Re:Is the Universe Conscious?
by jerf on Monday October 23, 2017 @02:50PM
(#15535859)
"If expansion (or contraction) of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could theoretically enact causality faster too right?"
Well, if you're looking to claim that the universe used to be conscious prior to inflation, at which point it was torn to pieces in every direction possible simultaneously, sure. Probably not what you were fishing for, though.
"Not that any of this is particularly likely, but since we don't understand the core mechanisms of consciousness very well, it seems possible they could be operating on levels of physics that we also don't understand yet."
Well, if the universe is operating in that manner, it would have to be doing so with some rather tight bounds on it to ensure that we never ever have to take those things into consideration when plotting the behavior of a system. I would tend to say this falls into the "raises more questions than it answers" bucket, myself.
If consciousness is a complicated phenomenon that only manifests in some sort of very small way in certain interactions, then A: what are those interactions? and B: by what mechanism is the universe even discovering those interactions? It's not hard to imagine a universe that has physics just like ours, except that a particular combination of 10 to the 11th atoms of carbon in a very precise linked order will spontaneously emit very large quantities of blue light. But without a clue as to what that may be, how is anything in the universe ever supposed to find that pattern of atoms? That is, if this is how consciousness works and there is some sort of very ill-defined, handwavey "field" associated with it, by what mechanism did anything in the universe discover how to interact with it?
These are not necessarily forever unanswerable questions, but right now, they would in many ways be bigger questions than the question they are putatively being offered as the answer to.
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.