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.
> 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.
> I also believe consciousness is not quantifiable, but shared, and you just have a narrow perspective at a time.
I agree, but I would go 1 step further and say: we are all human, yet experience life as individual beings rather than the sum of the species. Similarly, we are all alive and conscious, as the trees in the forest, as the bugs that dwell within, and as the bacteria that dwell within the bugs. It’s all happening right now, but we experience a small, linear slice because we are separated by our brains.
Due to the sense of self that arises from having a brain, we consider ourselves just an instantiation of a member of our species, but i firmly believe that the same life-force (the soul?) is living as all beings, simultaneously. Most probably across the universe.
That’s why when we hurt other people/animals and the environment that which they make up, we end up only hurting ourselves. Buddhists have the concept of Karma. Islam has the concept of a Judgement day where animals, plants and even the ground you stepped on, would speak against you if you transgressed against them during your life. I don’t think these are simply stories made up to keep us in line whilst we’re on this planet - I believe that there may be something more to all of this.
On a side note: I wonder if there exists a world where the predominant life forms are literally connected? Not by DNA history, but by something physical whereby they can share the same brain/experience whilst in different bodies. A literal hive mind. I wonder if that would be more conducive to cooperation on a global scale vs the way life evolved on Earth through competition?
Interesting take, but I have a purely physicalist viewpoint. I don't think the religious aspect has anything to do with it, and can be simply explained by them literally believing things have souls and are conscious.
I believe there is a case of conjoined twins where they are sharing the same brain part, having two brains, being able to feel each other's stimuli and emotions, although I've only heard of it.
> This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'
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.
It seems that an anesthesiologists job is to make sure you’re unconscious. If there’s anyone that knows how to define consciousness, it should probably be them.
Seems that consciousness is an awareness of certain stimuli that give rise to novel patterns in our brain, in turn triggering our frontal lobes to notice…
Arguably science is not able to define consciousness because of the subjective nature of it, and how the aim of science is to remove subjectivity from its observations and conclusions.
On the other hand, religions have been studying consciousness for thousands of years, and indeed it is not something that can be verified by science.
That is a real problem though. Many things you cannot define because their bounds are indefinite. To define those things requires knowing the bounds. It's much simpler to accept our limitations in language and cognition because it removes those artifical boundaries when connecting physics to metaphysics. We only need to describe things when they matter.
Then there are things you can very solidly define but never know what they are. We can describe physics, and their applications, but when connecting metaphysical effects down to the constituent quantum processes the whole is unknown. We aren't sensible enough.
The truly wholesome perspective is from outside the universe.
What I like to ask about consciousness is to identify the step in the chain of organisms or matters where we jump from not having consciousness to having one.
Why is it so hard for people who hold this view to see that there is a bootstrap problem for any knowledge beyond personal experience if this were true? The reality is that definitions are works-in-progress, and getting started often involves a 'definition' that is little more than a placeholder for an eventual explanation of something currently unexplainable.
I believe you are right to say that consciousness is generally regarded as more than self-awareness, but unless you want to regard self-awareness as specifically not a form of consciousness, then the consciousness of the people with the disorder you refer to are missing something - something that I believe was of great importance in the evolution of the human mind.
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?"
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.
I mean, really. I feel like having a method of sensation and an ability to react to those sensations is a fundamental basis for "consciousness" and if you can point to the sun or the Local Cluster's sensory apparatus, I may listen to the rest of your (the Editorial You, not the commenter this reply is attached to) argument.
Otherwise, we're just pointing at complex things and saying "does haz Conscience lol?"
The problem with your definition is that it excluded forms of life that do not have actors and sensors. Implying that consciousness is not a mental property, but rather a property of being physically able to manipulate the world.
I.e. you are saying Stephen Hawking is definitely less conscious than an average human with functioning arms and legs. In its essence, you are too focused on your own experience of reality.
It is about fundamental basis for consciousness. Stephen Hawking had sensory apparatus and a method to react to inputs. Alas, I would say he is no longer conscious. If he had no method to react, like locked-in patients, we could argue about whether they are conscious, but we are currently trying to measure consciousness in those people too by measuring brain waves (look, something changes predictably when he hears us). We don't see any evidence that sun has any sensory input or output. It's like you arguing whether 0.9999 or 0.99999 is bigger when I argue whether 0 or 1 is bigger.
> A pure observer with no deliberate actions or impulse reactions sounds like it can most definitely be conscious.
Yes, but how can we know about the existence of such observer? There can be infinite number of such observers filling every cubic millimeter of our space, but does it change anything for us? Existence of such observer is as meaningless as orbital teapots [0].
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.
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.
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.
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.
My view on this is that the mind is the instrument that acknowledges it's own existence. "I think therefore I am" and all that. I findnit funny, we all walk around absolutely certain of our own existence, very much aware of it, and then question that this is even occurring. I'm satisfied that I've identified consciousness with 100% certainty by simply noticing it in myself, even being able to notice it is proof that it's there. And heuristically I presume others with form similar to mine have done the same thing, I think that's a safe bet to make.
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.
Isn't that precisely the argument to extend the definition of consciousness, our own human bias on what is conscious colors what we define as such.
If the 'universe' is conscious, every cell in your body is as well... and well... they are alive - and they do make 'decisions' that end up keeping (royal)us alive that look intelligent from an outside perspective... which is about the same perspective a large (zero-g evolved) kaiju would have of us {small pieces of a whole that do seemingly intelligent things to benefit the group-entity}...
if we don't consider what we are made of as conscious material - from where does consciousness arise from? ...and until we have a clear answer, maybe it's a sliding scale and everything is some degree of 'awareness'?
I understand the argument you're making, but it feels misguided in my opinion. Other things don't need consciousness to be valid -- and more importantly, consciousness is not an inherently positive thing which needs to be extended other things. Ideally, consciousness is specifically defined such that we can draw relatively clear boundaries between what is conscious and what is not.
In any case to answer where consciousness comes from, consciousness arises from the brain. You can test this with anesthesia, which is markedly different from sleep in that it does remove conscious experience. Although I agree it would be hard to pin down exactly what spectrum of animal is, or is not conscious, I think the extremes are pretty obvious. Obvious, unless, you're trying to extend consciousness to anything which could sense and react to its environment. If you want to call that consciousness, that's fine -- the human experience of having a distinct identity which can feel self-conscious, proud, content, anxious, etc -- is then something different entirely.
> In any case to answer where consciousness comes from, consciousness arises from the brain. You can test this with anesthesia, which is markedly different from sleep in that it does remove conscious experience.
Similarly, the sound that comes out of a radio comes from the batteries, you can test this by removing the batteries and seeing that the sound stops.
But if you say consciousness is "a specific evolved mechanism, and like the eye, has probably convergently evolved to serve different purposes" then you must have some notion what this mechanism is and what it's purpose is so you can say, "See, here is consciousness. It helps this organism achieve the expected purpose." I think this is what NoMoreNicksLeft is getting at.
I believe the typical (mis)understanding proceeds like so: "I am conscious. I not only know things, but I have a sensation of knowing them. This (computer/animal) reacts to things in such a way that it demonstrably knows them in some sense, but it has no sensation of knowing them. Now what is this wonderful thing that distinguishes me from it? How did it come to be? What purpose does it serve?"
One purpose the concept of consciousness serves is that it gives a special ethical status to its possessor. The conscious being needs to care about other conscious beings but can treat those beings without consciousness as tools or resources.
>then you must have some notion what this mechanism is and what it's purpose is so you can say,
My intuitive sense is that consciousness is present in so many mammals precisely because mammal young require so much care after birth. ie, it is beneficial for a mother to have differentiate between her own consciousness and the consciousness of her children. And, to care for her young and possess an intuitive sense for the needs of her young. It feels like this trait, once bootstrapped, could find other evolutionarily-beneficial behaviors, such as hunting in packs, building cities, or forming competitive social hierarchies. (you can't really have social status without consciousness)
To be clear, I'm not a biologist, and for sure I could be wrong here. I think the general principle holds though -- if a species of animal possesses a trait, then that trait either currently or previously conferred some evolutionary benefit. It's easy enough to think of what those benefits could sensibly be, and of course more difficult to actually go ahead and prove it out.
>I believe the typical (mis)understanding proceeds like so: "I am conscious. I not only know things, but I have a sensation of knowing them. This (computer/animal) reacts to things in such a way that it demonstrably knows them in some sense, but it has no sensation of knowing them. Now what is this wonderful thing that distinguishes me from it? How did it come to be? What purpose does it serve?"
I think that's a really fair characterization, but I also think that this "feeling of what happens" does characterize consciousness. 1) this means that an AI _could_ be conscious, but it would probably also need to have been programmed to sense input and also have some sort of identity. 2) if we don't believe that consciousness is a "feeling of what happens," but instead is just a response to external stimuli, then I would think consciousness is just synonymous with "living things," and there's no point in having a separate concept for it.
>One purpose the concept of consciousness serves is that it gives a special ethical status to its possessor.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that "from the perspective of the conscious being, that person themselves puts more value on themselves or other conscious beings?" -- or, are you saying that "conscious beings _should_ put more emphasis on other conscious beings, and therefore it's important to extend consciousness other things?" I think in either case, I would say that this bias towards other conscious beings is just sort of an in-built human bias, and isn't particularly important when it comes to scientific understanding of consciousness. (from a moral standpoint, I concede it could be important.)
Perhaps, trees have a very muted consciousness. Perhaps every living thing is conscious at some level ranging from nearly zero to far in excess of human consciousness.
I think this just redefines consciousness to mean "things that are alive." This may be a fine concept, but it is not what people commonly mean by consciousness. I strongly suspect that people who want to extend consciousness to all living things (and beyond) do some from a _moral_ perspective -- they want to connect people to all living things in some moral and spiritual sense. And they want to remove the historical moral hierarchy whereby mankind has placed himself at the top of creation.
I have no interest in the antiquated view that man is the peak of creation. However, extending consciousness to everything seems to be a spiritual act, and quite distinct from determining a scientific definition of consciousness.
- 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.
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.
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.
I am conscious. What's the purpose of me having consciousness? As far as can tell I could have functioned the exact same way without experiencing anything whatsoever.
My tongue in cheek answer is that you need consciousness in order to get up in the morning and eat something, or else you die. What are the chances that food comes on its own into your mouth?
The serious answer: consciousness has the role to protect the body by adapting to the environment. At the same time consciousness is based on system trained with environment data, all we know comes from outside.
As you point out, that list is only necessary for the evolution of consciousness (perhaps) but it is not a requirement for consciousness itself.
From a functional computatoinalist POV, consciousness just requires information processing. People who meditate a lot can attest to the fact that conscious experience doesn't even need a self, it doesn't need thoughts, purpose or anything else. Consciousness is just raw awareness (meta-awareness)... however since we know the brain is processing information at some capacity (i.e. search Phineas Gage), then consciousness is something like the running simulation of reality being processed by the brain.
Joscha Bach, Max Tegmark, are two good sources for this perspective.
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.
> 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.
Starting from evolution as the cause for the fact that our physical bodies present sensation to our awareness, I have to assume there’s a reason for that to happen.
The obvious answer is that pleasure, pain, ideas, memories, etc. all exist to drive the behaviors that are advantageous in evolution.
It’s possible that there’s a deterministic set of gears in how sensation drives behavior, but the role of experience in driving physical action would be at least one of those components.
So if we take evolution as the cause of life as we understand it, then consciousness is at least a component of physics itself.
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.
It's very confusing how a relativity works in a non-deterministic world. Brian Greene's illustration of how relativity "slices the loaf" in the Fabric of the Cosmos (https://youtu.be/8Y-JmocB84Y?t=1334) makes it very difficult for me to understand how things work if reality is indeed non-deterministic.
Unless reality is more like Everything Everywhere All At Once, i.e., the Everett many loafs model.
> And of course we don’t have free will. We have experience, which fools us into thinking we are in control.
Not sure if you're disagreeing with me, or if you didn't grasp my comment. The quote above is meaningless without defining what free will is and how it can possibly mean anything other than "the experience of decision making".
Decision-making is something that a fully deterministic, non-conscious machine can do. (A motion detector performs decision making based on light input.) Decision-making does not require consciousness. Consciousness is what grants us the ability to experience and reflect on our decision making. It is fair to call that phenomenon "free will."
Defining "free will" as "the ability to make a decision not influenced by our state and inputs (including sensation, memory, etc.)" makes no sense. Decisions are fundamentally dependent on state and inputs*. Any definition of "free will" which ignores that is useless.
Indirect Realism as a consequence of evolution + lack of distribution of this knowledge (causing it to be phenomenologically experienced as Direct Realism) as a consequence of culture.
Quantum properties are randomly determined from a set of possible outcomes. (e.g if you measure "up vs down" you will never get "left", but it's physically impossible to know if it will be "up" or "down" until measurement.)
They also happen in context, not in a vacuum. Whether or not I make another cup of coffee might come down to fundamentally random quantum events, but that doesn't mean there's any chance I get up and brew a cup of steamy elephant piss because I don't have any on hand.
It's important to distinguish choice/will and consciousness. Conscious experience can happen in an entirely deterministic context..they are orthogonal concepts.
Sort of, but then philosophers have certainly discussed the topic of why would there be conscious experience if it didn't serve any function. It would be cruel irony if consciousness was a vestigial appendage of the cosmos, an unempowered observer. Not a proof of anything just something to think about.
For me, the real driving idea is that what we call physics is the aggregate behavior of conscious entities making choices, rather than being this framework that consciousness can "override" or worse, something that consciousness is forced to sit and observe. That idea simplifies a lot of the mysteries for me.
I think the best argument for consciousness having an effect on the physical world is that the physical world contains a formulation of the hard problem of consciousness. If consciousness doesn't affect what words get written, then no discussion of consciousness is actually about consciousness.
Panpsychism requires that we have a solid grasp on what constitutes consciousness, and we don’t. How would you falsify panpsychism? What testable predictions does it make?
I’m criticizing panpsychism as a theory of the universe, not as a theory of consciousness. But even as the latter, neither does it explain much of anything, nor does it make any useful predictions I’m aware of.
Personally I don’t make the claim that all humans or even I myself are conscious, because I find the notion of consciousness to be too ill-defined.
That is something we can certainly disagree on. I would hope given your fist-hand experience of the universe you would at least posit that you yourself are conscious :)
> 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.
You mean, like a newborn baby? That's not a "tall order," that's an everyday affair.
The newborn baby is "just" an assembly of atoms and molecules. What is it about this particular assembly that makes it so special? That's the key question. It might very well turn out that there is something very special about animate life forms that can only exist inside animate life forms - particular arrangements of molecules, or perhaps a heritage that encodes some quantum states we don't understand, or some feedback loop inside of the baby's brain, or maybe all of it; and these things don't exist inside of a rock or a star or a galaxy (beyond, of course, all the babies that exist inside the galaxy, and outside of the question, did the galaxy will the babies to exist, and is a baby an expression of the galactic sensory apparatus?)
If absolutely everything is conscious, how come we can go unconscious after a knock on the head?
How come chemicals like alcohol can change our consciousness? Or adrenalin?
How is it that the only consciousnesses we are aware of happen to be located in exactly one human body, rather than say only the upper half of one, or fifteen humans, or any other subdivision of the universe's matter? Why is my consciousness not shared with other people's?
To me the hypothesis "human bodies produce consciousness, probably by some mechanism that's shared by lots of life but not necessarily all" is a lot simpler.
You don't know that we're unaware when "unconscious" just that we're unresponsive, and we don't have memories of that time. There is evidence that the senses are still active and a lot of brain activity continues.
There is evidence that the human brain contains many consciousnesses, just look into research on split brain studies. I'm sure you've had the feeling of being aware of what was going on but feeling powerless to stop your behavior, as if you were a passenger in your body, at some point in your life, maybe there's more to that than we want to believe.
Because I'm arguing that there is consciousness, the processing systems of the brain are just too disoriented to pull together unitary consciousness sufficient to actively drive the body. Being knocked out doesn't turn the lights out, it just scatters them into a bunch of individual lights that are no longer working together, and don't imprint memories well.
You chose to type a reply to me right? I guess you could assume that you are compelled and your free will is an illusion, but honestly that view is shit.
I'm a lot more confident in my own consciousness than I am of the universe's, but to be honest I'm not entirely convinced of either.
I think the bit that's throwing me is the jump from "we know that consciousness exists" to "therefore the universe as a whole must be is conscious" but I bet I'm misinterpreting this somewhat.
Not who you're replying to, but I'll take a crack at this and share my ponderings on this topic.
Let's take for granted first that you're convinced of your own consciousness. You're more confident in it you say, though not thoroughly convinced, so let's start there. So in light of the fact that you are not simply a being inside the universe, but an integral, inseparable part of it, is you observing the universe not the universe observing itself? This might not be "the entire universe in totality is a big, pondering mind" but it at least means, again given that you are conscious, that the universe is at least as conscious and aware as you are.
If you're not conscious then there's no starting point from which to even begin this line of inquiry.
You might like one more than the other, and one even might cause you to experience a better (more optimistic, agency-ful etc.) life than the other, but there's absolutely zero empirical proof either way.
If there is equal evidence for two hypotheses, but one resonates with your personal experience and causes you to live a better life, what could possibly possess you to take the disempowering view?
Practically leading my life as if I had free will and being convinced I actually do have free will – despite zero evidence either way other than my senses and my reasoning, both of which regularly fail/deceive me in all kinds of situations – are two very different things.
There's of course also a variant of Pascal's wager in here, except that this one is logically sound, in my view: If there is free will, why not make use of it? And if there isn't, my beliefs aren't my choice anyway.
And just like from Pascal's wager, we can't derive any actual information about the nature of the universe and our conscious existence in it from that line of reasoning.
The main point of disagreement I have with this is that I don't think the notion that your senses and reality are not always perfectly in sync implies that your perception of free will is false. There's a lot of approximating that goes into taking sensory input and generating an experience, that doesn't invalidate your experience of making decisions.
Also, your doubt in your own free will isn't free, it has a cost. Is that doubt serving you in some way to offset that?
That may well be the case, but it feels deeply epistemologically wrong to me to say “I am certain about X” just because being certain about X might come with certain psychological advantages. Not much good follows from that line of reasoning applied to many other issues.
I also don’t think “it’s quite plausible that there is free will but I’m agnostic about it” is a particularly harmful position to have.
It's disempowering and does not resonate with our conscious experience, and given there is no more evidence for it than the opposite view, I find the idea that someone would choose a world view that tends to cause depression and fatalism to be absurd.
That is a choice that entertains both notions. The problem with that is that entertaining the notion that you are a powerless observer of the universe who must abide surfing the waves of fate with no agency is soul crushing for most people. If that choice isn't bringing you some power in some other way, why make it?
So you're very much in the Pragmatist camp, something is only true if it's useful?
Personally, I find it impossible to choose to believe something, all things equal, just because I like the implications. The doubt will always be in the back of my mind, "But what if it's not really true?"
I hold to compatabilism. As far as I can tell, the universe unfolds according to natural laws, and we're no exceptions. But we have agency over our own lives, the decisions we will make matter, and we're free in every way that's meaningful.
It isn't so much that, as given we don't know and we have equal evidence in a number of different directions, our utility function should be biased towards believing in things that empower us and help us lead a better life. If the weight of evidence were in favor of a hypothesis that was disempowering, the situation might be different, but it isn't.
> The most fundamental argument for panpsychism is that it obeys Occam's razor FAR better than the "emergent animate matter" hypothesis.
Meh. Seems to me like this is just dressing up the anthropic principle in clerical robes. The scare quotes around the "emergent animate matter" strawman sort of give the game away. There is no such "hypothesis". "Animate matter" is an observation, how it emerged is a question, and a difficult one. But declaring "Because Panpsychism" doesn't constitute an answer any more than "In the Beginning..." did.
Not at all. The anthropic principle is sort of going in the opposite direction in fact, as it presupposes all these conditions on consciousness then waves a magic wand over all of it because we happen to be able to observe and reason, so of course those conditions were met, end of story, yawn.
Panpsychism says that it doesn't matter how life evolved, because the universe is aware as a matter of fact, so the particulars are unimportant, just the ability to encode, store and transmit information so complexity can develop over time.
So, no, that's a mischaracterization. The Anthropic Principle isn't an explanation or a theory. It's not even science, it's just a philosophical argument putting a boundary around "Things that Make Sense to Talk About". Basically: "If things weren't the way they are we wouldn't be here to talk about them, so let's just not"
> Panpsychism says that it doesn't matter how life evolved, because the universe is aware as a matter of fact, so the particulars are unimportant,
Which is almost exactly a paraphrase of the concept I just elucidated. But with some weird religious imagery attached. I find that uninteresting.
yeah. It's "some parts of the universe that could replicate much more if they have consciousness developed consciousness" vs "the universe was conscious all along, and so it ensured that other small fractions of it had selection pressures to develop consciousness", and I'm not sure the second explanation is more parsimonious...
>Occam's razor is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements
it's a general principle or _recommendation_, not some law of the universe. Some people might argue that "God wills it" is the simplest explanation for many things, but that doesn't mean it's true. The simplicity of an explanation doesn't necessarily have anything to do with its validity.
In addition, the introduction of panpsychism, just like the introduction of God into any argument, brings up a whole other set of questions that need to be answered -- additional complexity, which is the opposite of Occam's Razor.
Emergence out of complex systems is arguably the simpler explanation, because it's something that's already been observed, measured, and studied, like storms emerging from simpler principles of weather systems.
Or take your computer or smartphone -- do you truly understand all the mechanisms from which we go from "shocking rocks" to create series of on/off signals, to things like communicating on the internet, or watching videos? Is computing and mathematics some inherent property of silicon? Nearly part of a computer, on some fundamental level, is a relatively simple mechanism, and has an almost useless function on its own. Even for engineers who understand every level of abstraction, it must still be near-miraculous that any of this works, even though these emergent properties are deliberately crafted, well-documented, and understood.
His ability to not only understand, but to also effectively communicate these concepts, I'd say makes him one of the smarter people out there. And yet, he remarks, "I don't know about you, but it really doesn't feel like this should actually work." There are still things people don't understand about why AI works the way it does, despite the fact that we built and trained them -- feel free to hit up Claude or your favorite resource for examples on emergent properties. LLMs can be passably apt at things they weren't trained for, and exhibit behaviors weirdly similar to people (like confabulation), despite the fact that their exposure to the world is literally only text.
I'm already imagining ways people could twist this into proof of panpsychism. But the point I'm getting to is that the human body is an absurdly, stupidly complex system of 37 trillion cells. The Milky Way is estimated to have 400 billion stars, at most. Like LLMs, we understand some things about our brains... but the complex interaction of many parts is less easy to understand. The purpose and value of feeling and awareness as a function of survival isn't a "tall order" -- it's just difficult for the human brain to grasp so many moving parts simultaneously. For some people, the complexity of the eyeball alone is proof that there must be a god -- the sheer magnitude of billions of years of brute force trial-and-error is difficult to comprehend.
Human intuition: a potentially powerful, but simultaneously and often error-prone weak force of the human brain.
>Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by conscious choice, which we already know happens
[citation overdue]
I think there are are at least two levels of logical fallacy here, not to mention avenues of undefined and fuzzy circular logic, but I've already spent too much time on this. I'd say try pasting that into Claude or another "big AI" and see what their critique is.
It isn't just about the simplicity of Panpsychism, friend, it's about the big things we have to explain if we rule it out that we are so far from being able to explain as to make us look foolish despite all our supposed knowledge. We don't even have a clue how to explain them, despite building atom bombs and space flight and getting close to artificial intelligence. That to me speaks volumes.
Please explain to me how emergence could create new "dimensions" that didn't exist before. Every emergent system we've ever observed creates unexpected complexity __WITHIN THE CONFINES AND STRUCTURE OF THE SYSTEM__. What you're describing is like if a flock of seagulls moved in unity then teleported to the other side of the earth they were so united - it makes zero sense within the framework, and only by ejecting from the framework can you salvage the notion.
I don't perfectly understand all the steps from zero to smartphone, but I have had enough education to have a decent overview, and I can gain that knowledge if I seek it. What will you study to understand consciousness?
The "emergence" you're describing from LLM behavior is a jump in capabilities that occurs due to complexity, but the LLM is just getting better at what it does, it isn't magically developing the ability to levitate researchers due to emergence, which is what "dumb" matter becoming conscious would be like.
The whole "god in the universe" angle is overblown, the root of panpsychism really is this: We and the rest of the stuff in the universe can perceive, feels, has free will, and makes decisions.
I understand it's hard to let go of your humancentric fallacies. The history of science has been brave men having to fight the power to point out the ways in which humans aren't unique or the center of the universe. Particularly if you're Christian, the idea that everything the bible said about man being god's chosen is bullshit must be a bitter pill to swallow.
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.
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.)
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."
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.
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.
Parts of the cosmos for sure are and there's no need to look very far for it - for example the part that forms me writing this right now is, in fact, conscious.
If the cosmos is conscious in the way that we are and the speed of light proves to be a limit, then its thoughts would take thousands or millions of years to process. It may be compelled to leverage entities with cogitation components within light seconds of each other for fast thinking. The Thinking, Fast and Slow paradigm could be built into the shape of the universe.
If the slow thinkers seek to constrain the fast thinkers we may get away with a lot before they catch up.
If the speed of light is a hard limit, leveraging localized cognition would not be useful at all. The localized cognition would only be able to ponder things it observes or experiences, that is, it can't ponder whatever the conscious universe wants it to, so the universe has to create it where it needs it, and then it can't use this cognition anywhere else because again, the speed of light. It really gets us nowhere.
I think though probably this "consciousness" of the universe, if it exists, is apparent and localized, but not bound and distinct locally, if that makes sense.
> then its thoughts would take thousands or millions of years to process
This reminds me of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", where pan-dimensional beings waited 7.5 million years for their first super computer to tell them "42". Then they constructed another super computer, Earth, to find the question.
>If the cosmos is conscious in the way that we are and the speed of light proves to be a limit, then its thoughts would take thousands or millions of years to process.
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).
This is a lot of working backwards. I find this interesting but ultimately not compelling. I see a lot of:
"If things were different than the way they are, they couldn't work they way that they work!"
Agreed, I find lots of these "what is the universe?" questions fall apart, due to the fact that humans aren't great at figuring out what we don't know. Just a thousand years ago, our smartest minds had a very different idea of what "space" was, how our solar system behaved, and even the shape of our planet, but it made sense to them at the time with the technology they had, so it's hard to mock them.
For us to theorize that which we cannot hope to ever understand makes us no different.
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.
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?
"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.
> 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.
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?
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.
>"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.
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...
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?
Nothing beyond food and shelter and reproduction matters in the practical sense, yet we are out here breaking apart atoms and launching rockets. The pursuit of knowledge is never a red herring.
I think that the question of conscience is actually not really relevant in the context of the problems it gets brought up in.
Like morality or artificial intelligence. In these contexts whether something is conscious or not doesn't really have a practical application nor should it be the moral guide for the way we react to things.
I would still believe in not "hurting" "unconcious" things even though the logic would assert that it was okay to do this. And I believe others would struggle with the same.
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.
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) is basically this. We are in Brahman, and Brahman is in us.
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.
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.
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) ?
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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?
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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???
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.
It's absurd and frustrating. This is something I wondered about as a child and subsequently immediately realized we are observing from a biased perspective. It's not as though we have millions of independent universes to look at and they're all perfect for the formation of life.
While I don't disagree with your reaction to the article in question...
"[The atrophic principle] tends to be invoked by theorists whenever they do not have a good enough theory to explain the observed facts." - Roger Penrose
Isn't the anthropic principle just the most recent god-of-the-gaps argument - i.e. a de facto mystery explanation of things we can't otherwise explain...?
I suppose that (to me) if or when the multi-verse theory becomes a falsifiable theory AND is empirically validated, then awesome we have the explanation pre-baked (the anthropic principle).
But until then, there doesn't seem to be grounds to say it's 'remedial'.
But curious for your thoughts, it's not my area of expertise beyond a layman's interest.
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.
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.
> The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique.
It also solve zero real-life problems, but the presence of structures like DNA and self-replicating cells does solve a problem, i.e. they fit inside something much larger than itself, requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created.
> requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created
Not sure what you mean here. Evolution doesn't work by rolling all the dice at once and only selecting a winner if all the dice match some magic string. Evolution is a selective tuning process; it works (figuratively) by rolling all the dice at once and keeping the dice that do match the magic string and then re-rolling the rest[1].
[1] Of course that's not how evolution actually works. It works by selecting very tiny slightly different versions of things in a biased way. Those biased versions of things just happen to be things that can make more of themselves, and so the system automatically selects for things that good at self-replicating and surviving. Evolution doesn't jump all over the place with infinite improbabilities, it is actually a very systematic and even somewhat predictable exploration of the fitness landscape.
Where did forces and fields or equivalent systems come from?
If your answer is some variant on "just because" then you don't have a better theory than some kind of necessary causality or contingency, in fact you have a mere absence of contemplation altogether.
I never imagined "don't think about it" as being the metaphysical basis of the scientific enterprise though and it's hard to imagine science getting as far as it has if it were.
Before we can start to really answer those questions, we first have to nail down what being conscious means. If we had a good understanding of what being conscious means, it might become relatively easy to look at something and assess if it meets the criteria or not.
We don't need to really nail it down. See my above comment. We have a good working understanding of what consciousness is in terms of practical behavior and in terms of the associated neural activity. That is definitely a reasonable basis for further study.
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.
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?
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.
In my experience smart people are pretty dumb. In seriousness, though, its hard for me to believe that there would be a lot of variation in this among neuroscientists, who I would expect to answer yes only to humans and animals.
Like consciousness isn't exactly as big of a mystery as its made out to be. To begin with its a genuine observable phenomenon in an informal way: we identify people as conscious more or less unambiguously, at the very least. Consequently, it can be studied at least at that level of specificity. From that point of view we have very strong evidence that consciousness is very tightly correlated with ongoing neural activity in certain architectures. From there I think we can begin to reasonably put pretty solid answers to the above list, particularly if you allow levels of consciousness to come into it.
My major point is that people love to cavalierly assert "we know nothing about consciousness whatsoever, anything goes, frankly" but I think that pretty radically oversimplifies and undersells what we do understand.
Your answer has the prejudice than only people and animals can be conscious.
I don't disagree, but that instantly makes the answer to the question "is the universe conscious" negative. Also AI, which currently is significantly more capable, at least in mimicking consciousness, than most animals.
I don't have that prejudice. I'm entirely open to the possibility that AI or other stuff could be conscious. In fact, I'm decidedly of the opinion that consciousness isn't magic and shouldn't be expected to be confined to specific arrangements of material per se. However, I am saying that we know quite a lot how brains work and how that relates to the observable phenomenon we bundle under the word consciousness and that knowledge allows us to say with some degree of certainty that a rock isn't conscious in any usefully descriptive way. I also believe that, despite their sophistication, language models aren't conscious because they specifically lack a lot of the sorts of structures which underly consciousness, which seems to me to be a specific kind of thing having to do with brains and language models don't need most of the circuitry that underpins consciousness because their training apparatus is external to the neural network. But I'm prepared to be wrong about this.
I simply object to the bald hand waving away of decades of neuroscience research and philosophical work with the suggestion that consciousness is a big question mark. It isn't, and I tend to think people who assert that are more interested in mystifying things than in clarifying them.
Could you point to some credible neuroscience research that mentions consciousness? My impression was the word consciousness is a taboo in those circles, much like AGI is in in machine learning research papers.
1. the object in question would need to behave in a conscious way
2. I'd have to look in the guts of the object and see evidence of some kind that the processes I was observing were inherent in the design of the thing.
To clarify a bit about the second point: I can talk to a phone with a person on the other end of it and it can demonstrate some properties of consciousness. If I didn't know what phones were I'd be tempted to identify this behavior with consciousness if not for the second criteria. In the case of a phone, if we take it apart and see how it works we can see that it is fit to transmit a voice from somewhere else, but not to generate the complex responses I was observing in the conversation.
Obviously the case of a language model, for instance, is significantly more complicated, since it does have some of the behaviors of a consciousness and some of the structures, but my hunch is that it doesn't really have enough of either to count. Definitely not discounting the possibility that we'll have artificial consciousnesses some day, I'm just skeptical language models are it.
Consciousness is observable huh? By rights you are a philosophical zombie, and only your passing resemblance to me - who I know from first principles possesses consciousness - gives even an inkling that you possess actual consciousness.
You are suffering from the a little knowledge is a dangerous thing trap. This rabbit hole goes much deeper than you think, you just haven't developed awareness to recognize that yet.
Yes, I too went to high school. If you think "what if philosophical zombies!?" is the extent of the philosophy and science of consciousness, well, I don't know what to tell you.
The simplest explanation of consciousness is that its a tool to build an abstract world model including fellow humans turned back on self.
You cant drive the entire network because that is an interactable problem so you model it like a fellow human and either feed broad input to it or sanctify decisions already made as part of the theory of "I"
I dont think gpt4 individual cells nor the algorithm can be said to have a subjective experience. I specifically doubt that the plants have one insofar as there doesn't appear to be a structure capable of building a model.
The boring answer that only the cat and the human are conscious seems like the correct one.
Polling a random sample of the population doesn't seem like a useful way to get at truth.
Since the universe isnt an actor building a model of a larger world I don't see how it could be conscious. If there is no other there is no I.
If all your attention is temporarily focused on something external to yourself, an onrushing train, say, are you temporarily not conscious?
People typically distinguish self-awareness from consciousness. It is not clear that they should, or shouldn't, but they typically do. They say consciousness is not facts but qualia, the sensation of the facts. A spreadsheet full of information can contain facts that differentiate blue from red. We hypothesize that a spreadsheet has no sensations, hence no qualia, hence no consciousness. We cannot actually operationalize this. We say a paramecium and a stone have no qualia, but this is more a hypothesis than a fact.
I think panpsychism in its essence is accepting that qualia are something and that the imagined boundary between things that have qualia and things which don't is established only by hypothesis and tradition. In the interest of not multiplying entities beyond necessity, we dispose of the boundary.
I am not a philsopher, so I don't really know what philosophers say.
I think by that definition you can argue that all the entities I mentioned in my original comment are conscious.
There is no way to quantify how expressive your model of the world has to be, or what mechanisms you have to act.
For example, a single neuron in an artificial neural network has a model of the world (it's weight), and can act by producing different outputs for different inputs.
I think it means that consciousness isn't anything terrifically special and that human level consciousness is just something along the same spectrum with a more complicated model.
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:
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.
> 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).
I hold that both of your positions lack basic metaphysical sophistication. I also submit that one source of potential error is a shared, but discredited metaphysical stance. However, if you have a sincere and humble interest in this subject matter, one open to correction, I would recommend "The Last Superstition"[0] as a starting point. There is no point in running in circles, because you can examine your presuppositions to discover the sources of your errors. And once you do so, you will see the intuitions you have absorbed through various cultural sources contain very serious errors.
The only conclusion we can draw from your observation of a really-nice-to-live-in universe (and almost all of it isn’t) is that we can create a simulated, even nicer-to-live-in universe in our havitable corner of it and run some AIs in it.
If there’s a creator, then this creator fellow must live in an even bigger, nicer universe within which ours exists. Now, where does that come from?
When you travel at the speed of light, time stops, and because of length contraction, the universe is no longer vast. To a proton - light - everything is instantaneous, time does not exist, and distance means nothing.
I don't know what the creator's purpose is. I just know we are part of something far larger and far greater. When we die, we go to another place.
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.
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?
> like how one of our skin cells don't understand how the body works
And how surprising would it be if, in one of our skin cells, there would be a life form that, through their scientific advancements, actually understands how the body works :)
> In the episode, Rick and Morty go inside Rick's microverse car battery, an entire verse that generates electricity to power Rick's car, unbeknown to the citizens of the microverse. Zeep Xanflorp, a scientist in the microverse, creates his own microverse, thus stopping the flow of energy to Rick's car.
I’ve always had thoughts like that. Like what if we were just some gods classification algorithm and the universe is the data being fed into the algorithm.
There are very, very, very, many "highly educated" people who think that human beings are incapable of grasping the vast scale of the cosmos.
I don't know if they mean "everyone", "everyone, except, of course, me", "everyone and isn't it a shame that they don't even realize it?", "everyone who isn't specially educated".
I am perfectly capable of internalizing and understanding a billion, trillion, or even quadrillion of something-- be they meters, light years, number of atoms of something, or grains of sand, thank you very much.
Size is related to the capacity to build computational processing elements; storage, working memory, logic gates. You can't serve YouTube from a pocket calculator.
OK, but that doesn't have anything to do with the ability to understand things, either. You only need enough elements to perform whatever the unknown algorithm is that allows understanding. There's no reason to suppose a series of progressively superior understanding-algorithms that require more and more components.
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.
Our intelligence is limited to our scale. David rappaport is intelligent enough to get a psychology degree because for his ancient ancestors that intelligence allowed for survival in the premodern environment. Yet it is still scale limited. Ancient humans see a buffalo that could be killed for food or a rock they can hold in one hand and use as a tool, but they are blind to things they might also see that aren't at the human scale level. E.G. that rock is coated in bacteria, can a premodern human see that and understand it? Nope. That rock also tumbled down a mountain side. Does the premodern human see the rock and immediately understand how tectonic plates or erosion work? Nope. Do we modern humans even fully understand these things today? Not really.
We have managed to hack our own limited intelligence by using collective memory so we aren't starting from zero every generation, but we still aren't naturally inclined to come up to things we readily understand at our scale and grasp what they might represent on much smaller or larger scales than our own. Even for people trained in these fields it is extremely challenging due to the problems with scale and our frame of reference. We had to develop things like microscopes and telescopes to take objects small and large and either magnify them or reduce them to something we can actually begin to make guesses about at our scale.
Right. So that is about perspective, in the sense of ability to observe things.
This seems separate from capacity to understand them, after gaining the ability to observe them.
I'm not convinced by the second part, about human knowledge becoming too gnarly for humans to cope with except by group effort. This a breadth vs. depth question, but depth is the winner over time I think.
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.