Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?
Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?
Physicists and philosophers recently met to debate a theory of consciousness called panpsychism
Interesting article didnt know where it fit best so I wanted to share it here.
A similar theory of consciousness was made popular by Babylon 5. It’s one of my favorite philosophical theories they discuss. In that show, the Minbari believe the universe manifests itself in each person in an effort to find meaning and understanding. Essentially, sentient life is as much a part of the universe’s core functioning as stars and planets. It develops as the way for the universe to explore and understand itself. To me, this concept is simpler, more beautiful, and more believable than all our human religions.
Why does philosophy constantly twist things into an over complicated mythical mess, and then act like it’s some novel insight? Like the things with colors: they only exist subjectively so they aren’t real in any other sense than being observed, so it’s only the observation that makes them real, and does that mean they are even real???
Yes, they are. Subatomic particles vibrate (or absorb vibrations) at specific frequencies, and therefor emit electromagnetic waves at certain frequencies when stimulated. That is real and objective. Evolution has left us with sensors and neurons that can detect and interpret some of these frequencies that appear to us as colors. That is subjective, but the science behind it is not. That’s what happens. Is the color real? Well, define the question better and there is an actual answer. The vibrations are real. Your interpretation is also real, but in a different way. Does the color exist without an observer? Well, what’s your definition of color? Does a tree falling in the woods with nothing to hear it make a sound? Well, what’s your definition of a sound?
Now I just know this article is wrong:
"But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”—the red of a sunset, say, or the bitter taste of a lemon—has proven far more difficult"
Lemons are sour, damn it, not bitter! Lemons are part of the universe and sour, so any consciousness that perceives them as bitter is not part of the universe. /s
No, it's not. Next question...
Seriously though, doesn't basically every experiment in brain surgery and neuroscience disprove this idea? We know how different structures in the brain contribute to consciousness. We can't explain the mechanism 100%, but that doesn't mean that every piece of matter secretly has some consciousness embedded in it. It's God of the Gaps nonsense.
I'm not against posting stuff like this. Obviously serious people take this idea seriously. Just none of the people taking it seriously study brains.
What else would be then? Whatever happens is part of the universe development. We are the universe being conscious of itself. We think we are something else apart, or self made…
It's simply irrelevant. If you believe this theory exactly nothing changes about what you can predict about the world. That's what knowledge is all about. If you have a theory that doesn't behave differently under some different circumstances, you've essentially said nothing.
Also reminds me a bit of the chapter in "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!" called "Is Electricity Fire?", if someone knows that.
I actually just made a community for when you don't know where to post something.
The question is if consciousness only exist on this level.
We know that ant hives have a hivemind that is not present in the individual ant. Similarly humans can also be observed to create a zeitgeist on larger than the individual scale. Even individual humans pass through different states of consciousness from birth to death. So it very much seems that consciousness is scalable. So where are we on that scale, can it be scaled down as well as up?
Most things in the universe have recursive properties. They can be scaled up and down or be understood as the sum of their parts. Saying that consciousness is an emergent property is no different, but it's sort of dodging the question just as badly as someone saying it's a magical new law of nature.
Perhaps AI can help us determine what the minimum number of required parts to create the emergent property is and why it isn't present in the same setup with just one less part, or with a different complexity. I doubt we'll find the answer, but it might lead to some better questions.
No.
“The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.”
- Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.
No, consciousness is just what it feels like when a meat brain uses its meat to change its focus of attention; which gives rise to beliefs (some of them even true!) about a meat brain having a self.
It takes time, because brains are made of meat, and meat is slow.
It's leaky, because brains are made of meat, and meat oozes.
It generates the image of a "self" because brains are in meat bodies and actually do have physical continuity rather than being disconnected instants of computation; a term for "I, me, myself" is a rough model of the existence of brain features like memory, meat features like hormones, and even ape social-behavior features.
Attention/awareness is leaky and takes time; meat pumps rhythmically; and chemicals stick around.
And the meat brain can notice its own meaty doings. Just as it builds models of the outside world, it builds models of itself, with thoughts like "I am in the middle of doing an action" or "I am impatient" or "I feel sleepy" or "OW, LEG CRAMPS SUCK!" That is, its attention can range over not only the leg cramp itself, but its own reaction to having a leg cramp, including how the existence of leg cramps fits into its larger model of whether the world is a terrible place.
It usually comes up with a lot of correct beliefs out of this reflection, like "this is my leg, not your leg" and "I know English" and "Wow, I am distractable this morning, maybe it's the strong coffee". But it also comes up with dubious beliefs like "I am an eternal soul", "I am fully continuous in time", or "Oh God, what sin did I commit to deserve this leg cramp?"
("This is my leg, not yours" is important because there's nothing anyone can do to your leg that will make my leg cramp go away. The "self/other" distinction is important to consciousness because it has real-world implications; bodies really are physically disconnected from one another, which is why depersonalization can be an unhealthy thing for a consciousness to do too much.)
There's no reason to believe ChatGPT or the like are conscious, because they don't have the properties that consciousness is a model of. They're not fed information about their own well-being or place in the world. They don't observe their own processing. They do run largely as disconnected instants of computation. They don't live in a space where having a sense of "self/other" is effective.
(Not yet, anyway. There are folks out there trying to build AI systems that do have the feedback loops that might generate something like consciousness. This is probably a bad idea, and may even be an evil one.)
i think that would be beautiful. [at the good times at least] being alive feels too special for it to just be some chemicals knocking about in the head, then you die and it stops
there's so much we don't know or understand about the world still -- imagine how INSANE the internet or even TV would be to people in the 1700s. what if there are secret frequencies for the soul?
No.
If it's just the universe, what would the universe want to experience? Should everybody live comfortably and kind of predictably or would the universe want to experience the maximally possible variance in life?
Scientific American asking questions that can't possibly be answered. Not very scientific.
Did anybody read it to the end? I found myself wondering how many vegans were at the conference around the time they were talking about fish.