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Comment by mynameisash | Hacker News Reader

> If you think about it, the universe is conscious, because our conscious minds are part of it

This seems like quite a leap. Parts of the earth are conscious, so is the earth conscious? Parts of the universe are alive, so is the universe alive? Every member of my family is conscious*, but I wouldn't say that "my family" is conscious.

*Solipsism notwithstanding

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The natural problem is drawing the line between which parts of you are conscious and which parts of you are merely the portion that surrounds the consciousness. Is merely your brain¹ conscious? The whole body? The brain+(not-brain body) system is conscious but the distinction isn't all that different from the brain+(not-brain body)+(not-you Earth) system being conscious.

I have to say I started with thinking that clearly containment vs. identity are separate but now for this question, I find myself confused. I bet someone has thought up this notion of what a being is already. If anyone has the keywords that will let me quickly search up the appropriate concepts in a dense fashion (i.e. without lots of unrelated stuff) I would be appreciative.

¹ Or whatever nervous system subset you find suitable, m.m.

If you spend a lot of time paying very close attention to all of the minute sub/unconscious actions of your body as you go throughout the day, you have these weird epiphanies that your consciousness is just a passenger barking orders to a meat machine with a mind if it’s own.

Do this long enough and you’ll experience episodes on non-verbal communication with whatever is at the helm. For me it occurs when I get stuck in thought and my body sort of involuntarily feints an act to remind me what I was doing before my mind wandered. It’s only happened to her three times in my life, probably many times before I realized it the first time. It’s subtle, but really weird. And probably just a product of my imagination, but that’s been my experience.

I've never heard this before but I think it's reasonable. Imagine if you were simulating the universe in a computer and a creature within your simulation achieved consciousness. I think it would be fair to say your simulation had achieved consciousness, even if 99.999...% of the processing power was spent simulating the rest of the universe "unrelated" to the conscious part.

The interesting thing is everything is required as it happened for the universe to become conscious in the form of humans. E.g. supernova that generated the right heavy metals to stabilize the protein complexes that let our brain function.

> The interesting thing is everything is required as it happened for the universe to become conscious in the form of humans.

Not necessarily. Anthropic Principle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

Would love it if we could test other universes with different alpha constants to observe their conscious creatures. Maybe they would be human’ and human’’ etc :)

The universe is a system. We a part of that system. So any traits we have are inherently traits that the universe has, even if parts of it don't share it. A human has a hand, the hand is part of the human, but the rest of the human is not necessarily a hand.

> The universe is a system. We a part of that system. So any traits we have are inherently traits that the universe has

I don't know how you can substantiate this. I am left-handed. My wife is right-handed. These are attributes of us as individuals. What is the handedness of the city we live in? I would reject the question outright since I don't think that traits attributed to parts of a system necessarily can be attributed to the system itself.

Syllogistic errors 101. Your ruthless logic tells us a (normal) human has one nail and five fingers, is made of keratin and is not conscious. Ergo, the universe has one nail and five fingers, is made of keratin and is not conscious.

Only logical conclusion: God is a manicurist.

your family might not be on our human plane of conciousness

but, a family might make decisions to prolong it's lifespan and reproduce itself. like the parts of our bodies, stomach, brain, eyes work to achieve these goals for ourselves, the family members likewise engage in similar decision making in it's own self-interest.

it can engage and interact with society as a unit, though it is comprised of distinct actors.

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