Why there is a universe; self realization

When are you going to introduce the hypothetical?

freaky. i hope i never read stuff like this when i'm stoned.

Ohhh...ahhh...well...ahhh...

...now that I think about it, forget my last post.

Cyracuz, you have read Douglas Adams, right?

Yes. I've read the hitchhikers guide. Do you see similarities between this idea and something he wrote?
It is a long time since I read the books, so I can't remember any mention of such ideas in the book. That is not to say that my idea isn't subconsiously derived, at least in part, from mr. Adams.

I found it similar to the concept that planet Earth, and all its inhabitants, were created by a more intelligent being as part of an experiment to understand what the purpose of life is

The universe would need to have a concept of self in order to desire self-awareness - which means that it must be self-aware to WANT to be self-aware.

Since the mind is created by neural networks in the brain, IMO it is highly unlikely that we will ever share consciousness. Even if we did, how would that make the universe self-aware? Can the universe see through our eyes, or tap into our thoughts? What senses might it use, and where did they come from? How would it communicate with its parts, given that a signal on one side would take billions of years to get to the other?

Where would it get the idea that it even had an origin, or that a few tiny cells on an obscure planet in one of its billions of galaxies would provide any kind of answer or self-realization?

Why would time and causality be meaningless to it?

The self-aware universe only works in fiction, unless you believe that it magically transcends physical laws as we currently understand them.

I wish that was written back when I used to get stoned.

They would be mechanisms of the inner workings of theis entity.

And yes, there would have to be the desire to have self awareness. That's the whole point. Awareness is suddenly achieved, then awareness wants to test how it could have come about, and so awareness starts a process; exerts itself, loses itself int he process only to find itself once more.

And concerning humans sharing consciousness, you seem to forget about technology. Maybe it's biologically impossible, (personally I don't think so), but technology could be applickable.

I am not saying that this is a real thing. It is indeed a fictional idea that popped into my head, and I am not the first to retain such notions. Just thought it'd be cool to share.

Terry, surely the brain is just a network of neurons, but we can't say for sure that consciousness is an emergent property of neural networks. It could be some quantum-physical phenomena tucked away in some hidden fold of our brain...

Time and causality are inner mechanisms for us, too, but we find them meaningful.

How is awareness achieved initially? What structures/mechanisms would allow a universe to be aware of itself or anything else? Where did these structures come from? If it is aware enough to desire knowledge of its own awareness, why would it expect to gain knowledge of itself by creating biological life-forms with evolutionary histories, sensors and processing units entirely different from its own?

Consciousness is a function of a biological brain linked to body systems. "Technology" is not some magic panacea that will solve all of our problems and make the impossible a reality.

Stuh, we CAN say for sure that consciousness is an emergent property of neural networks. We don't know precisely HOW it emerges, but we do know which specific structures in the brain are required for the various levels of consciousness. The brain has been dissected, imaged, and mapped to the point that there is no place left for mysterious folds to be hidden. There may well be undiscovered sub-microscopic structures where quantum physical phenomena preside, but I would be very surprised if they could ever be duplicated by "technology."

No we really cannot. The understanding we have of the brain is extremely primitive. The best we can do is roughly map certain personality features and computational tasks to certain areas of the brain.

It is not true that we have been able to map various levels of consciousness to different structures. We don't even know if there are various levels of consciousness!

Understanding of the brain is no longer as primitive as you seem to think, and levels of consciousness are determined by which parts of the brain are active:

Reticular Formation and Consciousness

Control of Consciousness

Consciousness

Neurophysiology and Mental Function

That is one way. You cannot know that there are no other ways to form consciousness. I am not saying that there are, mind you, just that there might be.

For all we know, brain is a product of mind, not the other way around.

Terry,

Thanks for the links. The levels of consciousness addressed in the first article are merely an observational classification of a person's responsiveness. They even state this explicitly: "We shall see that this continuum in our description of the stages of consciousness is not paralleled by a continuum in underlying neural activity in the CNS."

I have skimmed over all of the articles and did not find anything to change my opinion. First of all, there are a myriad of possible meanings for the word consciousness which can lead to a lot of miscommunication. When I say consciousness, I refer *only* to the state of being self aware. You either are, or you aren't self aware. One might argue that one can become "more" self aware, but that is highly debatable because emotions, spirituality, attitude, personality, humour, memory, etc...can all be completely separate. It is possible to construct a completely functional human that can interact, talk, have a job and a life, but not be self aware.

From our crude understanding of physics, it seems impossible for humans to make actual choices, but the illusion of choice could be created by an extremely ill-conditioned system running and evaluating Monte-Carlo simulations or something and evaluating based on some set of adapting goals. So even choice can be explained by a neural network.

In short, every single thing our brain can do can be described by a NN using the basic neuron model except self-awareness. As we understand the neuron, it simply realizes an input output function...and self awareness is not the output of a function, it is this entirely different thing.

I don't disagree that self awareness emerges from the brain somehow, but it definitely does not emerge from any network of neurons where a neuron is simply a node that takes a weighted sum of it's inputs and has outputs connected to other inputs. If that's all there was to it, then we could write a mathematical notation for a neural network and the paper would become self aware!

so the universe is concious of itself and it's inhabitants? like as if we are ticks that are tormenting a great being? i'm having trouble getting my head around this...

Yes, rockpie, it is not easy to wrap one's head around this.

A way to perhaps explain it is to say that all the qualities of human beings are qualities of the universe, since we are products of the evolving universe, extensions of the forces that worked in our evolution.

So if I am intelligent, then the universe is intelligent, because I am part of the universe.

i see. so we are living inside or on a larger scale version of us, and then you could say the same for the universe, that it is a smaller scale model of something else with similar qualities.