(January 7, 2018 at 9:31 am)Khemikal Wrote: You don't understand how consciousness could have evolved. You also indicate that your "theist lean" is in some palpable sense due to questions like these. Is that correct? If so, why have you defaulted to gods over a question of biology? Is "god" more than a moniker for unanswered questions?I don't see how consciousness can result from the unconscious. I don't see how either could exist without the other. Therefore if they are codependent pairs, then they must have eternally existed in that way or have arisen together because one can't engender the other.
Quote:Consciousness does not exist as we perceive it. (The hypothesis that we are chasing a phantom)Consciousness is an illusion? Well, people were conscious before I was born and they will be conscious after I'm gone which means that I am not required to have this point of view for life to go on, so why do I have a sense of me? We could say a robot is conscious, but I don't have its point of view and having that point of view is not required.
We could say that animals are conscious in the sense that a robot is conscious of how it handles packages, but who can say if any of them actually have a point of view and feeling of themselves as a point of conscious attention? Obviously, that is not required, so why does it exist?
Quote:There are non-natural processes. (The hypothesis that there are phantoms to be found)"Non-natural" doesn't exist, but yes there are phantoms to be found.
Quote:The universe is fundamentally absurd and inexplicable.
That's true. That's the point of it all. If it could be understood, there would be no point to it.
As I said before, if you were god, you'd be bored of it and would wish for a surprise.
We display that behavior all the time: "Don't tell me who won the game because I haven't seen it yet!" When it's obvious who is going to win a chess game, they end the game and start another. Knowing the future is hell. Having a surprise around every corner is what this universe is about.
Nearly all of the world's physicists are gravitating around the theory of inflation regarding the beginning of the universe. Inflation is the idea that the universe was once infinitesimally small and expanded much faster than the speed of light and they use that model to explain the uniformity of the universe that we observe. (As opposed to an explosion implied by the name Big Bang). The universe expanded much faster than light could travel and so it is that delaying of information (aka surprise) that gives us the illusion of spacetime. It seems plain to me that the point of everything is for the sake of surprise.
Does randomness exist? If not, then my theory is hogwash. Fortunately, it does: http://www.askamathematician.com/2009/12...andomness/
It took a while, but hidden variable theory was eventually disproved by John Bell, who showed that there are lots of experiments that cannot have unmeasured results. Thus the results cannot be determined ahead of time, so there are no hidden variables, and the results are truly random. That is, if it is physically and mathematically impossible to predict the results, then the results are truly, fundamentally random.
It's not that we're not yet capable of predicting the results due to some technological limitation, but it's impossible for us to predict the results... regardless how awesome we become.
Surprise is ingrained in the universe.
Quote:I suspect that an exhaustive investigation of the first two, at least, would be more useful than a swift declaration of "therefore gods, maybe". In fact I'd categorize "gods" as representatives of the absurd and inexplicable universe camp, myself. A universe in which the silly stories we tell somehow find a way to make themselves retroactively true and effective, no-how. The third hypothesis would be eequal parts entertaining and infuriating. Maybe the sky is blue because tulips. Sure, sure, we have a more mundane explanation..but if fairy tales can go back and create the universe (or whatever a person tells themselves about gods).....just how certain can we be that it isn't tulips what make the sky blue, again?lol, well, the sky is blue only because there are eyes to see the blue. Blue is just a specific frequency of electromagnetic radiation. Slow the frequency down and you'd perceive it as heat. Slow it more and you'd find radio waves. Speed it up and it would be UV or xray or gamma rays or maybe even neutrinos or other "particles". Blue only exists in our minds. Do you see the same blue as I do? Maybe your blue looks red to me. Maybe we all have the same favorite color, but just label it different.
An atom is just a conglomeration of localized bits of energy and it has no real extents because the wave function extends to infinity. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questi...o-infinity
All this stuff that we think is stuff is not stuff.
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about the atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. - Max Planck https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck
The world is essentially what you make of it, except that you are in the world too. The world is in my head and my head is in the world. That sort of codependency is hard to conceptualize using words.
Luckily, Einstein was born missing part the part of his brain which made talking difficult for him to learn. Through that handicap, he learn to think in terms of concepts instead of words. Words are circular and can only be defined using other words (the Vish game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vish_(game) ) Conceptual thinking allowed him to run thought experiments in his head that weren't possible in the real world.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein.
What I'm struggling to convey is if the universe is fundamentally unknowable, then what the hell?!? How does something exist that is impossible to figure out? No matter which line of thinking I pursue, I always come back to god and surprise.
