SentientMeat While your post was good, and I did read it. My lack of math skills and a seemingly fundamental difference in the definition of consciousness, I don’t know if that at this time we could even come to a common understanding of that which is being discussed.
For instance, I do not believe that ‘consciousness’ is diminished when taking nitrous oxide. I’ve taken nitrous oxide and been perfectly lucid of the fact that I was experiencing things differently, and I marvelled at how suddenly quiet sounds were quite loud, like the refridgerator, but the people talking to me seemed very far off and distant. We refer to sleep as lack of “consciousness” but that’s hardly the case. We delve into the subconscious which is just another level of consciousness, one we have deemed as “lower”, but just as the first floor of a building isn’t lesser in quality of the 33rd floor, neither one is either more or less conscious than the other, only conscious of different things. I personally do not believe that consciousness is limited to the brain, I think that all interactions that I spawn in the world is my “consciousness”, and that my will still interacts within other people’s brains even if I were to suddenly die. In otherwords I become a spirit, or a viral meme, but this does not mean that I lack “consciousness”.
I was comparing the size of the Planck unit to that of the entire known universe. If the known universe is expanding then the Planck unit is shrinking by comparison. I didn’t claim we discovered new galaxies, only that we discovered new properties of empty space, making empty space loom larger in the perspective than it did previously, thus the idea that it is “expanding”. Also, when I say there is no size to the universe, what I mean is that size is a property of measure, and requires a comparison to something else to be in any way meaningful. So the size of the entire universe is infinitely small and infinitely large all at once. In order for it to expand it would need to have a definable size. Since the word “define” means to set a limit. It is my feeling that to set such a limit would merely be fooling ourselves in an attempt to make it easier to understand the universe, thus obliterating any ability to do so. So as I was saying, just because the galaxies seem farther away, are they really? When you get into physical properties of celestial entities of that size there are a lot of factors that can go into color shifts and other such manners of measure by which we are attempting to quantify the intervening distance. I remain skeptical that we have discovered a way to accurately measure the distance between galaxies. The empty space is absolutely filled with the energies that interplay between celestial entities. Maybe the galaxy is not moving away, and that some other sort of confluence of energy, or entity that we cannot currently detect is growing and pushing those galaxies out of the way, but this does not imply that the universe itself is growing. The universe itself is constant, it simply is, and I think it’s a mistake to apply such definitions to the universe. If you want to say that the intervening space between us and the Andromeda Galaxy increases over time, I am willing to buy it, but I don’t think such a limited measure should be applied to the overall universe, which from all evidence I have ever seen or experienced, it is already infinite.
So my argument is that our awareness of the universe is changing, and that while it’s fundamental nature will remain as it always was and ever will be, how we perceive and measure it’s constituent parts will remain in constant flux.
Erek