31–40 of 244 posts
[flagged]
[flagged]
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.
[flagged]
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.
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: 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…
>it’s simply too perfect and conducive to life 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! I…
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).
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.
[flagged]
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…
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.
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
Is there any reason whatsoever to believe either of these?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 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…
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.