# Is all matter driven by/made of consciousness? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 1, 2014, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092 "2014-04-01T15:59:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2014, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/81 "2014-04-02T22:38:20Z")
> [@cmyk](#): > > No, and that’s the way I like you. You’re like the anti- **Der Trihs.** > > The universe has to balance itself out some way. Or so it seems to think… Statistical outliers, I’d say. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2014, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/82 "2014-04-02T22:41:41Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > Good luck doing anything with those, once entropy reaches maximum. Watching protons decay is the ultimate definition of boredom. Far worse than watching the grass grow. ---
**Author:** ![slowlearner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@slowlearner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/slowlearner)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/83 "2014-04-03T00:29:13Z")
That everything is an aspect of a universal consciousness is the core belief in that hugely wild and almost impenetrable religion called Hindu. That Brahman is everything is a belief thousands of years old. Buddha took that idea and created a whole new religion out of it. If the idea interests you there is more written about it than you could ever read, none of it in the form of proof. Sad to say, individual human consciousness is an illusion, Maya it’s called. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/84 "2014-04-03T01:21:56Z")
> [@slowlearner](#): > > That everything is an aspect of a universal consciousness is the core belief in that hugely wild and almost impenetrable religion called Hindu. That Brahman is everything is a belief thousands of years old. Buddha took that idea and created a whole new religion out of it. Wait, did he even **believe** it? No such figure or anything comparable plays any role in Buddhism, AFAIK. Brahman is a god, and in Buddhism gods are beside the point – you can’t get enlightenment by praying to them or trying to grow closer to them (as Hindu yogis do), they’re in the same fix **we** are. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/85 "2014-04-03T03:47:49Z")
Plank’s statement is very unconvincing. OTOH let us approach a conscious universe from a materialist perspective. 1. Consciousness as we know it arises from physical objects on a certain scale interacting in particular patterns: the material within our brains, neurons and such, stimulating each other in particular sorts of sequences be they “strange loops” or reverberating circuits or whatever. Material producing patterns of information processing with emergent properties. 2. Chaos theory teaches us that sufficiently complex nonlinear systems will have self-similarity at different levels of analysis (think those [Mandelbrot fractal design sets)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_GBwuYuOOs). 3. The universe is complex nonlinear system. 4. The patterns that the matter that makes up us (i.e. our produce the emergent property of our consciousness) interact in may be replicated in self-similar manners on larger scales - in society, in the universe. 5. If so then those patterns could create some emergent property self-similar to what we experience as consciousness even it is at a scale that is beyond our comprehension to understand or percieve, that could have existed before life, without life, and exist when life is long gone, that is even unaware that such a thing as “life” exists (our consciousness being too small and brief for it to comprehend, just another part of the whole), but is the universe and all that is. One theory btw does seriously put forth that matter is in fact an artifact of _information_ and is not necessarily “real”; that [the universe might be more aptly described as a hologram, a projection of information processing](http://www.nature.com/news/simulations-back-up-theory-that-universe-is-a-hologram-1.14328). And again, the materialist view of consciousness usually views consciousness on our scale as a result of information processing as well … ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/86 "2014-04-03T03:51:48Z")
Oh testing it … Step one would be to determine with some degree of confidence what patterns of information processing are correlates of consciousness in brains. Step two would be to track some correlate of interaction across galaxy wide scales and see if it is self-similar to the patterns identified in step one. We are no where near the abilty to accomplish either step but those are issues of current ability not theoretical falsifiability. ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/87 "2014-04-03T04:58:34Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Watching protons decay is the ultimate definition of boredom. Far worse than watching the grass grow. Both of 'em sure beat waiting in line at the DMV. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/88 "2014-04-03T07:16:46Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > Oh testing it … > > Step one would be to determine with some degree of confidence what patterns of information processing are correlates of consciousness in brains. > > Step two would be to track some correlate of interaction across galaxy wide scales and see if it is self-similar to the patterns identified in step one. > > We are no where near the abilty to accomplish either step but those are issues of current ability not theoretical falsifiability. Yeah, but whoever is making the argument for universal consciousness will just weasel out by saying that the universe must be diff… wait.. I’ll just quote post #43: > [@nole](#): > > The consciousness of the universe, if it exists, would function on a much larger scale far beyond what we can “tap into” so to speak. If you & I could create matter then things would be a bit chaotic, don’t you think? It probably wouldn’t bode well for any species, evolutionarily speaking, to hold that kind of power. ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/89 "2014-04-03T16:35:40Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > Yeah, but whoever is making the argument for universal consciousness will just weasel out by saying that the universe must be diff… wait… I’ll just quote post #43: Do you honestly believe that humanity’s science has discovered all there is to know about how the universe actually works? That crazy talk…we don’t even have cold fusion yet, or a verified equation for the TOE. ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/90 "2014-04-03T16:50:16Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > Do you honestly believe that humanity’s science has discovered all there is to know about how the universe actually works? No, but we’ve come a long way in ruling out a few possible options. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/91 "2014-04-03T16:53:46Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > Do you honestly believe that humanity’s science has discovered all there is to know about how the universe actually works? That crazy talk…we don’t even have cold fusion yet, or a verified equation for the TOE. That sounds suspiciously like “Until we know everything, we know nothing”. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/92 "2014-04-03T17:20:48Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Watching protons decay is the ultimate definition of boredom. Far worse than watching the grass grow. Yeah, I guess . . . Ooh! Positron! ---
**Author:** ![Daz\_the\_burner\_Rush](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dc4da7/32.png) [@Daz\_the\_burner\_Rush](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Daz_the_burner_Rush)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/93 "2014-04-03T18:40:18Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > That sounds suspiciously like “Until we know everything, we know nothing”. I think it sounds a bit more like ‘If a tree falls in a forest…’. But how about this by Bill Hicks; You never see a positive drug story on the news. They always have the same LSD story. You’ve all seen it: “Today a young man on acid … thought he could fly … jumped out of a building … what a tragedy!” What a dick. He’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he take off from the ground first? Check it out? You don’t see geese lined up to catch elevators to fly south; they fly from the fucking ground. He’s an idiot. He’s dead. Good! We lost a moron? Fucking celebrate. There’s one less moron in the world. Wouldn’t you like to see a positive LSD story on the news? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition? Perhaps? Wouldn’t that be interesting? Just for once? “Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.” ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/94 "2014-04-03T18:59:58Z")
> [@nole](#): > > I can’t prove it, nor can anyone else up to this point. But if a universal consciousness were to exist, would it differ from individual consciousness in anything other than scale? I’m sorry, but how are you defining the term “consciousness” in any meaningful sense when applied to the entire universe? Individual consciousness makes sense in that we are aware of ourselves and the environment around us. I feel hungry so I seek out something to eat. Someone tosses a baseball at me I try to catch it or get out of the way. So if you want to scale that up to the whole universe, what would the universe be conscious off? Does it “react” to anything and if so, what? Does it plan or ponder? What would that even mean? IOW, I think you are just throwing out terms that are meaningless in the context you are using them because it sounds poetic. You might as well ask if all energy is driven by/made of love and/or happiness. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/95 "2014-04-03T19:23:33Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > Do you honestly believe that humanity’s science has discovered all there is to know about how the universe actually works? Of course I don’t, but we don’t discover things by just making them up. > [@](#): > > That crazy talk…we don’t even have cold fusion yet It may never be possible. Some things might never be possible. > [@](#): > > or a verified equation for the TOE. A what? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/96 "2014-04-03T19:29:47Z")
**T** heory **O** f **E** verything. [Check it out.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything) ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/97 "2014-04-03T22:40:21Z")
> [@Telemark](#): > > No, but we’ve come a long way in ruling out a few possible options. Such as? > [@Czarcasm](#): > > That sounds suspiciously like “Until we know everything, we know nothing”. What’s so suspicious about it? I thought my statement was pretty direct & obvious. Make no mistake, science has come a long way in determining how the universe physically works – we’ve harnessed energy from steam boilers & other sources, we’ve eradicated numerous diseases, we’ve even got pocket-sized gadgets that combine a telephone, camera, and Internet browser into one. (“And yet we still can’t cure poverty…”) But when it comes to matters of how human consciousness works, or even precisely what “it” is, can’t we concede that the jury’s still out until science gets better at detecting whatever it’s actually made of? (Or if it’s even “made of” anything physical?) ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2014, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/98 "2014-04-03T23:55:03Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > Make no mistake, science has come a long way in determining how the universe physically works – we’ve harnessed energy from steam boilers & other sources, we’ve eradicated numerous diseases, we’ve even got pocket-sized gadgets that combine a telephone, camera, and Internet browser into one. (“And yet we still can’t cure poverty…”) But when it comes to matters of how human consciousness works, or even precisely what “it” is, can’t we concede that the jury’s still out until science gets better at detecting whatever it’s actually made of? (Or if it’s even “made of” anything physical?) No. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2014, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/99 "2014-04-04T00:27:54Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > Make no mistake, science has come a long way in determining how the universe physically works – we’ve harnessed energy from steam boilers & other sources, we’ve eradicated numerous diseases, we’ve even got pocket-sized gadgets that combine a telephone, camera, and Internet browser into one. (“And yet we still can’t cure poverty…”) But when it comes to matters of how human consciousness works, or even precisely what “it” is, can’t we concede that the jury’s still out until science gets better at detecting whatever it’s actually made of? (Or if it’s even “made of” anything physical?) OTOH, consider that millennia of religious or mystical or spiritual visions and revelations and effort and devotion and meditation and exercises and prayers and rituals and vision-quests and argument and philosophizing and doctrinal development by millions of human beings in all cultures do not appear to have brought us any nearer to any reliable understanding or insight of how human consciousness works, or even precisely what “it” is; and they probably would have, if the universe were anything like the OP is speculating. ---
**Author:** ![panache45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/panache45/32/64_2.png) [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2014, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092/100 "2014-04-04T02:20:11Z")
So God is pure consciousness, and is a solipsist? That raises the question: Can a conscious exist if it is conscious of nothing but itself? And then: Can a consciousness exist if there is nothing to be conscious of? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-all-matter-driven-by-made-of-consciousness/685092.md?page=6)