I’ve read numerous accounts that say that the universe is a fluctuation of the vacuum energy. In that case, space as we know it is not a prerequisite.
An example: A Mathematical Proof That The Universe Could Have Formed Spontaneously From Nothing. The “nothing” in the headline is of course the old fashioned colloquial usage.
The idea that the Big Bang was one random quantum fluctuation in a multiverse bubbling and frothing with such phenomena is decades old. But as I see it in my simple mind, one either has to believe that this multiverse obeys the same fundamental quantum laws as ours, or else the “quantum fluctuations” thing is merely an analogy, an attempt to conceptualize the mathematical solution to the Wheeler-DeWitt field equation in the paper your linked article describes. Why should we believe that the uncertainty principle, or anything at all about quantum mechanics, hold true in some arbitrary super-universe outside our own?
For example, the quantum fluctuations that we hypothesize necessarily take place in real space and time, and if the space happens to be in an intense gravitational field near a black hole, then one of those virtual particles may become instantiated as a real particle if its partner, which was supposed to annihilate it, is removed from causality quickly enough by disappearing across the event horizon. There are lots of assumptions here about the predicted operation of known physical laws.
The other thing I’ll note is that many other solutions to the Wheeler-Dewitt equation have been proposed, one of the most interesting of which is the Hartle-Hawking state, aka the “no-boundary” proposal that I already mentioned. Here, in fact, is the original 1983 paper in which James Hartle and Stephen Hawking develop the no-boundary proposal as a solution to Wheeler-Dewitt. The paper is not a useful intuitive explanation but I’m just pointing out that it was developed from the same underlying theory as the one you linked.
Why can’t it have always existed? Time is a man made construct to understand the universe, one theory is that everything that is, has and will exist already does.
Well, it could, if you believe in the multiple membranes and spontaneous creation of new bubble universes theory, or even the bounce theory (i.e. big bang leading eventually to a big crunch, rinse and repeat). If we are talking membranes then it’s turtles all the way down…where did the first ones come from? Sort of like the panspermia theory…you are just kicking the first life happening down the road. But as for our universe, the reason they say it stated at a specific instance (and a lot of physicists were not happy this was the case, including old Einstein) is because of observations. We can see the various galaxies and clusters moving apart, even speeding up, and we can look back in time and see the progression backwards to smaller and tighter clusters, even back to the emergence of the first observable stars (just a few hundred thousand years after the big bang, IIRC…or perhaps a few million, drink and age has dimmed my memory). It’s not just because of the human construct about time.
As for the OP, which seems like they are asking about how the universe came about and not about consciousness per se, I think the membrane theory, from what little I grasp of it, seems plausible. So does an infinitely dense infinitely small singularity becoming unstable and rapidly expanding out. I like the membrane theory because it makes more sense to me, but I don’t even pretend to understand more than a science channel level, probably not even that.
It’s really this sort of answer that has to be retired. Quantum uncertainty doesn’t really entail anything about virtual particles becoming real; virtual particles are a mathematical bookkeeping device that only exist in approximations to a full theory that help us calculate stuff.
All the sort of ‘universe from nothing’-arguments in physics going back to Edward Tryon really start the same way, by defining some origin state as ‘nothing’ and then going on from there. But of course, no state is ‘nothing’; there is no ‘nothing’-state. The vacuum state in a quantum field theory is just that, not nothing. It has properties, such as a nonzero energy expectation value; nothing doesn’t have that. Indeed, it’s literally meaningless to say it does. Likewise with ‘nothing is unstable’.
Besides, even if these ideas were sensible, they would fall short of the goal of explaining the universe: as soon as you rely on the laws of quantum mechanics, those themselves become explananda. So if quantum mechanics truly were to explain how ‘something can come from nothing’, that would just shift the question to ‘why quantum mechanics?’.
The intellectually honest answer is we don’t know.
But let’s be clear it’s a double don’t know: We don’t know whether nothing ever became something. Maybe our universe is part of a multiverse that has always existed?
But if there is a definite start point to explain, then we don’t have that explanation yet, and it’s hard to see how there could be one. We can’t start with “Quantum mechanics says…” when we’re asking the metaphysical question of why anything exists at all, including physical laws.
The OP mentions consciousness. Well, there’s no mystery there: it evolved as a feature of intelligent life; it’s something brains do.
Lots we don’t understand about consciousness, but not how it originated.
Okay, who created God?
Oh, God always was? Why does the universe need a cause if God doesn’t?
It’s possible the universe always existed.
It’s possible that it’s impossible for there to be nothing. Which must mean that matter is infinite. Which is certainly difficult to grasp.
But even if it’s impossible for there to be nothing due to sub-atomic rules, at some level there will be no explanation for WHY those rules exist. It is impossible to keep passing the buck. At some point, things exist for no reason, God or no God.
What exactly does the OP mean by consciousness? Some type of self-awareness? Consciousness as modern day humans know it? Can animals have consciousness?
Never understood why consciousness is such a big problem for some.
Are we happy to say that other creatures have a degree of consciousness a little below ours? and others at a level below that? and others below that? back through other apes, primates, higher mammals etc. etc.
If a physical or mental capability confers an evolutionary edge then it’ll be selected for. Now it just so happens that this capability ultimately allows the possessor species to notice it and ponder about it, capabilities such as the sight processing of a raptor or smell-sense of canines are equally incredible but don’t cause the possessor to think too hard about them.
Well, there’s a reason that the question of how conscious experience arises is generally known as ‘The Hard Problem’ in philosophy. One way of approaching the difficulty is to try and imagine how you would go about explaining to a blind person what the experience of seeing red is like: if consciousness is reducible to the physical, then there should be a story, no matter how complicated it might be, that you could tell, such that the blind person knows as well as you do what red looks like. Such a story exists, and can be easily conceived of at least in outline, for anything else—say, how a gigantic supercomputer performs its calculations. You could never tell that story, or hold it in the mind all at once, but it’s obvious that there is such a story.
However, with consciousness, nobody has yet even come up with a hint of how such a story plausibly might go, and indeed, pretty much everyone’s initial reaction is that this story is impossible: a blind person will never know what it’s like to see, because there is no amount of third person knowledge that suffices to transfer first person experience. But if that’s the case, then consciousness is fundamentally different from anything else studied in science, and conceived of in physical terms.
Furthermore, this serves to call the evolutionary story into question: after all, it’s perfectly possible to conceive of every action a living organism performs, in the complete absence of any conscious experience. Take stubbing your toe, and crying out in pain: a signal is transmitted from your toe to your brain, which activates the right sort of muscles to make the air vibrate just so. At no point in the explanation do I have to appeal to the conscious experience of pain: it’s all just signals flipping switches, like dominoes toppling one another.
But then, evolution must be blind to whether any conscious experience crops up at all: it can only select for function, but functions can be performed unconsciously (we all experience that—from being ‘in the flow’ to phenomena like sleepwalking, or more extreme cases like blindsight). So if that’s right, consciousness can’t be evolutionarily selected for—at most, it’s thus an accident, something we might just as well have ended up without.
Now, I think these questions can be answered; but they’re nevertheless difficult, and I think it only hurts us if we try to handwave them away (much like invoking ‘quantum fluctuations’ for the origin of the universe).
Precisely. Moreover, the rules don’t just say any arbitrary thing. They are exceedingly specific in what kind of substance can come from nothing, specify countless very specific details about our universe, and so on. It is hard to see why these rules would spontaneously make themselves exist or always exist and not some other set of rules.
This is ironically why theories of the multiverse or theories where every possible permutation of our universe must also exist somewhere do seem more plausible than “there is nothing but void and nothing but own our universe which will in some number of trillion years cool itself to nothing but empty space”. Even though this is all we can directly observe.
All of that is pure assertion, the so-called Hard Problem of consciousness seems no harder to explain in evolutionary terms than any other specialised function. Sight, smell, hearing, vibration, magnetism etc. etc. we have no problem in accepting a continuum of capability and system sophistication for all of those but somehow consciousness is different? No, I don’t buy it at all. In fact, if consciousness confers evolutionary benefit we should expect to see a spectrum of capabilities across the species and indeed we do.
Also, just because philosophers have given the problem a Capitalised Name does give it any special status.
If consciousness is, as it thought, an emergent property of a complex, physical brain then mutations will result in differing forms of consciousness which will lead creatures to behaving differently in the world. The outcomes of that behaviour will be positive, negative or neutral. Natural selection does the rest. It doesn’t seem like a problem to me at all.
That simply does not follow. The ability to sub-contract behaviours to the unconscious brain leaving higher brain functions for other purposes seems like a potential heritable trait that can easily be beneficial and so be selected for.
Novelty Bobble and Half Man Half Wit I think you’re talking past each other.
Hopefully we can all agree that:
But even for (1), I was careful here, and in my previous post, to say how it evolved, not why.
Because I would tend to agree with Half Man Half Wit that at least in some cases it’s not clear what subjective experience adds from a survival point of view. It may, at least partly, simply be a byproduct of useful traits.
Novelty Bobble alludes to some hypotheses of the utility of subjective experience but I don’t think anyone doubts there are candidate explanations, just we have no idea which, if any, are right.
There doesn’t have to be a “why” at all.
“why” is not necessarily a meaningful question because it seems to assume a purpose when really for any evolved feature “why” can be answered by saying “it is useful” and that is it. No further explanation needed and the “how” is the interesting part.
Seems pretty trivial to me to think up benefits. A subjective experience of the world may prompt a complex conscious brain to approach problems in different way and create better strategies and designs for food and shelter or sexual display or to enable higher-order thinking about the desires and motivations of you v others.
But sure. It may also be a misfire, an outcome of having a big brain that is either neutral or helpful.
I didn’t merely make assertions, but proposed arguments, such as explaining what sight is like to a blind man.
I’m not saying that consciousness doesn’t occur on a spectrum; I’m saying that as yet, nobody has any idea at all how matter gives rise to conscious experience. To all appearances, we can tell a complete story of everything an organism does, on the level of individual molecules if need be, without mentioning consciousness at all, or being able to deduce what its conscious experience is like from just that story.
But that’s the problem: evolution is selective on the level of behavior; but behavior and consciousness are not obviously coupled—just because something acts a certain way is not sufficient to conclude that it is conscious, much less in what way.
Fair enough, but it does mean that those with the biggest claim towards being experts on the matter consider it kind of a tough nut to crack, which one would think at least merits some examination of the reasons why they do think that way.
Consider the causal closure of the physical: that you scream when you stub your toe is fully determined by the facts of certain muscles moving, electrical signals racing along nerve fibers, neuron firings, and so on. Nothing else needs to be said—in particular, nothing about the fact that you feel pain needs to be said. You could show the exact same behavior, while feeling no pain at all. Indeed, it would be simple to construct a ‘robot’, that does nothing but emit a certain sound if certain sensors are triggered by an appropriate stimulus. Nobody would consider such a robot conscious.
But that’s true for the sum total of your behaviors. Evolution can select for avoidance behavior—i.e. you turning away from a harmful stimulus. But, since that on its own, to all appearances, does not determine whether you feel pain, feel nothing (are as unconscious as the simple robot), or feel something else entirely, evolution can’t select for you feeling pain.
Take the famous ‘inverted qualia’ thought experiment: my behavior would remain the same if, say, my color experiences were inverted. What I used to call red, I now call green, and vice versa; since I still call the same wavelength entering my eye by the same color name, nothing about my behavior will change. Evolution thus is blind regarding whether I experience a red-sensation while saying ‘I see red’, or whether I experience (what I would have earlier called) a green-sensation. Thus, my seeing red is not adaptive.
It gets worse than that. It’s a bit more subtle, but once you think about it, you realize that it’s deeply puzzling that our experiences should be appropriate to our circumstances at all. Evolution can’t differentiate between me fleeing from a predator and being terrified, and me fleeing from a predator and being content, or me avoiding a pain stimulus and being in pain, and me avoiding said stimulus in a feeling of bliss. Again, that’s just causal closure: that the particular pattern of neuron firings coupled to stubbing my toe should feel painful as opposed to blissful doesn’t make a difference, as long as that pattern leads to me retracting my foot and shouting ‘ow’.
I don’t really think this is clear at all. How does evolution select for pain to feel painful? It can only select for behavior following a pain-stimulus being such as to minimize harm; but that doesn’t entail anything about how it feels, or indeed, that it feels like anything at all.
What do you think couldn’t we do if we were completely unconscious automata?
If you say that “The vacuum state in a quantum field theory is just that, not nothing” I’m not seeing how that differs from what I said. Which is that “nothing” is impossible.
It may or may not be true that the universe started from a vacuum fluctuation. Apparently some physicists postulate that, even if you don’t. Even if it someday is shown not to be the answer, it works to gainsay the nonsensical “something comes from nothing.”
But it does not merely shift the question to “why quantum mechanics.” If there is always something, then there must be some scientific explanation. What that explanation is may be interesting but the explanation does not create the reality.
But in this context “why” is not some lofty philosophical question, we’re asking what evolutionary purpose it serves. This species has ridges on its back: is it for defensive purposes, sexual selection, temperature regulation, all of the above? That kind of question.
I don’t doubt we can trivially think of hypotheses: that’s true of the vast majority of phenomena that do not yet have a explanatory theory.
The point is simply: we don’t know yet. Your initial post begun with asking “why consciousness is such a big problem for some”. It’s not “a problem” for me, it’s simply that I acknowledge that there is a number of aspects of consciousness that we don’t have a good model for.