The universe and I both have tremendous amounts of gas, therefore…
a) I am one with the universe
b) the universe is bloated
c) I obscure distant galaxies
d) facile comparisons are meaningless and mockable
So, the entirety of the universe would have to be conscious for the idea that the universe is conscious to be non-mockabable? Well, that’s your opinion, man.
See, every thought you have, every memory, every feeling are nothing more than a local manifestation of a physical state of the universe. You think exist apart from the universe? As some metaphysical construct? Ok.
If we can say the universe is conscious because it contains conscious entities, then we can say my house is edible and that America is evaporating.
It’s ridiculous and just not how we assign attributes to things.
It’s like saying that the planet is “alive”. Well, sure, in a metaphorical sense, and in that sense the universe can be conscious, why not. But LITERALLY, planet Earth is not alive, it is an iron-rich rocky body with liquid water oceans and a mostly nitrogen atmosphere.
And LITERALLY the universe is just space that has things in it, some of which are conscious.
How about saying consciousness and the universe can both be apprehended as part of a unified whole. If so, that awareness suggests that either consciousness ‘trumps’ the universe, or that some part of the universe possesses consciousness. And, if the latter, is the consciousness not created from the same stuff as the rest universe?
Name three things that *can’t *be apprehended as part of a unified whole, whatever that means.
May I remind you that we humans as yet have no idea what consciousness is or how it is acquired or what objects have it or whether it’s different from having gas?
Fair enough. I don’t think I can do any better than you just did - I’ll name them ‘three things that can’t be apprehended as part of a unified whole’. So, perhaps, they’re understood to exist in some potential or parallel sense.
Everything seems to come back to self-reference.
My house has conscious beings in it. Is my house conscious? Does it become more conscious the more people are in it? If I have a party, does it realize a transcendent level of consciousness?
“What is the Fallacy of Composition, Alex?”
As always,there’s an xkcd for that.
Isn’t that just because our models and computation abilities aren’t advanced enough to model them?
My impression is that the universal language of this universe is math. Math begets physics, which begets chemistry, which begets fields like biology and material science. Biology begets psychology, which begets the humanities. etc.
So in theory why can’t you model a society or human brain using nothing but math? We just don’t understand the math, chemistry and physics well enough yet, and/or we don’t have computers advanced enough to run the models.
Disclaimer: I grew up in a Hindu family and to a certain extent my opinions are influenced by Hindu philosophy just like Deepak Chopra who I immensely dislike BTW. If that’s a turnoff for you, please ignore my post.
All Human Learning is metaphorical - is the prevailing view amongst psychiatrists especially Iain McGilchrist. If we agree that to be the case then Philosophy, Math, Biology, Physics, Chemistry all have the same human mind behind it and if the human mind itself is metaphorical, there’s bound to be elements of each in other.
A house has to do with consciousness as much as a wave has to do with imaginary numbers. Describing a Fourier transform of a wave (which uses imaginary numbers) gives you fundamental insights. Similarly a parent seeing his kids grow up in a house or her parents pass away in a house may attribute consciousness attributes to the house - it just helps assign meaning to the house in a space that exists in their own mind similar to the imaginary number space for a wave.
Let’s take another example of particle and wave in quantum mechanics. Something can be “Particle and Wave”, “Not Particle and not Wave”, “Particle and not Wave”, “Not Particle and Wave”, “Particle or Wave” , “Not Particle or not Wave”… Notice that all these states are in themselves metaphors from our consciousness. Quantum mechanics tells you that all these states are limited discriptions or that quantum matters exists in combination of the above states and maybe many other unknown states. But the moment you try to observe its property, it appears to you as one or the other.
The wave - Particle duality can be extended to Physics-Philosphy too in a similar manner.
This makes the pre-assumption that everything is modelable but this is contrary to what is known in non-linear system theories or chaos theory.
I am not a mathematician and as I understand from engineering, all math relies on somehow linearizing the system globally or locally. In simple terms the underlying assumption in all models is : a small change in the input produces a small change in the output. This is not true demonstrated by the butterfly effect where a small change in initial conditions produces vast changes in the results.
So short term weather predictions (local linearization ) works great but long term weather predictions just doesn’t work no matter how good humans get in math or science.
That sounds like just an argument against constructing models via algorithms. This indeed is not possible for certain systems whose behaviors are not expressable algorithmically, but they can still be modeled through simulation, where micro-behaviors are empirically described and perhaps certain aspects parameterized, and then system outcomes determined by doing thousands or millions of iterations. Simulations are a great tool for modeling chaotic systems.
Long term weather predictions are unreliable because the uncertainties inherent in the chaotic elements quickly become cumulative. Ironically, however, models that look at climate are far more reliable because they are concerned with timescales in which short-term chaotic variabilities tend to cancel out, at least with respect to key metrics like global temperature, polar ice cover, sea level rise, and so on.
I think we are on the same page. A model is measured by the accuracy of its outputs and the climate models are “linearizing” the short term weather fluctuations. I call them “linearizing” and you call them “tend to cancel out”.
The kinetic theory of gases is a perfect model for understanding the behavior of gases.
But it will be a mistake to think that the Climate models or the Kinetic theory of gases represent the systems correctly all the way down to its fundamentals or that it is even possible to model these systems down to its fundamentals.
Science is the process by which we describe the natural world (or the universe, or “everything”, or what-have-you). Mathematics is the language we use to do this description, because it has been found to provide the most precise and accurate descriptions. These descriptions can also be used to ferret out implied or extrapolated elements of the natural world that can be revealed as “new” through careful experimentation and analysis.
While I agree that we may fundamentally never be able to provide a “complete” description of the natural world, many seem to think this opens the way for “better” description using Philosophy, which uses human languages to produce its descriptions. As I said above, all other languages have proven to be less precise, less accurate in describing the natural world.
A good example is using Particle and Wave as a description (and attempting to extend understanding through linguistic maneuvers). In fact, scientists admit that the use of “particle” and the use of “wave” is strictly because the mathematics that best describes the quantum actions revealed by experiment are also descriptive of macroscopic waves and particles. Extending this math is useful. Extending the words and somehow imputing the full range of macroscopic behaviors and constraints seen by our human perceptions in that macroscopic world into the quantum realm has never achieved anything but a lot of woo.
Agree with everything else but this statement is not true. This statement implies that “complete” description exists that humans may never be able to reach. Whereas in many parts of science it has been proven that it does not exist.
For example: Take Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle about the uncertainty in measuring position / momentum. It’s not that Humans can eliminate this uncertainty by making better instruments - it cannot be done.
Same with long term weather predictions or for that matter the actual length of the Florida coastline.
Easy for you to say…
ETA: Translation: Translation?
I confess I’m not really sure what the big issue is. There’s many arguments in philosophy for the underdetermination of theory by data—to the effect that data will never yield a single, unique theory, but that instead, empirically equivalent theories can always be constructed. That the laws of physics can take many forms then should be expected, no?