Is it possible to prove the universe DOESN'T have consciousness?

[HamdenRice]

This possibility has been raised by scientists, philosophers and theologians -- both by those who don't think it at all likely, and by those who do.

But the basic problem is interesting. The galaxy has about as many stars as the brain has nerve cells. These stars interact through gravity, and in a sense can be said to be processing information about gravitational forces. Here is speculation by someone who doesn't think it likely:

http://www.builtonfacts.com/2008/06/06/whats-in-your-head/

I brought up the far-fetched thought experiment of considering our galaxy. It has roughly the same number of stars as a human brain has neurons, and like the neurons they mutually interact. Is the galaxy conscious? Clearly not. But really, what’s so clear about it? What exactly is different qualitatively about the information processing of gravity and the information processing of lots of cells that gives one the ability to generate consciousness but not the other? It probably can’t be what they’re made out of - both could be equally well simulated on the same Turing machine, and I don’t think there’s any reason to believe the “wetness” of biological brains is somehow privileged. So it’s actually quite difficult to say that a galaxy is not conscious if in fact the bare fact of information processing is necessary and sufficient to produce consciousness. This seems implausible, and so I remain unconvinced about that premise. Some people (including one commenter on the post) are in fact totally willing to believe that a galaxy is conscious, but I’m not. Not without evidence.

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So the question is: is it possible that a galaxy (or the universe) is conscious? In the same way that a single nerve cell isn't conscious but the brain is (nor is a molecule in a nerve cell conscious), at our scale we wouldn't know if there was a galactic consciousness.

The same issue is raised by the internet, an ant colony and certain other forms of distributed processing. Is the internet so vast that it is achieving consciousness, but we don't know it, because it can't communicate to us (Corbin Project film fans, check in!). An ant seems extremely simple, but an ant colony exhibits intelligence far beyond that of the individual ant.

For that matter, is it possible that there is universal human consciousness, that emerges from our interactions (and that is being accelerated through the internet)?

It's impossible to prove that there is such consciousness.

But is it possible to prove there isn't?

[trotsky]

1. Define "consciousness" first.

Then your post will have some meaning.

[groovedaddy]

2. Are we conscious? Are we part of the universe? n.t

[zbdent]

4. did you type that, or

did I imagine you typing it?

[BridgeTheGap]

8. as in "are you dreaming about a butterfly or are you a butterfly having a dream?" n.t

[zbdent]

12. now I'm wondering if butterflies can e-mail ...

[ZombieHorde]

24. That is what I thought when I read the subject line of the op.

[zazen]

3. google David Darling, physicist from U Manchester and author of Zen Physics & other books

His essential argument is that the human brain severely constrains consciousness rather than produces it as the pinnacle of human-centered evolution (though he does think evolution is rather human-centered in other ways.) That's why near death and other traumatic experiences seem to open us up--because they break down the evolutionarily necessary barriers of perception that enable us to focus on predation, reproduction, etc. I'm sure his work is more complex than this, but I found this and his book Equations of Eternity (and mathematics and evolution) to be really accessible in a way the Tao of Physics never was.

[lazer47]

5. We are outside of a bubble looking in,, at the same time

we are inside a bubble looking out on a bubble,, while being watched from a bubble.

[Jim__]

6. Fascinating question.

I think before we can begin to address any question of proof, we do first have to define consciousness and then define required properties for consciousness to exist.

Interaction between entities that make up consciousness is definitely a requirement; but I think it's clear that it's not sufficient. There would have to be some structural component to the interactions. If the human brain were just a collection of interacting neurons, we wouldn't have consciousness. There are structures that regulate the interaction of these neurons, and also a hierarchy to these structures - some interactions have the ability to override other on-going interactions. I believe a structural hierarchy is also required.

But, even if such hierarchical structures exist in the universe, could we find them? It would be fun to try.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

7. I don't think so

because consciousness is something that would be really difficult to measure. That being said, I have been in group situations where minds were so attuned to one another that everyone knew what was going to be happening next and acted accordingly. Rather an interesting feeling--like being safely swept down a stream.

[eilen]

9. Are you on the bus or off the bus-- kind of thing? nt

[cosmik debris]

10. Ambiguous terminology makes bad philosophy

and worse science.

[Meshuga]

11. I don't think so

In my personal opinion, of course.

Obviously scientists, philosophers and theologians are not immune when it comes to anthropomorphizing the universe. Some feel the need for it in order to fit their beliefs so they do it. And that is okay on a personal level. But it does look silly if they do try to make that into an objective truth.

Asking if it is impossible to prove that there is such consciousness is like asking if it is impossible to prove whether my computer chair suffers every time I let out a fart. And I had a lot of homebrew last night.

[Silent3]

13. Proving a negative tends to be difficult or impossible...

...in most cases, and this case is no exception. If you're flexible enough about what you mean by "conscious", and willing to speculate about all manner of unknown, as-yet-undiscovered phenomena, it's possible that a galaxy or the universe is conscious, in just the same sense that it's possible there's an invisible, very quiet pink unicorn in my room right now.

The more interesting question is whether it's even remotely plausible for a galaxy, or the universe as a whole, to be conscious, and to that I'd say no.

In order to define consciousness, I think it's best to start with not what consciousness is, but what it does. One thing consciousness does is react, and not just the way a rock "reacts" to gravity by falling, but in a complex way where a small stimulus or impulse can set off a chain reaction of impulses, and possibly physical responses.

That complexity is of a type that arises from having both sensory apparatus and effectors (an effector being a means of physically manipulating the external environment). While we can imagine a very unfortunate person who is both paralyzed and deprived of all physically sense still being conscious in a sense, it is very doubtful that a person who had been that way since birth would possess anything we'd call consciousness.

Even a human being so terribly cut off from the world, however, could still have a brain and nervous system that's nearly the same as any other human, still having the basic structure necessary to receive external stimuli and to respond to them, like a computer with no keyboard, no screen, no mouse, no printer, etc. -- the basics you need are there, just not hooked up. Setting aside the fact that unused and under-used computers don't atrophy the way unused and under-used brains do, just as it's possible for a computer without I/O to be pointlessly running a program without new external data and no way to display any results, maybe a human brain completely cut off from the outside world might, in an abstract sense, be doing something we could loosely call consciousness.

A galaxy on the other hand not only has no discernible sensory apparatus or effectors, but it doesn't even show any of the organizational complexity necessary to utilize such things if they were somehow provided. A universe can't have anything external to it at all -- if you imagine something being outside of the universe, you're just misusing the word "universe". The universe, by definition, is everything that is.

It's also useful to look at consciousness as an adaptation, something that doesn't merely exist for the sake of existing, but as a reaction to evolutionary forces. It's the struggle for survival in the natural world which has resulted in the complexity of the human brain. A universe can't compete with anything, because it's everything. Galaxies show no capability to predate upon each other, or compete over resources, apart from a very, very loose sense of those ideas that you might say favors bigger galaxies with more gravity to "suck up" smaller galaxies and intergalactic matter. At any rate, since galaxies can't consume so much that they reproduce and create even bigger galaxies as offspring, there's no true evolution there, nothing to drive the formation of the deep complexity of a conscious brain.

Lastly, even if we allow that somehow, someway, by some very, very loose definition of consciousness a galaxy, or the universe as a whole, could be conscious, if the idea is that gravitational and electromagnetic interactions are the fabric of that consciousness, it would be an EXTREMELY slow and unimaginably ponderous consciousness due to the speed of light and the vast distances between the constituent elements of such a conscience.

Imagine being surrounded by a swarm of intelligent gnats which are born, live, reproduce, and die within a microsecond. Imagine one of those gnats trying to communicate with you. Communication on an individual basis would be hopeless. If you're what the gnats imagine as being a God, you aren't going to be very helpful to them in dispensing godly wisdom or saving their jobs at the gnatmobile plant when they pray to you to for help in hard times. You could eventually communicate with them, after millions of generations had come and gone, and that only after the billions or trillions of generations it would probably take you to decide such communication was worthwhile. The gnats could only communicate with you through an enormous multi-generational effort, sustained for millions of generations, a highly unlikely thing.

[HamdenRice]

14. How about universal human consciousness. Consider global warming.

I should preface this by saying that this is the more conventional speculation, going back to Hegel and Marx.

Is there some supra individual human consciousness? Your criteria of reaction is useful for finding consciousness that is analogous to our animal consciousness. But that conceivably applies to humanity.

We collectively, after lots of debate and interaction, concluded that global warming is real. The mass of humanity is probably (hopefully?) going to reorient its activities and react to warming in a way that no individual could -- reforesting the deforested areas, cutting back on digging black stuff out of the ground and burning it. We will be like an ant colony that is switching burrows.

Yet no one of us can "sense" that collective consciousness (if it exists) as collective consciousness.

[Silent3]

15. Universal human consciousness is at a little more plausible.

Certainly humanity as a whole can respond collectively, such as to an environmental threat as you've suggested, in ways that would indicate a crude type of self awareness.

I suppose it's useful to think of consciousness not as something which simply exists or doesn't exist, but something that can exist in degrees. I can see myself willing to work with a definition of consciousness that would define humanity as a whole as conscious, albeit to a fairly low and disorganized degree. One could say that this level of consciousness, even as low as it is, is probably much higher now than it was just a century or two ago because technology has greatly increased the speed and number of interconnections between people, institutions, and storehouses of information.

That collective consciousness, however, hasn't been honed by much experience at functioning in a strongly unified and collective way, or by cooperating with or competing with similar but separate consciousnesses. While that wouldn't put universal human consciousness in as terrible a bind, by analogy, as an individual human cut off from birth from all external stimulus as I talked about previously, I think we'd be dealing with something roughly akin to a brain damaged human growing up in isolation, in a very deprived environment.

[HamdenRice]

16. On second thought -- about the galaxy

Your criteria focuses on consciousness having an instrumentality and reactivity (if I understand correctly).

That reminded me of something discussed here some time ago -- the experience of being a sensor for stellar processes. When we look up at the night sky, all that "processing" of gravitational forces by the stars and our galaxy is, to some extent, reflected on our retina and reprocessed in our brains.

If we then sit down and do a star map, or even more to the point, learn to calculate orbits and predict planetary movements -- and actually put symbols down on paper -- would that qualify as the galaxy having an instrumentality that reacts to its consciousness (if there were such consciousness)?

If you're willing to consider it in the global warming/change of human behavior context, are you willing to consider it in the humans-as-stellar-sensor context?

[Silent3]

19. Willing to consider humans-as-stellar-sensor?

Not really. The rest of the galaxy isn't "wired up" to me or any other human in a significant way to use us as sensors.

Sure, on our own accord we might decide to send radio messages back out into space based on what we've perceived, but that would be making a stab in the dark, with no clearly established protocol to represent sensory data, no obvious signal path, and no obvious organization for processing the data.

Might what we perceive now, recorded and/or transmitted to be used someday far in the future, become sensory input for some far grander entity? Perhaps, but I think that requires way too much speculation and a lot of loosening of the definition of "consciousness" to get to an interpretation of galactic or universal consciousness with us as the sensory apparatus.

[Duppers]

28. ck. post # 27 below

:hi:

[Taverner]

17. Just gonna say - can't prove a negative

[Taverner]

18. Well I think the better question is to prove that it does

And look for any evidence. Not anecdotal, but reproducible verifiable empirical evidence

For example, how can you measure this consciousness?

Does consciousness even really exist?

[muriel_volestrangler]

20. The galaxy is more akin to a suspension of fat droplets in water

appropriately, since its name comes from 'milk'. It doesn't process information in anything like the way, or amount, that neurons do - they have specific connections to other neurons, and vary widely in time in the effect they have on each other. The gravitational effect of suns on each other varies with their mass, and position , and that's it - they can't affect some other suns that are further away, while affecting those that are closer less, and they can't get into a special state associated with a particular event. That makes them more like some objects that are in motion, can attract (or may repel, in the case of things involving electromagnetic forces) each other, that might occasionally collide and coalesce, or break apart.

If you ascribe consciousness to a galaxy, then I think a lot of fluids would need to get it too.

[Canadiana]

21. No

it is not possible to prove a null hypothesis like "the universe is not conscious". Frankly it would also be very difficult to disprove that null!

Interesting concept of universal consciousness though!! Maybe we're all just floating on a tiny piece of a neuron-like substance...

[InvisibleTouch]

22. Personally, I think the Universe IS consciousness...

...that is, consciousness pervades everything. But can it be proven or disproven? No. At least not with the state of knowledge we currently have. People may have a conviction one way or the other, but that's all it is - a personal belief that may or may not have any relation to the truth.

[Silent3]

25. How would consciousness "pervade" anything?

Consciousness is what consciousness does. Consciousness doesn't "pervade" your brain, or anything else, any more than education pervades the bricks of a school or music pervades the ink and paper of a musical score.

(This is giving me an idea for a separate thread, and I'll continue that point in that other thread.)

But can it be proven or disproven? No. At least not with the state of knowledge we currently have. People may have a conviction one way or the other, but that's all it is - a personal belief that may or may not have any relation to the truth.

The issue in this thread is less a matter of proving or disproving anything than it is a matter of realizing that "consciousness" is a word made up by humans that means what we humans want it to mean, not a word in search of a meaning we haven't found yet. We define what the word means, then look at the universe and try to decide if the universe as a whole exhibits the characteristics we define as consciousness. I think you're starting from a mystical notion of what makes consciousness work, theorizing some mystical "essence" behind what we call consciousness, then wondering if that essence pervades the universe.

You're of course welcome to that idea of consciousness, yet another among countless ideas that share the unremarkable quality "well, you can't prove me wrong", but it's not a very useful way of looking at consciousness, particularly when a biochemical approach has been far more productive, an approach which doesn't require speculation upon any sort of mysterious energy or ethereal presence to make great strides toward improving our understanding of consciousness.

[TechBear_Seattle]

23. The onus of proof is always on the one making the affirmative statement

The person who claims that there is some kind of universal consciousness is the one responsible for providing proof.

[TWiley]

26. A rock has "intelligence" and memory

It learns from its environment, and becomes warm during the day. It remembers this into the cool of the night.

[Duppers]

27. The universe have a conscious? Uh, No, but here's food for thought: a Princeton study ...

This is not the universe, but a parallel subject. An eerie coincidence?

Googling consciousness, random number generator, you'll find:

The Global Consciousness Project

Vid: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnvJfkI5NVc

Laboratory scientist Dean Radin describes an experiment testing the relationship between mind and matter. In this experiment, random number generators are used to test whether collective human attention corresponds to a change in the physical environment.

and this....

September 11 2001: Exploratory and Contextual Analyses
Roger Nelson, Director, GCP

...The following material shows the behavior of the Global Consciousness Project's network of 37 REG devices called "eggs" placed around the world as they responded during various periods of time surrounding September 11. A book chapter gives a compact summary. These eggs generate random data continuously and send it for archiving and analysis to a dedicated server in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. We analyse the data to determine whether the normally random array of values shows structure correlated with global events. This page shows a wide range of exploratory analyses that provide context for the formal hypothesis testing related to the events on September 11. A number of people have done supplementary and complementary analyses, as well as direct replications. Links to these are provided below. An especially interesting effort was undertaken by Bryan Williams, who used data in 15-minute blocks, to compare with the seconds resolution used in the formal analyses. To the extent his results are similar, this provides some response to the question whether a general, external influence is at work, as opposed to an "experimenter effect" operating via fortuitous (albeit anomalous) selection of the analysis specifications.

The underlying motivation for this work is to discover whether there is evidence for an anomalous interaction driving the eggs to non-random behavior. In a metaphoric sense, we are looking for evidence of a developing global consciousness that might react to events with deep meaning. The whole world reeled in disbelief and horror as the news of the terrorist attack and the unspeakable tragedy unfolded. Our analyses show that the EGG network registered an unmistakable and profound response.

Introduction
I want to acknowledge that I like the notion of Global Consciousness, but that this idea is really an aesthetic speculation. I don't think we have real grounds to claim that the statistics and graphs representing the data prove the existence of a global consciousness. On the other hand, we do have strong evidence of anomalous structure in what should be random data, and clear correlations of these unexplained departures from expectation with well-defined events that are of special importance to people. The events share a common feature, namely, that they engage our attention, and draw us into a common focus.

This is a report of what we see in the data recorded on September 11, 2001 and the surrounding period. It is the best description we can give of measurements and effects that are essentially mysterious. We do not know how the correlations that arise between electronic random event generators and human concerns come to be, and yet, the results of our analyses over the past three years repeatedly indicate such correlations.

much more: http://noosphere.princeton.edu/terror.html

including lots of graphs....


:crazy: