9 ms·
Is the Universe Conscious?
- sgarrity 9y agoYes?
- cvaidya1986 9y ago“The Spirit by which all this universe is pervaded, is indestructible. No one can destroy the imperishable Spirit. - Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2 Yoga of Knowledge Sankhya Yoga Verse 17” searchgita.com
- runeks 9y agoGiven that I am conscious, and I am part of the universe, I conclude that the universe is conscious. Or, at the very least, the universe cannot be entirely unconscious, since I am part of the universe and I am conscious.
- danielam 9y agoIn the same way a room becomes conscious the moment a person walks into it.
- runeks 9y agoA room and a person in it can be considered separate. But nothing in existence can be considered separate from the universe, since the universe is everything in existence. So, to use your example, a room with a conscious person in it, considered as one whole, is at the very least partially conscious, since the person in it is conscious. Whether the room itself is conscious we don't quite know. But this leads to the question: does the notion of "partially conscious" make sense?
- danielam 9y agoSo, 1. a room and a person in it are separate 2. nothing is separate from the universe Therefore, there are two things that are not separate from the universe but separate from each other.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- runeks 9y agoSeparation is a matter of perspective. A room with a person in it can be viewed as one whole, and saying that this room-person is only partially conscious is equivalent to saying that, because my teeth are not conscious and my teeth are part of me, I’m only partially conscious.
- JackFr 9y ago> Separation is a matter of perspective. Indeed separation is matter of consciousness. If we believe that the universe is more or less a frothing foam of energetic particles, the only thing that differentiates my teeth from my gums and me from the room is my recognition and identification of them. There is matter with or with out me, but there is no room, no tooth, no me without my consciousness.
- danielam 9y ago"[...] the universe is more or less a frothing foam of energetic particles [...]" "Particles" is plural, implying separation. It that, too, a "matter of consciousness"? Sounds a lot like "consciousness" is being used to do a lot of passing of the proverbial buck.
- andrewla 9y agoAnd how a body becomes non-conscious the moment the brain is removed.
- mr_overalls 9y agoI would argue that the room (or the space enclosed by it) _does_ become capable of satisfying certain definitions of consciousness.
- johndoe489 9y agoHere is a similar argument from Alan Watts illustrated by Matt Stone and Trey Parker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA3NLyQNDBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA3NLyQNDBQ Another way to look at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEunth9YCgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEunth9YCgo (You are the Big Bang)
- mannykannot 9y agoThis appears to be extreme anti-reductionism: the determined refusal to acknowledge that a property of a compound entity could be wholly explained by part of it. Why does the presence of a person in a room make a difference, as opposed to any other relationship between the two things?
- mabub24 9y agoBut that doesn't align with how we use the concept of consciousness. A bug is conscious - we put a bug in a bottle - we say the bug is in a bottle. We don't say the bottle is conscious like the bug, we say the bug is conscious in a bottle. A human engulfed in fire is not a conscious fire beyond a poetic turn of phrase. We don't say houses are conscious in the same way human's are. We might say a house is "aware of something" in the same way we say a house is "conscious of something", not to mean exhibiting the mark of the mental but to mean every person contained is aware of a certain thing; but if we're using the concept of consciousness in the way this article is using the concept, not as being aware, but as a mark of the mental, we don't ever apply that to a house because that is nonsensical. We would say "you don't mean the house, you mean the people inside." The entire starting question seems nonsensical. If we conclude the universe, or a star, is conscious like us we've stretched the concept of consciousness to absurdity or metaphysical wankery.
- uoaei 9y agoBeing inside of something is different from being a part of something.
- Arun2009 9y agoThat may be a fallacy of composition - what's true of a part or a component needn't be true of the whole. For example, your cells divide, they are part of you, but you do not divide.
- unabst 9y agoTo borrow the logical construct from the OP: > Or, at the very least, I cannot be entirely indivisible, since cells are part of me and they are dividing. The point is more that the universe must have the capacity for consciousness within it's inner-workings, much like divisibility must be inherent in any biological system -- more so than "cells" being divisibile -- we're after the notion of divisibility itself.
- pavement 9y agoIt sure is, and no less than several billion times over, at least, depending on how you count, and that's just on this planet alone.
- carapace 9y ago"Is the Universe Conscious?" on nbcnews.com has to be some sort of cultural milestone.
- kwoff 9y agoYeah the NBC News article, from June 2017, someone "recently published a paper" -- in July 2016 (I suppose on a cosmic scale...). At the risk of...ad-hominism, the site they linked doesn't inspire confidence. For one thing, the peer-review process: http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/about/editorialPolicies#peerRe... is basically two editors from the same company, and eventually one or more of a group of "advisors" ( http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/about/displayMembership/3 http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/about/displayMembership/3 ), 7 out of 17 being "Independent Researchers".
- QAPereo 9y agoAssuming that c is really the speed of causality, then no, there’s a limit to large scale structures or operations in an expanding universe.
- akvadrako 9y agoI suppose that's true based on what we know. But perhaps there is a way to demonstrate it's only a temporary split and the universe will come back together when we (as in the universe) are done considering two thoughts in parallel.
- danenania 9y agoDoesn't the inflation theory contradict this? If expansion (or contraction) of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could theoretically enact causality faster too right? Or even more theoretically, isn't it also possible that distant regions of our universe could be adjacent in other dimensions? Perhaps in some higher (or lower?) dimension, every particle in the universe is right next to each other, having never separated after the big bang. Not that any of this is particularly likely, but since we don't understand the core mechanisms of consciousness very well, it seems possible they could be operating on levels of physics that we also don't understand yet.
- jerf 9y ago"If expansion (or contraction) of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could theoretically enact causality faster too right?" Well, if you're looking to claim that the universe used to be conscious prior to inflation, at which point it was torn to pieces in every direction possible simultaneously, sure. Probably not what you were fishing for, though. "Not that any of this is particularly likely, but since we don't understand the core mechanisms of consciousness very well, it seems possible they could be operating on levels of physics that we also don't understand yet." Well, if the universe is operating in that manner, it would have to be doing so with some rather tight bounds on it to ensure that we never ever have to take those things into consideration when plotting the behavior of a system. I would tend to say this falls into the "raises more questions than it answers" bucket, myself. If consciousness is a complicated phenomenon that only manifests in some sort of very small way in certain interactions, then A: what are those interactions? and B: by what mechanism is the universe even discovering those interactions? It's not hard to imagine a universe that has physics just like ours, except that a particular combination of 10 to the 11th atoms of carbon in a very precise linked order will spontaneously emit very large quantities of blue light. But without a clue as to what that may be, how is anything in the universe ever supposed to find that pattern of atoms? That is, if this is how consciousness works and there is some sort of very ill-defined, handwavey "field" associated with it, by what mechanism did anything in the universe discover how to interact with it? These are not necessarily forever unanswerable questions, but right now, they would in many ways be bigger questions than the question they are putatively being offered as the answer to.
- muxator 9y agoSimilar discussion from some time ago: [0]. TL;DR a galaxy is too big for letting any sort of meaningful intelligence develop. The latency of signals would severely limit the complexity of the "brain". Edit: moreover, on a less serious stance, there is always [1], which reassures us that the answer to such a question would inevitably be "no", when the question is posed as part of an headline. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395585 [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...
- corpMaverick 9y ago>> Latency... That shouldn't be a problem if the quantum particles are entangled. right? >> which reassures us that the answer to such a question would inevitably be "no The Universe doesn't care about such laws ;)
- bcherny 9y agoYou still can't move information faster than light.
- singularity2001 9y agounless maybe you are super intlligent and found new physics
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- d0lph 9y agoCurious about this, is there some sort of study I can read?
- bcherny 9y agoI am not a physicist, but as I understand it this is a basic law of physics, and is a consequence of relativity. > It is not possible, however, to use this effect to transmit classical information at faster-than-light speeds [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
- nabla9 9y agoThere are may ways to argue for panpsychism. So far I have solid and interesting arguments only from David Chalmers. Most others, like Penrose, make basic errors or hand wave too much to my taste.
- uoaei 9y agoWould you please link to some of the Chalmers pieces you like?
- nabla9 9y agoHis all papers are here: http://consc.net/all-papers-by-date/ http://consc.net/all-papers-by-date/ Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism. Amherst Lecture in Philosophy, 2013. http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf The Combination Problem for Panpsychism. In (G. Bruntrup and L. Jaskolla, eds.) Panpsychism. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf
- Shendare 9y agoI like the idea on some level, but could consciousness be separated from biological motivations like pleasure and pain? That feels more like the idea of universe-as-computer than in the examples of conscious, living celestial bodies.
- modzu 9y agoa "dominant" theory of consciousness is a bit of a misnomer that is to say, - most scientists would hesitate to say they have a clue - philosophers have all kinds of ideas but all with epistemological issues - your average joe would probably equate consciousness with the "soul"
- danielam 9y ago"As I have argued there and elsewhere, naturalism cannot in fact be salvaged. It either collapses into Rosenberg-style eliminativism, which is (hard as Rosenberg tries to make it work) ultimately incoherent; or, in order to do justice to the aspects of reality that even many of Nagel’s critics acknowledge to be irreducible, is either transformed into the panpsychism of Whitehead, Chalmers, and Strawson, or entails a return to an essentially Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy of nature [...]" http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/06/mind-and-cosmos-roundup.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/06/mind-and-cosmos-roun...
- asow92 9y agoAre we part of the universe? Check. Are we conscious? Check? (probably yes). Does that make the universe transitively conscious? Partially at least, I suppose, yes it does. As far as the universe as a whole being conscious: Latency is problem, but when you're the universe I imagine you've got a lot of time on your hands.
- kfrzcode 9y ago> Latency is problem, but when you're the universe I imagine you've got a lot of time on your hands. Best sentence I've read all month
- danenania 9y agoIs there a universe outside of our consciousness? This cannot be proven, so if it is to be believed, it must be a matter of faith. Consciousness is the only thing we can be certain of.
- SerLava 9y agoIt can be proven. Look down at your navel. Did you know about that lint? It was outside of your consciousness. Maybe that lint was it, but probably not.
- akvadrako 9y agoThat doesn't prove it - maybe you just decided there was lint there when you looked down.
- JeffreyKaine 9y agoI think therefore I am?
- kazinator 9y agoI think, therefore I avoid vacuous statements like "I am therefore I am"; moreover, I think I am.
- Alex3917 9y ago> to Carl Sagan intoning that “we are made of star stuff” I like how Carl Sagan’s most famous quote is him just dumbing down the lyrics of a Joni Mitchell song so that his audience could understand it.
- derefr 9y agoIgnoring the whole "speed-of-light delays make galaxy-brains impossible" thing, here's a different argument I'm fond of: A conscious mind has an at-least-somewhat-coherent preference function, yes? (Under modern predictive-processing models of the brain, the experience of being a mind is the experience of focusing on things that allow you to make reward-biased predictions, to further drive embodied processes like movement to "unify" those biased predictions with the environment—i.e. to seek the reward state. So you need a preference function to focus, and thereby to have a train of thought.) So, the Earth might be conscious. Despite seeing ourselves as different from e.g. spiders, or algae, or bacteria, every preference-function of Earth-based life is actually rather close-together in possible-preference-function-space. You could say that the Earth—i.e. everything on Earth that thinks—"wants" to spread carbon-based life through mitosis and meiosis. If the Earth was a starship, this would be its mission. The universe, on the other hand? Maybe if we're the only life in it. Otherwise, there's probably a https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer somewhere with a very different idea of what the universe "wants", that can't really be coherently combined with our own. If such a universe had a brain, it would necessarily be one with split-brain syndrome; it wouldn't be able to both "be" Earth-based life and "be" a paperclip-maximizer at the same time, and still have consciousness in the sense we define it. So, not "one" consciousness, no.
- jonreem 9y agoIf it's possible for the Earth to have "one" consciousness while containing both the Cheetah and the Gazelle, the universe can reconcile us and a paperclip maximizer.
- derefr 9y agoIf you assume that the Earth has a consciousness, then individual beings on its surface are more like cells in a body than like separate minds. The minds of the individual components aren't "part of" that consciousness, in the way that mental schema are a part of a brain; they're more like neurons, or other nerve cells elsewhere in the body, literal parts of the brain. You wouldn't derive your idea of what a brain is thinking from what an individual nerve cell "wants" (cells "want" ATP, mostly); you'd only derive it from what that cell does in response to stimuli from other cells, and how that maps to thinking at a larger level. A human being wants things that often involve the destruction of its various cells. We want to drink alcohol sometimes, for example. This is possible because our preference-function has no factor for the preferences of the individual cells killed in the process. They aren't a semantic part of our mind. They're just a literal part of our bodies. A hypothetical Earth-Mind wouldn't have a preference-function derived via coherent extrapolated volition of all Earth-life. Its mind would simply be the set of preferences the Earth seems to have if you're an alien trying to interact with "the Earth" as a coherent being, on some scale where the actions of individual cells (e.g. humans) don't matter as much as the actions of the biosphere as a whole. Maybe with action-and-reaction observed over a time-scale of billions of years, for example. That preference function might be observed to be, for example, "install replicating carbon-based life onto anything that comes into contact with it." Or "capture solar radiation into ongoing surface chemistry." Note that these are coincidentally things that some of the individual cells also want, but again, the cells in existence at any given moment and their wants aren't anything you can use to deduce the preferences of the mind. It's more what cells are kept in existence and given more resources over time—especially in response to specific stimuli—that allow you to make educated guesses about what a multicellular agent is "trying" to do. (With the proviso that those cells shouldn't also be clearly fighting the rest of the organism in doing so; a model that predicts that animals want to get cancer is a bad model.) Presuming humans terraform the planet completely, the preference-function of the Earth as a whole might seem to end up as "transform all raw materials into structures, items, and cells suitable as inputs to sustain the life of the 'human' cell-line." This is a higher-level thought-process that could be found, but it wouldn't erase the lower level; the Earth-Mind would still look to have those other desires, because humans are still carbon-based life and still do carbon-based life things. Just like our own brain cells, despite being the "dominant cell-line" of our bodies, still function as cells in a body. Humans are "embodied" by our biosphere just like our brain cells are "embodied" by other cell-lines. And so it still makes sense to talk to a human by talking to its body, rather than directly to its brain—and it still makes sense to talk to "the [terraformed] Earth" rather than talking to humans. On the other hand, the "observed mind" of a planet with a paperclip-maximizer on it wouldn't look anything like a natural-biosphere or human-driven-biosphere. It would just look like the single paperclip-maximizer's mind. A paperclip-mamixizer isn't part of a biosphere; it's a monocellular culture, the preferences of the whole identical to the preferences of the individual entities. And those preferences are completely orthogonal to the preferences of a biosphere. If Earth came into contact with a paperclip-maximizer, their interaction wouldn't look like a coherent mind at work; it would look like two minds each blindly attempting to achieve their own goals with no greater purpose in their collision. The point I hold out on is that, if you interact with the Universe as a whole, on a scale where things like biospheres are the "cells", and attempt to ascertain its preference-function, you won't get anything sensible out. Unlike Earth, where both the Cheetah and the Gazelle "serve" to tree-search a set of biological machines that started with Earth's first carbon-based replicators, an interaction between the Earth-Mind and the Paperclipper-Mind doesn't serve to "do" anything. The behaviour of the interaction wouldn't throw off byproducts that would be of use to anyone trying to predict anything. The Universe, as an experiment containing multiple orthogonally-preferenced agents, is purposeless; unlike Earth itself, there is nothing from which an alien standing outside of it could infer the hand of an intelligent designer—a mind at the Universe's scale that found it useful to set its "cells" in motion in the way the Universe has been set in motion. Which makes sense, I think; the "intelligent designer" of the Earth-Mind was the first carbon-based replicator, but there was no equivalent process that "took over" the Universe as a whole to infuse it with a self-similar cluster of optimization-processes.
- visarga 9y agoI see consciousness as a way to describe the reinforcement learning process for an agent in an environment. Thus I try to see if a universe consciousness would have the characteristics of an RL agent. What would such a conscious universe be conscious of? Would it need to feed, mate, learn and defend itself? If there is no utility, no purpose, then why would it be conscious? At least in biological life, there is an internal purpose - that is - to live and self reproduce. The consciousness of the universe would not have such needs, and with their loss, it would lose all that evolution achieved.
- zzzeek 9y agoBy some definitions, proving this would objectively prove God exists.
- singularity2001 9y agoby some definitions the converse would not be necessarily true: if God reveals her/himself to you, she would still need to prove that he controls the whole universe. unless you believe them.
- Animats 9y agoOh, Penrose. He comes up with weird theories of consciousness every once in a while. His basic argument is that for some reason consciousness in a deterministic universe runs into undecidability, and therefor consciousness must require some quantum phenomenon to work. It's a big jump from "some stars emit jets that seem to move them in a non-random direction" to "consciousness".
- y04nn 9y agoStrange coincidence, today I was thinking about the same thing in the opposite way while walking next to a highway. Humans are not 100% rational like elementary particles in quantum physics, and they were all in cars moving in a predictable way like H2O molecules in a river. And it made me wondering if there is a possibility of consciousness that we try to describe with physics laws but will never be able to totally understand because of an underling consciousness.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bootcat 9y agoYoga and Hinduism have always been preaching this. The universe and for that matter, even a stone is a living entity. There is a higher cosmic intelligence and consciousness that is capable of taking macro/micro decisions.
- vorg 9y ago> Penrose sums up this connection beautifully in his opus "The Road to Reality": “The laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.” This circular thinking breaks down at "mathematics can encode in a succinct and inspiring way the laws of physics". The laws of physics are partitioned into at least three different sub-theories, none of which have been successfully encoded with another sub-theory using mathematics, i.e. General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and the laws arising from the directedness of Time. (That last one could include the Theory of Consciousness if entropy causes brain memories, and memories cause consciousness.) Perhaps because physics produces consciousness, and consciousness produces mathematics, mathematics can never describe a united theory of physics.