Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious? • Hacker News Board

Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#241

Post by joquarky » Tue, Apr 02, 2024, 7:04 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #184

ethanbond wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you falsify the claim that all living humans are conscious? Or that none of them except you are? Or that you are not conscious? This is an inconvenience for every theory of consciousness, isn't it?

I’m criticizing panpsychism as a theory of the universe, not as a theory of consciousness. But even as the latter, neither does it explain much of anything, nor does it make any useful predictions I’m aware of. Personally I don’t make the claim that all humans or even I myself are conscious, because I find the notion of consciousness to be too ill-defined.

It seems like you're trying to apply science outside of its domain. Science is a tool to examine only phenomena that can be repeated and quantified.

Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#242

Post by michaelmrose » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:14 AM UTC

fooker wrote: post #166

michaelmrose wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be tempted to imagine it might be conscious if it merely acted as if it had motive and a model of the world. At first blush chatGPT seems conscious for instance.

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.

Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#243

Post by catlover76 » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 2:57 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #53

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 doe…

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Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#244

Post by peddamat » Fri, Apr 05, 2024, 6:14 AM UTC

digging wrote: post #131

peddamat wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it assumed that everything is deterministic apart from what is done by the somewhat magical, "free will"?

No - quantum uncertainty gives us the assumption that everything is fundamentally random and nothing is deterministic, unless we assume a meta-determinism (or superdeterminism) whereby fundamentally random outcomes are actually predetermined. How does that relate with the experience of decision making? That's a complete unknown. But the simplest explanation is that free will is simple, once we define it as "the exper…

It's very confusing how a relativity works in a non-deterministic world. Brian Greene's illustration of how relativity "slices the loaf" in the Fabric of the Cosmos (https://youtu.be/8Y-JmocB84Y?t=1334) makes it very difficult for me to understand how things work if reality is indeed non-deterministic.

Unless reality is more like Everything Everywhere All At Once, i.e., the Everett many loafs model.