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Asante
Omnicyclion prophet
Registered: 02/06/02
Posts: 87,302
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The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness?
#4658537 - 09/14/05 05:42 AM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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Does matter hold a degree of consciousness? Is the universe sentient? Let me tell you where I'm coming from.
Let's say the brain is a computer (with or without a soul attached - whatever) and that your sentience is due to your brain and what it does.
Now what is the brain?
A tangle of interconnected matter that sends impulses across intricate (neural) pathways causing a cycle of interaction that goes around and around, basically.
Technically that would mean that a thing such as artificial intelligence/sentience is possible. Already, a computer virus acts like an evolving cell in the primordial soup which is cyberspace and spyware acts like a bunch of leafcutter ants who take important bits (lol) of their surroundings (your IP) to the colony, the company that sends them out.
But now: in earth, water, fire and air you can also have intricate patterns of matter interacting, for instance by collision, electron sharing, molecular interaction, temperature fluctuations, gravity waves et cetera.
In lumps of matter (let's say the Sun) you've got all sorts of particles banging into eachother. You could call this random, but basically you can also say that structures temporarily evolve (in a cloud of plasma more briefly than a crystal) in which matter can interact (communicate) in the same patterns as if it were in a human brain or a computerchip.
That would mean that the sun is a swarming sea of consciousness-es, and since you can scale this up you could say the sun is a kind of super-brain that dwarfs anything we can remotely imagine.
If you scale that up a giant leap you see that the universe is interconnected (by a field of gravity fluctuations etc) and sustains patterns of internal interaction. This would make the universe itself have all degrees of sentience.
So perhaps there IS such a thing as "intelligent design" and perhaps is human consciousness the result of an omnipresent consciousness upgraded (or downgraded) a considerable couple of notches.
So maybe we humans are the result of something that was already there, and that that "already there" includes consciousness.
Spiritually this might mean that a human emerges from the Whole into something specific and then sinks back into the Whole, so that you after life become *everything* rather than *nothing* which nihilists believe.
Our universe - we got an interconnected mass of energy which interacts to form and then decompose very specific structures. If you read the label on the back you can see that one serving contains all consciousness, sentience, life and death within it. Is it important that one calls this "Universe" and the other calls it "God"?
I hope some of you who waded through the bogs of this rant found something on-topic to spark your postingness.
-------------------- Omnicyclion.org higher knowledge starts here
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psychomime
o_O
Registered: 05/16/05
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Asante]
#4658560 - 09/14/05 05:57 AM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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there's a guy called Stuart Hameroff who has done a lot of scientific work on consciousness. its fascinating stuff. some of the implications of his work is that consciousness may be a consequence of fundamental properties of matter at the quantum level. check this post for some discussion of his findings.
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Asante
Omnicyclion prophet
Registered: 02/06/02
Posts: 87,302
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: psychomime]
#4658567 - 09/14/05 06:02 AM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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Cool! *clicks link*
-------------------- Omnicyclion.org higher knowledge starts here
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Asante
Omnicyclion prophet
Registered: 02/06/02
Posts: 87,302
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Asante]
#4658593 - 09/14/05 06:23 AM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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Wow, I burnt some calories getting my head around that one! *post rolls out of the printer*
Slowly it starts to dawn on Science that the chick he's boning is a Goddess.
-------------------- Omnicyclion.org higher knowledge starts here
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PhanTomCat
Teh Cat....
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Asante]
#4658619 - 09/14/05 06:42 AM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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Planck scales, Microtubules, OH MY....!
The smaller they go, the bigger it gets....!?
-------------------- I'll be your midnight French Fry.... "The most important things in life that are often ignored, are the things that one cannot see...." >^;;^<
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MAIA
World-BridgerKartikeya (DftS)
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Asante]
#4658760 - 09/14/05 08:34 AM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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The prime components of this reality or universe are energy and matter. Consciousness is a structured form of energy and matter, in a sense that energy structured matter in a certain way, a way that permits an sentient interaction with reality. Therefore, if energy and matter are all over the universe, it's very likely the existence of unknown or unseen forms of consciousness.
Can a consciousness with a different structured matter communicate with us ? Probably, but only with an interface or gateway , it's like we're on the TCP IP network 192.168.0.x and, let's say, the sun is on 192.168.100.x
MAIA
-------------------- Spiritual being, living a human experience ... The Shroomery Mandala Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy. Voltaire
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BlueCoyote
Beyond
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Asante]
#4659341 - 09/14/05 11:13 AM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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I that read !
Comments perhaps later...
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IgnatiusJReilly
Up From Sloth
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: BlueCoyote]
#4660729 - 09/14/05 03:12 PM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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Wow, you just articulated more clearly some thoughts I was trying to hammer out the other day in my Consciousness as Awareness thread. Because consciousness is composed of matter and energy does not necessarily mean that matter and energy are composed of consciousness. You dig? But another part of me wants to assume that the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm (take that whichever way you want??brain=universe or universe=brain). I'm gonna check this link out??I was saying in my thread how the mechanism of DNA precipitates the mechanism of consciousness...
edit: meant to respond to Wiccan
-------------------- "A Bad Day for Pants"
Edited by IgnatiusJReilly (09/14/05 03:13 PM)
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Asante
Omnicyclion prophet
Registered: 02/06/02
Posts: 87,302
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: IgnatiusJReilly]
#4661156 - 09/14/05 04:39 PM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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can you edit your post to include a link to your thread? sounds interesting!
-------------------- Omnicyclion.org higher knowledge starts here
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Veritas
Registered: 04/15/05
Posts: 11,089
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Asante]
#4661163 - 09/14/05 04:41 PM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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falcon
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Asante]
#4662769 - 09/14/05 10:16 PM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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Azimov's Foundation series has a planet where this happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(Asimov)
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Ravus
Not an EggshellWalker
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Loc: Cave of the Patriarchs
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Asante]
#4662853 - 09/14/05 10:29 PM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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Yet if the advanced brain capable of holding consciousness was created by natural selection, it's unlikely the sun or any form not regulated to natural selection would evolve to create such a massively complex thing as consciousness created by a conscious organ. Consciousness is just 10 to the high exponents of molecules, but without Darwinism to even create a primitive brain in something like the sun, I don't how consciousness could come about.
This obviously applies to not only the sun, but any non-living substance, entity or particle. Consciousness is too complex to create by chance I believe; human consciousness required billions of years of natural selection refining the genes, eventually getting a nerve clump that grew more advanced as more organisms with better nerve clumps had better chances of survival.
However, your idea did make me think. The sun is, after all, massive, but unless the sun is creating intact rocks and worms for 10^-8 of a second, it's quite a leap to say it could randomly create consciousness. It seems doubtful pure old entropy itself without Darwinism to refine it could ever create any form of intelligence, consciousness or thought.
-------------------- So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.
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HB
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Ravus]
#4666169 - 09/15/05 04:45 PM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin. - Alan Watts
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MushmanTheManic
Stranger
Registered: 04/21/05
Posts: 4,587
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: HB]
#4666261 - 09/15/05 05:12 PM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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Does the universe have a nervous system?
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HB
Registered: 04/06/01
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: MushmanTheManic]
#4666277 - 09/15/05 05:15 PM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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i personally feel that it does, though it seems more of potential energy than concentrated matter, since all matter is, after all, a vibration like everything else ...
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psyka
Praetorian
Registered: 06/09/03
Posts: 1,652
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Asante]
#4666450 - 09/15/05 05:48 PM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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Y'know... it really is weird.
Must be the 'shrooms I havent read a New Age book in my life (with the exception of Stalking the Wild Pendulumn, which was after these revelations). Though, I find it extremely intriguing how similiar our beliefs systems structure themselves after hallucinogens... its almost like you picked that knowledge right from my own mind and transmitted them on the screen for all to read and compare.
However, truthful it may sound it is still a vague concept shared by individuals without any concrete evidence. So, for now, it remains for entertainment purposes only.
-------------------- As the life of a candle, my wick will burn out. But, the fire of my mind shall beam into infinite.
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psyka
Praetorian
Registered: 06/09/03
Posts: 1,652
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: psyka]
#4666491 - 09/15/05 05:57 PM (18 years, 6 months ago) |
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I think people who dont agree, really just cant see this perspective.
It takes a whole lot of "cooperation" from natural phenomena to go from lifeless molecules to bacteria to intelligent self-aware animals. Redefine your scope of life. Where do you draw the line between lifeless molecules and vibrant cell structures? And by line, I really mean spectrum.
-------------------- As the life of a candle, my wick will burn out. But, the fire of my mind shall beam into infinite.
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Saturdayraining
Wendigo
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Asante]
#11946050 - 02/02/10 02:09 AM (14 years, 1 month ago) |
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I this post
perhaps individual consciousnesses spring into and out of existance, like a neurological hawking particle. the question raised is, "can they affect the universe by will, defined as the synthesis of information to arrive at a decision?"
if so.... there may be some sort of communication. Ive got to post my theories on myco-intelligence soon. its a form of agglomerated matter, taking the form of a less entropic physical system (read:life). remember stamets hinting on that in "mycellium running"?
here is a (relavent) short sci-fi story:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/gravitymine.htm
-------------------- - Saturday I have a lot of friends in the drug culture. I try to help them out by posting on here, and sometimes they put stuff up without my permission, but I do not condone or commit any acts described. “In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion" -Carl Sagan Anyone have some Macrocybe Titans spores or samples? PM me
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Noteworthy
Sophyphile
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Saturdayraining]
#11946101 - 02/02/10 02:35 AM (14 years, 1 month ago) |
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Although I think it is highly likely that the whole universe is sentient, I think it is wrong to suggest that this sentience would be 'intelligent'. Thoughts are a type of content of sentience. They rely on the structure of the brain. If the sun is sentient, its experience would be completely foreign to anyone, except perhaps the explorers of the mind... who have seen the world as a jumbled mess of anythingness
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Saturdayraining
Wendigo
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Re: The mind of matter -- does agglomerated matter (and the universe itself) have consciousness? [Re: Noteworthy]
#11946112 - 02/02/10 02:39 AM (14 years, 1 month ago) |
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true that on incomprehensibility.
Have you read solaris? it is about a planet that is covered with a liquid that simulates consciousness through chemical interaction, so the whole planet is one sentient being. But it is so alien, we can find no way to communicate. and it does weird stuff....
-------------------- - Saturday I have a lot of friends in the drug culture. I try to help them out by posting on here, and sometimes they put stuff up without my permission, but I do not condone or commit any acts described. “In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion" -Carl Sagan Anyone have some Macrocybe Titans spores or samples? PM me
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