12 ms·

Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

94 points by kull 2y ago

nico 2y ago
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
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Sure, and if certain Ancient Greek beliefs are right, thunder is smithed by the god Hephaestos in his forge under mount Etna for Zeus to throw at his enemies. Is there any reason whatsoever to believe either of these?
  - nico 2y ago
    > 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
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      You're giving a (very weak) reason - personal experience while in altered states of mind. Of course, people doing at least some of these practices also personally experience all sorts of other false things, many which they themselves don't believe when outside the altered state, such as vivid hallucinations.
      - hackable_sand 2y ago
        Altered state and personal experience are still a part of the fabric of reality though... They are just different configurations. 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.
        tsimionescu 2y ago
        Let me put it like this. When taking psychedelics, you may see long dead people, hear voices, etc. These things are real experiences, but that doesn't mean that the long dead person really came to visit you, it's just a construct of your mind under the effects of the psychedelic. That experience is of course an aspect of reality, but it is not proof that dead people can sometimes re-materialize and visit us. Not even the person who had the experience believes that (usually). 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.
randogeek 2y ago
The author should brush up on his history. This is panpsychism and it is a very old idea, going back to Spinoza. Einstein was a adherent of that idea as well, in his own way. As to it's truth of it, that's somewhat above my pay-grade.
- fidrelity 2y ago
  Goff being one of the most popular modern panpsychists you're save to assume he's aware of its history. I guess he uses the term less these days because it's too easily dismissed as something esoteric.
- Vox_Leone 2y ago
  In fact, Einstein declared having this religious-like reverence for the “mysterium tremendum” – what scientifically minded person doesn’t after all? The Numinous[0] – which Spinoza and Kant also addressed in their respective works. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous
monero-xmr 2y ago
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 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 we die.
- wk_end 2y ago
  Given that the universe is unfathomably vast and almost all of it is extraordinarily hostile to - and so far as we know, entirely devoid of - life, I can't say I agree.
- eatsyourtacos 2y ago
  >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! 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.
  - catlover76 2y ago
    > Does every other living being on this earth move on to something else? 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).
seba_dos1 2y ago
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.
- delichon 2y ago
  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 thinkers we may get away with a lot before they catch up.
  - spacephysics 2y ago
    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”
    - itishappy 2y ago
      No. Entanglement does not allow information to travel faster than light. 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/faster-than-light-data-transmission-using-entanglement https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/8638/fa... https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15282/quantum-entanglement-faster-than-speed-of-light https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15282/quantum-en...
  - xeromal 2y ago
    So I'm a luddite but this to me is profound. >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.
wetpaws 2y ago
[dead]
cheeselip420 2y ago
We are the cosmos. So of course.
crunchycensus 2y ago
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!"
- cowsup 2y ago
  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 theorize that which we cannot hope to ever understand makes us no different.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    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.
Hoasi 2y ago
Let's hope so.
asdff 2y ago
There are a lot of compelling theories out there for the purpose/true nature of the universe. We are probably orders and orders of magnitude too small ourselves to fully grasp the complexity, like how one of our skin cells don't understand how the body works but coupled into an entire multicellular organism, we can now read an anatomy textbook. 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?
- card_zero 2y ago
  > too small ourselves to fully grasp the complexity Size has nothing do with ability to understand things, so this doesn't make sense.
  - edgyquant 2y ago
    It matters very much when it comes to perspective. The posters point is spot on so unless you have some counter you should just delete yours.
    - card_zero 2y ago
      Perhaps I don't understand the point. "Perspective", you say? I'm thinking that, for instance, a very very large rock does not have an advanced ability to understand things, whereas David Rappaport had a psychology degree. (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.
fooker 2y ago
[flagged]
- danbruc 2y ago
  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.
  - nathan_compton 2y ago
    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.
    - CuriouslyC 2y ago
      Wow, just whoosh. We have data on the behavior of nervous systems, and we have correlates with states of consciousness, not even close to what the GP was talking about.
    - scarmig 2y ago
      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?
      - michaelmrose 2y ago
        What substrate is the universe using and what is it modeling
        scarmig 2y ago
        I'm not defending panpsychism; I'm pointing out that a hand-wavey argument that "consciousness is just something that arises from nervous systems that are ours or very similar systems" doesn't explain or justify itself.
krunck 2y ago
> He contends that the universe is just too perfectly perfect to be an accident. If it wasn't maybe he would'nt be here to ask the question.
- conesus 2y ago
  The universe may be as great as they say. But it wouldn't be missed if it didn't exist. — Piet Hein
ricksunny 2y ago
Boltzmann brain: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (1x08) actually had an episode on this: https://screenrant.com/strange-new-worlds-boltsman-brain-star-trek-space-god/ https://screenrant.com/strange-new-worlds-boltsman-brain-sta...
- hydrolox 2y ago
  the thing with the Boltzmann brain is that, even though it sounds compelling (in a philosophy thought experiment / random thought kind of way), I think there's one main criticism that shuts it down. If the brain is having all these experiences/thoughts itself, it came up with the idea of a Boltzmann brain, and the laws of physics, and logic, etc. So therefore, the laws of physics that Boltzmann brain is using the justify the Boltzmann brain are completely made up by it, and can't really be used as a valid argument.
  - digging 2y ago
    I don't think that's as strong an argument as you're presenting it. If anything can exist, and if randomness can exist, it's simpler for a Boltzmann Brain to exist than for our actual universe to exist. The exact laws of physics that the Brain has imagined don't actually matter and they don't have to match the physics in the universe that created the Brain. (It doesn't have to be a literal human brain.)
  - InternetPerson 2y ago
    That's why Boltzmann brains are a problem. If a theory predicts the appearance of Boltzmann brains, then that theory is (arguably) self-defeating. 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." [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00850 https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00850
sixQuarks 2y ago
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 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?
- catlover76 2y ago
  > 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? 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.
- hscontinuity 2y ago
  "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.
praptak 2y ago
That's not very different from Berkeley (everything is God's mind). Also we cannot even tell for sure if other people are conscious.
suby 2y ago
I think it's unlikely for consciousness to exist in stars or in any population of thing which isn't subject to natural selection / evolution. It seems to me that it arises due to giving a competitive advantage for the population in question.
- 4rt 2y ago
  I always thought self-awareness would only evolve relative to how social the beings are.
dragonwriter 2y ago
Can anyone asking this kind of question define “conscious”?
x0n 2y ago
The scourge of "intelligent design" comes in many forms.
harel 2y ago
I suppose on a purely philosophical aspect it's as plausible as any other explanation of Gods that we came up with. If I continue this thread on a (pseudo semi baked) science and more philosophy, I could "argue" that us being made from particles of the universe, combined with the idea of particles being entangled and sharing "existence", are in fact "The" consciousness of the Universe and our feeling of Oneness is indeed on the particle level. 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.
- thelittleone 2y ago
  Perhaps consciousness is an attributeless void where being aware of it is possible but describing it is not.
  - harel 2y ago
    Or maybe it's a n-deep attribution model where consciousness is being aware of being aware of one self...
titzer 2y ago
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 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
- User23 2y ago
  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.
  - titzer 2y ago
    The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique. The space of possibilities is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. And yet there is no why for the wrinkles on the back of your hand. Nothing chose it. Nothing is perfect about it. Not every improbable thing was chosen. 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.
tonybeltramelli 2y ago
"Consciousness is the universe experiencing itself"
fsiefken 2y ago
Critiques: ## bernardo kastrup https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2020/07/the-irony-of-philip-goffs-arguments.html https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2020/07/the-irony-of-philip-... ## joshua farris https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-missing-subject-a-critique-of-philip-goffs-panpsychism/reading/ https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-missing-subject-a-cri... ## edward faser http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/07/problems-for-goffs-panpsychism.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/07/problems-for-goffs-p...
abetusk 2y ago
Ha! I think Lem had this idea 50+ years ago, with some scientists claiming that the universe was conscious and filling out consistent scientific theory as our tools got better. I can't exactly remember but I think it was near the end of "His Masters Voice" [0]. 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)
everdrive 2y ago
There seems to be a very mystical branch of consciousness theory. In my opinion, it is completely misguided. Consciousness, as far as I can tell, is a specific evolved mechanism, and like the eye, has probably convergently evolved to serve different purposes. (mammals & birds --> primarily for child care, and then later for social dynamics. Squids --> no idea!) In some sense, the search for consciousness where it 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.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  Is there a useful definition of "consciousness" that is empirically testable with some sort of instrument such that you can point it at a squid and say "yep, that one has consciousness!" ? 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.
  - everdrive 2y ago
    In my mind, this is part of the mysticism of the movement. If you define a word widely enough, then anything can fit. I hate to invoke this, but this often feels like a Motte & Bailey argument. If you want to call "God" the energy which started the big bang, you're sort of smuggling personification into something which really bears zero resemblance to traditional religious ideas. And so it is with consciousness. If we define consciousness widely enough so that a planet, galaxy, etc, could be considered conscious, then we've smuggled a familiar and personified concept into an arena where it doesn't really apply. 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.
a13o 2y ago
We never bothered to define consciousness with any scientific rigor, so why not? It's common for things that are everywhere, to also be nowhere at all. Could the cosmos, in fact, be smurpity-badoingo?
- dgoodell 2y ago
  Why is it so hard for people to understand that you can’t have productive discussions about things that you haven’t solidly defined?
  - dekhn 2y ago
    human history is filled with examples of important discoveries based on productive discussions about things we haven't solidly defined. I have found that the further I stay from those areas, the happier I am.
  - metabagel 2y ago
    We know what consciousness is. It's our self-awareness. We don't know where it comes from our how to test it, because each individual can only observe their own consciousness.
    - polishdude20 2y ago
      All we know is that we have it because its not about what the word means. It's about how we apply the category of "conscious" to things. It's a way of either distancing or bringing ourselves closer to things. We might as well just ask "Is the universe like us?"
    - ethanbond 2y ago
      > We know what consciousness is. It's our self-awareness Not really. There are plenty of disorders that destroy a person’s self-awareness but appear to leave a fully conscious person there anyway.
      - JohnAaronNelson 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
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CuriouslyC 2y ago
The most fundamental argument for panpsychism is that it obeys Occam's razor FAR better than the "emergent animate matter" hypothesis. Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by conscious choice, which we already know happens, so from the perspective of Occam's razor we would actually need to explain why it DIDN'T happen for non-animal matter. 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.
- RaftPeople 2y ago
  > Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by conscious choice, which we already know happens 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.
  - peddamat 2y ago
    Isn't it assumed that everything is deterministic apart from what is done by the somewhat magical, "free will"?
    - interstice 2y ago
      If by assumed you mean hotly debated, yes
    - BurningFrog 2y ago
      Not since we were forced to accept quantum physics.
    - digging 2y ago
      No - quantum uncertainty gives us the assumption that everything is fundamentally random and nothing is deterministic, unless we assume a meta-determinism (or superdeterminism) whereby fundamentally random outcomes are actually predetermined. How does that relate with the experience of decision making? That's a complete unknown. But the simplest explanation is that free will is simple, once we define it as "the 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.
kouru225 2y ago
In the first volume of Masks of God, Joseph Campbell points out that you can break all creation myths down to 3 categories: Creationism (where there is a god that created the universe), Animism (where the universe itself is alive), and Participationism (where the universe is the result of some interaction). 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.
- m463 2y ago
  what if the universe was never created, and always was?
  - digging 2y ago
    Doesn't that fall under participationism?
  - noncoml 2y ago
    We would have to come up with a better explanation/understanding of time in order to make this argument logical.
- stvltvs 2y ago
  Joseph Campbell was not an expert on every creation myth ever. His ideas had large cultural blind spots, and he was prone to over-generalization. A sibling comment pointed out an exception that doesn't fit into the assumptions behind Campbell's leading question to the children.
b450 2y ago
> Goff knows what he’s proposing sounds “extravagant”, but, he says, new ideas always sound extravagant, especially in the West where we’re “trained” to be sceptical of anything that smacks of religion. We don’t often think of our “secular bias”. > 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???
teekert 2y ago
“Theoretically, it’s clearly no more outlandish than the idea that a supernatural, all-powerful, all-knowing and omnipresent creator God formed the heavens and the Earth on a whim, and breathed life into inanimate clay bringing forth man and woman.” 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.
timwaagh 2y ago
Do pigs, in fact, fly?
metabagel 2y ago
I rather think that there is a common consciousness which our brains focus into individual local manifestations of consciousness in a way similar to how a lens focuses light.
- mo_42 2y ago
  What evidence supports your thinking?
  - metabagel 2y ago
    It’s just a feeling that consciousness has to derive from something, and there may be a conservation of consciousness similar to the conservation of energy. 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.
- coldblues 2y ago
  Sounds like Open Individualism
visarga 2y ago
No, consciousness requires - 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.
- ebb_earl_co 2y ago
  This is good reasoning, but from where did you get the requirements? After having read Annaka Harris’ “Conscious” and Philip Goff’s “Galileo’s Error”, it seems plausible to me (and the most logically simple resolution) that panpsychism explains the universe. 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.
- lxgr 2y ago
  I think you're mixing up intelligence (i.e. having a model of self, being able to learn and all of that) and consciousness (having qualia) here. In a non-panpsychic universe, p-zombies might well have a model of self without being conscious.
- friend_and_foe 2y ago
  I would argue that consciousness doesn't require a purpose. I woke up here, what was my purpose? If I don't decide that purpose, what does? How is that thing able to give me one and not be conscious in some way? Evolution has no purpose other than it's own continuation, which is interestingly also the only purpose I was born with. I'd say purpose is innate to consciousness, emergent with it, but not a precursor. The universe doesn't need me here. 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.
0xcrypto 2y ago
My only concern with such articles is the use of "god" and "religion" which only gives the majority of humanity a reason to pray more and kill anyone who disagrees. Conscious or not, why can't we just continue calling it the universe and continue studying it as usual?
jimnotgym 2y ago
>"Imagine tossing a coin 70 times and getting heads every time, or rolling dice and getting six every time. Nobody would say that’s a fluke,” 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. [0]: https://youtu.be/XzYLHOX50Bc?si=uCQUBl65fsEyehJb https://youtu.be/XzYLHOX50Bc?si=uCQUBl65fsEyehJb
- netsharc 2y ago
  If "the universe" not getting 70 heads (e.g. if that one constant is not 0.007) mean we don't exist, then, the fact that we exist means the universe got 70 heads, yes, by chance...
hscontinuity 2y ago
Why are humans so often seeking to bind clarity about our universe behind a non-connected ideology? Meaning, outside of theism we find ourselves in a scientific endeavoring; and both sides agree at some point connectedness among 'life' rang unshakably true - via faith and via experimentation. However we skip right over most of that in seeking truths in complex detail - when - it would make much more sense to me to find the simple truth in reality. 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?
Dansvidania 2y ago
Or, there are infinite universes and what we see is the only universe that can be seen (because in most other infinite universes the goldielocks are not locked and there is nobody to see them) ? Kind of a weird survivorship bias?
rpmisms 2y ago
As good a time as any to mention Chris Langan's CTMU, which posits that the universe is a self-generating concept-cum-reality.
binarymax 2y ago
Of course. It's turtles all the way up.
smeej 2y ago
This entire article reads like an April Fools joke. It can be summarized, "I can't understand the mind of the God I think exists, therefore there must not be one, even though all the evidence points to willfulness behind what I have managed to understand." 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.
netsharc 2y ago
Douglas Adams; > 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!'
- paulddraper 2y ago
  See the Anthropic Principle [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
  - Quekid5 2y ago
    ... and "This Is Water", by Wallace
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      Ref: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
untech 2y ago
I didn’t like this article at all. Maybe I am missing something, but the thesis seems just too shallow, borderline pseudoscientific. 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.
coldblues 2y ago
I believe consciousness is on a spectrum of self-awareness. It just exists, perhaps even without evolutionary need. Even if you act mainly on instinct or even purely you could still very well be conscious. 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.
- fredski42 2y ago
  This view resembles the Buddhist viewpoints somewhat.
- lxgr 2y ago
  > When you make a clone and kill the original, the clone is the original, exactly. 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.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  The universe is conscious if humans are conscious.
- phantompeace 2y ago
beryilma 2y ago
Oh, please. The ramblings of a philosopher does not make it so. These people who have no understanding of physics hear the phrases like "dark energy", "fine tuning", and "non-locality", then make up mystic, anthropomorphic theories about the universe. He is just an educated version of the "water has memory" people... > “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.
- mistermann 2y ago
  > These people who have no understanding of physics hear the phrases like "dark energy", "fine tuning", and "non-locality", then make up mystic, anthropomorphic theories about the universe. He is just an educated version of the "water has memory" people... 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.
amai 2y ago
Isn't that the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism ? "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself" (Carl Sagan)
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related, maybe: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858941
aleksiy123 2y ago
Anyone else starting to get a feeling that whether something is conscious, or even studying consciousness matters at all in a practical sense. 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?
- Scarblac 2y ago
  There may be an ethical element, we try not to hurt animals but don't care about crushing rocks.
  - aleksiy123 2y ago
    Yes, but I'm actually starting to think that consciousness isn't the real reason for this. 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.
- ethanbond 2y ago
  You don’t think “is dog conscious” is relevant to how we treat dogs?
  - aleksiy123 2y ago
    Yeah I actually don't. 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.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
layer8 2y ago
I recommend reading Sean Carroll’s Consciousness and the Laws of Physics: https://philarchive.org/archive/CARCAT-33 https://philarchive.org/archive/CARCAT-33.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
This would be a serious problem for me. I would no longer be able to eat moon rocks, as a vegan.
abhiyerra 2y ago
It is funny that the title of the article is a "new 21st century religion." The Hindu conception of Brahman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman) is basically this. We are in Brahman, and Brahman is in us.
mannykannot 2y ago
Philip Goff, like a number of other philosophers promoting some sort of panpsychism, spends much more time trying to argue that our minds cannot be merely biophysical phenomena than he does in explaining what he actually means when he says things like "consciousness is fundamental" and "electrons are conscious." 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.
grantcas 2y ago
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94 points by kull 2y ago

nico 2y ago

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

tsimionescu 2y ago
Sure, and if certain Ancient Greek beliefs are right, thunder is smithed by the god Hephaestos in his forge under mount Etna for Zeus to throw at his enemies. Is there any reason whatsoever to believe either of these?
- nico 2y ago
  > 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
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    You're giving a (very weak) reason - personal experience while in altered states of mind. Of course, people doing at least some of these practices also personally experience all sorts of other false things, many which they themselves don't believe when outside the altered state, such as vivid hallucinations.
    - hackable_sand 2y ago
      Altered state and personal experience are still a part of the fabric of reality though... They are just different configurations. 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.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        Let me put it like this. When taking psychedelics, you may see long dead people, hear voices, etc. These things are real experiences, but that doesn't mean that the long dead person really came to visit you, it's just a construct of your mind under the effects of the psychedelic. That experience is of course an aspect of reality, but it is not proof that dead people can sometimes re-materialize and visit us. Not even the person who had the experience believes that (usually). 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.

randogeek 2y ago

The author should brush up on his history. This is panpsychism and it is a very old idea, going back to Spinoza. Einstein was a adherent of that idea as well, in his own way. As to it's truth of it, that's somewhat above my pay-grade.

fidrelity 2y ago
Goff being one of the most popular modern panpsychists you're save to assume he's aware of its history. I guess he uses the term less these days because it's too easily dismissed as something esoteric.
Vox_Leone 2y ago
In fact, Einstein declared having this religious-like reverence for the “mysterium tremendum” – what scientifically minded person doesn’t after all? The Numinous[0] – which Spinoza and Kant also addressed in their respective works. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous

monero-xmr 2y ago

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 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 we die.

wk_end 2y ago
Given that the universe is unfathomably vast and almost all of it is extraordinarily hostile to - and so far as we know, entirely devoid of - life, I can't say I agree.
eatsyourtacos 2y ago
>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! 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.
- catlover76 2y ago
  > Does every other living being on this earth move on to something else? 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).

seba_dos1 2y ago

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.

delichon 2y ago
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 thinkers we may get away with a lot before they catch up.
- spacephysics 2y ago
  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”
  - itishappy 2y ago
    No. Entanglement does not allow information to travel faster than light. 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/faster-than-light-data-transmission-using-entanglement https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/8638/fa... https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15282/quantum-entanglement-faster-than-speed-of-light https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/15282/quantum-en...
- xeromal 2y ago
  So I'm a luddite but this to me is profound. >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.

wetpaws 2y ago

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cheeselip420 2y ago

We are the cosmos. So of course.

crunchycensus 2y ago

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!"

cowsup 2y ago
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 theorize that which we cannot hope to ever understand makes us no different.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  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.

Hoasi 2y ago

Let's hope so.

asdff 2y ago

There are a lot of compelling theories out there for the purpose/true nature of the universe. We are probably orders and orders of magnitude too small ourselves to fully grasp the complexity, like how one of our skin cells don't understand how the body works but coupled into an entire multicellular organism, we can now read an anatomy textbook. 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?

card_zero 2y ago
> too small ourselves to fully grasp the complexity Size has nothing do with ability to understand things, so this doesn't make sense.
- edgyquant 2y ago
  It matters very much when it comes to perspective. The posters point is spot on so unless you have some counter you should just delete yours.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Perhaps I don't understand the point. "Perspective", you say? I'm thinking that, for instance, a very very large rock does not have an advanced ability to understand things, whereas David Rappaport had a psychology degree. (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.

fooker 2y ago

[flagged]

danbruc 2y ago
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.
- nathan_compton 2y ago
  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.
  - CuriouslyC 2y ago
    Wow, just whoosh. We have data on the behavior of nervous systems, and we have correlates with states of consciousness, not even close to what the GP was talking about.
  - scarmig 2y ago
    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?
    - michaelmrose 2y ago
      What substrate is the universe using and what is it modeling
      - scarmig 2y ago
        I'm not defending panpsychism; I'm pointing out that a hand-wavey argument that "consciousness is just something that arises from nervous systems that are ours or very similar systems" doesn't explain or justify itself.

krunck 2y ago

> He contends that the universe is just too perfectly perfect to be an accident. If it wasn't maybe he would'nt be here to ask the question.

conesus 2y ago
The universe may be as great as they say. But it wouldn't be missed if it didn't exist. — Piet Hein

ricksunny 2y ago

Boltzmann brain: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (1x08) actually had an episode on this: https://screenrant.com/strange-new-worlds-boltsman-brain-star-trek-space-god/ https://screenrant.com/strange-new-worlds-boltsman-brain-sta...

hydrolox 2y ago
the thing with the Boltzmann brain is that, even though it sounds compelling (in a philosophy thought experiment / random thought kind of way), I think there's one main criticism that shuts it down. If the brain is having all these experiences/thoughts itself, it came up with the idea of a Boltzmann brain, and the laws of physics, and logic, etc. So therefore, the laws of physics that Boltzmann brain is using the justify the Boltzmann brain are completely made up by it, and can't really be used as a valid argument.
- digging 2y ago
  I don't think that's as strong an argument as you're presenting it. If anything can exist, and if randomness can exist, it's simpler for a Boltzmann Brain to exist than for our actual universe to exist. The exact laws of physics that the Brain has imagined don't actually matter and they don't have to match the physics in the universe that created the Brain. (It doesn't have to be a literal human brain.)
- InternetPerson 2y ago
  That's why Boltzmann brains are a problem. If a theory predicts the appearance of Boltzmann brains, then that theory is (arguably) self-defeating. 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." [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00850 https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00850

sixQuarks 2y ago

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 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?

catlover76 2y ago
> 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? 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.
hscontinuity 2y ago
"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.

praptak 2y ago

That's not very different from Berkeley (everything is God's mind). Also we cannot even tell for sure if other people are conscious.

suby 2y ago

I think it's unlikely for consciousness to exist in stars or in any population of thing which isn't subject to natural selection / evolution. It seems to me that it arises due to giving a competitive advantage for the population in question.

4rt 2y ago
I always thought self-awareness would only evolve relative to how social the beings are.

dragonwriter 2y ago

Can anyone asking this kind of question define “conscious”?

x0n 2y ago

The scourge of "intelligent design" comes in many forms.

harel 2y ago

I suppose on a purely philosophical aspect it's as plausible as any other explanation of Gods that we came up with. If I continue this thread on a (pseudo semi baked) science and more philosophy, I could "argue" that us being made from particles of the universe, combined with the idea of particles being entangled and sharing "existence", are in fact "The" consciousness of the Universe and our feeling of Oneness is indeed on the particle level. 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.

thelittleone 2y ago
Perhaps consciousness is an attributeless void where being aware of it is possible but describing it is not.
- harel 2y ago
  Or maybe it's a n-deep attribution model where consciousness is being aware of being aware of one self...

titzer 2y ago

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 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

User23 2y ago
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.
- titzer 2y ago
  The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique. The space of possibilities is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. And yet there is no why for the wrinkles on the back of your hand. Nothing chose it. Nothing is perfect about it. Not every improbable thing was chosen. 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.

tonybeltramelli 2y ago

"Consciousness is the universe experiencing itself"

fsiefken 2y ago

Critiques: ## bernardo kastrup https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2020/07/the-irony-of-philip-goffs-arguments.html https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2020/07/the-irony-of-philip-... ## joshua farris https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-missing-subject-a-critique-of-philip-goffs-panpsychism/reading/ https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-missing-subject-a-cri... ## edward faser http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/07/problems-for-goffs-panpsychism.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/07/problems-for-goffs-p...

abetusk 2y ago

Ha! I think Lem had this idea 50+ years ago, with some scientists claiming that the universe was conscious and filling out consistent scientific theory as our tools got better. I can't exactly remember but I think it was near the end of "His Masters Voice" [0]. 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)

everdrive 2y ago

There seems to be a very mystical branch of consciousness theory. In my opinion, it is completely misguided. Consciousness, as far as I can tell, is a specific evolved mechanism, and like the eye, has probably convergently evolved to serve different purposes. (mammals & birds --> primarily for child care, and then later for social dynamics. Squids --> no idea!) In some sense, the search for consciousness where it 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.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
Is there a useful definition of "consciousness" that is empirically testable with some sort of instrument such that you can point it at a squid and say "yep, that one has consciousness!" ? 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.
- everdrive 2y ago
  In my mind, this is part of the mysticism of the movement. If you define a word widely enough, then anything can fit. I hate to invoke this, but this often feels like a Motte & Bailey argument. If you want to call "God" the energy which started the big bang, you're sort of smuggling personification into something which really bears zero resemblance to traditional religious ideas. And so it is with consciousness. If we define consciousness widely enough so that a planet, galaxy, etc, could be considered conscious, then we've smuggled a familiar and personified concept into an arena where it doesn't really apply. 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.

a13o 2y ago

We never bothered to define consciousness with any scientific rigor, so why not? It's common for things that are everywhere, to also be nowhere at all. Could the cosmos, in fact, be smurpity-badoingo?

dgoodell 2y ago
Why is it so hard for people to understand that you can’t have productive discussions about things that you haven’t solidly defined?
- dekhn 2y ago
  human history is filled with examples of important discoveries based on productive discussions about things we haven't solidly defined. I have found that the further I stay from those areas, the happier I am.
- metabagel 2y ago
  We know what consciousness is. It's our self-awareness. We don't know where it comes from our how to test it, because each individual can only observe their own consciousness.
  - polishdude20 2y ago
    All we know is that we have it because its not about what the word means. It's about how we apply the category of "conscious" to things. It's a way of either distancing or bringing ourselves closer to things. We might as well just ask "Is the universe like us?"
  - ethanbond 2y ago
    > We know what consciousness is. It's our self-awareness Not really. There are plenty of disorders that destroy a person’s self-awareness but appear to leave a fully conscious person there anyway.
    - JohnAaronNelson 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

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CuriouslyC 2y ago

The most fundamental argument for panpsychism is that it obeys Occam's razor FAR better than the "emergent animate matter" hypothesis. Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by conscious choice, which we already know happens, so from the perspective of Occam's razor we would actually need to explain why it DIDN'T happen for non-animal matter. 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.

RaftPeople 2y ago
> Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by conscious choice, which we already know happens 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.
- peddamat 2y ago
  Isn't it assumed that everything is deterministic apart from what is done by the somewhat magical, "free will"?
  - interstice 2y ago
    If by assumed you mean hotly debated, yes
  - BurningFrog 2y ago
    Not since we were forced to accept quantum physics.
  - digging 2y ago
    No - quantum uncertainty gives us the assumption that everything is fundamentally random and nothing is deterministic, unless we assume a meta-determinism (or superdeterminism) whereby fundamentally random outcomes are actually predetermined. How does that relate with the experience of decision making? That's a complete unknown. But the simplest explanation is that free will is simple, once we define it as "the 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.

kouru225 2y ago

In the first volume of Masks of God, Joseph Campbell points out that you can break all creation myths down to 3 categories: Creationism (where there is a god that created the universe), Animism (where the universe itself is alive), and Participationism (where the universe is the result of some interaction). 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.

m463 2y ago
what if the universe was never created, and always was?
- digging 2y ago
  Doesn't that fall under participationism?
- noncoml 2y ago
  We would have to come up with a better explanation/understanding of time in order to make this argument logical.
stvltvs 2y ago
Joseph Campbell was not an expert on every creation myth ever. His ideas had large cultural blind spots, and he was prone to over-generalization. A sibling comment pointed out an exception that doesn't fit into the assumptions behind Campbell's leading question to the children.

b450 2y ago

> Goff knows what he’s proposing sounds “extravagant”, but, he says, new ideas always sound extravagant, especially in the West where we’re “trained” to be sceptical of anything that smacks of religion. We don’t often think of our “secular bias”. > 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???

teekert 2y ago

“Theoretically, it’s clearly no more outlandish than the idea that a supernatural, all-powerful, all-knowing and omnipresent creator God formed the heavens and the Earth on a whim, and breathed life into inanimate clay bringing forth man and woman.” 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.

timwaagh 2y ago

Do pigs, in fact, fly?

metabagel 2y ago

I rather think that there is a common consciousness which our brains focus into individual local manifestations of consciousness in a way similar to how a lens focuses light.

mo_42 2y ago
What evidence supports your thinking?
- metabagel 2y ago
  It’s just a feeling that consciousness has to derive from something, and there may be a conservation of consciousness similar to the conservation of energy. 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.
coldblues 2y ago
Sounds like Open Individualism

visarga 2y ago

No, consciousness requires - 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.

ebb_earl_co 2y ago
This is good reasoning, but from where did you get the requirements? After having read Annaka Harris’ “Conscious” and Philip Goff’s “Galileo’s Error”, it seems plausible to me (and the most logically simple resolution) that panpsychism explains the universe. 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.
lxgr 2y ago
I think you're mixing up intelligence (i.e. having a model of self, being able to learn and all of that) and consciousness (having qualia) here. In a non-panpsychic universe, p-zombies might well have a model of self without being conscious.
friend_and_foe 2y ago
I would argue that consciousness doesn't require a purpose. I woke up here, what was my purpose? If I don't decide that purpose, what does? How is that thing able to give me one and not be conscious in some way? Evolution has no purpose other than it's own continuation, which is interestingly also the only purpose I was born with. I'd say purpose is innate to consciousness, emergent with it, but not a precursor. The universe doesn't need me here. 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.

0xcrypto 2y ago

My only concern with such articles is the use of "god" and "religion" which only gives the majority of humanity a reason to pray more and kill anyone who disagrees. Conscious or not, why can't we just continue calling it the universe and continue studying it as usual?

jimnotgym 2y ago

>"Imagine tossing a coin 70 times and getting heads every time, or rolling dice and getting six every time. Nobody would say that’s a fluke,” 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. [0]: https://youtu.be/XzYLHOX50Bc?si=uCQUBl65fsEyehJb https://youtu.be/XzYLHOX50Bc?si=uCQUBl65fsEyehJb

netsharc 2y ago
If "the universe" not getting 70 heads (e.g. if that one constant is not 0.007) mean we don't exist, then, the fact that we exist means the universe got 70 heads, yes, by chance...

hscontinuity 2y ago

Why are humans so often seeking to bind clarity about our universe behind a non-connected ideology? Meaning, outside of theism we find ourselves in a scientific endeavoring; and both sides agree at some point connectedness among 'life' rang unshakably true - via faith and via experimentation. However we skip right over most of that in seeking truths in complex detail - when - it would make much more sense to me to find the simple truth in reality. 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?

Dansvidania 2y ago

Or, there are infinite universes and what we see is the only universe that can be seen (because in most other infinite universes the goldielocks are not locked and there is nobody to see them) ? Kind of a weird survivorship bias?

rpmisms 2y ago

As good a time as any to mention Chris Langan's CTMU, which posits that the universe is a self-generating concept-cum-reality.

binarymax 2y ago

Of course. It's turtles all the way up.

smeej 2y ago

This entire article reads like an April Fools joke. It can be summarized, "I can't understand the mind of the God I think exists, therefore there must not be one, even though all the evidence points to willfulness behind what I have managed to understand." 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.

netsharc 2y ago

Douglas Adams; > 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!'

paulddraper 2y ago
See the Anthropic Principle [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
- Quekid5 2y ago
  ... and "This Is Water", by Wallace
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    Ref: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

untech 2y ago

I didn’t like this article at all. Maybe I am missing something, but the thesis seems just too shallow, borderline pseudoscientific. 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.

coldblues 2y ago

I believe consciousness is on a spectrum of self-awareness. It just exists, perhaps even without evolutionary need. Even if you act mainly on instinct or even purely you could still very well be conscious. 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.

fredski42 2y ago
This view resembles the Buddhist viewpoints somewhat.
lxgr 2y ago
> When you make a clone and kill the original, the clone is the original, exactly. 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.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
The universe is conscious if humans are conscious.
phantompeace 2y ago

beryilma 2y ago

Oh, please. The ramblings of a philosopher does not make it so. These people who have no understanding of physics hear the phrases like "dark energy", "fine tuning", and "non-locality", then make up mystic, anthropomorphic theories about the universe. He is just an educated version of the "water has memory" people... > “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.

mistermann 2y ago
> These people who have no understanding of physics hear the phrases like "dark energy", "fine tuning", and "non-locality", then make up mystic, anthropomorphic theories about the universe. He is just an educated version of the "water has memory" people... 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.

amai 2y ago

Isn't that the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism ? "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself" (Carl Sagan)

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related, maybe: Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858941

aleksiy123 2y ago

Anyone else starting to get a feeling that whether something is conscious, or even studying consciousness matters at all in a practical sense. 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?

Scarblac 2y ago
There may be an ethical element, we try not to hurt animals but don't care about crushing rocks.
- aleksiy123 2y ago
  Yes, but I'm actually starting to think that consciousness isn't the real reason for this. 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.
ethanbond 2y ago
You don’t think “is dog conscious” is relevant to how we treat dogs?
- aleksiy123 2y ago
  Yeah I actually don't. 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.
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layer8 2y ago

I recommend reading Sean Carroll’s Consciousness and the Laws of Physics: https://philarchive.org/archive/CARCAT-33 https://philarchive.org/archive/CARCAT-33.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago

This would be a serious problem for me. I would no longer be able to eat moon rocks, as a vegan.

abhiyerra 2y ago

It is funny that the title of the article is a "new 21st century religion." The Hindu conception of Brahman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman) is basically this. We are in Brahman, and Brahman is in us.

mannykannot 2y ago

Philip Goff, like a number of other philosophers promoting some sort of panpsychism, spends much more time trying to argue that our minds cannot be merely biophysical phenomena than he does in explaining what he actually means when he says things like "consciousness is fundamental" and "electrons are conscious." 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.

grantcas 2y ago

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