It’s obvious to me that the universe was intelligently designed. For exactly the reasons the author states, it’s simply too perfect and conducive to life.
If you have 10 minutes watch this video of a cardiac surgeon whose patient had a near death experience:
Given that the universe is unfathomably vast and almost all of it is extraordinarily hostile to - and so far as we know, entirely devoid of - life, I can't say I agree.
Conducive to life as we know it. Every 'version' of the universe and every little difference would lead to a different kind of life. And in all of those scenarios you would say the same thing. "Look how much it's conducive to us!".
The smaller context is people saying that earth is the perfect difference to support our life, therefore it must be god that put it there! If the earth was much closer like mercury, there would be no life to say that "well, we weren't placed in the right place- no god".
>and what happens when we die
It's more arrogant to think that you are more than a biological machine. Stab someone in the head with an icepick and they will be brain damaged and possibly even have a different personality, memory loss etc. So when that person "dies" you think what.. their conscious magically lives on? Which one, the one before being stabbed or the damaged one?
Does every other living being on this earth move on to something else? Humans aren't special. We are animals no different than anything else on this planet.
> Does every other living being on this earth move on to something else?
Maybe, yeah.
> It's more arrogant to think that you are more than a biological machine.
I think you have a point there, but it's also the case that the only thing we know is our consciousness, which is a thing for which we in fact have no material explanation.
> The smaller context is people saying that earth is the perfect difference to support our life, therefore it must be god that put it there! If the earth was much closer like mercury, there would be no life to say that "well, we weren't placed in the right place- no god".
This is true, to a large degree, but I think misses quite how obtuse it is to (reductively stated) look at the kind of system nature is and figure it must have come about purely by chance. I think it's one of the weaker arguments made by religious people and one of the weaker put-downs by religion-haters, and people don't seem to go deep into what it is about nature they are talking about in this context.
> Stab someone in the head with an icepick and they will be brain damaged and possibly even have a different personality, memory loss etc. So when that person "dies" you think what.. their conscious magically lives on? Which one, the one before being stabbed or the damaged one?
I think there are a lot of cases of people getting injured in their brain and being fine, or people being basically brain-dead and then coming back reporting various types of near-death experience (i.e. they were conscious while brain-dead).
I hold that both of your positions lack basic metaphysical sophistication. I also submit that one source of potential error is a shared, but discredited metaphysical stance. However, if you have a sincere and humble interest in this subject matter, one open to correction, I would recommend "The Last Superstition"[0] as a starting point. There is no point in running in circles, because you can examine your presuppositions to discover the sources of your errors. And once you do so, you will see the intuitions you have absorbed through various cultural sources contain very serious errors.
The only conclusion we can draw from your observation of a really-nice-to-live-in universe (and almost all of it isn’t) is that we can create a simulated, even nicer-to-live-in universe in our havitable corner of it and run some AIs in it.
If there’s a creator, then this creator fellow must live in an even bigger, nicer universe within which ours exists. Now, where does that come from?
When you travel at the speed of light, time stops, and because of length contraction, the universe is no longer vast. To a proton - light - everything is instantaneous, time does not exist, and distance means nothing.
I don't know what the creator's purpose is. I just know we are part of something far larger and far greater. When we die, we go to another place.
Parts of the cosmos for sure are and there's no need to look very far for it - for example the part that forms me writing this right now is, in fact, conscious.
If the cosmos is conscious in the way that we are and the speed of light proves to be a limit, then its thoughts would take thousands or millions of years to process. It may be compelled to leverage entities with cogitation components within light seconds of each other for fast thinking. The Thinking, Fast and Slow paradigm could be built into the shape of the universe.
If the slow thinkers seek to constrain the fast thinkers we may get away with a lot before they catch up.
No. Entanglement does not allow information to travel faster than light.
You can instantly know the state of another particle by measuring it's twin, but you can't do anything useful with that info until you share the results of your measurements (at the speed of light).
>If the cosmos is conscious in the way that we are and the speed of light proves to be a limit, then its thoughts would take thousands or millions of years to process.
> then its thoughts would take thousands or millions of years to process
This reminds me of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", where pan-dimensional beings waited 7.5 million years for their first super computer to tell them "42". Then they constructed another super computer, Earth, to find the question.
If the speed of light is a hard limit, leveraging localized cognition would not be useful at all. The localized cognition would only be able to ponder things it observes or experiences, that is, it can't ponder whatever the conscious universe wants it to, so the universe has to create it where it needs it, and then it can't use this cognition anywhere else because again, the speed of light. It really gets us nowhere.
I think though probably this "consciousness" of the universe, if it exists, is apparent and localized, but not bound and distinct locally, if that makes sense.
This is a lot of working backwards. I find this interesting but ultimately not compelling. I see a lot of:
"If things were different than the way they are, they couldn't work they way that they work!"
Agreed, I find lots of these "what is the universe?" questions fall apart, due to the fact that humans aren't great at figuring out what we don't know. Just a thousand years ago, our smartest minds had a very different idea of what "space" was, how our solar system behaved, and even the shape of our planet, but it made sense to them at the time with the technology they had, so it's hard to mock them.
For us to theorize that which we cannot hope to ever understand makes us no different.
I generally agree, though one small caveat - the shape and even size of the Earth was pretty well known to scholars since ancient times, at least since the 3rd century BCE, both in the Hellenistic world and in India.
There are a lot of compelling theories out there for the purpose/true nature of the universe. We are probably orders and orders of magnitude too small ourselves to fully grasp the complexity, like how one of our skin cells don't understand how the body works but coupled into an entire multicellular organism, we can now read an anatomy textbook.
Despite how little we are capable of understanding at such a scale, I still think its fun to postulate what might be the utility of all this reality. For example, in the cloudflare HQ there is a wall of lava lamps, which are imaged and used to establish random seeds. Perhaps our own universe be another's wall of lava lamps, generating a random seed?
I’ve always had thoughts like that. Like what if we were just some gods classification algorithm and the universe is the data being fed into the algorithm.
> like how one of our skin cells don't understand how the body works
And how surprising would it be if, in one of our skin cells, there would be a life form that, through their scientific advancements, actually understands how the body works :)
Perhaps I don't understand the point. "Perspective", you say? I'm thinking that, for instance, a very very large rock does not have an advanced ability to understand things, whereas David Rappaport had a psychology degree.
(Extra bits edited in follow:)
I detect another implied point, which is that there are levels of ability to reason. That is, by analogy with cells, which are dumb, inside a human, which is smart, the supposition is that humans are relatively dumb components inside a universe which is super-smart. This relies on the concept of super-smart having a meaning. (It also implies that the cells are less than totally dumb.) Then humans are somewhere on a sliding scale between totally dumb and infinitely smart. But I see no reason to make this supposition that such a scale exists or has any meaning. So far as I can see, there's only one kind of reasoning and it doesn't have levels.
I guess there's things like squirrels solving puzzles to get nuts out of a container. But I think that's a different function from understanding stuff.
Our intelligence is limited to our scale. David rappaport is intelligent enough to get a psychology degree because for his ancient ancestors that intelligence allowed for survival in the premodern environment. Yet it is still scale limited. Ancient humans see a buffalo that could be killed for food or a rock they can hold in one hand and use as a tool, but they are blind to things they might also see that aren't at the human scale level. E.G. that rock is coated in bacteria, can a premodern human see that and understand it? Nope. That rock also tumbled down a mountain side. Does the premodern human see the rock and immediately understand how tectonic plates or erosion work? Nope. Do we modern humans even fully understand these things today? Not really.
We have managed to hack our own limited intelligence by using collective memory so we aren't starting from zero every generation, but we still aren't naturally inclined to come up to things we readily understand at our scale and grasp what they might represent on much smaller or larger scales than our own. Even for people trained in these fields it is extremely challenging due to the problems with scale and our frame of reference. We had to develop things like microscopes and telescopes to take objects small and large and either magnify them or reduce them to something we can actually begin to make guesses about at our scale.
Right. So that is about perspective, in the sense of ability to observe things.
This seems separate from capacity to understand them, after gaining the ability to observe them.
I'm not convinced by the second part, about human knowledge becoming too gnarly for humans to cope with except by group effort. This a breadth vs. depth question, but depth is the winner over time I think.
Size is related to the capacity to build computational processing elements; storage, working memory, logic gates. You can't serve YouTube from a pocket calculator.
OK, but that doesn't have anything to do with the ability to understand things, either. You only need enough elements to perform whatever the unknown algorithm is that allows understanding. There's no reason to suppose a series of progressively superior understanding-algorithms that require more and more components.
There are very, very, very, many "highly educated" people who think that human beings are incapable of grasping the vast scale of the cosmos.
I don't know if they mean "everyone", "everyone, except, of course, me", "everyone and isn't it a shame that they don't even realize it?", "everyone who isn't specially educated".
I am perfectly capable of internalizing and understanding a billion, trillion, or even quadrillion of something-- be they meters, light years, number of atoms of something, or grains of sand, thank you very much.
> In the episode, Rick and Morty go inside Rick's microverse car battery, an entire verse that generates electricity to power Rick's car, unbeknown to the citizens of the microverse. Zeep Xanflorp, a scientist in the microverse, creates his own microverse, thus stopping the flow of energy to Rick's car.
Before we can start to really answer those questions, we first have to nail down what being conscious means. If we had a good understanding of what being conscious means, it might become relatively easy to look at something and assess if it meets the criteria or not.
We don't need to really nail it down. See my above comment. We have a good working understanding of what consciousness is in terms of practical behavior and in terms of the associated neural activity. That is definitely a reasonable basis for further study.
Wow, just whoosh. We have data on the behavior of nervous systems, and we have correlates with states of consciousness, not even close to what the GP was talking about.
How would you evaluate whether other entities with sophisticated information processing behaviors are conscious or not? Just outright rejecting anything that does information processing on a substrate very dissimilar to ours?
I'm not defending panpsychism; I'm pointing out that a hand-wavey argument that "consciousness is just something that arises from nervous systems that are ours or very similar systems" doesn't explain or justify itself.
In my experience smart people are pretty dumb. In seriousness, though, its hard for me to believe that there would be a lot of variation in this among neuroscientists, who I would expect to answer yes only to humans and animals.
Like consciousness isn't exactly as big of a mystery as its made out to be. To begin with its a genuine observable phenomenon in an informal way: we identify people as conscious more or less unambiguously, at the very least. Consequently, it can be studied at least at that level of specificity. From that point of view we have very strong evidence that consciousness is very tightly correlated with ongoing neural activity in certain architectures. From there I think we can begin to reasonably put pretty solid answers to the above list, particularly if you allow levels of consciousness to come into it.
My major point is that people love to cavalierly assert "we know nothing about consciousness whatsoever, anything goes, frankly" but I think that pretty radically oversimplifies and undersells what we do understand.
Your answer has the prejudice than only people and animals can be conscious.
I don't disagree, but that instantly makes the answer to the question "is the universe conscious" negative. Also AI, which currently is significantly more capable, at least in mimicking consciousness, than most animals.
1. the object in question would need to behave in a conscious way
2. I'd have to look in the guts of the object and see evidence of some kind that the processes I was observing were inherent in the design of the thing.
To clarify a bit about the second point: I can talk to a phone with a person on the other end of it and it can demonstrate some properties of consciousness. If I didn't know what phones were I'd be tempted to identify this behavior with consciousness if not for the second criteria. In the case of a phone, if we take it apart and see how it works we can see that it is fit to transmit a voice from somewhere else, but not to generate the complex responses I was observing in the conversation.
Obviously the case of a language model, for instance, is significantly more complicated, since it does have some of the behaviors of a consciousness and some of the structures, but my hunch is that it doesn't really have enough of either to count. Definitely not discounting the possibility that we'll have artificial consciousnesses some day, I'm just skeptical language models are it.
I don't have that prejudice. I'm entirely open to the possibility that AI or other stuff could be conscious. In fact, I'm decidedly of the opinion that consciousness isn't magic and shouldn't be expected to be confined to specific arrangements of material per se. However, I am saying that we know quite a lot how brains work and how that relates to the observable phenomenon we bundle under the word consciousness and that knowledge allows us to say with some degree of certainty that a rock isn't conscious in any usefully descriptive way. I also believe that, despite their sophistication, language models aren't conscious because they specifically lack a lot of the sorts of structures which underly consciousness, which seems to me to be a specific kind of thing having to do with brains and language models don't need most of the circuitry that underpins consciousness because their training apparatus is external to the neural network. But I'm prepared to be wrong about this.
I simply object to the bald hand waving away of decades of neuroscience research and philosophical work with the suggestion that consciousness is a big question mark. It isn't, and I tend to think people who assert that are more interested in mystifying things than in clarifying them.
Could you point to some credible neuroscience research that mentions consciousness? My impression was the word consciousness is a taboo in those circles, much like AGI is in in machine learning research papers.
Consciousness is observable huh? By rights you are a philosophical zombie, and only your passing resemblance to me - who I know from first principles possesses consciousness - gives even an inkling that you possess actual consciousness.
You are suffering from the a little knowledge is a dangerous thing trap. This rabbit hole goes much deeper than you think, you just haven't developed awareness to recognize that yet.
Yes, I too went to high school. If you think "what if philosophical zombies!?" is the extent of the philosophy and science of consciousness, well, I don't know what to tell you.
The simplest explanation of consciousness is that its a tool to build an abstract world model including fellow humans turned back on self.
You cant drive the entire network because that is an interactable problem so you model it like a fellow human and either feed broad input to it or sanctify decisions already made as part of the theory of "I"
I dont think gpt4 individual cells nor the algorithm can be said to have a subjective experience. I specifically doubt that the plants have one insofar as there doesn't appear to be a structure capable of building a model.
The boring answer that only the cat and the human are conscious seems like the correct one.
Polling a random sample of the population doesn't seem like a useful way to get at truth.
Since the universe isnt an actor building a model of a larger world I don't see how it could be conscious. If there is no other there is no I.
I think by that definition you can argue that all the entities I mentioned in my original comment are conscious.
There is no way to quantify how expressive your model of the world has to be, or what mechanisms you have to act.
For example, a single neuron in an artificial neural network has a model of the world (it's weight), and can act by producing different outputs for different inputs.
I think it means that consciousness isn't anything terrifically special and that human level consciousness is just something along the same spectrum with a more complicated model.
If all your attention is temporarily focused on something external to yourself, an onrushing train, say, are you temporarily not conscious?
People typically distinguish self-awareness from consciousness. It is not clear that they should, or shouldn't, but they typically do. They say consciousness is not facts but qualia, the sensation of the facts. A spreadsheet full of information can contain facts that differentiate blue from red. We hypothesize that a spreadsheet has no sensations, hence no qualia, hence no consciousness. We cannot actually operationalize this. We say a paramecium and a stone have no qualia, but this is more a hypothesis than a fact.
I think panpsychism in its essence is accepting that qualia are something and that the imagined boundary between things that have qualia and things which don't is established only by hypothesis and tradition. In the interest of not multiplying entities beyond necessity, we dispose of the boundary.
I am not a philsopher, so I don't really know what philosophers say.
the thing with the Boltzmann brain is that, even though it sounds compelling (in a philosophy thought experiment / random thought kind of way), I think there's one main criticism that shuts it down. If the brain is having all these experiences/thoughts itself, it came up with the idea of a Boltzmann brain, and the laws of physics, and logic, etc. So therefore, the laws of physics that Boltzmann brain is using the justify the Boltzmann brain are completely made up by it, and can't really be used as a valid argument.
I don't think that's as strong an argument as you're presenting it. If anything can exist, and if randomness can exist, it's simpler for a Boltzmann Brain to exist than for our actual universe to exist. The exact laws of physics that the Brain has imagined don't actually matter and they don't have to match the physics in the universe that created the Brain. (It doesn't have to be a literal human brain.)
That's why Boltzmann brains are a problem. If a theory predicts the appearance of Boltzmann brains, then that theory is (arguably) self-defeating.
For example, let's say you tell me your theory of the universe. And then I say, "Wait a minute, doesn't your theory lead to an infinite stretch of time where random brains can randomly spring into existence?"
If you say, "yes", then I'd say, "If your theory is true, then I'm probably just a Boltzmann brain, and this whole conversation is just a figment of my imagination."
I would assume that I'm probably a Boltzmann brain because the number of Boltzmann brains that ever exist will be far larger than the number of human brains that ever exist. Even if it takes a zillion years for a Boltzmann brain to appear, it will happen zillion times, over an infinite stretch of time.
Sean Carroll discusses this in much more depth in "Why Boltzmann Brains Are Bad" [1]. In the paper, he argues that "the theories that predict [Boltzmann Brains] are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed."
The article is quite ridiculous for stating that the alternative theory of a Multiverse is sloppy. It didn’t really give a reason why it’s sloppy. The Multiverse theory is an elegant and simple explanation for why everything seems to be so fine tuned.
What’s more sloppy of an explanation - that the cosmos is somehow conscious and directed life to appear, or that there is an infinite number of universes?
Looking back at the history of science, when we first thought that the earth was the center of the universe, then found out that the sun is, then found out that the sun is only a small part of a huge galaxy, then to find out our galaxy is just a spec Within hundreds of billions of other galaxies. Doesn’t it make sense that the next step is to discover there are multiple universes?
> What’s more sloppy of an explanation - that the cosmos is somehow conscious and directed life to appear, or that there is an infinite number of universes?
In isolation, with little context or flesh on the ideas, who is to say? The multiverse thing is just a narrative or thought experiment. It's not even a hypothesis.
"Doesn’t it make sense that the next step is to discover there are multiple universes?"
That depends. Multiple universes don't explain causation. For example if you assert that all things present in the material world you live in (right now) at some point transcended existence in thought only to a material form (the planet didn't build concrete, we did) - how does this fit through entropy in a multiverse? To assert that in a multiverse the causation is defined by tuning, the existence of a universe in contrast to that which we are currently experiencing brings no causation from one to another. To me, this implies that a 'multiverse' is likely not the case; rather - dimensionality within the universe we experience is much more likely the case for a unified cosmos, given the fine tuning.
As Tesla would say, to understand the world you have to understand frequency and vibration. Such as, matter is able to exist in multiple form with the same building blocks, thus extra dimensions would posit why this is possible across relativistic time by the observer. We're bound by our dimension and other dimensions are not.
You and I experience in 3D - but what about other organisms, perhaps they have attained an experience of our cosmos in other dimensions.
I think it's unlikely for consciousness to exist in stars or in any population of thing which isn't subject to natural selection / evolution. It seems to me that it arises due to giving a competitive advantage for the population in question.
If panpsychism is right, consciousness is part of the fabric of the cosmos, you just can't separate consciousness from it. Does that mean that the cosmos is conscious itself, and what does that mean? I'm not sure, but it's pretty fascinating to think about
Sure, and if certain Ancient Greek beliefs are right, thunder is smithed by the god Hephaestos in his forge under mount Etna for Zeus to throw at his enemies.
Is there any reason whatsoever to believe either of these?
> Is there any reason whatsoever to believe either of these?
Not a reason, but there are many people that have had experiences that align with panpsychism
It's not necessarily something that you have to believe, like a made-up story. Instead, it's something that you can experience for yourself (either through yoga, meditation, breathing, psychedelics or other forms of attaining different states of consciousness)
Edit: (can't reply to the reply) @tsimionescu it seems you just want to contradict whatever I say, that's your personal opinion. If you want a reason, you can come up with a thousand different ones. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, just offering a point of view for a, hopefully interesting, conversation
You're giving a (very weak) reason - personal experience while in altered states of mind. Of course, people doing at least some of these practices also personally experience all sorts of other false things, many which they themselves don't believe when outside the altered state, such as vivid hallucinations.
Let me put it like this. When taking psychedelics, you may see long dead people, hear voices, etc. These things are real experiences, but that doesn't mean that the long dead person really came to visit you, it's just a construct of your mind under the effects of the psychedelic. That experience is of course an aspect of reality, but it is not proof that dead people can sometimes re-materialize and visit us. Not even the person who had the experience believes that (usually).
So in the same way, if under the effects of psychedelics you get a sense that everything around you is conscious in some way, that's a valid experience, but it does not mean we should take an absurd idea like panpsychism seriously as a theory of reality.
The author should brush up on his history. This is panpsychism and it is a very old idea, going back to Spinoza. Einstein was a adherent of that idea as well, in his own way.
As to it's truth of it, that's somewhat above my pay-grade.
In fact, Einstein declared having this religious-like reverence for the “mysterium tremendum” – what scientifically minded person doesn’t after all? The Numinous[0] – which Spinoza and Kant also addressed in their respective works.
I suppose on a purely philosophical aspect it's as plausible as any other explanation of Gods that we came up with. If I continue this thread on a (pseudo semi baked) science and more philosophy, I could "argue" that us being made from particles of the universe, combined with the idea of particles being entangled and sharing "existence", are in fact "The" consciousness of the Universe and our feeling of Oneness is indeed on the particle level.
But I'm not that smart so I won't even suggest such outlandish ideas. I do dig the idea though, that the Universe is conscious. It's got more sense to it than a pretty angry all powerful being that is totally dependant on the belief and faith of some meat bags on a blue planet.
The arguments to fine-tuning are utterly remedial. I can't believe that no one in their orbit ever brought up the anthropic principle [1]. We are not randomly distributed over possible universes; we are embedded in a universe that is by definition capable of supporting our existence (and indeed giving rise to it). It doesn't matter how stupidly improbable it is. Observer effect is off the charts!
Second, in evolution, the entire chain of reproducing life forms from the first replicator to now is a series of stupidly improbable happenings. But it's not just that they're stupidly improbable all in a row (i.e. multiplied together), but they are one by one and selective; lots of stupidly impossible things were tried (read: bad mutations), and they all died out. We're left with good stupidly improbably things, one after the other. Evolution of life forms is governed by a tuning process (copy, mutate, select), why couldn't universes also be?
Who writes these kinds of articles? None of the ideas posited here are new, and in fact, they've been argued over for decades, sometimes even centuries. I find it hard to believe the proponent of these ideas is ignorant of the most basic criticisms.
The anthropic principle has equal explanatory power to “because it did.” Making up a story about a cosmic crow shitting out the universe has equal explanatory power and it at least offers a reason.
And obviously we know the crow shit it out because if it didn’t we wouldn’t be here!
Also you failed to explain why the universe is organized such that random processes exhaustively explore the state space of potential configurations such that you’re here to say it did. Why was there a quantum field to be in a vacuum state to begin with? Or whatever the leading explanation for the beginning of the “lol so random” cosmology is.
The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique. The space of possibilities is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. And yet there is no why for the wrinkles on the back of your hand. Nothing chose it. Nothing is perfect about it. Not every improbable thing was chosen.
The anthropic principle doesn't explain a goddamn thing! It rejects the notion that we need an explanation for some things, because they could as well as been randomly chosen and we'd still be here all the same with absolutely no why whatsoever.
> The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique.
It also solve zero real-life problems, but the presence of structures like DNA and self-replicating cells does solve a problem, i.e. they fit inside something much larger than itself, requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created.
> requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created
Not sure what you mean here. Evolution doesn't work by rolling all the dice at once and only selecting a winner if all the dice match some magic string. Evolution is a selective tuning process; it works (figuratively) by rolling all the dice at once and keeping the dice that do match the magic string and then re-rolling the rest[1].
[1] Of course that's not how evolution actually works. It works by selecting very tiny slightly different versions of things in a biased way. Those biased versions of things just happen to be things that can make more of themselves, and so the system automatically selects for things that good at self-replicating and surviving. Evolution doesn't jump all over the place with infinite improbabilities, it is actually a very systematic and even somewhat predictable exploration of the fitness landscape.
Where did forces and fields or equivalent systems come from?
If your answer is some variant on "just because" then you don't have a better theory than some kind of necessary causality or contingency, in fact you have a mere absence of contemplation altogether.
I never imagined "don't think about it" as being the metaphysical basis of the scientific enterprise though and it's hard to imagine science getting as far as it has if it were.
It's absurd and frustrating. This is something I wondered about as a child and subsequently immediately realized we are observing from a biased perspective. It's not as though we have millions of independent universes to look at and they're all perfect for the formation of life.
While I don't disagree with your reaction to the article in question...
"[The atrophic principle] tends to be invoked by theorists whenever they do not have a good enough theory to explain the observed facts." - Roger Penrose
Isn't the anthropic principle just the most recent god-of-the-gaps argument - i.e. a de facto mystery explanation of things we can't otherwise explain...?
I suppose that (to me) if or when the multi-verse theory becomes a falsifiable theory AND is empirically validated, then awesome we have the explanation pre-baked (the anthropic principle).
But until then, there doesn't seem to be grounds to say it's 'remedial'.
But curious for your thoughts, it's not my area of expertise beyond a layman's interest.
Ha! I think Lem had this idea 50+ years ago, with some scientists claiming that the universe was conscious and filling out consistent scientific theory as our tools got better. I can't exactly remember but I think it was near the end of "His Masters Voice" [0].
As I remember it, this was Lem's way of critiquing this type of theory and scientist because of its absurd and unfalsifiable nature.
There seems to be a very mystical branch of consciousness theory. In my opinion, it is completely misguided. Consciousness, as far as I can tell, is a specific evolved mechanism, and like the eye, has probably convergently evolved to serve different purposes. (mammals & birds --> primarily for child care, and then later for social dynamics. Squids --> no idea!)
In some sense, the search for consciousness where it doesn't exist feels like a misfiring of the human need to personify. People were afraid of robots long before there was any chance for them to possess AI. When people dreamed about space, they primarily dreamed about encountering other conscious beings. In other words, if a dog could think about other planets he would wonder how they smell. Not because that's an inherently meaningful question, but because that's the question that aligns primarily with their interests. It's the same with people: we look for consciousness everything, and assume that other things have more value if they can be thought of as conscious.
Is there a useful definition of "consciousness" that is empirically testable with some sort of instrument such that you can point it at a squid and say "yep, that one has consciousness!" ?
I ask because I've never heard such a definition nor has anyone actually ever told me what the instrument is that detects this. Until then, I figure there's no such thing as consciousness... it's just what superstitious monkeys say now that they feel silly talking about "souls" which is the old word that used to be used for this superstitious concept.
In my mind, this is part of the mysticism of the movement. If you define a word widely enough, then anything can fit. I hate to invoke this, but this often feels like a Motte & Bailey argument. If you want to call "God" the energy which started the big bang, you're sort of smuggling personification into something which really bears zero resemblance to traditional religious ideas. And so it is with consciousness. If we define consciousness widely enough so that a planet, galaxy, etc, could be considered conscious, then we've smuggled a familiar and personified concept into an arena where it doesn't really apply.
A great example would be trees: trees "sleep", they communicate with each other. They have immune responses, they mate, etc. But there's no coherent reason to think of trees as conscious, unless you just stretch the definition outside of its common meaning.
Isn't that precisely the argument to extend the definition of consciousness, our own human bias on what is conscious colors what we define as such.
If the 'universe' is conscious, every cell in your body is as well... and well... they are alive - and they do make 'decisions' that end up keeping (royal)us alive that look intelligent from an outside perspective... which is about the same perspective a large (zero-g evolved) kaiju would have of us {small pieces of a whole that do seemingly intelligent things to benefit the group-entity}...
if we don't consider what we are made of as conscious material - from where does consciousness arise from? ...and until we have a clear answer, maybe it's a sliding scale and everything is some degree of 'awareness'?
I understand the argument you're making, but it feels misguided in my opinion. Other things don't need consciousness to be valid -- and more importantly, consciousness is not an inherently positive thing which needs to be extended other things. Ideally, consciousness is specifically defined such that we can draw relatively clear boundaries between what is conscious and what is not.
In any case to answer where consciousness comes from, consciousness arises from the brain. You can test this with anesthesia, which is markedly different from sleep in that it does remove conscious experience. Although I agree it would be hard to pin down exactly what spectrum of animal is, or is not conscious, I think the extremes are pretty obvious. Obvious, unless, you're trying to extend consciousness to anything which could sense and react to its environment. If you want to call that consciousness, that's fine -- the human experience of having a distinct identity which can feel self-conscious, proud, content, anxious, etc -- is then something different entirely.
> In any case to answer where consciousness comes from, consciousness arises from the brain. You can test this with anesthesia, which is markedly different from sleep in that it does remove conscious experience.
Similarly, the sound that comes out of a radio comes from the batteries, you can test this by removing the batteries and seeing that the sound stops.
But if you say consciousness is "a specific evolved mechanism, and like the eye, has probably convergently evolved to serve different purposes" then you must have some notion what this mechanism is and what it's purpose is so you can say, "See, here is consciousness. It helps this organism achieve the expected purpose." I think this is what NoMoreNicksLeft is getting at.
I believe the typical (mis)understanding proceeds like so: "I am conscious. I not only know things, but I have a sensation of knowing them. This (computer/animal) reacts to things in such a way that it demonstrably knows them in some sense, but it has no sensation of knowing them. Now what is this wonderful thing that distinguishes me from it? How did it come to be? What purpose does it serve?"
One purpose the concept of consciousness serves is that it gives a special ethical status to its possessor. The conscious being needs to care about other conscious beings but can treat those beings without consciousness as tools or resources.
>then you must have some notion what this mechanism is and what it's purpose is so you can say,
My intuitive sense is that consciousness is present in so many mammals precisely because mammal young require so much care after birth. ie, it is beneficial for a mother to have differentiate between her own consciousness and the consciousness of her children. And, to care for her young and possess an intuitive sense for the needs of her young. It feels like this trait, once bootstrapped, could find other evolutionarily-beneficial behaviors, such as hunting in packs, building cities, or forming competitive social hierarchies. (you can't really have social status without consciousness)
To be clear, I'm not a biologist, and for sure I could be wrong here. I think the general principle holds though -- if a species of animal possesses a trait, then that trait either currently or previously conferred some evolutionary benefit. It's easy enough to think of what those benefits could sensibly be, and of course more difficult to actually go ahead and prove it out.
>I believe the typical (mis)understanding proceeds like so: "I am conscious. I not only know things, but I have a sensation of knowing them. This (computer/animal) reacts to things in such a way that it demonstrably knows them in some sense, but it has no sensation of knowing them. Now what is this wonderful thing that distinguishes me from it? How did it come to be? What purpose does it serve?"
I think that's a really fair characterization, but I also think that this "feeling of what happens" does characterize consciousness. 1) this means that an AI _could_ be conscious, but it would probably also need to have been programmed to sense input and also have some sort of identity. 2) if we don't believe that consciousness is a "feeling of what happens," but instead is just a response to external stimuli, then I would think consciousness is just synonymous with "living things," and there's no point in having a separate concept for it.
>One purpose the concept of consciousness serves is that it gives a special ethical status to its possessor.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that "from the perspective of the conscious being, that person themselves puts more value on themselves or other conscious beings?" -- or, are you saying that "conscious beings _should_ put more emphasis on other conscious beings, and therefore it's important to extend consciousness other things?" I think in either case, I would say that this bias towards other conscious beings is just sort of an in-built human bias, and isn't particularly important when it comes to scientific understanding of consciousness. (from a moral standpoint, I concede it could be important.)
Perhaps, trees have a very muted consciousness. Perhaps every living thing is conscious at some level ranging from nearly zero to far in excess of human consciousness.
I think this just redefines consciousness to mean "things that are alive." This may be a fine concept, but it is not what people commonly mean by consciousness. I strongly suspect that people who want to extend consciousness to all living things (and beyond) do some from a _moral_ perspective -- they want to connect people to all living things in some moral and spiritual sense. And they want to remove the historical moral hierarchy whereby mankind has placed himself at the top of creation.
I have no interest in the antiquated view that man is the peak of creation. However, extending consciousness to everything seems to be a spiritual act, and quite distinct from determining a scientific definition of consciousness.
My view on this is that the mind is the instrument that acknowledges it's own existence. "I think therefore I am" and all that. I findnit funny, we all walk around absolutely certain of our own existence, very much aware of it, and then question that this is even occurring. I'm satisfied that I've identified consciousness with 100% certainty by simply noticing it in myself, even being able to notice it is proof that it's there. And heuristically I presume others with form similar to mine have done the same thing, I think that's a safe bet to make.
We never bothered to define consciousness with any scientific rigor, so why not? It's common for things that are everywhere, to also be nowhere at all.
All we know is that we have it because its not about what the word means. It's about how we apply the category of "conscious" to things. It's a way of either distancing or bringing ourselves closer to things.
We might as well just ask "Is the universe like us?"
I believe you are right to say that consciousness is generally regarded as more than self-awareness, but unless you want to regard self-awareness as specifically not a form of consciousness, then the consciousness of the people with the disorder you refer to are missing something - something that I believe was of great importance in the evolution of the human mind.
What I like to ask about consciousness is to identify the step in the chain of organisms or matters where we jump from not having consciousness to having one.
That is a real problem though. Many things you cannot define because their bounds are indefinite. To define those things requires knowing the bounds. It's much simpler to accept our limitations in language and cognition because it removes those artifical boundaries when connecting physics to metaphysics. We only need to describe things when they matter.
Then there are things you can very solidly define but never know what they are. We can describe physics, and their applications, but when connecting metaphysical effects down to the constituent quantum processes the whole is unknown. We aren't sensible enough.
The truly wholesome perspective is from outside the universe.
Why is it so hard for people who hold this view to see that there is a bootstrap problem for any knowledge beyond personal experience if this were true? The reality is that definitions are works-in-progress, and getting started often involves a 'definition' that is little more than a placeholder for an eventual explanation of something currently unexplainable.
human history is filled with examples of important discoveries based on productive discussions about things we haven't solidly defined. I have found that the further I stay from those areas, the happier I am.
I mean, really. I feel like having a method of sensation and an ability to react to those sensations is a fundamental basis for "consciousness" and if you can point to the sun or the Local Cluster's sensory apparatus, I may listen to the rest of your (the Editorial You, not the commenter this reply is attached to) argument.
Otherwise, we're just pointing at complex things and saying "does haz Conscience lol?"
The problem with your definition is that it excluded forms of life that do not have actors and sensors. Implying that consciousness is not a mental property, but rather a property of being physically able to manipulate the world.
I.e. you are saying Stephen Hawking is definitely less conscious than an average human with functioning arms and legs. In its essence, you are too focused on your own experience of reality.
It is about fundamental basis for consciousness. Stephen Hawking had sensory apparatus and a method to react to inputs. Alas, I would say he is no longer conscious. If he had no method to react, like locked-in patients, we could argue about whether they are conscious, but we are currently trying to measure consciousness in those people too by measuring brain waves (look, something changes predictably when he hears us). We don't see any evidence that sun has any sensory input or output. It's like you arguing whether 0.9999 or 0.99999 is bigger when I argue whether 0 or 1 is bigger.
> A pure observer with no deliberate actions or impulse reactions sounds like it can most definitely be conscious.
Yes, but how can we know about the existence of such observer? There can be infinite number of such observers filling every cubic millimeter of our space, but does it change anything for us? Existence of such observer is as meaningless as orbital teapots [0].
Arguably science is not able to define consciousness because of the subjective nature of it, and how the aim of science is to remove subjectivity from its observations and conclusions.
On the other hand, religions have been studying consciousness for thousands of years, and indeed it is not something that can be verified by science.
It seems that an anesthesiologists job is to make sure you’re unconscious. If there’s anyone that knows how to define consciousness, it should probably be them.
Seems that consciousness is an awareness of certain stimuli that give rise to novel patterns in our brain, in turn triggering our frontal lobes to notice…
243 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadIf you have 10 minutes watch this video of a cardiac surgeon whose patient had a near death experience:
https://youtu.be/JL1oDuvQR08
The most arrogant thing I could possibly imagine thinking, is that I know all of the mysteries of the universe and what happens when we die.
Conducive to life as we know it. Every 'version' of the universe and every little difference would lead to a different kind of life. And in all of those scenarios you would say the same thing. "Look how much it's conducive to us!".
The smaller context is people saying that earth is the perfect difference to support our life, therefore it must be god that put it there! If the earth was much closer like mercury, there would be no life to say that "well, we weren't placed in the right place- no god".
>and what happens when we die
It's more arrogant to think that you are more than a biological machine. Stab someone in the head with an icepick and they will be brain damaged and possibly even have a different personality, memory loss etc. So when that person "dies" you think what.. their conscious magically lives on? Which one, the one before being stabbed or the damaged one?
Does every other living being on this earth move on to something else? Humans aren't special. We are animals no different than anything else on this planet.
Maybe, yeah.
> It's more arrogant to think that you are more than a biological machine.
I think you have a point there, but it's also the case that the only thing we know is our consciousness, which is a thing for which we in fact have no material explanation.
> The smaller context is people saying that earth is the perfect difference to support our life, therefore it must be god that put it there! If the earth was much closer like mercury, there would be no life to say that "well, we weren't placed in the right place- no god".
This is true, to a large degree, but I think misses quite how obtuse it is to (reductively stated) look at the kind of system nature is and figure it must have come about purely by chance. I think it's one of the weaker arguments made by religious people and one of the weaker put-downs by religion-haters, and people don't seem to go deep into what it is about nature they are talking about in this context.
> Stab someone in the head with an icepick and they will be brain damaged and possibly even have a different personality, memory loss etc. So when that person "dies" you think what.. their conscious magically lives on? Which one, the one before being stabbed or the damaged one?
I think there are a lot of cases of people getting injured in their brain and being fine, or people being basically brain-dead and then coming back reporting various types of near-death experience (i.e. they were conscious while brain-dead).
[0] https://a.co/d/2qTcFlw
If there’s a creator, then this creator fellow must live in an even bigger, nicer universe within which ours exists. Now, where does that come from?
I don't know what the creator's purpose is. I just know we are part of something far larger and far greater. When we die, we go to another place.
If the slow thinkers seek to constrain the fast thinkers we may get away with a lot before they catch up.
So we’re still within the speed of light limit, but information can be “passed”
You can instantly know the state of another particle by measuring it's twin, but you can't do anything useful with that info until you share the results of your measurements (at the speed of light).
https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/8638/fa...
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15282/quantum-en...
>If the cosmos is conscious in the way that we are and the speed of light proves to be a limit, then its thoughts would take thousands or millions of years to process.
Thanks for sharing.
This reminds me of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", where pan-dimensional beings waited 7.5 million years for their first super computer to tell them "42". Then they constructed another super computer, Earth, to find the question.
If the speed of light is a hard limit, leveraging localized cognition would not be useful at all. The localized cognition would only be able to ponder things it observes or experiences, that is, it can't ponder whatever the conscious universe wants it to, so the universe has to create it where it needs it, and then it can't use this cognition anywhere else because again, the speed of light. It really gets us nowhere.
I think though probably this "consciousness" of the universe, if it exists, is apparent and localized, but not bound and distinct locally, if that makes sense.
For us to theorize that which we cannot hope to ever understand makes us no different.
Despite how little we are capable of understanding at such a scale, I still think its fun to postulate what might be the utility of all this reality. For example, in the cloudflare HQ there is a wall of lava lamps, which are imaged and used to establish random seeds. Perhaps our own universe be another's wall of lava lamps, generating a random seed?
And how surprising would it be if, in one of our skin cells, there would be a life form that, through their scientific advancements, actually understands how the body works :)
Size has nothing do with ability to understand things, so this doesn't make sense.
(Extra bits edited in follow:)
I detect another implied point, which is that there are levels of ability to reason. That is, by analogy with cells, which are dumb, inside a human, which is smart, the supposition is that humans are relatively dumb components inside a universe which is super-smart. This relies on the concept of super-smart having a meaning. (It also implies that the cells are less than totally dumb.) Then humans are somewhere on a sliding scale between totally dumb and infinitely smart. But I see no reason to make this supposition that such a scale exists or has any meaning. So far as I can see, there's only one kind of reasoning and it doesn't have levels.
I guess there's things like squirrels solving puzzles to get nuts out of a container. But I think that's a different function from understanding stuff.
We have managed to hack our own limited intelligence by using collective memory so we aren't starting from zero every generation, but we still aren't naturally inclined to come up to things we readily understand at our scale and grasp what they might represent on much smaller or larger scales than our own. Even for people trained in these fields it is extremely challenging due to the problems with scale and our frame of reference. We had to develop things like microscopes and telescopes to take objects small and large and either magnify them or reduce them to something we can actually begin to make guesses about at our scale.
This seems separate from capacity to understand them, after gaining the ability to observe them.
I'm not convinced by the second part, about human knowledge becoming too gnarly for humans to cope with except by group effort. This a breadth vs. depth question, but depth is the winner over time I think.
I don't know if they mean "everyone", "everyone, except, of course, me", "everyone and isn't it a shame that they don't even realize it?", "everyone who isn't specially educated".
I am perfectly capable of internalizing and understanding a billion, trillion, or even quadrillion of something-- be they meters, light years, number of atoms of something, or grains of sand, thank you very much.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ricks_Must_Be_Crazy
> In the episode, Rick and Morty go inside Rick's microverse car battery, an entire verse that generates electricity to power Rick's car, unbeknown to the citizens of the microverse. Zeep Xanflorp, a scientist in the microverse, creates his own microverse, thus stopping the flow of energy to Rick's car.
Like consciousness isn't exactly as big of a mystery as its made out to be. To begin with its a genuine observable phenomenon in an informal way: we identify people as conscious more or less unambiguously, at the very least. Consequently, it can be studied at least at that level of specificity. From that point of view we have very strong evidence that consciousness is very tightly correlated with ongoing neural activity in certain architectures. From there I think we can begin to reasonably put pretty solid answers to the above list, particularly if you allow levels of consciousness to come into it.
My major point is that people love to cavalierly assert "we know nothing about consciousness whatsoever, anything goes, frankly" but I think that pretty radically oversimplifies and undersells what we do understand.
I don't disagree, but that instantly makes the answer to the question "is the universe conscious" negative. Also AI, which currently is significantly more capable, at least in mimicking consciousness, than most animals.
1. the object in question would need to behave in a conscious way 2. I'd have to look in the guts of the object and see evidence of some kind that the processes I was observing were inherent in the design of the thing.
To clarify a bit about the second point: I can talk to a phone with a person on the other end of it and it can demonstrate some properties of consciousness. If I didn't know what phones were I'd be tempted to identify this behavior with consciousness if not for the second criteria. In the case of a phone, if we take it apart and see how it works we can see that it is fit to transmit a voice from somewhere else, but not to generate the complex responses I was observing in the conversation.
Obviously the case of a language model, for instance, is significantly more complicated, since it does have some of the behaviors of a consciousness and some of the structures, but my hunch is that it doesn't really have enough of either to count. Definitely not discounting the possibility that we'll have artificial consciousnesses some day, I'm just skeptical language models are it.
2 invites our prejudice for how we think conscious could work.
I simply object to the bald hand waving away of decades of neuroscience research and philosophical work with the suggestion that consciousness is a big question mark. It isn't, and I tend to think people who assert that are more interested in mystifying things than in clarifying them.
Could you point to some credible neuroscience research that mentions consciousness? My impression was the word consciousness is a taboo in those circles, much like AGI is in in machine learning research papers.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8
You are suffering from the a little knowledge is a dangerous thing trap. This rabbit hole goes much deeper than you think, you just haven't developed awareness to recognize that yet.
You cant drive the entire network because that is an interactable problem so you model it like a fellow human and either feed broad input to it or sanctify decisions already made as part of the theory of "I"
I dont think gpt4 individual cells nor the algorithm can be said to have a subjective experience. I specifically doubt that the plants have one insofar as there doesn't appear to be a structure capable of building a model.
The boring answer that only the cat and the human are conscious seems like the correct one.
Polling a random sample of the population doesn't seem like a useful way to get at truth.
Since the universe isnt an actor building a model of a larger world I don't see how it could be conscious. If there is no other there is no I.
At first blush chatGPT seems conscious for instance.
There is no way to quantify how expressive your model of the world has to be, or what mechanisms you have to act.
For example, a single neuron in an artificial neural network has a model of the world (it's weight), and can act by producing different outputs for different inputs.
People typically distinguish self-awareness from consciousness. It is not clear that they should, or shouldn't, but they typically do. They say consciousness is not facts but qualia, the sensation of the facts. A spreadsheet full of information can contain facts that differentiate blue from red. We hypothesize that a spreadsheet has no sensations, hence no qualia, hence no consciousness. We cannot actually operationalize this. We say a paramecium and a stone have no qualia, but this is more a hypothesis than a fact.
I think panpsychism in its essence is accepting that qualia are something and that the imagined boundary between things that have qualia and things which don't is established only by hypothesis and tradition. In the interest of not multiplying entities beyond necessity, we dispose of the boundary.
I am not a philsopher, so I don't really know what philosophers say.
If it wasn't maybe he would'nt be here to ask the question.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (1x08) actually had an episode on this:
https://screenrant.com/strange-new-worlds-boltsman-brain-sta...
For example, let's say you tell me your theory of the universe. And then I say, "Wait a minute, doesn't your theory lead to an infinite stretch of time where random brains can randomly spring into existence?"
If you say, "yes", then I'd say, "If your theory is true, then I'm probably just a Boltzmann brain, and this whole conversation is just a figment of my imagination."
I would assume that I'm probably a Boltzmann brain because the number of Boltzmann brains that ever exist will be far larger than the number of human brains that ever exist. Even if it takes a zillion years for a Boltzmann brain to appear, it will happen zillion times, over an infinite stretch of time.
Sean Carroll discusses this in much more depth in "Why Boltzmann Brains Are Bad" [1]. In the paper, he argues that "the theories that predict [Boltzmann Brains] are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed."
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00850
What’s more sloppy of an explanation - that the cosmos is somehow conscious and directed life to appear, or that there is an infinite number of universes?
Looking back at the history of science, when we first thought that the earth was the center of the universe, then found out that the sun is, then found out that the sun is only a small part of a huge galaxy, then to find out our galaxy is just a spec Within hundreds of billions of other galaxies. Doesn’t it make sense that the next step is to discover there are multiple universes?
In isolation, with little context or flesh on the ideas, who is to say? The multiverse thing is just a narrative or thought experiment. It's not even a hypothesis.
That depends. Multiple universes don't explain causation. For example if you assert that all things present in the material world you live in (right now) at some point transcended existence in thought only to a material form (the planet didn't build concrete, we did) - how does this fit through entropy in a multiverse? To assert that in a multiverse the causation is defined by tuning, the existence of a universe in contrast to that which we are currently experiencing brings no causation from one to another. To me, this implies that a 'multiverse' is likely not the case; rather - dimensionality within the universe we experience is much more likely the case for a unified cosmos, given the fine tuning.
As Tesla would say, to understand the world you have to understand frequency and vibration. Such as, matter is able to exist in multiple form with the same building blocks, thus extra dimensions would posit why this is possible across relativistic time by the observer. We're bound by our dimension and other dimensions are not.
You and I experience in 3D - but what about other organisms, perhaps they have attained an experience of our cosmos in other dimensions.
Also we cannot even tell for sure if other people are conscious.
Is there any reason whatsoever to believe either of these?
Not a reason, but there are many people that have had experiences that align with panpsychism
It's not necessarily something that you have to believe, like a made-up story. Instead, it's something that you can experience for yourself (either through yoga, meditation, breathing, psychedelics or other forms of attaining different states of consciousness)
Edit: (can't reply to the reply) @tsimionescu it seems you just want to contradict whatever I say, that's your personal opinion. If you want a reason, you can come up with a thousand different ones. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, just offering a point of view for a, hopefully interesting, conversation
Granted only a few people have been able to transcend materialism since the beginning of history, but it's all the same either way.
Reality is axiomatic. Either we're here and a part if it or reality doesn't exist.
So in the same way, if under the effects of psychedelics you get a sense that everything around you is conscious in some way, that's a valid experience, but it does not mean we should take an absurd idea like panpsychism seriously as a theory of reality.
As to it's truth of it, that's somewhat above my pay-grade.
I guess he uses the term less these days because it's too easily dismissed as something esoteric.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous
But I'm not that smart so I won't even suggest such outlandish ideas. I do dig the idea though, that the Universe is conscious. It's got more sense to it than a pretty angry all powerful being that is totally dependant on the belief and faith of some meat bags on a blue planet.
Second, in evolution, the entire chain of reproducing life forms from the first replicator to now is a series of stupidly improbable happenings. But it's not just that they're stupidly improbable all in a row (i.e. multiplied together), but they are one by one and selective; lots of stupidly impossible things were tried (read: bad mutations), and they all died out. We're left with good stupidly improbably things, one after the other. Evolution of life forms is governed by a tuning process (copy, mutate, select), why couldn't universes also be?
Who writes these kinds of articles? None of the ideas posited here are new, and in fact, they've been argued over for decades, sometimes even centuries. I find it hard to believe the proponent of these ideas is ignorant of the most basic criticisms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
And obviously we know the crow shit it out because if it didn’t we wouldn’t be here!
Also you failed to explain why the universe is organized such that random processes exhaustively explore the state space of potential configurations such that you’re here to say it did. Why was there a quantum field to be in a vacuum state to begin with? Or whatever the leading explanation for the beginning of the “lol so random” cosmology is.
Remedial indeed.
The anthropic principle doesn't explain a goddamn thing! It rejects the notion that we need an explanation for some things, because they could as well as been randomly chosen and we'd still be here all the same with absolutely no why whatsoever.
It also solve zero real-life problems, but the presence of structures like DNA and self-replicating cells does solve a problem, i.e. they fit inside something much larger than itself, requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created.
Not sure what you mean here. Evolution doesn't work by rolling all the dice at once and only selecting a winner if all the dice match some magic string. Evolution is a selective tuning process; it works (figuratively) by rolling all the dice at once and keeping the dice that do match the magic string and then re-rolling the rest[1].
[1] Of course that's not how evolution actually works. It works by selecting very tiny slightly different versions of things in a biased way. Those biased versions of things just happen to be things that can make more of themselves, and so the system automatically selects for things that good at self-replicating and surviving. Evolution doesn't jump all over the place with infinite improbabilities, it is actually a very systematic and even somewhat predictable exploration of the fitness landscape.
Simply: Reality doesn't have "why"s. Reality has forces and fields or equivalent systems.
If your answer is some variant on "just because" then you don't have a better theory than some kind of necessary causality or contingency, in fact you have a mere absence of contemplation altogether.
I never imagined "don't think about it" as being the metaphysical basis of the scientific enterprise though and it's hard to imagine science getting as far as it has if it were.
That's comes with the 'general purpose nerd messageboard' territory, it's in some way true for almost everything posted. It's got lengthy caselaw:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
"[The atrophic principle] tends to be invoked by theorists whenever they do not have a good enough theory to explain the observed facts." - Roger Penrose
Isn't the anthropic principle just the most recent god-of-the-gaps argument - i.e. a de facto mystery explanation of things we can't otherwise explain...?
I suppose that (to me) if or when the multi-verse theory becomes a falsifiable theory AND is empirically validated, then awesome we have the explanation pre-baked (the anthropic principle).
But until then, there doesn't seem to be grounds to say it's 'remedial'.
But curious for your thoughts, it's not my area of expertise beyond a layman's interest.
## bernardo kastrup https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2020/07/the-irony-of-philip-...
## joshua farris https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-missing-subject-a-cri...
## edward faser http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/07/problems-for-goffs-p...
As I remember it, this was Lem's way of critiquing this type of theory and scientist because of its absurd and unfalsifiable nature.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)
In some sense, the search for consciousness where it doesn't exist feels like a misfiring of the human need to personify. People were afraid of robots long before there was any chance for them to possess AI. When people dreamed about space, they primarily dreamed about encountering other conscious beings. In other words, if a dog could think about other planets he would wonder how they smell. Not because that's an inherently meaningful question, but because that's the question that aligns primarily with their interests. It's the same with people: we look for consciousness everything, and assume that other things have more value if they can be thought of as conscious.
I ask because I've never heard such a definition nor has anyone actually ever told me what the instrument is that detects this. Until then, I figure there's no such thing as consciousness... it's just what superstitious monkeys say now that they feel silly talking about "souls" which is the old word that used to be used for this superstitious concept.
A great example would be trees: trees "sleep", they communicate with each other. They have immune responses, they mate, etc. But there's no coherent reason to think of trees as conscious, unless you just stretch the definition outside of its common meaning.
If the 'universe' is conscious, every cell in your body is as well... and well... they are alive - and they do make 'decisions' that end up keeping (royal)us alive that look intelligent from an outside perspective... which is about the same perspective a large (zero-g evolved) kaiju would have of us {small pieces of a whole that do seemingly intelligent things to benefit the group-entity}...
if we don't consider what we are made of as conscious material - from where does consciousness arise from? ...and until we have a clear answer, maybe it's a sliding scale and everything is some degree of 'awareness'?
In any case to answer where consciousness comes from, consciousness arises from the brain. You can test this with anesthesia, which is markedly different from sleep in that it does remove conscious experience. Although I agree it would be hard to pin down exactly what spectrum of animal is, or is not conscious, I think the extremes are pretty obvious. Obvious, unless, you're trying to extend consciousness to anything which could sense and react to its environment. If you want to call that consciousness, that's fine -- the human experience of having a distinct identity which can feel self-conscious, proud, content, anxious, etc -- is then something different entirely.
Similarly, the sound that comes out of a radio comes from the batteries, you can test this by removing the batteries and seeing that the sound stops.
I believe the typical (mis)understanding proceeds like so: "I am conscious. I not only know things, but I have a sensation of knowing them. This (computer/animal) reacts to things in such a way that it demonstrably knows them in some sense, but it has no sensation of knowing them. Now what is this wonderful thing that distinguishes me from it? How did it come to be? What purpose does it serve?"
One purpose the concept of consciousness serves is that it gives a special ethical status to its possessor. The conscious being needs to care about other conscious beings but can treat those beings without consciousness as tools or resources.
My intuitive sense is that consciousness is present in so many mammals precisely because mammal young require so much care after birth. ie, it is beneficial for a mother to have differentiate between her own consciousness and the consciousness of her children. And, to care for her young and possess an intuitive sense for the needs of her young. It feels like this trait, once bootstrapped, could find other evolutionarily-beneficial behaviors, such as hunting in packs, building cities, or forming competitive social hierarchies. (you can't really have social status without consciousness)
To be clear, I'm not a biologist, and for sure I could be wrong here. I think the general principle holds though -- if a species of animal possesses a trait, then that trait either currently or previously conferred some evolutionary benefit. It's easy enough to think of what those benefits could sensibly be, and of course more difficult to actually go ahead and prove it out.
>I believe the typical (mis)understanding proceeds like so: "I am conscious. I not only know things, but I have a sensation of knowing them. This (computer/animal) reacts to things in such a way that it demonstrably knows them in some sense, but it has no sensation of knowing them. Now what is this wonderful thing that distinguishes me from it? How did it come to be? What purpose does it serve?"
I think that's a really fair characterization, but I also think that this "feeling of what happens" does characterize consciousness. 1) this means that an AI _could_ be conscious, but it would probably also need to have been programmed to sense input and also have some sort of identity. 2) if we don't believe that consciousness is a "feeling of what happens," but instead is just a response to external stimuli, then I would think consciousness is just synonymous with "living things," and there's no point in having a separate concept for it.
>One purpose the concept of consciousness serves is that it gives a special ethical status to its possessor.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that "from the perspective of the conscious being, that person themselves puts more value on themselves or other conscious beings?" -- or, are you saying that "conscious beings _should_ put more emphasis on other conscious beings, and therefore it's important to extend consciousness other things?" I think in either case, I would say that this bias towards other conscious beings is just sort of an in-built human bias, and isn't particularly important when it comes to scientific understanding of consciousness. (from a moral standpoint, I concede it could be important.)
I have no interest in the antiquated view that man is the peak of creation. However, extending consciousness to everything seems to be a spiritual act, and quite distinct from determining a scientific definition of consciousness.
Could the cosmos, in fact, be smurpity-badoingo?
We don't know where it comes from our how to test it, because each individual can only observe their own consciousness.
We might as well just ask "Is the universe like us?"
Not really. There are plenty of disorders that destroy a person’s self-awareness but appear to leave a fully conscious person there anyway.
How about conscious is awareness? The more aware you are, the more conscious you are?
Then there are things you can very solidly define but never know what they are. We can describe physics, and their applications, but when connecting metaphysical effects down to the constituent quantum processes the whole is unknown. We aren't sensible enough.
The truly wholesome perspective is from outside the universe.
I mean, really. I feel like having a method of sensation and an ability to react to those sensations is a fundamental basis for "consciousness" and if you can point to the sun or the Local Cluster's sensory apparatus, I may listen to the rest of your (the Editorial You, not the commenter this reply is attached to) argument.
Otherwise, we're just pointing at complex things and saying "does haz Conscience lol?"
I.e. you are saying Stephen Hawking is definitely less conscious than an average human with functioning arms and legs. In its essence, you are too focused on your own experience of reality.
Do we have to interact with it?
Yes, but how can we know about the existence of such observer? There can be infinite number of such observers filling every cubic millimeter of our space, but does it change anything for us? Existence of such observer is as meaningless as orbital teapots [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
Edit: a voice recorder without a tape and battery meets your definition. Is it conscious?
On the other hand, religions have been studying consciousness for thousands of years, and indeed it is not something that can be verified by science.
Seems that consciousness is an awareness of certain stimuli that give rise to novel patterns in our brain, in turn triggering our frontal lobes to notice…