(April 5, 2015 at 7:26 pm)bennyboy Wrote: @emjay
Okay here's a question for you. If every thing carries information, and consciousness is integrated information, then how would you define the substance of the universe? Would you call it all mental? All physical? All neutral monist (neither physical nor mental but something else)? Would the universe itself, which includes all information, be thought of as conscious?
I can't even hazard a guess about your first question I'm afraid. As for the second, the only way I can wrap my head around such ideas is to look at in terms of software and ask whether a simulation can run within another simulation. And the answer to that for me is a resounding yes - think of emulators if nothing else. But that's probably not what you mean. Whether there was a universal consciousness would I guess depend on whether all the information of the universe formed a coherent system, but even then consciousness, intelligence, and self-awareness are (IMO) different things - I would strongly doubt that if there were such a consciousness that it would be intelligent and self-aware like us unless there was an intergalactic 'evolutionary' reason for it to develop that way. But just because the universe contains all information doesn't seem to me to imply that it would necessarily be conscious - just as a list of data doesn't make a program. It depends whether you class all interactions in the universe as 'information exchanges' - for instance is a chemical reaction an exchange of information or is gravity? That's where the 'system' is in the universe, in its physical laws, but is that data interchange?
