Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
scientificamerican.com
Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
1–10 of 326 posts
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#2Donald Hoffman and Tom Campbell are interesting YouTube forays in this area.
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#3I suspect so. But we need a way to find out what it's made of and measure it. It seems to be very elusive in that regard.
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#4I suspect so. But we need a way to find out what it's made of and measure it. It seems to be very elusive in that regard.
Maybe some things are just inmensurable
Consciousness is not even well defined, in that sense it is ineffable
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#5If consciousness is "the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings" then it depends on dualism, ie, this and that.
Is the fabric of the universe dual or non-dual? If it is non-dual it can have no consciousness. Because the universe would be able to see a "non-universe".
IMHO, consciousness arises out of the universe via the creation of duality by the human mind.
The fabric is unknowable and that frustrates scientists so they make up theories like panpsychism. But is it really just the same sort of anthropomorphic delusions that they have always suffered from. "If I am aware, then so the universe." Guess what, we are not Gods, we are humans.
Adding that consciousness is just when my brain compares a new sense object with an already brain encoded sense object (memory).
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#6> Since Galileo’s time the physical sciences have leaped forward, explaining the workings of the tiniest quarks to the largest galaxy clusters. But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”
Everything we know about anything is mediated through our subjective understanding and perception. Be it mathematical formulas that describe the universe or feelings about something. If you remove people, we don’t know what there is, because we have no way of knowing
Sure you can remove some people and have others observe, but that is still mediated by people
We can never truly know anything that we don’t perceive ourselves - so it is just impossible to know anything about a universe that doesn’t include our perception of it
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#7Especially considering recent advances in the neurosciences, and where they intersect with systems theory (see: Friston), it seems inevitable to conclude that learning systems -- mammalian nervous systems being quite architecturally specialized but nonetheless made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe -- generally experience consciousness.
Note for the layperson: consciousness is not necessarily awareness (modeling sensory perceptions) nor sentience (recognizing oneself as an agent) but merely "subjective phenomenological experience". So the experience may not necessarily be very complex nor even recognized as such by the experiencer, but it is experience nonetheless.
Also worth noting there are a few flavors of panpsychism and some vigorous debate within the sub-sub-field as to which one is most reasonable. I dug deep into this a couple years ago and disagreed with some but not all of Goff's positions.
The argument from him that stuck with me and forms part of the basis of my attachment to panpsychism now is just an application of the scientific method: if we know we are conscious, and we don't know whether anything else is conscious or not, the null hypothesis states that everything should be considered conscious until proven otherwise.
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#8I was really hoping to see descriptions of some experiments being done to test this theory. What is a situation where a photon would act differently if it has consciousness than if it is merely an unthinking artifact of physical laws? Or a berry, or a fish, or a small plastic statue of a dragon, or a bong?
Of course there may also be the problem that experiments that confirm this theory can very quickly lead you down a path to publishing a paper whose tl,dr is "I think I just confirmed that 'magic' works" and that is very definitely not a route to tenure and/or further funding; Bengston's "The Energy Cure" is a pretty good example of what happens when you start doing that.
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#9If consciousness is "the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings" then it depends on dualism, ie, this and that. Is the fabric of the universe dual or non-dual? If it is non-dual it can have no consciousness. Because the universe would be able to see a "non-universe". IMHO, consciousness arises out of the universe via the creation of duality by the human mind. The fabric is unknowable and that frustrates…
Unfortunately we will never truly know, as the only way we can experience the universe is through our consciousness, in that sense, from a human perception perspective, the universe and our consciousness are inextricably intertwined and any theory or explanation we try to come up with is just our own subjective observations
Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?
#10Donald Hoffman and Tom Campbell are interesting YouTube forays in this area.
and Bernardo Kastrup.