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Comment by fideloper | Hacker News Reader

Trying to comprehend the scale of the universe is deeply unsettling, especially when thinking about our minute, insignificant part of it.

Anyway, I hope the startup you're killing yourself over is going well!

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Your comment just made me smile and exhale with a sigh of relief. You hit my sentiment exactly. Sometimes I don't know why we waist it all for silly business ventures instead of enjoying the splendor that the universe has to offer. It's baffling to me. Though, starving sucks, but do we need to try so hard to do such insignificant things (in general)? It's probably why I won't spend my time trying to write another Tetris clone in some obscure language; it's been done, move on. :-) Let's make a real difference so we can spend time reflecting and getting our minds blown by reality.

I disagree that any part of the universe is insignificant. We're all important.

If everyone is important than no one is.

False dichotomy? :P

important with respect to the universe, not eachother

One person being important doesn't negate anyone or anything else from being important. This is not the same as "everyone is special."

Depends on whether you are comparing everyone to each other or to something outside of the group of everyone. I could imagine we would say that everyone is important as compared to a typical stray photon with a duel-identity crisis.

False. A group's ability to survive a cataclysmic event, natural catastrophe, epidemic, or genocide depends on its size and diversity. There is safety in numbers and diversity.

I suppose that depends on how you define "important". We're pretty important to ourselves, I suppose.

> to comprehend the scale of the universe is deeply unsettling, especially when thinking about our minute, insignificant part of it

Humans are 10^27 times smaller than the observable universe, and 10^24 times bigger than the neutrino, presently the smallest observable thing, and 10^35 times bigger than the smallest theoretical distance, the Planck length. That puts humans around the center of the Universe's scale, hardly minute and insignificant, and one could argue on that basis the human brain, even mind, is at the conceptual center of the Universe!

Yeah, we're at the center of everything we can observe. That seems to make sense. It might seem the same way from the point of view of a neutrino =)

A neutrino isn't conscious.

Consider also that not only are we very, very, minute and insignificant; we are also exceedingly brief!

We might be insignificant on a physical scale but that's not the right measure to use.

We are actually very very significant. We are, as far as we can tell, the only thing that actually notices the universe!

This whole enormous universe? It's for us. (And other intelligences, if they exist.)

> We are, as far as we can tell, the only thing that actually notices the universe!

Yes, but that could be quite common as well. The universe could be littered with intelligent beings who all think exactly this.

And every one of them is (probably) tiny, and every one is important.

Consciousness and life are two miracles of existence that neither the galaxies, nor the atoms seem to manifest. Probably most life forms on earth are not conscious either.

From that point of view we seem to be a miraculous needle in the haystack of the universe as we know it.

At this point I think current opinion is that pretty much all mammals are consciousness. It's not that rare.

Yah I read that silly article too. They call them conscious because they redefined the term. It's nonsense.

Which article is that?

They may not be self-aware, but it seems reasonable to assume that animals like dogs (for example) have inner lives, after their own fashion, and are capable of experiencing qualia. Certainly more reasonable than to assume that they can't.

I guarantee you other animals are first-class conscious. I can't prove it to you, but that's a problem with epistemology, not a problem with the other animals.

It's probably because the only animals YOU ever see are the ones in your dining plate. If you studied animal behavior a little you'd maybe realize how wrong you are.

Even fishes, too.

The property of the universe to become capable of self reflection after billions of years of non-intervention is just mind blowing. Life is the most amazing thing. It's as if life and consciousness are inherent emergent properties of certain systems. If you create a complicated enough state machine with low enough entropy (i.e. the universe), the ability to self reflect simply seems to emerge after a while. It's as if life just wants to exist. Amazing.

As for animal consciousness, there are probably degrees of that. Humans are probably the only living beings on Earth that are capable of higher order reasoning and self reflection (meta-thinking). That's not to say animals aren't conscious; they probably just aren't able to reason about the world and their own existence the same way we are (since their brains aren't as developed). In the same vein, who is to say there aren't beings in this universe capable of reasoning on such a high level that even with sufficient explanations, our brains wouldn't be able to accommodate such reasoning on the biological/hardware level due to a lack of proper circuitry.

Life and consciousness are not the properties of a complex state machine, but the properties of the universe.

The universe is not the mathematics or physics that we use to describe it.

Universe is just a complex digital state machine transitioning from one state to another. This existence is digital in nature.

We may never know what the universe really is.

> We are, as far as we can tell, the only thing that actually notices the universe!

Note that the dung beetle uses the Milky Way to navigate! :)

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/24/dung-beet...

Scroll the slider to the left and we are HUGE.

You should really play around with this, if you haven't. Going at speed through the galaxy Star Trek-style felt very freaky:

http://en.spaceengine.org/

I imagine the experience would be so much better in VR.

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