Re: Why I believe a universal awareness must exist.

On Mar 25, 6:42 am, "Robert Carnegie" <rja.carne...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Joshua wrote:
On Mar 24, 8:25 pm, "Robert Carnegie" <rja.carne...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Inez wrote:
Nothingness doesn't exist. Existence must be attached to "something,"
it cannot just float around unattached.
Who says?

What about empty space? The vacuum?
What about it, it is a dimension, like an empty set waiting to be
filled. Actually, it is incredibly low density ionized gas, but that
is nearly mute I think it is like 3 atoms per cubic meter.

If once there was nothing, how did anything ever start to happen?
That is exactly what I was trying to explain. In fact, I removed the
need for a god at all, but you didn't even think to look that god
evolved into existence in my account. Why I think god must exist is
the nature of intelligence itself, not the need for a creator. I view
god as the infant god, created by natural evolution and evolved into
being just as us. In fact, he and us would have been created by the
same processes, kind of like drifters in a sea. Really, it is a mute
point. Even if the consciousness did exist, there is little
probability of it being aware of us, but I also think that the
internet is aware, and probably most ion storms.

I have to say, with your best interest at heart, that that is crazy
talk. I mean literally. People with mental illness, schizophrenia,
often give personhood to inanimate objects, in their perception
automobiles, home appliances. If you do have issues in that direction
then there are agencies that can help you.


I would agree with you if that is how I were meaning myself; however,
what I am speaking of is an altered form of Orch-OR, a theory of
consciousness that says that consciousness is essentially information
in motion that maintains some level of chaos in a general orderly
patern. Human consciousness in fact has been found to have 40 moments
of consciousness per second (well 20 to 90, 40 being average taken by
wide areas of the brain oscilating, measured in Hz). That means our
mind really works like the spool on a film machine and not like a
flow, which is why at 60 frames per second, a roll of film seems like
a flow to us. According to this theory, anything that gets over a
certain set of qualifications would be consciously aware, perhaps even
of itself. The real problem is that our brain is fed information by
transitional sensors, part of them work on our level, our abstract
level, and part of them are acted upon by the universe around them.
While I think that all of existence is aware, I doubt seriously that
it is any more aware of its composition, ie the physical universe than
we are of the chemicals and neurons in our brain. It is probably a
very aware, very insane intelligence that is locked in a dark and
silent room for all of time. But, that is what I intended in the first
place. Never did I say that this entity would have created the
universe, but evolved along side it. While I think that it may have
become aware of its composition due to the incredible power of its
mind, I do not think that it would have created us, merely discovered
us and analyzed us thoroughly. Oh well, it is really not that
important. I found it terrifically interesting, if you really read
Orch-OR, it suggests that microtubules in the eukaryotic cells
actually work on a quantum level. It suggests that possibly, our
consciousness is an extension of this massive overlying consciousness.
Based on this theory, they are finding that these microtubules would
have the computation power of 10/\16 operations per second within each
neuron of the human brain. What it would mean is that some mysticisms
may be right. We may be a member of an extended intelligence network
and that intelligence may be reabsorbed by the greater intelligence
when this information is freed from our physical brain. It also
suggests that reincarnation is the nature of the universe. Oh well,
that certainly would provide a purpose for all life, the universe
discovering itself; however, I wouldn't want to sound too religious. I
am simply excited by these ideas. I would be just as excited if
someone claimed to have invented a time machine, and I would
investigate it with enthusiasm as well. Well, you all have a good day.
I guess between being called a maniac, being beaten down, and called
clincially insane, I should be disabused of the idea of thinking about
anything unconventional. Really, it just saddens me. Firstly that you
never imagine anything outside of the norm, and secondly that the
lessons of kindergarten and polite behavior have evaporated from our
society. You know that there was a study that found that most people
voted in societies where balot boxes were held in public and most
people voted with good taste in societies where the balots were not
secret. I guess social distress is still the greatest form of behavior
control, even in our modern society. Perhaps if you could see the
dissapointed faces of your peers you would not be so quick to disabuse
another person of their individual right to free thought. The only
right that is not easily taken away from any man in any nation.

Having said that, I cheerfully give credit to computers and
refrigerators for consciousness. A refrigerator has a mechanism to
detect whether its interior chamber is cooler or warmer than a certain
temperature. Well, for me that is consciousness, in a very limited
way of course. I hold this position partly because when people talk
about the uniqueness of the human mind amongst living things, it rubs
me up the wrong way.

And I'd say computers know what they're doing, but the Internet as a
whole does not - it's a community of independent entities.

There is an interesting metaphor that someone explained to me, from a
story. They imagined an anthill whose ants together made up a brain.
And the anthill had a friend, an anteater; they would talk together
pleasantly while the anteater ate from the ants, who individually were
terribly afraid. So the anthill had a different personality and
different opinions from the ants.

But really there is no natural reason for such a personality to
arise. And a personality that did not like anteaters would be more
reasonable.

I now have reminded myself of another story - where anxiety about the
propriety of killing eating animals that might be, were, sentient -
that had feelings - led to the breeding of animals that specifically
want to be eaten and will tell you so. That's from the story _The
Restaurant at the End of the Universe_. Once again these are not
natural beings, but were made for this use.

Now as to your ideas, I think you are unnecessarily imagining a Deist
God coming into existence. Unnecessarily, because you suppose that
the universe got started without him. The consensus of scientists is
to believe that living things on earth arose and developed into their
present-day forms by natural processes, and that includes the
development of human intelligence, as a survival skill. For a god to
evolve in outer space just so that there will be a god - it multiplies
the unlikeliness.

Now I think these questions have answers that /don't/ involve
intelligence. But I think it would need to be shown in detail that
the questions don't need answers, if you wanted to go that way.
Sure

Maybe we could say more about this. For instance, I like the metaphor
- however much it does or does not represent objective reality or
scientific fact - that in the /curved/ universe of space and time,
before and after are like northnand south on the surface of the
earth. So taking an imaginary stroll backwards in time would be like
walking northwards on the globe. Well,, if you do that, eventually
you fall in the water - but, putting that aside, eventually you come
to the north pole. This is a place where there isn't any more north -
every direction that you could go is south, although they go to
different places. But you aren't doing anything fantastic if you
visit the north pole of the earth, although it is interesting - you
are just walking on ice to a particular place.

Then again, I think that in quantum theory, which seems to be how the
universe fundamentally works although there are things that it doesn't
quite fit - in quantum theory there are cases where cause and effect,
before and after, are mixed up in the wrong order. This amounts to
saying roughly that perhaps the entire universe burped backwards in
time in a quantum way and caused itself to exist.

I'm not sure we'll know. So let me propose some other thoughts, maybe
troubling and best not dwelt on since we wouldn't be able to do
anything about them anyway.

One is why anything exists at all. There seems not to be a good
reason that anything exists instead of nothing existing. And it's not
as though we'd notice that we weren't existing. I don't think that
God himself - a universe-creating god, not like yours - could explain
why things, including him, do exist. If he does, which I doubt.

Then again - if the universe is just the working-out of events in a
universe governed by laws of behaviour of matter, energy, and so on
that can be expressed mathematically - then does it exist, really, or
does only mathematics exist? For instance, imagine - like the film
_The Matrix_, or the Internet environment "Second Life" - that there
is a mighty computer running a program that simulates the universe.
Since we are inside the universe, how could we tell that it was only a
simulation? And - does the computer need to exist for us to "live" in
the simulated universe, or is the mathematics sufficient?

I think that may be another unanswerable, but then again, with quantum
theory, I think there is room for doubt that the universe /is/ just
the working-out of events in a universe governed by laws of behaviour
of matter, energy, and so on that can be expressed mathematically. So
it's probably all right. ;-)


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