Good question, if everyone here could manage to get off their high horse & be open to discussing an interesting topic it might even make for a great discussion but, alas, this is not the case
If we were to look at consciousness as only existing only in our minds then there is no difference because the universe in that situation is not conscious. If you’d like to look at consciousness as one thing that is experienced at different scales then the interesting question is how it affects the potential of the human mind. For example, is telepathy then possible? Can thoughts then be transported through a field? Would we be better at predicting results & future occurrences?
I’ll look up & post a few different experiments later when I’m home.
You claim you’re being inviting but you’re really just being antagonistic with crap like this.
We’re getting better at all those things (or at least are gaining a better understanding of how they might be achieved) because of applied science, not just how we “look at consciousness.”
My mind is conscious but can’t directly create matter. Seems like we’ve got a great many examples of where it isn’t true that mind creates matter - so why is it an attractive hypothesis that matter is created by mind?
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.
Again, I’m not sure extrapolating from a semi defined consciousness (us, or at least me) to poorly defined consciousnesses (other animals)and finally out to an observable universe makes any sense.
Not even the Universe can create matter, that would violate Newton’s First Law. We’re basically stuck with what came into existence after the Big Bang, and even that’s being slowly eaten away by black holes which will one day consume everything that ever was. (Got about 10,000,000,000,000,000 years before that becomes a major problem, though.)
Put it this way, then: Scientists have searched for, and never found, some kind of “life force” or “chi” or “kundalini” or “elan vital” or “extra bit” that distinguishes living from nonliving matter. All that is detectable and distinguishes living matter is the complexity of its organization; and the present consensus – for lack of any evidence to the contrary – is that that alone is sufficient to account for life and therefore consciousness.
Christof Koch is the neuroscientist who is chief scientific officer of the Allen brain science institute, before that he was a professor at CalTech. He has written a bit about integrated information theory which states consciousness arises as a natural phenomena when there is integrated information (whatever that means). That doesn’t imply matter is created by consciousness, it seems to imply (from what I can tell as an amateur) that consciousness is a natural phenomena that arises out of integrated systems. Koch postulates that even natural phenomena could be conscious in their own way.
So our consciousness could be (probably is) quite rudimentary compared to what could exist if IIT is correct.
With all due respect, nole., you appear to be new to this particular forum of this board. Please be advised, that is not how you frame an issue for debate in GD; “wouldn’t it be cool if” is more of an IMHO thing. In GD, we state a position we’re ready to defend, we bring facts and cites and logic and ingenious arguments and bullshit arguments and the debates often get as fierce as is possible for rules-moderated and purely intellectual discourse.
If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay on the porch!
All consciousness is made of matter, not the other way around. Consciousness is just the result of a particular pattern of activity in some types of structures made of matter, such as brains.
Even if a conscious entity on such a scale were to exist, it could never be a single thing; the universe is too large, and light speed too slow.
The relationship is a bit different however. For one, consciousness is an active state of a system, it requires the system it’s part of to be functioning in order to exist; software on the other hand is pure information, and is still software even if the system it’s running on is turned off or it’s written down onto a piece of paper. Also, matter is more basic than hardware; software isn’t made of hardware but it is made of matter, even if it’s just in the form of moving electrons.
EDIT: Come to think of it you could have software that isn’t made of matter, if it’s encoded into energy like a laser and transmitted somewhere. Still, it has to be made of something.
Likewise with consciousness, but it still wouldn’t be made of that something. Information depends on matter but is not made of matter. Buckminster Fuller used to do a trick with a silk rope and a hemp rope and a nylon rope spliced together and the whole thing tied in a loose knot and the knot run through all three segments – the same knot at every stage even though composed of different materials.
I think this explanation falls into the category ‘making shit up’. Why would it ‘function on a much larger scale far beyond what we can “tap into” so to speak’, other than the fact that this answer rescues your argument from criticism?
If your argument is made unassailable by just whipping out any old arbitrary explanation/exception to each and every challenge, it’s a worthless argument.
If you’re wrong, and matter* isn’t* made from consciousness, how could we find that out? - that’s the question.