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.

Douglas Adams;

> This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'

We never bothered to define consciousness with any scientific rigor, so why not? It's common for things that are everywhere, to also be nowhere at all.

Could the cosmos, in fact, be smurpity-badoingo?

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.

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.

Critiques:

## bernardo kastrup https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2020/07/the-irony-of-philip-...

## joshua farris https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-missing-subject-a-cri...

## edward faser http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/07/problems-for-goffs-p...

No, consciousness requires

- a purpose - why would the universe need it?

- a mechanism - how would learning occur?

- a source of learning - that is the environment, what is the environment of the universe? doesn't make sense

What I think are good signs for possibility of consciousness:

- a self replicating agent, with the ability to perfectly copy and multiply its code

- limited resources, leading to competition

- other agents, forming a complex environment based on cooperation and competition

Why is it necessary to have many agents? Because evolution is a blind, open-ended search. The more attempts the faster it goes.

Consciousness makes sense for agents who have to navigate complex environments to survive. It needs to be localized, subjective, the universe would not have that property.

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.

Boltzmann brain: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (1x08) actually had an episode on this:

https://screenrant.com/strange-new-worlds-boltsman-brain-sta...

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.

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.

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!"

We are the cosmos. So of course.

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?

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)

>"Imagine tossing a coin 70 times and getting heads every time, or rolling dice and getting six every time. Nobody would say that’s a fluke,”

No I would say it was a trick. A Derren Brown type trick [0]. I started reading thinking this cosmos bloke was an amazing benefactor, and ended thinking he was scamming me.

[0]: https://youtu.be/XzYLHOX50Bc?si=uCQUBl65fsEyehJb

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?

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

More of just a nerd snipe or red herring to waste time on.

Like working to understand consciousness probably won't actually advance building an GAI in any meaningful way.

Nor will it be the driver of how we interact with our surroundings be it rock, dirt, tree fish, dog, human, robot or universe?

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.

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

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

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) ?

Kind of a weird survivorship bias?

“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.

> He contends that the universe is just too perfectly perfect to be an accident.

If it wasn't maybe he would'nt be here to ask the question.

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

That's not very different from Berkeley (everything is God's mind).

Also we cannot even tell for sure if other people are conscious.

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

Isn't that the same as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism ?

"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself" (Carl Sagan)

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.

Related, maybe:

Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858941

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

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.

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

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

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.

Do pigs, in fact, fly?

Let's hope so.

> 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???

"Consciousness is the universe experiencing itself"

The arguments to fine-tuning are utterly remedial. I can't believe that no one in their orbit ever brought up the anthropic principle [1]. We are not randomly distributed over possible universes; we are embedded in a universe that is by definition capable of supporting our existence (and indeed giving rise to it). It doesn't matter how stupidly improbable it is. Observer effect is off the charts!

Second, in evolution, the entire chain of reproducing life forms from the first replicator to now is a series of stupidly improbable happenings. But it's not just that they're stupidly improbable all in a row (i.e. multiplied together), but they are one by one and selective; lots of stupidly impossible things were tried (read: bad mutations), and they all died out. We're left with good stupidly improbably things, one after the other. Evolution of life forms is governed by a tuning process (copy, mutate, select), why couldn't universes also be?

Who writes these kinds of articles? None of the ideas posited here are new, and in fact, they've been argued over for decades, sometimes even centuries. I find it hard to believe the proponent of these ideas is ignorant of the most basic criticisms.

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

It’s obvious to me that the universe was intelligently designed. For exactly the reasons the author states, it’s simply too perfect and conducive to life.

If you have 10 minutes watch this video of a cardiac surgeon whose patient had a near death experience:

https://youtu.be/JL1oDuvQR08

The most arrogant thing I could possibly imagine thinking, is that I know all of the mysteries of the universe and what happens when we die.

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?