To talk about the universe being conscious in this sense, seems to be meaningless to me. I get this strange feeling that we are trying to force something that is vastly mysterious (numinous, not divine) into our world view of how lifeforms work on earth.

Reminds me of a fascinating discussion with Richard Dawkins from a while ago. If you can ignore the pseudo-scientific babble from Deepak Chopra and the annoying host, Dawkins makes some deeply interesting points worth thinking about.

https://youtu.be/BiwLrxPb1fE?t=16m12s

The article is talking less about "does the Universe contain consciousness?" but more about "can non-biological things have consciousness?"

The author quotes a scientist who thinks stars that emit jets in a single direction might be doing so consciously. If that's the case, then the scientist raises the question if other non-biological things in the universe might be conscious.

It sounds like no one is taking this idea seriously, but some guy wants to test it just to rule it out.

Best sentence I've read all month

Consciousness is the only thing we can be certain of.

Maybe that lint was it, but probably not.

The 'existence' of our hands is perceived by our senses and filtered through consciousness. There is no way to prove that they actually exist outside of our minds.

Edit: moreover, on a less serious stance, there is always [1], which reassures us that the answer to such a question would inevitably be "no", when the question is posed as part of an headline.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395585

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...

There is a whole heck of a lot of physics out there still so I think calling a galaxy-wide intelligence impossible is premature (let alone the debate over what 'intelligence' is counted as).

That shouldn't be a problem if the quantum particles are entangled. right?

>> which reassures us that the answer to such a question would inevitably be "no

The Universe doesn't care about such laws ;)

> It is not possible, however, to use this effect to transmit classical information at faster-than-light speeds [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

What's to say that the universe doesn't simply operate on vastly different timescales?

Or, at the very least, the universe cannot be entirely unconscious, since I am part of the universe and I am conscious.

We don't say houses are conscious in the same way human's are. We might say a house is "aware of something" in the same way we say a house is "conscious of something", not to mean exhibiting the mark of the mental but to mean every person contained is aware of a certain thing; but if we're using the concept of consciousness in the way this article is using the concept, not as being aware, but as a mark of the mental, we don't ever apply that to a house because that is nonsensical. We would say "you don't mean the house, you mean the people inside."

The entire starting question seems nonsensical. If we conclude the universe, or a star, is conscious like us we've stretched the concept of consciousness to absurdity or metaphysical wankery.

So, to use your example, a room with a conscious person in it, considered as one whole, is at the very least partially conscious, since the person in it is conscious. Whether the room itself is conscious we don't quite know.

But this leads to the question: does the notion of "partially conscious" make sense?

1. a room and a person in it are separate

2. nothing is separate from the universe

Therefore, there are two things that are not separate from the universe but separate from each other.

Indeed separation is matter of consciousness. If we believe that the universe is more or less a frothing foam of energetic particles, the only thing that differentiates my teeth from my gums and me from the room is my recognition and identification of them. There is matter with or with out me, but there is no room, no tooth, no me without my consciousness.

"Particles" is plural, implying separation. It that, too, a "matter of consciousness"? Sounds a lot like "consciousness" is being used to do a lot of passing of the proverbial buck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA3NLyQNDBQ

Another way to look at it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEunth9YCgo (You are the Big Bang)

Why does the presence of a person in a room make a difference, as opposed to any other relationship between the two things?

> Or, at the very least, I cannot be entirely indivisible, since cells are part of me and they are dividing.

The point is more that the universe must have the capacity for consciousness within it's inner-workings, much like divisibility must be inherent in any biological system -- more so than "cells" being divisibile -- we're after the notion of divisibility itself.

It's a big jump from "some stars emit jets that seem to move them in a non-random direction" to "consciousness".

like, a person's brain can be split in 2 and have them live, iirc, so that it could split into parts that are no longer connected at some point, doesn't seem to by itself rule out the consciousness of a part I think?

That isn't to say that I think "this connected component of the universe " is conscious. I don't think it is. (I believe in the existence of souls, though by that I do not mean that I am confident that a human-made AI couldn't be conscious. Maybe it could, I don't know. If it seemed to be, I think it would be best (in most contexts) to err on the side of assuming that it was? Point is, I think there is something humans have(/are) that "this connected component of the universe" doesn't.)

How big could life forms like these become? Interesting thoughts require not only a complex brain, but also sufficient time for formulation. The speed of neural transmissions is about 300 kilometers per hour, implying that the signal crossing time in a human brain is about 1 millisecond. A human lifetime, then, comprises 2 trillion message-crossing times (and each crossing time is effectively amplified by rich, massively parallelized computational structuring). If both our brains and our neurons were 10 times bigger, and our lifespans and neural signaling speeds were unchanged, we’d have 10 times fewer thoughts during our lifetimes.

If our brains grew enormously to say, the size of our solar system, and featured speed-of-light signaling, the same number of message crossings would require more than the entire current age of the universe, leaving no time for evolution to work its course. If a brain were as big as our galaxy, the problem would become even more severe. From the moment of its formation, there has been time for only 10,000 or so messages to travel from one side of our galaxy to the other. We can argue, then, that, it is difficult to imagine any life-like entities with complexity rivaling the human brain that occupy scales larger than the stellar size scale. Were they to exist, they wouldn’t yet have had sufficient time to actually do anything.

http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/can-a-living-creature-be-as...

Or even more theoretically, isn't it also possible that distant regions of our universe could be adjacent in other dimensions? Perhaps in some higher (or lower?) dimension, every particle in the universe is right next to each other, having never separated after the big bang.

Not that any of this is particularly likely, but since we don't understand the core mechanisms of consciousness very well, it seems possible they could be operating on levels of physics that we also don't understand yet.

There is no theoretical limit to the rate of metric expansion, but unfortunately metric expansion doesn’t allow for FTL communication. Let’s put aside issues of lightspeed in an expanding universe though because we don’t even need to go there to address this basic issue of why you can’t have a brain past certain limits.

At some point limited by the speed of light even in a static universe, your “thoughts“ would be incredibly slow. What would it mean to have a neuron the width of the galaxy? Would you be particularly intelligent just because you had a lot of individual parts from a certain distance? There’s probably some theoretical upper bound on the optimum size for a computing body in a universe bound by c, based on the total amount of entropy which could ever be contained in a given region and the rate of signal transmission.

As to adjacent dimensions and that kind of thing, who knows? In current physics that would be like magic, and magic can be whatever you want it to be after all.

An Alcubierre warp drive[1] would be capable of enacting causality faster than light, no?

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

Imagine that human civilization survives and progresses for 100 million years. Do you think that they'll be able to look back on any of our "laws" without laughing?

At that point we'd likely be far beyond Dyson spheres, harvesting large quantities of antimatter, solar system scale particle accelerators, artificial black holes, quantum supercomputers, etc., etc. Whatever would be discovered is almost guaranteed to be unimaginable by us.

For the artificial black holes, Dyson spheres, antimatter, quantum computers, and giant accelerators to actually work, the laws of physics they're based on can't be that wrong. They can be incomplete, requiring their place within a greater theory, but not simply wrong. There is observation consistent with the notion that the speed of light has been constant for the last ~14 billion years, everywhere we can see.

Well, if you're looking to claim that the universe used to be conscious prior to inflation, at which point it was torn to pieces in every direction possible simultaneously, sure. Probably not what you were fishing for, though.

"Not that any of this is particularly likely, but since we don't understand the core mechanisms of consciousness very well, it seems possible they could be operating on levels of physics that we also don't understand yet."

Well, if the universe is operating in that manner, it would have to be doing so with some rather tight bounds on it to ensure that we never ever have to take those things into consideration when plotting the behavior of a system. I would tend to say this falls into the "raises more questions than it answers" bucket, myself.

If consciousness is a complicated phenomenon that only manifests in some sort of very small way in certain interactions, then A: what are those interactions? and B: by what mechanism is the universe even discovering those interactions? It's not hard to imagine a universe that has physics just like ours, except that a particular combination of 10 to the 11th atoms of carbon in a very precise linked order will spontaneously emit very large quantities of blue light. But without a clue as to what that may be, how is anything in the universe ever supposed to find that pattern of atoms? That is, if this is how consciousness works and there is some sort of very ill-defined, handwavey "field" associated with it, by what mechanism did anything in the universe discover how to interact with it?

These are not necessarily forever unanswerable questions, but right now, they would in many ways be bigger questions than the question they are putatively being offered as the answer to.

Humans are not 100% rational like elementary particles in quantum physics, and they were all in cars moving in a predictable way like H2O molecules in a river. And it made me wondering if there is a possibility of consciousness that we try to describe with physics laws but will never be able to totally understand because of an underling consciousness.

A conscious mind has an at-least-somewhat-coherent preference function, yes? (Under modern predictive-processing models of the brain, the experience of being a mind is the experience of focusing on things that allow you to make reward-biased predictions, to further drive embodied processes like movement to "unify" those biased predictions with the environment—i.e. to seek the reward state. So you need a preference function to focus, and thereby to have a train of thought.)

So, the Earth might be conscious. Despite seeing ourselves as different from e.g. spiders, or algae, or bacteria, every preference-function of Earth-based life is actually rather close-together in possible-preference-function-space. You could say that the Earth—i.e. everything on Earth that thinks—"wants" to spread carbon-based life through mitosis and meiosis. If the Earth was a starship, this would be its mission.

The universe, on the other hand? Maybe if we're the only life in it. Otherwise, there's probably a https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer somewhere with a very different idea of what the universe "wants", that can't really be coherently combined with our own.

If such a universe had a brain, it would necessarily be one with split-brain syndrome; it wouldn't be able to both "be" Earth-based life and "be" a paperclip-maximizer at the same time, and still have consciousness in the sense we define it. So, not "one" consciousness, no.

A human being wants things that often involve the destruction of its various cells. We want to drink alcohol sometimes, for example. This is possible because our preference-function has no factor for the preferences of the individual cells killed in the process. They aren't a semantic part of our mind. They're just a literal part of our bodies.

A hypothetical Earth-Mind wouldn't have a preference-function derived via coherent extrapolated volition of all Earth-life. Its mind would simply be the set of preferences the Earth seems to have if you're an alien trying to interact with "the Earth" as a coherent being, on some scale where the actions of individual cells (e.g. humans) don't matter as much as the actions of the biosphere as a whole. Maybe with action-and-reaction observed over a time-scale of billions of years, for example.

That preference function might be observed to be, for example, "install replicating carbon-based life onto anything that comes into contact with it." Or "capture solar radiation into ongoing surface chemistry." Note that these are coincidentally things that some of the individual cells also want, but again, the cells in existence at any given moment and their wants aren't anything you can use to deduce the preferences of the mind. It's more what cells are kept in existence and given more resources over time—especially in response to specific stimuli—that allow you to make educated guesses about what a multicellular agent is "trying" to do. (With the proviso that those cells shouldn't also be clearly fighting the rest of the organism in doing so; a model that predicts that animals want to get cancer is a bad model.)

Presuming humans terraform the planet completely, the preference-function of the Earth as a whole might seem to end up as "transform all raw materials into structures, items, and cells suitable as inputs to sustain the life of the 'human' cell-line." This is a higher-level thought-process that could be found, but it wouldn't erase the lower level; the Earth-Mind would still look to have those other desires, because humans are still carbon-based life and still do carbon-based life things. Just like our own brain cells, despite being the "dominant cell-line" of our bodies, still function as cells in a body. Humans are "embodied" by our biosphere just like our brain cells are "embodied" by other cell-lines. And so it still makes sense to talk to a human by talking to its body, rather than directly to its brain—and it still makes sense to talk to "the [terraformed] Earth" rather than talking to humans.

On the other hand, the "observed mind" of a planet with a paperclip-maximizer on it wouldn't look anything like a natural-biosphere or human-driven-biosphere. It would just look like the single paperclip-maximizer's mind. A paperclip-mamixizer isn't part of a biosphere; it's a monocellular culture, the preferences of the whole identical to the preferences of the individual entities. And those preferences are completely orthogonal to the preferences of a biosphere.

If Earth came into contact with a paperclip-maximizer, their interaction wouldn't look like a coherent mind at work; it would look like two minds each blindly attempting to achieve their own goals with no greater purpose in their collision.

The point I hold out on is that, if you interact with the Universe as a whole, on a scale where things like biospheres are the "cells", and attempt to ascertain its preference-function, you won't get anything sensible out. Unlike Earth, where both the Cheetah and the Gazelle "serve" to tree-search a set of biological machines that started with Earth's first carbon-based replicators, an interaction between the Earth-Mind and the Paperclipper-Mind doesn't serve to "do" anything. The behaviour of the interaction wouldn't throw off byproducts that would be of use to anyone trying to predict anything. The Universe, as an experiment containing multiple orthogonally-preferenced agents, is purposeless; unlike Earth itself, there is nothing from which an alien standing outside of it could infer the hand of an intelligent designer—a mind at the Universe's scale that found it useful to set its "cells" in motion in the way the Universe has been set in motion.

Which makes sense, I think; the "intelligent designer" of the Earth-Mind was the first carbon-based replicator, but there was no equivalent process that "took over" the Universe as a whole to infuse it with a self-similar cluster of optimization-processes.

This circular thinking breaks down at "mathematics can encode in a succinct and inspiring way the laws of physics". The laws of physics are partitioned into at least three different sub-theories, none of which have been successfully encoded with another sub-theory using mathematics, i.e. General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and the laws arising from the directedness of Time. (That last one could include the Theory of Consciousness if entropy causes brain memories, and memories cause consciousness.)

Perhaps because physics produces consciousness, and consciousness produces mathematics, mathematics can never describe a united theory of physics.

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/06/mind-and-cosmos-roun...

So far I have solid and interesting arguments only from David Chalmers. Most others, like Penrose, make basic errors or hand wave too much to my taste.

Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism. Amherst Lecture in Philosophy, 2013. http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf

The Combination Problem for Panpsychism. In (G. Bruntrup and L. Jaskolla, eds.) Panpsychism. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf

That feels more like the idea of universe-as-computer than in the examples of conscious, living celestial bodies.

I like how Carl Sagan’s most famous quote is him just dumbing down the lyrics of a Joni Mitchell song so that his audience could understand it.

What would such a conscious universe be conscious of? Would it need to feed, mate, learn and defend itself? If there is no utility, no purpose, then why would it be conscious?

At least in biological life, there is an internal purpose - that is - to live and self reproduce. The consciousness of the universe would not have such needs, and with their loss, it would lose all that evolution achieved.

that is to say,

- most scientists would hesitate to say they have a clue

- philosophers have all kinds of ideas but all with epistemological issues

- your average joe would probably equate consciousness with the "soul"