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Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

The universe is probably conscious at some base level. All conscious agents existing within it are kind of short lived threads within its VM. Death may or may not be a transition from the localized to the global state of awareness. But I'm quite sure that anything that computes over some non random inputs including individual atoms has a base level of consciousness woven into it.

Well, you wanted outrageous didn't you?

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I'm an apatheist, truly, but have "pet beliefs" that I play around with to push back the expansive vacuum sometimes.

One of them is "The Egg" by Andy Weir, where everyone on earth is a single entity at different parts of its life.

But I truly believe that we are the universe experiencing itself. Observation and matter are inseparable, and that consciousness isn't required for observation, but is useful for it.

http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

Thanks for the rec.

I love Kurzgesagt’s animation of The Egg.

I’m convinced of something like this when on a high enough dose of certain psychedelics. I feel like I am experiencing movement of my self along different dimensions of a consciousness space that makes up the universe. And that the substrate making up my mind gets temporarily split into many smaller minds that can examine one another. Maybe everything’s a simulation and it’s all just data. Maybe there doesn’t even need to be a computer to run the simulation, and the state space representing my consciousness just exists the same way the matrix [1, 2, 3] exists whether or not a computer is storing it.

After sobering up, I’m 99% sure this is a delusion, that my brain is just running wild and inventing the experience. That other 1%, though…

I've seen mandela effects, or retcons in the past 8 months.... a year ago I would've thought you were full of it.... a flip flop esp. messed w/ my head, so now I can definitely see Simulation theory or something w/ the entire universe being a dream of a single consciousness as being a thing....

I don't believe in any kind of transition of consciousness because I think consciousness is fundamentally unique to the system that it emerges from. There is only one physical you, so the consciousness that emerges from you is from your particular arrangement of dna/atoms/etc.

But I do believe in consciousnesses at different levels, like you mention. Also, at different time scales. For example, some systems may only appear conscious to us when considering 100 years of their time as 1 second of our time. The complexity of the system probably has some direct correlation to the "amount" of consciousness that can emerge from it over some time scale.

Yeah, I think we're actually more or less in agreement, at least in part. But I do believe that there is a phenomenal sense of "being an atom" or even "being a subatomic particle" and it's the absolutely most basic form of consciousness. But the emergent consciousness of a fruit fly or yourself is but a more advanced manifestation of the same phenomenon of subjectivity. The open question is whether upon one's death the subjectivity of you melts back into the global subjectivity "soup" in some way that propagates the continuity of that self? Mind you, I'm still working in a materialistic framework assuming that your memories are all gone when the neurons that form them are irreversibly damaged.

A belief of mine that's related to yours and might be much harder for the HN community to digest: I believe that computers come far, far short of an adequate explanation/analogy/metaphor for the workings of the universe

Your non-belief against a strawman and that smug sense of superiority is not out of the ordinary. In fact it is very common around here.

Like I said, this one is hard to digest because I know a lot of the HN community loves computers (myself included). I'm sorry if I came off acting superior or smug. Nonetheless I stand by my comment and I think it's interesting to contemplate the limits of computers because it's a common metaphor for understanding many different aspects of the universe and I think you made this discussion much more personal than it needed to be. Sure, I disagreed with someone's belief, but I don't think I said anything personal against that person.

What I meant by strawman is that you are arguing against a position that does not exist. And by smugness I mean your general attitude against people whom you perceive as naive. Hope that clarifies it. Happy holidays.

I have had this very same idea a while ago. I actually like it, and I am probably not the only one, but I could not find anything remotely related to it.

Do you know if this idea/theory has a common name?

> Do you know if this idea/theory has a common name?

Maybe panpsychism?

I've only heard the term used in recent physics discussions, but apparently it has a longer history of usage in philosophy, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

HN is probably conscious at some base level. All conscious pseudonymous accounts existing within it are kind of short lived threads within its VM. HN Karma may or may not be a transition from the localized to the global state of awareness. But I'm quite sure that anything that computes over some non random inputs including individual atoms has a base level of consciousness woven into it.

Well, you wanted outrageous didn't you?

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