Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?(heraldscotland.com) |
Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?(heraldscotland.com) |
Despite how little we are capable of understanding at such a scale, I still think its fun to postulate what might be the utility of all this reality. For example, in the cloudflare HQ there is a wall of lava lamps, which are imaged and used to establish random seeds. Perhaps our own universe be another's wall of lava lamps, generating a random seed?
And how surprising would it be if, in one of our skin cells, there would be a life form that, through their scientific advancements, actually understands how the body works :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ricks_Must_Be_Crazy
> In the episode, Rick and Morty go inside Rick's microverse car battery, an entire verse that generates electricity to power Rick's car, unbeknown to the citizens of the microverse. Zeep Xanflorp, a scientist in the microverse, creates his own microverse, thus stopping the flow of energy to Rick's car.
Size has nothing do with ability to understand things, so this doesn't make sense.
I don't know if they mean "everyone", "everyone, except, of course, me", "everyone and isn't it a shame that they don't even realize it?", "everyone who isn't specially educated".
I am perfectly capable of internalizing and understanding a billion, trillion, or even quadrillion of something-- be they meters, light years, number of atoms of something, or grains of sand, thank you very much.
(Extra bits edited in follow:)
I detect another implied point, which is that there are levels of ability to reason. That is, by analogy with cells, which are dumb, inside a human, which is smart, the supposition is that humans are relatively dumb components inside a universe which is super-smart. This relies on the concept of super-smart having a meaning. (It also implies that the cells are less than totally dumb.) Then humans are somewhere on a sliding scale between totally dumb and infinitely smart. But I see no reason to make this supposition that such a scale exists or has any meaning. So far as I can see, there's only one kind of reasoning and it doesn't have levels.
I guess there's things like squirrels solving puzzles to get nuts out of a container. But I think that's a different function from understanding stuff.
We have managed to hack our own limited intelligence by using collective memory so we aren't starting from zero every generation, but we still aren't naturally inclined to come up to things we readily understand at our scale and grasp what they might represent on much smaller or larger scales than our own. Even for people trained in these fields it is extremely challenging due to the problems with scale and our frame of reference. We had to develop things like microscopes and telescopes to take objects small and large and either magnify them or reduce them to something we can actually begin to make guesses about at our scale.
This seems separate from capacity to understand them, after gaining the ability to observe them.
I'm not convinced by the second part, about human knowledge becoming too gnarly for humans to cope with except by group effort. This a breadth vs. depth question, but depth is the winner over time I think.
If this is the measure of outlandishness, it’s super outlandish. Unless you were indoctrinated starting at a young age of course. In any event, to me it’s a dismissing argument.
If it wasn't maybe he would'nt be here to ask the question.
The universe may
be as great as they say.
But it wouldn't be missed
if it didn't exist.
Also we cannot even tell for sure if other people are conscious.
"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself" (Carl Sagan)
It also might explain how there seem to be different levels of consciousness. In a lower level of consciousness, the brain is acting like a poor lens.
I think we don’t know what consciousness is, but I posit that it is something more substantial than a bunch of electrochemical reactions, although it seems like electrochemical reactions are necessary for its existence as far as we can tell.
Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]
> “Once you pass a certain point of improbability, it’s no longer rational to say it’s a fluke. If people break into a bank and there’s a 10-digit combination for the safe and they get it the first time, nobody would say ‘oh, they just guessed it’. That’s too improbable.
> “So the alternative is that this isn’t a fluke, that the numbers in physics are there because they’re the right numbers for life. In other words, there’s some kind of ‘directedness’ towards life at the basic level of physics.”
Doesn't Bayesian posterior probability already explain such situations? Asking if something is a fluke after the fluke has occurred does not make it a result of some divine intervention. Similarly, saying the universe is too finely tuned (as a result of consciousness or God or something similar) is asking the question post the improbable event: if the universe was not finely tuned, we would not be here to ask the question in the first place.
Where did you learn these suspiciously specific neuroscientific facts from?
I think this philosopher dude isn't the only person in this thread who has rather ambitious ideas about how things work.
Is there any reason whatsoever to believe either of these?
Not a reason, but there are many people that have had experiences that align with panpsychism
It's not necessarily something that you have to believe, like a made-up story. Instead, it's something that you can experience for yourself (either through yoga, meditation, breathing, psychedelics or other forms of attaining different states of consciousness)
Edit: (can't reply to the reply) @tsimionescu it seems you just want to contradict whatever I say, that's your personal opinion. If you want a reason, you can come up with a thousand different ones. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, just offering a point of view for a, hopefully interesting, conversation
The main argument is “fine-tuning”: the fact that global constants in the universe are in an optimal state for existence of complex matter and, by extension, humanity. For me, the simplest explanation is the anthropic principle, or survivorship bias. If the constants weren’t optimal, we wouldn’t be able to make this observation.
The article barely touches this obvious explanation, and uses weak “multi-universe” theory. And refutes this strawman in a weird, in my opinion demagogic way (see for yourself).
Also: this line of thinking doesn’t refute creationism! The only argument against creationism was made against omnibenevolent god, so creationism was also strawmanned.
I regret that this article has gained so much attention on HN.
The level of arrogance here is absolutely laughable. I would strongly recommend even a high school level theology class to this poor philosopher before he hurts himself.
> He cites Occam’s razor – the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the best. What makes greater sense to you – the God of the Bible or one of the other world religions, the meaninglessness of an atheistic universe, a multiverse, a flawed designer god, or a conscious universe? Perhaps, none. Perhaps, it all seems nonsense to you. Perhaps, humanity will never find an answer.
> “Why believe in a supernatural creator that stands outside the universe if you can just attribute consciousness and intention to the universe itself? The physics just gives us the maths, there must be something that underlies the maths. I argue it’s a ‘conscious mind’, and strange as that may sound it’s no less extravagant than the other options.”
What the heck, man. I'm really not qualified to comment on the whole fine-tuning argument, as suspect as it seems to me, because I don't know a lick of physics or anything about the calibration of the universe's variables or whatever, but to excuse the leap made here with "Occam’s razor" is simply incredible to me.
Can we not agree by now? Minds evolved. Their evolutionary value is obvious. Someone shared an amazing article on HN recently about chemotaxis in E. Coli recently. It's an incredible illustration of how, from the _obviously purely physical_ nanomachinery of the cell, there seems to emerge a creature with genuine "interests" - that is attracted and averse to things in its environment according to their survival value, and even possesses a "memory" and other seemingly proto-mental capacities.
So now we have this Goff fellow positing a minded universe as an explanation for fine-tuning. And it is meant to serve as an explanation in that minds have "certain goals and aims". But the "goals and aims" of minds are explained by the fact that they are the products of natural selection. In a meaningless physical universe without values, values will be manifest within the perspective of creatures created with implicit imperatives (reproduction, homeostasis, survival, whatever we want to say is being selected for). The idea that the whole universe has a mind which has values (goals, whatever), values which in turn serve to explain fine-tuning (it's just what the universe wanted!), seems to me to be insane, because where the hell did that mind come from, why does it have goals, why are its nature and provenance it so radically unlike all the evolved minds that we actually know exist? Occam's razor???
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.
If you have 10 minutes watch this video of a cardiac surgeon whose patient had a near death experience:
The most arrogant thing I could possibly imagine thinking, is that I know all of the mysteries of the universe and what happens when we die.
"[The atrophic principle] tends to be invoked by theorists whenever they do not have a good enough theory to explain the observed facts." - Roger Penrose
Isn't the anthropic principle just the most recent god-of-the-gaps argument - i.e. a de facto mystery explanation of things we can't otherwise explain...?
I suppose that (to me) if or when the multi-verse theory becomes a falsifiable theory AND is empirically validated, then awesome we have the explanation pre-baked (the anthropic principle).
But until then, there doesn't seem to be grounds to say it's 'remedial'.
But curious for your thoughts, it's not my area of expertise beyond a layman's interest.
That's comes with the 'general purpose nerd messageboard' territory, it's in some way true for almost everything posted. It's got lengthy caselaw:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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.
The anthropic principle doesn't explain a goddamn thing! It rejects the notion that we need an explanation for some things, because they could as well as been randomly chosen and we'd still be here all the same with absolutely no why whatsoever.
Simply: Reality doesn't have "why"s. Reality has forces and fields or equivalent systems.
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! 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".
>and what happens when we die
It's more arrogant to think that you are more than a biological machine. 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?
Does every other living being on this earth move on to something else? Humans aren't special. We are animals no different than anything else on this planet.
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).
If there’s a creator, then this creator fellow must live in an even bigger, nicer universe within which ours exists. Now, where does that come from?
I don't know what the creator's purpose is. I just know we are part of something far larger and far greater. When we die, we go to another place.
If your answer is some variant on "just because" then you don't have a better theory than some kind of necessary causality or contingency, in fact you have a mere absence of contemplation altogether.
I never imagined "don't think about it" as being the metaphysical basis of the scientific enterprise though and it's hard to imagine science getting as far as it has if it were.
It also solve zero real-life problems, but the presence of structures like DNA and self-replicating cells does solve a problem, i.e. they fit inside something much larger than itself, requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created.
Not sure what you mean here. Evolution doesn't work by rolling all the dice at once and only selecting a winner if all the dice match some magic string. Evolution is a selective tuning process; it works (figuratively) by rolling all the dice at once and keeping the dice that do match the magic string and then re-rolling the rest[1].
[1] Of course that's not how evolution actually works. It works by selecting very tiny slightly different versions of things in a biased way. Those biased versions of things just happen to be things that can make more of themselves, and so the system automatically selects for things that good at self-replicating and surviving. Evolution doesn't jump all over the place with infinite improbabilities, it is actually a very systematic and even somewhat predictable exploration of the fitness landscape.
Granted only a few people have been able to transcend materialism since the beginning of history, but it's all the same either way.
Reality is axiomatic. Either we're here and a part if it or reality doesn't exist.
So in the same way, if under the effects of psychedelics you get a sense that everything around you is conscious in some way, that's a valid experience, but it does not mean we should take an absurd idea like panpsychism seriously as a theory of reality.
You will continue to exist as long as conscious life is able to propagate. For me, it makes sense that a state of nonexistence can't exist. Your consciousness is not unique, it's only a physical phenomena, thus it can be replicated, and it doesn't even have to be exact, after all, you are the ship of Theseus. When you make a clone and kill the original, the clone is the original, exactly. Like waking up from a dream, to suddenly being teleported somewhere. When you go to sleep, why don't you wake up as a rabbit? Who says you don't? Consciousness so far can only be examined from the outside but this does not deny our subjective conscious experience. I believe that when you die you will just move on, not as the same person, but as another conscious being. Eternal life. Essentially immortal, but you lose everything, and you're unaware of it. Even if 5 million years have to pass, you will just wake suddenly wake up.
I also believe consciousness is not quantifiable, but shared, and you just have a narrow perspective at a time. When you die I'd say you don't even have to wake up as a newborn, you could just spontaneously be another person, as long as there's no other path of continuity.
But what if the original lives on? What if you ship-of-theseus-like swap half of the clone's and the original's brain?
> Your consciousness is not unique, it's only a physical phenomena,
We have zero evidence for that – but then again, there's also zero evidence for people other than yourself being conscious in the first place, although there are compelling arguments.
I agree, but I would go 1 step further and say: we are all human, yet experience life as individual beings rather than the sum of the species. Similarly, we are all alive and conscious, as the trees in the forest, as the bugs that dwell within, and as the bacteria that dwell within the bugs. It’s all happening right now, but we experience a small, linear slice because we are separated by our brains.
Due to the sense of self that arises from having a brain, we consider ourselves just an instantiation of a member of our species, but i firmly believe that the same life-force (the soul?) is living as all beings, simultaneously. Most probably across the universe.
That’s why when we hurt other people/animals and the environment that which they make up, we end up only hurting ourselves. Buddhists have the concept of Karma. Islam has the concept of a Judgement day where animals, plants and even the ground you stepped on, would speak against you if you transgressed against them during your life. I don’t think these are simply stories made up to keep us in line whilst we’re on this planet - I believe that there may be something more to all of this.
On a side note: I wonder if there exists a world where the predominant life forms are literally connected? Not by DNA history, but by something physical whereby they can share the same brain/experience whilst in different bodies. A literal hive mind. I wonder if that would be more conducive to cooperation on a global scale vs the way life evolved on Earth through competition?
I believe there is a case of conjoined twins where they are sharing the same brain part, having two brains, being able to feel each other's stimuli and emotions, although I've only heard of it.
> This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'
Could the cosmos, in fact, be smurpity-badoingo?
He then points out that if you ask random children to make up the story of how the universe was created, the story they tell you will (essentially without fail) fall under one of these 3 categories, and you can also categorize which one the children tend to favor based on stages of development. Very young children tend to favor animism and participationism, while older children (who are becoming more self-aware of their dependence on their parents) tend to favor creationism of some kind.
In some sense, the search for consciousness where it doesn't exist feels like a misfiring of the human need to personify. People were afraid of robots long before there was any chance for them to possess AI. When people dreamed about space, they primarily dreamed about encountering other conscious beings. In other words, if a dog could think about other planets he would wonder how they smell. Not because that's an inherently meaningful question, but because that's the question that aligns primarily with their interests. It's the same with people: we look for consciousness everything, and assume that other things have more value if they can be thought of as conscious.
## bernardo kastrup https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2020/07/the-irony-of-philip-...
## joshua farris https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-missing-subject-a-cri...
## edward faser http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/07/problems-for-goffs-p...
- a purpose - why would the universe need it?
- a mechanism - how would learning occur?
- a source of learning - that is the environment, what is the environment of the universe? doesn't make sense
What I think are good signs for possibility of consciousness:
- a self replicating agent, with the ability to perfectly copy and multiply its code
- limited resources, leading to competition
- other agents, forming a complex environment based on cooperation and competition
Why is it necessary to have many agents? Because evolution is a blind, open-ended search. The more attempts the faster it goes.
Consciousness makes sense for agents who have to navigate complex environments to survive. It needs to be localized, subjective, the universe would not have that property.
Additionally, if we go with the emergence hypothesis, we have to explain the mechanism by which permutations of the states of matter can create a new dimension of "feeling" and "awareness" where one did not already exist. That's a tall order.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (1x08) actually had an episode on this:
https://screenrant.com/strange-new-worlds-boltsman-brain-sta...
For example, let's say you tell me your theory of the universe. And then I say, "Wait a minute, doesn't your theory lead to an infinite stretch of time where random brains can randomly spring into existence?"
If you say, "yes", then I'd say, "If your theory is true, then I'm probably just a Boltzmann brain, and this whole conversation is just a figment of my imagination."
I would assume that I'm probably a Boltzmann brain because the number of Boltzmann brains that ever exist will be far larger than the number of human brains that ever exist. Even if it takes a zillion years for a Boltzmann brain to appear, it will happen zillion times, over an infinite stretch of time.
Sean Carroll discusses this in much more depth in "Why Boltzmann Brains Are Bad" [1]. In the paper, he argues that "the theories that predict [Boltzmann Brains] are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed."
As to it's truth of it, that's somewhat above my pay-grade.
I guess he uses the term less these days because it's too easily dismissed as something esoteric.
If the slow thinkers seek to constrain the fast thinkers we may get away with a lot before they catch up.
If the speed of light is a hard limit, leveraging localized cognition would not be useful at all. The localized cognition would only be able to ponder things it observes or experiences, that is, it can't ponder whatever the conscious universe wants it to, so the universe has to create it where it needs it, and then it can't use this cognition anywhere else because again, the speed of light. It really gets us nowhere.
I think though probably this "consciousness" of the universe, if it exists, is apparent and localized, but not bound and distinct locally, if that makes sense.
This reminds me of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", where pan-dimensional beings waited 7.5 million years for their first super computer to tell them "42". Then they constructed another super computer, Earth, to find the question.
>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.
Thanks for sharing.
So we’re still within the speed of light limit, but information can be “passed”
For us to theorize that which we cannot hope to ever understand makes us no different.
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 at the history of science, when we first thought that the earth was the center of the universe, then found out that the sun is, then found out that the sun is only a small part of a huge galaxy, then to find out our galaxy is just a spec Within hundreds of billions of other galaxies. Doesn’t it make sense that the next step is to discover there are multiple universes?
That depends. Multiple universes don't explain causation. For example if you assert that all things present in the material world you live in (right now) at some point transcended existence in thought only to a material form (the planet didn't build concrete, we did) - how does this fit through entropy in a multiverse? To assert that in a multiverse the causation is defined by tuning, the existence of a universe in contrast to that which we are currently experiencing brings no causation from one to another. To me, this implies that a 'multiverse' is likely not the case; rather - dimensionality within the universe we experience is much more likely the case for a unified cosmos, given the fine tuning.
As Tesla would say, to understand the world you have to understand frequency and vibration. Such as, matter is able to exist in multiple form with the same building blocks, thus extra dimensions would posit why this is possible across relativistic time by the observer. We're bound by our dimension and other dimensions are not.
You and I experience in 3D - but what about other organisms, perhaps they have attained an experience of our cosmos in other dimensions.
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.
Conscious or not, why can't we just continue calling it the universe and continue studying it as usual?
As I remember it, this was Lem's way of critiquing this type of theory and scientist because of its absurd and unfalsifiable nature.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)
No I would say it was a trick. A Derren Brown type trick [0]. I started reading thinking this cosmos bloke was an amazing benefactor, and ended thinking he was scamming me.
I see the world (Earth, specifically, then my perception of it, and ultimately the cosmos behind that) as inherently connected at the most basic of levels. Science has shown us that much of the physical world that we can interact with is uncannily common in structure - we and stars are essentially made up of the same basic materials - as is everything else in the cosmos.
So why then, do we concede a connected cosmos at its core (basic building blocks) and instead seek to dissect this basic cosmic connection - via theism, or reality, creationism or intelligence on cosmic scale?
To me, if everything you can see and touch and interact with was at one point basic building blocks of all things, why would consciousness be different?
More of just a nerd snipe or red herring to waste time on.
Like working to understand consciousness probably won't actually advance building an GAI in any meaningful way.
Nor will it be the driver of how we interact with our surroundings be it rock, dirt, tree fish, dog, human, robot or universe?
I think that the question of conscience is actually not really relevant in the context of the problems it gets brought up in.
Like morality or artificial intelligence. In these contexts whether something is conscious or not doesn't really have a practical application nor should it be the moral guide for the way we react to things.
I would still believe in not "hurting" "unconcious" things even though the logic would assert that it was okay to do this. And I believe others would struggle with the same.
Like I may still believe that hurting a robot is immoral even though its not "conscious".
I think what I am trying to explain is I don't believe that the level of conciousness of an entity should be the moral guide for how that entity has a right to be treated.
Mostly because of the logical conclusion that it implies: it is alright to treat a lower consciousness entity more poorly than a higher consciousness being.
If we learned that dogs where less conscious or even not conscious would you be okay with treating them poorly?
What I am really saying is I don't think people love their dogs because of there level of consciousness. Its everything else that matters.
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.
The article quotes Goff as saying his ideas "fit into the space between traditional religion and secular atheism": a sort of secular God in the Gaps concept, and he seems uninterested in bringing it out of the gap and into the light.
Kind of a weird survivorship bias?
Seems that consciousness is an awareness of certain stimuli that give rise to novel patterns in our brain, in turn triggering our frontal lobes to notice…
On the other hand, religions have been studying consciousness for thousands of years, and indeed it is not something that can be verified by science.
Then there are things you can very solidly define but never know what they are. We can describe physics, and their applications, but when connecting metaphysical effects down to the constituent quantum processes the whole is unknown. We aren't sensible enough.
The truly wholesome perspective is from outside the universe.
We don't know where it comes from our how to test it, because each individual can only observe their own consciousness.
I mean, really. I feel like having a method of sensation and an ability to react to those sensations is a fundamental basis for "consciousness" and if you can point to the sun or the Local Cluster's sensory apparatus, I may listen to the rest of your (the Editorial You, not the commenter this reply is attached to) argument.
Otherwise, we're just pointing at complex things and saying "does haz Conscience lol?"
I.e. you are saying Stephen Hawking is definitely less conscious than an average human with functioning arms and legs. In its essence, you are too focused on your own experience of reality.
I ask because I've never heard such a definition nor has anyone actually ever told me what the instrument is that detects this. Until then, I figure there's no such thing as consciousness... it's just what superstitious monkeys say now that they feel silly talking about "souls" which is the old word that used to be used for this superstitious concept.
A great example would be trees: trees "sleep", they communicate with each other. They have immune responses, they mate, etc. But there's no coherent reason to think of trees as conscious, unless you just stretch the definition outside of its common meaning.
I.e., in the vain search for the place to draw “the line” between what animals or systems are conscious and which aren’t, (viruses? Amoebas? The smallest insect?) what if consciousness can be seen as a property of existence? Then, clearly, different systems (such as humans) have wildly different experiences (a.k.a. contents of consciousness) than rocks or shrimp or trees etc., but if you take Thomas Nagel’s phrasing for this—that if there is something it is like to be a rock or a shrimp or a tree, then that is conscious—then it seems to me that there IS something that it is like to be the cosmos.
Does the process of evolution "learn"? I'd say empirically yes it does, but there's no organ or part of it that does the learning, learning is just innate as well. The system learns and the evidence of what it has learned are apparent in it's form.
Go down the list, evolution, the biosphere, meets all these criteria except for replication. It hasn't replicated, but it does appear it is learning how to do so. So is the biosphere conscious in it's own way? I don't know, but either answer is problematic for your set of axioms, so I don't think they're correct.
So let's get a little more curious. If I'm conscious, and I'm part of the universe, does that mean that the universe is conscious? And if so, was it conscious in some way before I opened memy eyes for the first time? On the first question I'd argue yes, it is conscious at least to the degree I am and with awareness at least as far as mine goes, seeing as I'm not merely inside the universe, but am an inseparable part of it. Further, though I don't know for certain if there are other conscious beings in the universe, I observe several around me that appear to have the same form and behavior that I have, I'd wager that my parents and such are also conscious, so the universe probably has a consciousness beyond just mine. On the second question, it's not so straightforward, but considering that this consciousness that I have comes from something in the universe I think a "yes" to this one would be more likely to be the right answer than a "no". It would appear that some constants, rules, traits of the universe not only allow for consciousness, but select for it via convergent evolution. There is, at the very least, something fundamental about the universe that emerges as consciousness somewhere inside it.
In a non-panpsychic universe, p-zombies might well have a model of self without being conscious.
The serious answer: consciousness has the role to protect the body by adapting to the environment. At the same time consciousness is based on system trained with environment data, all we know comes from outside.
From a functional computatoinalist POV, consciousness just requires information processing. People who meditate a lot can attest to the fact that conscious experience doesn't even need a self, it doesn't need thoughts, purpose or anything else. Consciousness is just raw awareness (meta-awareness)... however since we know the brain is processing information at some capacity (i.e. search Phineas Gage), then consciousness is something like the running simulation of reality being processed by the brain.
Joscha Bach, Max Tegmark, are two good sources for this perspective.
Can you clarify what we "already know happens"?
Even for humans, it's not clear that "conscious choice" exists and causes changes in state, because we don't know what the mechanism is that can cause a state change other than state at time T-1.
The obvious answer is that pleasure, pain, ideas, memories, etc. all exist to drive the behaviors that are advantageous in evolution.
It’s possible that there’s a deterministic set of gears in how sensation drives behavior, but the role of experience in driving physical action would be at least one of those components.
So if we take evolution as the cause of life as we understand it, then consciousness is at least a component of physics itself.
For me, the real driving idea is that what we call physics is the aggregate behavior of conscious entities making choices, rather than being this framework that consciousness can "override" or worse, something that consciousness is forced to sit and observe. That idea simplifies a lot of the mysteries for me.
This is an inconvenience for every theory of consciousness, isn't it?
You mean, like a newborn baby? That's not a "tall order," that's an everyday affair.
How come chemicals like alcohol can change our consciousness? Or adrenalin?
How is it that the only consciousnesses we are aware of happen to be located in exactly one human body, rather than say only the upper half of one, or fifteen humans, or any other subdivision of the universe's matter? Why is my consciousness not shared with other people's?
To me the hypothesis "human bodies produce consciousness, probably by some mechanism that's shared by lots of life but not necessarily all" is a lot simpler.
There is evidence that the human brain contains many consciousnesses, just look into research on split brain studies. I'm sure you've had the feeling of being aware of what was going on but feeling powerless to stop your behavior, as if you were a passenger in your body, at some point in your life, maybe there's more to that than we want to believe.
Do we know this?
Meh. Seems to me like this is just dressing up the anthropic principle in clerical robes. The scare quotes around the "emergent animate matter" strawman sort of give the game away. There is no such "hypothesis". "Animate matter" is an observation, how it emerged is a question, and a difficult one. But declaring "Because Panpsychism" doesn't constitute an answer any more than "In the Beginning..." did.
Panpsychism says that it doesn't matter how life evolved, because the universe is aware as a matter of fact, so the particulars are unimportant, just the ability to encode, store and transmit information so complexity can develop over time.
>Occam's razor is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements
it's a general principle or _recommendation_, not some law of the universe. Some people might argue that "God wills it" is the simplest explanation for many things, but that doesn't mean it's true. The simplicity of an explanation doesn't necessarily have anything to do with its validity.
In addition, the introduction of panpsychism, just like the introduction of God into any argument, brings up a whole other set of questions that need to be answered -- additional complexity, which is the opposite of Occam's Razor.
Emergence out of complex systems is arguably the simpler explanation, because it's something that's already been observed, measured, and studied, like storms emerging from simpler principles of weather systems.
Or take your computer or smartphone -- do you truly understand all the mechanisms from which we go from "shocking rocks" to create series of on/off signals, to things like communicating on the internet, or watching videos? Is computing and mathematics some inherent property of silicon? Nearly part of a computer, on some fundamental level, is a relatively simple mechanism, and has an almost useless function on its own. Even for engineers who understand every level of abstraction, it must still be near-miraculous that any of this works, even though these emergent properties are deliberately crafted, well-documented, and understood.
Here's a video about GPT transformers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M
His ability to not only understand, but to also effectively communicate these concepts, I'd say makes him one of the smarter people out there. And yet, he remarks, "I don't know about you, but it really doesn't feel like this should actually work." There are still things people don't understand about why AI works the way it does, despite the fact that we built and trained them -- feel free to hit up Claude or your favorite resource for examples on emergent properties. LLMs can be passably apt at things they weren't trained for, and exhibit behaviors weirdly similar to people (like confabulation), despite the fact that their exposure to the world is literally only text.
I'm already imagining ways people could twist this into proof of panpsychism. But the point I'm getting to is that the human body is an absurdly, stupidly complex system of 37 trillion cells. The Milky Way is estimated to have 400 billion stars, at most. Like LLMs, we understand some things about our brains... but the complex interaction of many parts is less easy to understand. The purpose and value of feeling and awareness as a function of survival isn't a "tall order" -- it's just difficult for the human brain to grasp so many moving parts simultaneously. For some people, the complexity of the eyeball alone is proof that there must be a god -- the sheer magnitude of billions of years of brute force trial-and-error is difficult to comprehend.
Human intuition: a potentially powerful, but simultaneously and often error-prone weak force of the human brain.
>Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by conscious choice, which we already know happens
[citation overdue]
I think there are are at least two levels of logical fallacy here, not to mention avenues of undefined and fuzzy circular logic, but I've already spent too much time on this. I'd say try pasting that into Claude or another "big AI" and see what their critique is.
Please explain to me how emergence could create new "dimensions" that didn't exist before. Every emergent system we've ever observed creates unexpected complexity __WITHIN THE CONFINES AND STRUCTURE OF THE SYSTEM__. What you're describing is like if a flock of seagulls moved in unity then teleported to the other side of the earth they were so united - it makes zero sense within the framework, and only by ejecting from the framework can you salvage the notion.
I don't perfectly understand all the steps from zero to smartphone, but I have had enough education to have a decent overview, and I can gain that knowledge if I seek it. What will you study to understand consciousness?
The "emergence" you're describing from LLM behavior is a jump in capabilities that occurs due to complexity, but the LLM is just getting better at what it does, it isn't magically developing the ability to levitate researchers due to emergence, which is what "dumb" matter becoming conscious would be like.
The whole "god in the universe" angle is overblown, the root of panpsychism really is this: We and the rest of the stuff in the universe can perceive, feels, has free will, and makes decisions.
I understand it's hard to let go of your humancentric fallacies. The history of science has been brave men having to fight the power to point out the ways in which humans aren't unique or the center of the universe. Particularly if you're Christian, the idea that everything the bible said about man being god's chosen is bullshit must be a bitter pill to swallow.
You can instantly know the state of another particle by measuring it's twin, but you can't do anything useful with that info until you share the results of your measurements (at the speed of light).
https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/8638/fa...
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15282/quantum-en...
> Panpsychism says that it doesn't matter how life evolved, because the universe is aware as a matter of fact, so the particulars are unimportant,
Which is almost exactly a paraphrase of the concept I just elucidated. But with some weird religious imagery attached. I find that uninteresting.
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.
Why do you mention that if you're arguing that absolutely everything is conscious? Why would brain activity be relevant?
Do we have to interact with it?
Yes, but how can we know about the existence of such observer? There can be infinite number of such observers filling every cubic millimeter of our space, but does it change anything for us? Existence of such observer is as meaningless as orbital teapots [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
Edit: a voice recorder without a tape and battery meets your definition. Is it conscious?
Not really. There are plenty of disorders that destroy a person’s self-awareness but appear to leave a fully conscious person there anyway.
How about conscious is awareness? The more aware you are, the more conscious you are?
We might as well just ask "Is the universe like us?"
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 experience of making a decision" instead of the traditional, nonsensical definition of "the act of making a decision that is fundamentally independent from prior events". Usually free will is framed as "choice vs slavery", which is a useless definition because choices can't be made in a vacuum.
In other words, of course we have free will: We feel like we have free will, and free will is simply the feeling of having free will. Conscious decisions (if those even exist!) are physical processes just like everything else in the universe.
Unless reality is more like Everything Everywhere All At Once, i.e., the Everett many loafs model.
And of course we don’t have free will. We have experience, which fools us into thinking we are in control.
Not sure if you're disagreeing with me, or if you didn't grasp my comment. The quote above is meaningless without defining what free will is and how it can possibly mean anything other than "the experience of decision making".
Decision-making is something that a fully deterministic, non-conscious machine can do. (A motion detector performs decision making based on light input.) Decision-making does not require consciousness. Consciousness is what grants us the ability to experience and reflect on our decision making. It is fair to call that phenomenon "free will."
Defining "free will" as "the ability to make a decision not influenced by our state and inputs (including sensation, memory, etc.)" makes no sense. Decisions are fundamentally dependent on state and inputs*. Any definition of "free will" which ignores that is useless.
They also happen in context, not in a vacuum. Whether or not I make another cup of coffee might come down to fundamentally random quantum events, but that doesn't mean there's any chance I get up and brew a cup of steamy elephant piss because I don't have any on hand.
If the 'universe' is conscious, every cell in your body is as well... and well... they are alive - and they do make 'decisions' that end up keeping (royal)us alive that look intelligent from an outside perspective... which is about the same perspective a large (zero-g evolved) kaiju would have of us {small pieces of a whole that do seemingly intelligent things to benefit the group-entity}...
if we don't consider what we are made of as conscious material - from where does consciousness arise from? ...and until we have a clear answer, maybe it's a sliding scale and everything is some degree of 'awareness'?
In any case to answer where consciousness comes from, consciousness arises from the brain. You can test this with anesthesia, which is markedly different from sleep in that it does remove conscious experience. Although I agree it would be hard to pin down exactly what spectrum of animal is, or is not conscious, I think the extremes are pretty obvious. Obvious, unless, you're trying to extend consciousness to anything which could sense and react to its environment. If you want to call that consciousness, that's fine -- the human experience of having a distinct identity which can feel self-conscious, proud, content, anxious, etc -- is then something different entirely.
Similarly, the sound that comes out of a radio comes from the batteries, you can test this by removing the batteries and seeing that the sound stops.
I believe the typical (mis)understanding proceeds like so: "I am conscious. I not only know things, but I have a sensation of knowing them. This (computer/animal) reacts to things in such a way that it demonstrably knows them in some sense, but it has no sensation of knowing them. Now what is this wonderful thing that distinguishes me from it? How did it come to be? What purpose does it serve?"
One purpose the concept of consciousness serves is that it gives a special ethical status to its possessor. The conscious being needs to care about other conscious beings but can treat those beings without consciousness as tools or resources.
My intuitive sense is that consciousness is present in so many mammals precisely because mammal young require so much care after birth. ie, it is beneficial for a mother to have differentiate between her own consciousness and the consciousness of her children. And, to care for her young and possess an intuitive sense for the needs of her young. It feels like this trait, once bootstrapped, could find other evolutionarily-beneficial behaviors, such as hunting in packs, building cities, or forming competitive social hierarchies. (you can't really have social status without consciousness)
To be clear, I'm not a biologist, and for sure I could be wrong here. I think the general principle holds though -- if a species of animal possesses a trait, then that trait either currently or previously conferred some evolutionary benefit. It's easy enough to think of what those benefits could sensibly be, and of course more difficult to actually go ahead and prove it out.
>I believe the typical (mis)understanding proceeds like so: "I am conscious. I not only know things, but I have a sensation of knowing them. This (computer/animal) reacts to things in such a way that it demonstrably knows them in some sense, but it has no sensation of knowing them. Now what is this wonderful thing that distinguishes me from it? How did it come to be? What purpose does it serve?"
I think that's a really fair characterization, but I also think that this "feeling of what happens" does characterize consciousness. 1) this means that an AI _could_ be conscious, but it would probably also need to have been programmed to sense input and also have some sort of identity. 2) if we don't believe that consciousness is a "feeling of what happens," but instead is just a response to external stimuli, then I would think consciousness is just synonymous with "living things," and there's no point in having a separate concept for it.
>One purpose the concept of consciousness serves is that it gives a special ethical status to its possessor.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that "from the perspective of the conscious being, that person themselves puts more value on themselves or other conscious beings?" -- or, are you saying that "conscious beings _should_ put more emphasis on other conscious beings, and therefore it's important to extend consciousness other things?" I think in either case, I would say that this bias towards other conscious beings is just sort of an in-built human bias, and isn't particularly important when it comes to scientific understanding of consciousness. (from a moral standpoint, I concede it could be important.)
I have no interest in the antiquated view that man is the peak of creation. However, extending consciousness to everything seems to be a spiritual act, and quite distinct from determining a scientific definition of consciousness.
I think the bit that's throwing me is the jump from "we know that consciousness exists" to "therefore the universe as a whole must be is conscious" but I bet I'm misinterpreting this somewhat.
Let's take for granted first that you're convinced of your own consciousness. You're more confident in it you say, though not thoroughly convinced, so let's start there. So in light of the fact that you are not simply a being inside the universe, but an integral, inseparable part of it, is you observing the universe not the universe observing itself? This might not be "the entire universe in totality is a big, pondering mind" but it at least means, again given that you are conscious, that the universe is at least as conscious and aware as you are.
If you're not conscious then there's no starting point from which to even begin this line of inquiry.
There's of course also a variant of Pascal's wager in here, except that this one is logically sound, in my view: If there is free will, why not make use of it? And if there isn't, my beliefs aren't my choice anyway.
And just like from Pascal's wager, we can't derive any actual information about the nature of the universe and our conscious existence in it from that line of reasoning.
Do tell. I also have strong views about free will, but opposing views are worth more than an offhand dismissal.
Also, your doubt in your own free will isn't free, it has a cost. Is that doubt serving you in some way to offset that?
I also don’t think “it’s quite plausible that there is free will but I’m agnostic about it” is a particularly harmful position to have.
Personally, I find it impossible to choose to believe something, all things equal, just because I like the implications. The doubt will always be in the back of my mind, "But what if it's not really true?"
I hold to compatabilism. As far as I can tell, the universe unfolds according to natural laws, and we're no exceptions. But we have agency over our own lives, the decisions we will make matter, and we're free in every way that's meaningful.