragraph:

> We have no evidence for souls. By the same logic, we have no evidence for the absence of souls.

We have no evidence for the existence of a highest prime number, yet we have evidence for the absence of a highest prime number. I have no evidence for there being a tiger in the room I currently occupy, yet I do have evidence for the absence of one.

> We do have evidence for consciousness. We have no evidence for unconsciousness.

The evidence for consciousness has only been found in certain animals with well-developed neural systems. As these comprise only a small fraction of everything we know to be on Earth, there is evidence for some of the things we know of being without consciousness.

The first is the question of "existing absent qualia": is this a reference to the p-zombie argument, which claims to show the metaphysical possibility of entities that are physically identical to us but which do not have qualia? I (and many others) reject this argument by rejecting the inference from conceivability to possibility, on account of it depending on a question-begging definition of conceivability.

If you do accept the zombie argument, then you are, ipso facto, accepting the metaphysical possibility of some things having qualia and other, otherwise identical things not having them - which would introduce a boundary into your panpsychic hypothesis that mirrors the one you are trying to use to reject emergent physicalism.

Secondly, you are misconstruing Occam's razor here: it is not a claim that constrains what sort of conclusion it is acceptable to argue for; it is, instead, an argument about what constitutes an acceptable set of premises. Both Occam's razor and logic in general accept that one can validly argue for a conclusion for which there is no other evidence than the evidence for your premises in conjunction with the argument you are making. To reject this would be to reject deductive and inductive reasoning!

Nevertheless, your argument does attempt to show that emergent physicalism would be predicated on a premise for which you say there is no evidence: the assumption that there are some things that are not conscious. This is mistaken, however: it simply does not take a position on that question, as its universe of discourse is limited to things with consciousness. Its conclusion almost certainly would have the corollary that many things are not conscious, but, as we have seen in the previous paragraph, there is nothing wrong in that, and an emergent-physicalist hypothesis would not be refuted even if there were no independent evidence for non-conscious entities (which is a claim that I have already disputed, in the final section of my previous reply.) To falsify the hypothesis on this basis, you would have to rule out there being anything without consciousness.

> You have never experienced color?

We've got a model for that, thanks. It's called perception. But we haven't observed it, not as a group. Many of us can describe it from personal experience, but since no-one, not even your beloved philosophers, has come up with a good, operationalizable definition, there's no way of observing it.

Which we could likely easily engineer into whatever system eventually exists, once that point is reached. I doubt anyone who makes such a thing would intentionally engineer it to NOT consent to their experimentation.

> Consent plus the ability to reset

For a hypothetical example: If I said I would perform <some psychological experiment> on you, but it's okay because I can force consent into you and then perfectly reset your brain and body back to how they were pre-experiment, would you still be okay with it? This may be a bit of an extreme way of looking at it, but the ethical concerns matter.

I don't, but I find that it produces results that are instrumental, and I assume that the past behaves analogously to the future, and similar situations behave similarly because this has generally been true in my experience.

>Why should we undertake it?

I'm religious, so certain science is useful to me in accomplishing my goal of attaining heaven.

>These are questions of philosophy, no experiments can answer them.

I agree.

Why would we ask that? Not ideal for what? It just is.

> The third option is that physics is unable to interrogate itself.

This is likely true. We are the product of physics and we can only delve so deep. It might be that we cannot see to the most fundamental level(s). That's not a third option though, that's just the state of any scientific investigation at any point of time. However, given all we have learnt so far, what we don't need to do is invent new gods for the levels we cannot see or the things we cannot yet understand. I mean, people will, evidently, but that's all just wishful thinking.

Meanwhile there is slow progress to piece together how the brain works. My opinion is that we will figure it out but the answers about consciousness will be unsatisfactory. Just like right now, given the current understanding of physical processes even taking into account quantum systems having probabilistic outcomes, we have no free will. It's an answer, I find it a compelling one, but most folks don't like that answer.

Reading the comments, one thing that's been unsaid is whether each person discussing is religious/spiritual or not. My guess is that if you are religious then the idea of there being another layer in the universe goes without saying, and if you are not then it's ridiculous.

It's probably a waste of time debating across that line.

Meanwhile others think that the knocked out human and the corpse and the average human are all conscious, but they experience their respective consciousnessess aka the consciousness of an average human, knocked out human or corpse. You could say that this is just a disagreement in what the word conscious means.

Similarly, if my mind experiences my body reaching out to take a drug and then my conciousness fractures, I think that's a sign that the experience is pretty damn real, regardless of whatever fragile concept of "consciousness" is floating in that reality.

If "you" are unable to sense the real world because you're unconscious, that doesn't mean your body isn't cogitating, it just means that the individual parts haven't come together to construct the illusion that is "you". Parts of your nervous system continue to work, though.

1- He's independent agent who's watching and describing another independent agent in a real objective world

2- He acknowledge that there is cause/effect in principal (that's why they can deduce that there are flaws in the patient mind just based on external behaviour)

3- The doctor is trusting that he's not himself hallucinating, and that he's indeed see'ing real things and he's not just a programmed robot doing some random job.

and so on.

--

As you can see I was talking about very basic level, it's the level that allow you to build another more complex level of information, and which any other information is necessarily less reliable than it. Because trusting that I'm independent agent who exists in an objective world along another independent agents is a necessary Premise to accept any external information provided by those other agents, and any information provided by those agents that contradicts this basic experience it also destroys any reliability in the objectivity and correctness of their existence for me and any input provided by them. Hence, any "scientific" paper that contradicts my direct experience about myself (e.g Free will) is necessarily less reliable than said experience no matter what is the impact factor of the journal.

Now, why is it pseudoscience?

Because the parts of the theory due to Penrose are essentially philosophical, he doesn't really make any firm claims beyond "quantum effects - particularly superposition - are involved in human decision-making". The parts that Hameroff brings to the table are specific, but fanciful. The whole "microtubules observe quantum effects" is about as plausible as cold fusion - it is motivated thinking that contradicts some basic limits that we have observed, and relies on some gaps in our physical knowledge to not quite be provably wrong.

Overall they are combining musings about the universe with bits of biology and QM that are not yet fully understood into a theory that uses the trappings of science, but relies on motivated thinking to have any plausibility. It's most similar to the homeopathic quacks' claims about the memory of water: not fully proven to be impossible, but moatly on account of the vagueness of the claims. So, what they are doing fits the definition of pseudoscience.

Uh, no. The reason why you need a "conscious" universe is precisely beause humans aren't special. In a conscious universe model, the brain "abuses" the laws of physics including whatever laws that relate to consciousness to result in an organism with higher environmental fitness.

I am more than willing to consider a robot or a wet piece of cloth as conscious, but the problem is that you need to somehow unify these incredibly different experiences as conscious.

The people who believe that consciousness is just the result of processes in the brain also believe that a computer can become conscious given the right program, but this is nonsense, because the computer hardware already has all of the hardware to perform lesser forms of consciousness. The "thoughts" of a processor don't have to be in the form of human intelligence that can be easily observed. The idea that consciousness suddenly turns on because you load a carefully crafted file from your SSD into RAM and turns off if you zero it out, is what is ridiculous to me and that is exactly what "the brain gives rise to consciousness" says to me. After all, if you could somehow simulate the brain of a crow or any other animal, you would not be able to understand what the animal is saying and discount it's consciousness the same way we discount the consciousness of farm animals. So for me, your explanation is the one that makes humans special.

I have personally seen and experienced things that cannot be explained by these physical theories, and while you may want to just throw those observations as delusions or fraud, consider how the standard process of deciding what counts as “scientific evidence” is biased towards those that are consistent with the status quo.

You actually don’t need to look too far to find things that don’t quite sit well with the established theories. Those that are not obviously fraud. People then just casually explain them away as coincidence or physiological illusions or the like.

I can totally understand how people can convince themselves that the established theories are sufficient unless and until they experience a dramatic event that throws them off course. That said the rabbit hole is truly deep if you actually spend time searching for info.

I’m just trying to tell you that the quoted sentence is just plainly wrong. I have no obviously better theories however, and to the extent that modern science can convince a large part of the population that the quoted sentence is correct shows how reasonably well the theories of modern science holds up to scrutiny. I just think it’s a disservice to all to brush away the weird bits that don’t fit.

The point is that, at the end of the day, it's still necessarily going to be physics.

The anthropic principle is a concept we've created out of our conscious observation of the universe. But take away our consciousness and you take away any and all of our knowledge of any universe whatsoever.

Consciousness cannot be "obscure" when it is the basis for one's own experienced reality, the substrata underlying everything else. Consciousness experience is fact; our conceptual understanding of the universe is mere theory. Well-tested theory, but theory nonetheless.