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Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#141

Post by wafer_thin »

cassianoleal wrote: post #100
tetrisgm wrote: post #79

I went to a talk by John Cleese, of Monty Python. He made a point about a recent thought that he landed through meditation. He said he believes less and less that consciousness is in the brain. Maybe it's something external, shared, and our brains work more like a camera, and make whatever is out there our own. It made an impression on me.

Many people arrive at the same idea/perception, be it through meditation and/or with the help of psychedelics. I think it was Terrence McKenna who described the brain as an antenna that tunes in to a certain band of the universal consciousness, and that's what we consider to be the thoughts of an individual. More or less same idea, slightly different way of phrasing it. I believe some buddhist practitioners also have…

I've wondered about this and whether it might someday be testable. One thing I keep coming back to is the brain's apparent search power: you see a 5s video clip and can recall the show. This means your brain can trawl all your memories of all the movies and shows that you've ever seen, without generating a fraction of the heat energy of search done in a computer. It's pretty weird to think our brains can actually do this without help...

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#142

Post by tsimionescu »

nico wrote: post #119
jayd16 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is just impossible to know anything about a universe that doesn’t include our perception of it Is this true? What about logical deductions? Can't you use math and logic to know things without perceiving them?

To me, the quote and your questions seem like different concepts Regarding your questions: There is a difference between intellectual knowledge and experience Sometimes the concept of gnosis is used to differentiate them So for example, you can read a book about riding a bike, maybe the book is very detailed and tells you everything there is to “know” about riding a bike, but unless you actually ride a bike, you can…

> So for example, you can read a book about riding a bike, maybe the book is very detailed and tells you everything there is to “know” about riding a bike, but unless you actually ride a bike, you can never “truly know” (experience) what riding a bike is

This is often asserted, but I don't see any reason to believe it is true. Just like we can picture creatures that have never existed, and even draw elaborate images of them, with enough detail and introspection we can picture an experience.

And even if we really couldn't, this would at best be a limitation of our wiring, there would be no reason to think it's a limitation of any conscious being. After all, a computer is perfectly able to simulate itself and to simulate any input it could receive, so it can clearly simulate any possible experience it could have given enough details. By the same token, the fact that we can't control our optic nerves (nor other senses) as precisely is an accident of our genetic makeup, not some fundamental property.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#143

Post by some_furry »

crazygringo wrote: post #140
some_furry wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting philosophy, but I don't see how consciousness is implied by the standard model or the current investigations into physics beyond the standard model.

It isn't. It still has to be integrated with it, that's the whole point. We don't know how gravity is implied by the standard model either, but we still know it's there. The point is that, at the end of the day, it's still necessarily going to be physics.

I'm not a philosopher. I did study physics in college.

I do not see it necessary for consciousness to be as fundamental as electroweak interactions and so on. In my mind, it's perfectly possible for consciousness to be an emergent property of a complex system that itself is not conscious in any meaningful way.

Look at other examples of this; i.e. tensegrity.

To conclude that consciousness is as fundamental as bosons or gravity needs a lot of evidence.

Since you said so definitively that you believe that conclusion is true, I was hoping you had specific evidence on hand.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#144

Post by jemmyw »

kklisura wrote: post #126
jemmyw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame to see so many comments engaged in this kind of pseudoscience. There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies. I'm open minded to hypothesis that are potentially testable, but people keep just repeating the implausible. I also hate that I keep reading that consciousness, or anything else, is a universe "hack" which is several levels…

> It's a shame to see so many comments engaged in this kind of pseudoscience. You have Roger Penrose [1] interested in link to say between consciousness and physics [2]. Would you consider that to be pseudoscience? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose [2] https://nautil.us/roger-penrose-on-why-consciousness-does-no...

I have watched and read his opinions and yes, he has, in my opinion, veered into pseudoscience. It's not exactly without precedence for an established and respected scientist to go all philosophical with age.

I would put his current position somewhere like "I really want free will to be true therefore..." rather than an observational approach.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#145

Post by jancsika »

swader999 wrote: post #42
gchamonlive wrote: post #30

I have been imersing myself in this subject and the gist of what I got is that consciousness collapses under the reductionist process currently employed in the scientific method. Moreover, the very framework in which the current scientific work is done might well be just an emergent data structure used by what we understand as consciousness to navigate whatever the objective reality is in a way that is simpler and mo…

You have a good grasp on this. Have you looked at Tom Campbell? He has a separate angle than Hoffman but very similar conclusions. The batshit crazy thing about Tom is that he shows you ways that you can individually experiment and prove through your own experiences the things he's positing. His My Big Toe trilogy goes into all this, but I shudder to recommend it. Tedious slog. If you really want to prove it to yours…

> If you really want to prove it to yourself, it's not too hard.

Perhaps.

But proving it to anyone else at all is a hell of a leap in difficulty from there.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#146

Post by _8j50 »

Animats wrote: post #125

But humans are special . They have to be special. Right? Not just what happens once nematodes evolve to survive better. Otherwise, why are we here? It gets worse for this kind of philosophy as machine learning gets better. Machine learning is a rather simple operation replicated a huge number of times, fed with lightly filtered data about the world. As you add more units and feed in more raw data, it gets smarter. No…

You are confusing accurate automation with intelligence. And I suspect you haven't thought too deeply about consciousness. Intelligence and consciousness are not the same, chicken have consciousness and dream.

The classic childish confusion of how vs what is also something to be wary of.

Imagine a program in a computer figuring out it is made out of instructions and bits and bytes, that's how its world works but what exactly is that program? Information? A bunch of complex logic gates? An encoding of logic according to the conscious intent of the programmer? Are programs really at the end of the day a representation of human intent?

Much in the same way, this complex piece of software that we are and our limited awareness of our world such as understanding quantum mechanics (like the program understanding bits and instructions) is just describing how things are not what we, the consciousness (not the one ones) ultimately are.

I suspect a lot of the quantum weirdness might be humans looking at the equivalent of "transistor current" , at such a low level that meaning is obscured where at a higher level things just work in bits represented by low/high volage (digital), without minding specific voltage sampling (analog). Just my unfounded speculation though.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#147

Post by wafer_thin »

DFHippie wrote: post #20

"Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma." -- Anil Seth, from the article This bit -- "nor why consciousness is lost in stat…

very astute and interesting point about memory. It occurs that memory is a fundamental component of the consciousness we all know and love. There would be no ability to even register "blue" without memory, there would just be moments in time where there was stimulus, each packet of info having no bearing on the last, and thus completely new and novel

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#148

Post by jemmyw »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #107
jemmyw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame to see so many comments engaged in this kind of pseudoscience. There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies. I'm open minded to hypothesis that are potentially testable, but people keep just repeating the implausible. I also hate that I keep reading that consciousness, or anything else, is a universe "hack" which is several levels…

I think that there is such a groundswell of articles about 'consciousness', right now, is because of the surge in AI and GPT. If this is true. >"state arising from the physical processes" Then nothing prevents silicon from eventually also being 'conscious'. Carbon or Silicon, they are both a physical processes. Electrical potentials. So the section of population that just can't abide that AI could be 'conscious' are…

> Then nothing prevents silicon from eventually also being 'conscious'.

I would agree except "nothing we know" because we still don't know how consciousness works.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#149

Post by saled »

BasedAnon wrote: post #121
orwin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a philosophy has enough proofs and credibility, it becomes a science. Also, I do not think you can call logician philosophers. Lewis Carroll wouldn't. Agree that the gatekeeping is a bit much, but doesn't warranted a swipe imho.

>When a philosophy has enough proofs and credibility, it becomes a science I completely disagree with this notion of science. To me science is the practice of analysing findings from controlled experimentation and then deriving predictive, reproducible and falsifiable hypotheses.

Why do you think that collecting evidence from experiments leads to truth though? What about the process gives you certainty?

What evidence is important to making progress and what evidence is irrelevant?

What does progress in understanding an area look like? Why should we undertake it?

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

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#150

Post by mindok »

some_furry wrote: post #143
crazygringo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't. It still has to be integrated with it, that's the whole point. We don't know how gravity is implied by the standard model either, but we still know it's there. The point is that, at the end of the day, it's still necessarily going to be physics.

I'm not a philosopher. I did study physics in college. I do not see it necessary for consciousness to be as fundamental as electroweak interactions and so on. In my mind, it's perfectly possible for consciousness to be an emergent property of a complex system that itself is not conscious in any meaningful way. Look at other examples of this; i.e. tensegrity. To conclude that consciousness is as fundamental as bosons…

How can you conceive of bosons or gravity without consciousness? How can you possibly prove objective reality through the filter of subjective consciousness?
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