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Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

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

#41

Post by fooker »

fooker wrote: post #36
nathan_compton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your answer has the prejudice than only people and animals can be conscious. 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.

Rephrasing this: What would it take for something not categorized under animal to be considered conscious in your book?

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

#42

Post by spacephysics »

delichon wrote: post #27
seba_dos1 wrote: post #3

Parts of the cosmos for sure are and there's no need to look very far for it - for example the part that forms me writing this right now is, in fact, conscious.

If the cosmos is conscious in the way that we are and the speed of light proves to be a limit, then its thoughts would take thousands or millions of years to process. It may be compelled to leverage entities with cogitation components within light seconds of each other for fast thinking. The Thinking, Fast and Slow paradigm could be built into the shape of the universe. If the slow thinkers seek to constrain the fast…

Not at all qualified to mention this, as a googler wouldn’t quantum entanglement be a counter example to faster-than-light travel?

So we’re still within the speed of light limit, but information can be “passed”

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

#44

Post by CuriouslyC »

nathan_compton wrote: post #32
fooker wrote: post #14

[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…

Consciousness is observable huh? By rights you are a philosophical zombie, and only your passing resemblance to me - who I know from first principles possesses consciousness - gives even an inkling that you possess actual consciousness.

You are suffering from the a little knowledge is a dangerous thing trap. This rabbit hole goes much deeper than you think, you just haven't developed awareness to recognize that yet.

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

#46

Post by User23 »

titzer wrote: post #39

The arguments to fine-tuning are utterly remedial. I can't believe that no one in their orbit ever brought up the anthropic principle [1]. We are not randomly distributed over possible universes; we are embedded in a universe that is by definition capable of supporting our existence (and indeed giving rise to it). It doesn't matter how stupidly improbable it is. Observer effect is off the charts! Second, in evolution…

The anthropic principle has equal explanatory power to “because it did.” Making up a story about a cosmic crow shitting out the universe has equal explanatory power and it at least offers a reason.

And obviously we know the crow shit it out because if it didn’t we wouldn’t be here!

Also you failed to explain why the universe is organized such that random processes exhaustively explore the state space of potential configurations such that you’re here to say it did. Why was there a quantum field to be in a vacuum state to begin with? Or whatever the leading explanation for the beginning of the “lol so random” cosmology is.

Remedial indeed.

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

#47

Post by lo_zamoyski »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #10
monero-xmr wrote: post #2

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…

I hold that both of your positions lack basic metaphysical sophistication. I also submit that one source of potential error is a shared, but discredited metaphysical stance. However, if you have a sincere and humble interest in this subject matter, one open to correction, I would recommend "The Last Superstition"[0] as a starting point. There is no point in running in circles, because you can examine your presuppositions to discover the sources of your errors. And once you do so, you will see the intuitions you have absorbed through various cultural sources contain very serious errors.

[0] https://a.co/d/2qTcFlw

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

#48

Post by scarmig »

nathan_compton wrote: post #33
danbruc wrote: post #31

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.

How would you evaluate whether other entities with sophisticated information processing behaviors are conscious or not? Just outright rejecting anything that does information processing on a substrate very dissimilar to ours?

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

#49

Post by tsimionescu »

cowsup wrote: post #17
crunchycensus wrote: post #6

This is a lot of working backwards. I find this interesting but ultimately not compelling. I see a lot of: "If things were different than the way they are, they couldn't work they way that they work!"

Agreed, I find lots of these "what is the universe?" questions fall apart, due to the fact that humans aren't great at figuring out what we don't know. Just a thousand years ago, our smartest minds had a very different idea of what "space" was, how our solar system behaved, and even the shape of our planet, but it made sense to them at the time with the technology they had, so it's hard to mock them. For us to theori…

I generally agree, though one small caveat - the shape and even size of the Earth was pretty well known to scholars since ancient times, at least since the 3rd century BCE, both in the Hellenistic world and in India.

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

#50

Post by teaearlgraycold »

titzer wrote: post #39

The arguments to fine-tuning are utterly remedial. I can't believe that no one in their orbit ever brought up the anthropic principle [1]. We are not randomly distributed over possible universes; we are embedded in a universe that is by definition capable of supporting our existence (and indeed giving rise to it). It doesn't matter how stupidly improbable it is. Observer effect is off the charts! Second, in evolution…

It's absurd and frustrating. This is something I wondered about as a child and subsequently immediately realized we are observing from a biased perspective. It's not as though we have millions of independent universes to look at and they're all perfect for the formation of life.
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