If No Consciousness Exists, By What Right Does The Universe?

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Cyperium, May 22, 2021.

  1. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    Consciousness is a property. There has to be some "thing" to be conscious, usually some living thing. So, until you were a thing - i.e. some time after conception, not birth - you were not conscious.
    Genesis suggests a lot of things that are not true.
     
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  3. ThazzarBaal Registered Senior Member

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    Pointing to a mental universe theory then?
     
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  5. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    The capacity of matter to primitively manifest to itself, as a way of existing independent of abstract description and human conceptions (i.e., mental and cultural activity), doesn't entail that it has the cognitive abilities of a brain (memory-based identification, understanding, guided goals, intelligence/creativity). The latter is contingent on a complex organization that isn't present in 99.9999... percent of the universe. It's a classification error committed by philosophy of mind to label an ontological characteristic or ability (manifestation) as a psychological property (i.e., panpsychism).

    Put another way: No one can actually confirm that "not even nothingness" follows death, or that being the way non-neural matter normally exists to itself. Such a "just so" dogmatic story certainly doesn't facilitate explaining the phantasmal content of consciousness (images, sounds, odors, bodily sensations, etc), if matter has zero presentation of itself as anything. But it's certainly consistent with the evidence to assert that there is no working biological or technological apparatus available for recognizing and validating that there are chaotic, elemental phenomenal occurrences after death. Vaguely akin to a person claiming that they never dream, but the actual likelihood is that they simply don't retain memories of their dreams after waking up (ergo, the conviction that there was only blankness or missing time rather than "something").[1]

    - - - footnote - - -

    [1] But death or a return to the normal internal state of matter or the overall universe certainly wouldn't be as complex and organized as a dream. It would just be random nonsense, figuratively spasms of noise and pixel static incapable of even reciprocally verifying that briefly they "are there".
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    Last edited: Feb 9, 2023
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  7. ThazzarBaal Registered Senior Member

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    Ok, technical type verbiage I'm somewhat new too, but I can understand that I'll be as if I'm asleep after I die. I'll assume the same was true before I became aware of self. At least I think that was the gist of your post.
     
  8. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    It's not the same as being asleep because you dream when you are asleep, and there's cognitive activity transpiring that identifies and understands what is being presented in that dream. None of the latter continues after death, and the random phenomenal nonsense occurring would be akin to noise -- not an organized, unfolding narrative like a dream. There would be no memory-based apparatus anymore for verifying the events (again, that's why it could still be inaccurately construed as "not even nothingness", even though non-biological matter activity is still transpiring).
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    Last edited: Feb 9, 2023
  9. ThazzarBaal Registered Senior Member

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    I don't know, but then I don't always dream ... Or so it seems sometimes.
     
  10. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    Cognition (identification and understanding) and other facets of intelligence are dependent on a memory system. If the latter is gone or not functioning properly, then you don't know about anything existing slash occurring, even if it's figuratively slapping you in the face (manifestation or feeling wise).
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  11. ThazzarBaal Registered Senior Member

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    Sure, dead dead is another type of sleep. With that stated, there's an element of faith attached to people like myself. If God is a consuming fire, and God is spirit, then my faith is in that to bring me back to life after I die, then another evolutionary process can begin again, such as we've seen happen here on earth. That's my faith.

    It gives life is the premise. God as spirit, which takes me to the sun and the future.
     
  12. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    Obviously it is a futile effort here to continue pointing out why death (ceasing to exist as a functioning biological entity for future eons, no cryogenic restoration and revival involved) is not sleep. "Good day." -- Paul Harvey
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  13. ThazzarBaal Registered Senior Member

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    I'm fairly sure the term is utilized to connote a wake up day.
     
  14. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    No. Pretty much the opposite - i.e. no consciousness without biology.
     
  15. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    For me it means the laws of physics allow the various anything's around us to exist

    What does it mean - if by this phase you are referring to an ending emerging out of a random beginning, I doubt this will be so

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  16. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    Well, the only term I would change is "truth" and I would change it to "fact", the truth is that nothing can be verified unless it is you verifying your own existence, cause that is the only truth we truly know and can verify. I do believe in an external world, but I don't believe that it is much different than our internal one, just a different manifestation, but it relies on the same thing; consciousness. What consciousness is in respect to the external world I don't know, it should mean the basics of our own consciousness but could have completely different characteristics otherwise, fundamentally it would be to know of existence, and it would imply a subject to that knowledge. In my view, the universe just wouldn't have any place to be otherwise, there wouldn't be anything to discern it from nothing.


    Or what about John 1 "In the beginning was the word", the word is logos, logic, knowledge, order and reason. The philosophy that the main principle for the universe is logic and order, which was formed from the chaos before it. It isn't unreasonable that consciousness is a property of the formation of logic and order. With formation I don't mean static order, or static knowledge, but the action of bringing order and the action of using knowledge, I think that in that process consciousness manifests itself as the inherent meaning of that knowledge.

    Darkness to reality is nothing, existence is the light and the light is consciousness. It reveals existence.

    This is what I think could be a way to see it: Before *you* were born *you* were aware of existence but not *your* existence. I think that there was a general existence to us, our brain has captured a slice of consciousness from the general consciousness of the universe. We return to that general consciousness when the brain no longer can bind us.
     
  17. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    That the laws of physics allow for things to exist seems very reasonable and doesn't go against anything that I believe either. What strikes me is that imagining a world without any consciousness is the same as nothing. I mean it's so deeply nothing that I can't see in what WAY something exists (even laws or whatever else). At all. It's so difficult to explain but I know that there's something to learn here.
     
  18. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    Atoms and elemental particles reacting to each other are kind of acknowledging their mutual presence. But it's a "dark / non-feeling" form of primitive, precursor awareness (in which the invisible merely confirms the invisible invisibily).

    Ergo, things and events don't seem to be truly verifiable as existing without manifestation / feeling. But even the latter is still useless if there is no cognitive system underlying those presentations manipulating them so that they reciprocally validate one another.

    "This is a sound-based thought narrative acknowledging that you are there, extrospective visual scene." ... "And these are recalled flashes of images stored in memory being recruited to supply understanding to what your introspectively voiced words mean."
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  19. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    That the laws of physics allow for things to exist seems very reasonable and doesn't go against anything that I believe either

    I'm glad about. Would not like the laws of physics going against your beliefs. As for being reasonable, such would be a individuals call and nothing they could do to change any of the laws

    Me - they (physics laws) - are what they are - FULL STOP .

    What strikes me is that imagining a world without any consciousness is the same as nothing

    Not so. We have no idea of the situation before the Big Bang so for the purpose of this discussion let's take Big Bang as our starting point

    It seems to been a while before stuff began to be formed and the situation changed from nothingness to somethingness

    Think I can say with 100% certainty none of the somethingness which arose included consciousness

    Why would that be? For me the simple answer (and the only one I fathom) while physics regulates, with a ironcladness, the behaviour of stuff physics has no ability to regulate consciousness (consciousness not being stuff)

    Consciousness is being in a state of awareness, two bits of terminology which have no physical construction

    No physical construction? nothing for physics to work with


    I know that there's something to learn here.


    Me thinks in thou thinking you have come to the question, I think is unanswerable

    How can inanimate substances become
    animate and further along become conscious? Moving up to
    consciousness
    (consciousness is thinking about thinking)

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  20. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    What is a cognitive system anyway? Does it need to be a brain? Sure, if we talk about complex reasoning or reasoning about things, but for the simple awareness of existing alone?




    That they are what they are doesn't mean that we can't reason about them, also, we have found no foundation for them, do they need a foundation? Well, that's the philosophical question which this thread is all about, I argue that they need a foundation and that the foundation is consciousness - not human consciousness but consciousness nevertheless. It strikes me as odd that just because we humans possess it, it must be something unnatural! That it can't have any meaning or representation without humans or life. Consciousness is real and it is a part of the universe, if it is only part of humans or if it is also present in animals or plants or inanimate matter or the very fabric of spacetime, that we don't know, but we know that it is present with us humans at least.


    "been a while", "formed", "change", all of these doesn't really mean anything without consciousness do they? What does it mean to have "been a while"? Been a while for whom? There is no universal time in the universe, no time from where it has been a while. That we can form words doesn't mean that they tell us anything. We have to consider the framing of what we are trying to describe here. We have no understanding of what the universe is like without consciousness. Sure, we can pretend and imagine the universe at different states in the past as if we were there looking at it, or as if we paint that image on some mental canvas representing space, but we truly have no idea of what it is actually like.



    I'm not saying that consciousness is in any way seperated from that which arose, I'm saying that consciousness is most likely the foundation of every bit of existence, including that which arose, consciousness is what determines what exists and what doesn't exist.


    I'm saying though that consciousness is at the very heart of stuff, the fact that it exists is itself consciousness.

    What is the physical construction for the anthropic principle? It is a physical principle but there is no tangible fabric to work with, it exists purely as an idea that manifest itself by physical properties that follow that idea. Consciousness is like that, we can infer that it exists, not through physical measurement, but by the fact that we are consciousness and this is the basis for what we know as our existence (the only basis we know), there is no reason not to assign consciousness to other things that exists.

    Might be unanswerable, we think that dogs are conscious because they are like us in some ways, the less like us things are the less conscious we think that they are. But we really have no idea, everything could be conscious in its own way.

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  21. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    I would agree if you mean conscious in a not conscious sort of way. For example it doesn't seem like a piece of felspar has many thoughts or feelings.
     
  22. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    Indeed, neither am I saying that a rock is thinking anything, or feeling anything (if existence itself could not be described as a feeling of sorts).

    I think that there is something fundamentally true about consciousness. I mean, all the actions we take in life has reasons, we love eachother so that we stick together to raise the kids (if seen from a evolutionary perspective), we feel angry so that people don't abuse us, etc., every feeling, emotion and strive we have has a evolutionary reason. It has a physical necessity to it, yet all of that could be accomplished without consciousness. Consciousness is kind of a byproduct of that.

    Still: Imagine a world without consciousness, there are still people acting as if they love eachother, acting as if they enjoy a youtube video, acting as if they enjoy the company of their friends over a pizza, all of the mundane stuff that humans do. As it is necessary physically for our species evolution to ensure bond to eachother and cooperation, all of that. But isn't there still something missing without consciousness? Isn't consciousness such a natural and true fit to bring meaning to all of those activities?

    It's as if it is fundamental. To us. But also, I believe, to all of existence. It isn't just a strange illusion or emergent property, it fits too well into our behavior, in fact, our behavior would be pointless if not for consciousness (even though there is no physical need for it).
     
  23. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    That is the part that is silly and demonstrably wrong.
    I'm not sure what your argument is. Obviously animals are conscious, otherwise they would just be lying on the ground, so there actually is a physical need for consciousness.
     

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