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Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

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

#151

Post by gchamonlive »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #138
gchamonlive wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's plausible, even probable, given the arguments layed out in Nick Bolstrom essay "Are you living in a computer simulation?". I used to think the question that should preclude this one is if the universe is even able to host a simulation of itself, but given that we know it is probable we live in a perceived reality that not only is separated from what we think as objective reality, that this perceived reality is,…

> what is really keeping you from experiencing the dharma body of the Buddha What makes you think dharma body is more real than Santa Claus?

If you think quality is real then you probably saw the dharma body's reflection already. It is as real as all the ghosts we perceive with our consciousness mind knife. Gravity, light, music... are they real? Why? Because they affect the world we perceive in meaningful ways? Then why is Santa not real when it manifests itself in the holiday every year? If the idea of the spaghetti monster makes you fast every fortnight it has a real impact on you, the same way that believing earth was the center of the universe influenced the people around Galileo at the time until he proved it was a meaningless ghost.

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

#152

Post by some_furry »

mindok wrote: post #150
some_furry wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It doesn't matter how I conceive of anything. They existed for billions of years before I came around.

Even if, like, I take a solipsistic approach to life, objective reality has a sort of object permanence to it that's more stable than e.g. my dreams. So even if everything is a hallucination, the mechanism for preserving the information is the closest to "real" I can identify.

And from studying the things we call real, we understand physics. And from physics, I see nowhere that necessitates consciousness at a super low level.

Care to cite and explain the specific mechanisms that I'm not aware of that do necessitate it?

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

#153

Post by jemmyw »

BasedAnon wrote: post #122
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…

>There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies Actually this is backward, "I think therefore I am". There's no reason to believe consciousness is a state arising from a physical process, our experience of consciousness precedes our experience of sensory input and therefore the physical world. There is more evidence for the reality of consciousn…

There are plenty of reasons to believe it's physical. I mean, in some ways I can't believe I'm having to write "there are no ghosts" to a technically minded community.

If consciousness was not physical then where is it? Why would it switch on and off with physical changes to brains? Why would you be able to get altered states of consciousness with chemicals, disease and age? Why would be be able to marry some conscious activity with MRI scans?

There's quite a few bits of evidence to suggest it's physical even if we don't know how it works. There doesn't appear to be any evidence of another... what is a non physical process anyway? Surely there's only two options: the physics we know and the physics we don't know?

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

#154

Post by bradleyishungry »

BasedAnon wrote: post #88

What's the deal with these things being lumped in with physics? This isn't physics this is just regular philosophy with some scientific sounding language. I feel like this is people reaching for religion but not wanting to admit it to themselves.

I think the neuroscientists who question why a first-person-perspective happens in the brain generally assume it comes about from the physical formation of electromagnetic fields. Most don’t believe there’s some unexplored part of the universe that forms it, just that its something to do with the structure. So its still physics, just not pseudoscience.

I am certainly not well versed on the field though and have only read a paper on the topic, and it could have been bad science, but I did find it informative when I read it.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.7676...

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

#155

Post by fatfingerd »

crazygringo wrote: post #123
some_furry wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of the universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental forces -- and physics is concerned with describing the laws of the universe. Why do you believe this to be true? If it's a self-evident observation, try explaining it to me like I'm 5.

Sure, ELI5: the only things we actually know are from our conscious experience. Everything else we have to logically infer from those conscious experiences. Literally everything is built upon our conscious awareness. We have direct experience of our conscious awareness before we can even do physics to determine the four fundamental forces at all. To clarify, consciousness isn't just a fundamental aspect of the univer…

You've just demonstrated the anthropic principle. Intelligent contemplation requires a lot of things so we will see them and can see them as fundamental, but they might be obscure in the universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

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

#156

Post by jemmyw »

some_furry wrote: post #120
crazygringo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of the universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental forces -- and physics is concerned with describing the laws of the universe. How could consciousness not be lumped in with physics, from this perspective? It doesn't matter whether consciousness pervades the universe in a form of panpsychism, or is emergent out of interactions we already understand.…

> Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of the universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental forces -- and physics is concerned with describing the laws of the universe. Why do you believe this to be true? If it's a self-evident observation, try explaining it to me like I'm 5.

Funny because the whole argument does work better if you imagine the proponents are 5. "I'm special therefore the universe must care about me and my thoughts"

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

#157

Post by yongjik »

crazygringo wrote: post #116
BasedAnon wrote: post #88

What's the deal with these things being lumped in with physics? This isn't physics this is just regular philosophy with some scientific sounding language. I feel like this is people reaching for religion but not wanting to admit it to themselves.

Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of the universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental forces -- and physics is concerned with describing the laws of the universe. How could consciousness not be lumped in with physics, from this perspective? It doesn't matter whether consciousness pervades the universe in a form of panpsychism, or is emergent out of interactions we already understand.…

Fluid mechanics might actually be a good analogy. We know that fluid mechanics happens, and it's entirely made of already known physical interactions, yet the phenomenon is so complicated that it deserves to be its own field of study.

On the other hand, asking something like "Is viscosity a part of the fabric of the universe?" would be meaningless, because viscosity is not a property of any elementary particle or force. The complication arises out of how those groups of particles interact with each other.

At least, with fluid mechanics, there's a good physical abstraction that reduces real world phenomena into partial differential equations which work surprisingly well. When it comes to consciousness, we can't even ask "What's the consciousness per gram of this substance?" and I doubt such a question will become meaningful any time soon.

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

#158

Post by jayd16 »

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…

Hmm I think we've moved the goal post from "know anything" to "truly know" (whatever that means).

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

#159

Post by orwin »

BasedAnon wrote: post #122
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…

>There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies Actually this is backward, "I think therefore I am". There's no reason to believe consciousness is a state arising from a physical process, our experience of consciousness precedes our experience of sensory input and therefore the physical world. There is more evidence for the reality of consciousn…

No. Or rather what do you mean?

We are able to track down and physically explain (thanks to MRI) the sentation, the objective part of consciousness (Chalmers's 'easy problems of consciousness'). That really exist and we can prove it (or we have an idea about experiments to run to prove it)

I suppose here you're talking about the subjective sentation, the phenomenal experience, the 'hard problem', and you reference the 'cogito' not because you are a dualists, but because you truly think Descartes was right on this point (and this point only, the rest was extremely weak).

I will argue that you're wrong. There is absolutely no evidence to the cogito, at most billions of anecdata from homo sapiens who all have similar brains and reactions!

Some people believe subjective experience do not really exist [0][1]. A simple explanation would be: if we are somehow able to predict, by pure observation of predictable physical reactions, how an organism will act and react, including the fact that he will believe in a subjective experience, then we do not need to think subjective experience really exist. This is merely a tool for our bodies to create a sense of self unique through time, created from our own continuous perceptions, to allow our brains to strategize and avoid dangers.

[0]https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02071-y

[1]https://github.com/keithfrankish/articles/blob/master/Franki...

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

#160

Post by swader999 »

smokel wrote: post #99
swader999 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A thing with Out-of-Body-Experiences is that if you were able to shift outside of your body, then why would you still be constrained to the body of the earth? If you were able to roam around free of physics, then certainly you would leave not only your human body, but you would have to take account of the earth moving around the sun as well (at breakneck speed, mind you). You'd probably be either a few kilometers ins…

The thing that convinced Campbell it was real was when he and a colleague met up during them and recounted the shared experiences after. I'm not that motivated to go to the moon but people said that's no big deal to do that.
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