Comment by qsera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qsera | Hacker News Reader

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>Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends.

The starting idea is that there can be no definition of existence other than "something a consciousness can detect (directly or indirectly)". So if there is no consciousness, there is no existence.

But I think there could be a difference between death of all conscious beings, and consciousness itself disappearing. Consciousness could also be something that evolution found a way to tap into.

>Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.

Yea, take that. I think the number of possible worlds where a simple life form spontaneously assembled and evolved to a human following the laws of that world, are enormously larger than a world where a full human brain spontaneously assembled all by itself. It is just statistics that we find ourselves in a world of the former kind and not a brain alone in an empty universe..

>The starting idea is that there can be no definition of existence

Yea, I don't subscribe to this line of thinking as consciousness had to happen before existence. Kinda messy when you think about it.

>Consciousness could also be something that evolution found a way to tap into.

This, at least how it's written makes consciousness something like the electromagnetic field that exists everywhere. For example if I said "If you want to fly, you need to oscillate the flying field". Most scientists are going to give you a hold up and state it doesn't work that way. They'll tell you that you need an atmosphere and a body capable of generating force to create lift. It's not like a magnet that jiggles a field that exists everywhere in spacetime.

Looking at flying is fun in itself... do fish fly in the water? At what viscosity does flying become swimming. Sorties paradox creates lot of issues in different places, especially the discussion of consciousness.

>consciousness had to happen before existence

Concepts like "before", "happen" does not have a meaning in this context? Did the left part of a circle happened before the right part?

In a similar way, consciousness and existence could be part of the same structure that exists outside of time and space. It is not meaningful to say that one part existed before the other. It is not even meaningful to say that this structure had always existed.

I think that gets us closer to the right way of thinking about it. Somehow existence and consciousness are the same "thing", or two opposing aspects of the same "thing", where "thing" stands for something for which we cannot have a word, because it's beyond (or previous to) the distinction between object and subject. I think using the word "being" instead of "existence" makes things a bit more clear. Beings are almost by definition conscious. A stone (or a thermostat) is not a being, but an animal is.

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