
Is the Universe Conscious? - arikr
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/universe-conscious-ncna772956
======
asow92
Are we part of the universe? Check. Are we conscious? Check? (probably yes).
Does that make the universe transitively conscious? Partially at least, I
suppose, yes it does. As far as the universe as a whole being conscious:
Latency is problem, but when you're the universe I imagine you've got a lot of
time on your hands.

~~~
danenania
Is there a universe outside of our consciousness? This cannot be proven, so if
it is to be believed, it must be a matter of faith.

Consciousness is the only thing we can be certain of.

~~~
ElatedOwl
Can we be certain of consciousness? How can we be certain that what we
perceive as reality isn't some demon feeding sensory information to our brain?

~~~
danenania
That would still be consciousness--or call it 'perception' if you like. But
yes, objectively speaking, this is as likely to be the case as any other
explanation.

------
muxator
Similar discussion from some time ago: [0]. TL;DR a galaxy is too big for
letting any sort of meaningful intelligence develop. The latency of signals
would severely limit the complexity of the "brain".

Edit: moreover, on a less serious stance, there is always [1], which reassures
us that the answer to such a question would inevitably be "no", when the
question is posed as part of an headline.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395585)

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
indubitable
Octopuses are an interesting argument against this view. Octopuses do not
directly control their own arms. And their arms even have reflex reactions
completely independent of their brain. In other words, it may be that nature
itself discovered centralization is a pretty bad idea beyond a certain scale.

~~~
teddyh
In other words, the universe is Cthulhu?

------
runeks
Given that I am conscious, and I am part of the universe, I conclude that the
universe is conscious.

Or, at the very least, the universe cannot be entirely unconscious, since I am
part of the universe and I am conscious.

~~~
danielam
In the same way a room becomes conscious the moment a person walks into it.

~~~
runeks
A room and a person in it can be considered separate. But nothing in existence
can be considered separate from the universe, since the universe is everything
in existence.

So, to use your example, a room with a conscious person in it, considered as
one whole, is at the very least partially conscious, since the person in it is
conscious. Whether the room itself is conscious we don't quite know.

But this leads to the question: does the notion of "partially conscious" make
sense?

~~~
danielam
So,

1\. a room and a person in it are separate

2\. nothing is separate from the universe

Therefore, there are two things that are not separate from the universe but
separate from each other.

~~~
runeks
Separation is a matter of perspective. A room with a person in it can be
viewed as one whole, and saying that this room-person is only partially
conscious is equivalent to saying that, because my teeth are not conscious and
my teeth are part of me, I’m only partially conscious.

~~~
JackFr
> Separation is a matter of perspective.

Indeed separation is matter of consciousness. If we believe that the universe
is more or less a frothing foam of energetic particles, the only thing that
differentiates my teeth from my gums and me from the room _is my recognition
and identification of them_. There is matter with or with out me, but there is
no room, no tooth, no me without my consciousness.

~~~
danielam
"[...] the universe is more or less a frothing foam of energetic particles
[...]"

"Particles" is plural, implying separation. It that, too, a "matter of
consciousness"? Sounds a lot like "consciousness" is being used to do a lot of
passing of the proverbial buck.

------
Animats
Oh, Penrose. He comes up with weird theories of consciousness every once in a
while. His basic argument is that for some reason consciousness in a
deterministic universe runs into undecidability, and therefor consciousness
must require some quantum phenomenon to work.

It's a big jump from "some stars emit jets that seem to move them in a non-
random direction" to "consciousness".

------
QAPereo
Assuming that c is really the speed of causality, then no, there’s a limit to
large scale structures or operations in an expanding universe.

~~~
danenania
Doesn't the inflation theory contradict this? If expansion (or contraction) of
spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could
theoretically enact causality faster too right?

Or even more theoretically, isn't it also possible that distant regions of our
universe could be adjacent in other dimensions? Perhaps in some higher (or
lower?) dimension, every particle in the universe is right next to each other,
having never separated after the big bang.

Not that any of this is particularly likely, but since we don't understand the
core mechanisms of consciousness very well, it seems possible they could be
operating on levels of physics that we also don't understand yet.

~~~
QAPereo
_Doesn 't the inflation theory contradict this? If expansion (or contraction)
of spacetime can occur faster than the speed of light, then it could
theoretically enact causality faster too right?_

There is no theoretical limit to the rate of metric expansion, but
unfortunately metric expansion doesn’t allow for FTL communication. Let’s put
aside issues of lightspeed in an expanding universe though because we don’t
even need to go there to address this basic issue of why you can’t have a
brain past certain limits.

At some point limited by the speed of light even in a static universe, your
“thoughts“ would be incredibly slow. What would it mean to have a neuron the
width of the galaxy? Would you be particularly intelligent just because you
had a lot of individual parts from a certain distance? There’s probably some
theoretical upper bound on the optimum size for a computing body in a universe
bound by c, based on the total amount of entropy which could ever be contained
in a given region and the rate of signal transmission.

As to adjacent dimensions and that kind of thing, who knows? In current
physics that would be like magic, and magic can be whatever you want it to be
after all.

~~~
danenania
M-theory (which posits additional dimensions) is obviously not observationally
proven by any stretch, but it's based on mathematics and scientific principles
and is respected by many prominent physicists, so I wouldn't call it the realm
of magic. It does make falsifiable predictions--the problem is developing
technology capable of falsifying them.

An Alcubierre warp drive[1] would be capable of enacting causality faster than
light, no?

1 -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive)

~~~
QAPereo
The Alcubierre drive might or might not work on our universe; it requires
something which may not exist. If it did work, it would also be a time
machine, and so far causality has been a safer bet. M-theory is engaging and
fascinating, filled with great math, but there is no indication that it
describes our reality. Worse, M-Theory flirts with unfalsifiability. All told,
when looking at things like the original question raised by the article, we
have to look to established theory backed by observation.

~~~
danenania
Sure, I'm not trying to say that this stuff is very plausible. My point is
that we do have some reasonable indications that some of our hard and fast
laws might be more slippery than is commonly thought, and given the
strangeness of consciousness, how it works could be pretty slippery as well.

Imagine that human civilization survives and progresses for 100 million years.
Do you think that they'll be able to look back on any of our "laws" without
laughing?

At that point we'd likely be far beyond Dyson spheres, harvesting large
quantities of antimatter, solar system scale particle accelerators, artificial
black holes, quantum supercomputers, etc., etc. Whatever would be discovered
is almost guaranteed to be unimaginable by us.

~~~
QAPereo
I think that to the best of anyone's ability to tell, the speed of light is
ultimately fixed and represents the speed of causality. I think that we can do
a _lot_ within those limits, much of it beyond belief today. That said, I
truly doubt that we're going to exceed the speed of causality, create time
machines, and that kind of thing.

For the artificial black holes, Dyson spheres, antimatter, quantum computers,
and giant accelerators to actually work, the laws of physics they're based on
can't be _that_ wrong. They can be incomplete, requiring their place within a
greater theory, but not simply wrong. There is observation consistent with the
notion that the speed of light has been constant for the last ~14 billion
years, everywhere we can see.

------
y04nn
Strange coincidence, today I was thinking about the same thing in the opposite
way while walking next to a highway.

Humans are not 100% rational like elementary particles in quantum physics, and
they were all in cars moving in a predictable way like H2O molecules in a
river. And it made me wondering if there is a possibility of consciousness
that we try to describe with physics laws but will never be able to totally
understand because of an underling consciousness.

------
derefr
Ignoring the whole "speed-of-light delays make galaxy-brains impossible"
thing, here's a different argument I'm fond of:

A conscious mind has an at-least-somewhat-coherent preference function, yes?
(Under modern predictive-processing models of the brain, the experience of
being a mind is the experience of focusing on things that allow you to make
reward-biased predictions, to further drive embodied processes like movement
to "unify" those biased predictions with the environment—i.e. to seek the
reward state. So you need a preference function to focus, and thereby to have
a train of thought.)

So, the Earth might be conscious. Despite seeing ourselves as different from
e.g. spiders, or algae, or bacteria, every preference-function of Earth-based
life is actually rather close-together in possible-preference-function-space.
You could say that the Earth—i.e. everything on Earth that thinks—"wants" to
spread carbon-based life through mitosis and meiosis. If the Earth was a
starship, this would be its mission.

The universe, on the other hand? Maybe if we're the only life in it.
Otherwise, there's probably a
[https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)
somewhere with a very different idea of what the universe "wants", that can't
really be coherently combined with our own.

If such a universe had a brain, it would necessarily be one with split-brain
syndrome; it wouldn't be able to both "be" Earth-based life and "be" a
paperclip-maximizer at the same time, and still have consciousness in the
sense we define it. So, not "one" consciousness, no.

~~~
jonreem
If it's possible for the Earth to have "one" consciousness while containing
both the Cheetah and the Gazelle, the universe can reconcile us and a
paperclip maximizer.

~~~
derefr
If you assume that the Earth has a consciousness, then individual beings on
its surface are more like cells in a body than like separate minds. The minds
of the individual components aren't "part of" that consciousness, in the way
that mental schema are a part of a brain; they're more like neurons, or other
nerve cells elsewhere in the body, _literal_ parts of the brain. You wouldn't
derive your idea of what a brain is thinking from what an individual nerve
cell "wants" (cells "want" ATP, mostly); you'd only derive it from what that
cell does in response to stimuli from other cells, and how that maps to
thinking at a larger level.

A human being _wants_ things that often involve the destruction of its various
cells. We _want_ to drink alcohol sometimes, for example. This is possible
because our preference-function has no factor for the preferences of the
individual cells killed in the process. They aren't a _semantic_ part of our
mind. They're just a literal part of our bodies.

A hypothetical Earth-Mind wouldn't have a preference-function derived via
coherent extrapolated volition of all Earth-life. Its mind would simply be the
set of preferences the Earth seems to have if you're an alien trying to
interact with "the Earth" as a coherent being, on some scale where the actions
of individual cells (e.g. humans) don't matter as much as the actions of the
biosphere as a whole. Maybe with action-and-reaction observed over a time-
scale of billions of years, for example.

That preference function might be observed to be, for example, "install
replicating carbon-based life onto anything that comes into contact with it."
Or "capture solar radiation into ongoing surface chemistry." Note that these
are coincidentally things that some of the individual _cells_ also want, but
again, the cells in existence at any given moment and _their_ wants aren't
anything you can use to deduce the preferences of the mind. It's more what
cells are _kept in existence_ and _given more resources_ over time—especially
in response to specific stimuli—that allow you to make educated guesses about
what a multicellular agent is "trying" to do. (With the proviso that those
cells shouldn't also be clearly fighting the rest of the organism in doing so;
a model that predicts that animals _want_ to get cancer is a bad model.)

Presuming humans terraform the planet completely, the preference-function of
the Earth as a whole might seem to end up as "transform all raw materials into
structures, items, and cells suitable as inputs to sustain the life of the
'human' cell-line." This is a _higher-level_ thought-process that could be
found, but it wouldn't erase the lower level; the Earth-Mind would still look
to have those other desires, because humans are still carbon-based life and
still do carbon-based life things. Just like our own brain cells, despite
being the "dominant cell-line" of our bodies, still function as cells in a
body. Humans are "embodied" by our biosphere just like our brain cells are
"embodied" by other cell-lines. And so it still makes sense to talk to a human
by talking to _its body_ , rather than directly to its brain—and it still
makes sense to talk to "the [terraformed] Earth" rather than talking to
humans.

On the other hand, the "observed mind" of a planet with a paperclip-maximizer
on it wouldn't look anything like a natural-biosphere or human-driven-
biosphere. It would just look like the single paperclip-maximizer's mind. A
paperclip-mamixizer isn't part of a biosphere; it's a monocellular culture,
the preferences of the whole identical to the preferences of the individual
entities. And those preferences are completely orthogonal to the preferences
of a biosphere.

If Earth came into contact with a paperclip-maximizer, their interaction
wouldn't look like a coherent mind at work; it would look like two minds each
blindly attempting to achieve their own goals with no greater purpose in their
collision.

The point I hold out on is that, if you interact with the _Universe_ as a
whole, on a scale where things like biospheres are the "cells", and attempt to
ascertain _its_ preference-function, you won't get anything sensible out.
Unlike Earth, where both the Cheetah and the Gazelle "serve" to tree-search a
set of biological machines that started with Earth's first carbon-based
replicators, an interaction between the Earth-Mind and the Paperclipper-Mind
doesn't serve to "do" anything. The behaviour of the interaction wouldn't
throw off byproducts that would be of use to anyone trying to predict
anything. The Universe, as an _experiment_ containing multiple orthogonally-
preferenced agents, is purposeless; unlike Earth itself, there is nothing from
which an alien standing outside of it could infer the hand of an intelligent
designer—a mind at the Universe's scale that found it useful to set its
"cells" in motion in the way the Universe has been set in motion.

Which makes sense, I think; the "intelligent designer" of the Earth-Mind was
the first carbon-based replicator, but there was no equivalent process that
"took over" the Universe as a whole to infuse it with a self-similar cluster
of optimization-processes.

------
vorg
> Penrose sums up this connection beautifully in his opus "The Road to
> Reality": “The laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex
> systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can
> then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of
> physics that gave rise to it.”

This circular thinking breaks down at "mathematics can encode in a succinct
and inspiring way the laws of physics". The laws of physics are partitioned
into _at least three_ different sub-theories, none of which have been
successfully encoded with another sub-theory using mathematics, i.e. General
Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and the laws arising from the directedness of
Time. (That last one could include the Theory of Consciousness if entropy
causes brain memories, and memories cause consciousness.)

Perhaps _because_ physics produces consciousness, and consciousness produces
mathematics, mathematics can never describe a united theory of physics.

------
danielam
"As I have argued there and elsewhere, naturalism cannot in fact be salvaged.
It either collapses into Rosenberg-style eliminativism, which is (hard as
Rosenberg tries to make it work) ultimately incoherent; or, in order to do
justice to the aspects of reality that even many of Nagel’s critics
acknowledge to be irreducible, is either transformed into the panpsychism of
Whitehead, Chalmers, and Strawson, or entails a return to an essentially
Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy of nature [...]"

[http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/06/mind-and-cosmos-
roun...](http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/06/mind-and-cosmos-roundup.html)

------
bootcat
Yoga and Hinduism have always been preaching this. The universe and for that
matter, even a stone is a living entity. There is a higher cosmic intelligence
and consciousness that is capable of taking macro/micro decisions.

------
zzzeek
By some definitions, proving this would objectively prove God exists.

~~~
singularity2001
by some definitions the converse would not be necessarily true: if God reveals
her/himself to you, she would still need to prove that he controls the whole
universe. unless you believe them.

~~~
uoaei
The definitions that the parent are referring to are the basis for pantheism,
i.e. that God is everything. Some people call it Gaia, or Brahman.

~~~
zzzeek
correct

------
nabla9
There are may ways to argue for panpsychism.

So far I have solid and interesting arguments only from David Chalmers. Most
others, like Penrose, make basic errors or hand wave too much to my taste.

~~~
uoaei
Would you please link to some of the Chalmers pieces you like?

~~~
nabla9
His all papers are here: [http://consc.net/all-papers-by-
date/](http://consc.net/all-papers-by-date/)

Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism. Amherst Lecture in Philosophy, 2013.
[http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf](http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf)

The Combination Problem for Panpsychism. In (G. Bruntrup and L. Jaskolla,
eds.) Panpsychism. Oxford University Press, 2017.
[http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf](http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf)

------
Shendare
I like the idea on some level, but could consciousness be separated from
biological motivations like pleasure and pain?

That feels more like the idea of universe-as-computer than in the examples of
conscious, living celestial bodies.

------
cvaidya1986
“The Spirit by which all this universe is pervaded, is indestructible. No one
can destroy the imperishable Spirit. \- Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2 Yoga of
Knowledge Sankhya Yoga Verse 17” searchgita.com

------
Alex3917
> to Carl Sagan intoning that “we are made of star stuff”

I like how Carl Sagan’s most famous quote is him just dumbing down the lyrics
of a Joni Mitchell song so that his audience could understand it.

------
visarga
I see consciousness as a way to describe the reinforcement learning process
for an agent in an environment. Thus I try to see if a universe consciousness
would have the characteristics of an RL agent.

What would such a conscious universe be conscious of? Would it need to feed,
mate, learn and defend itself? If there is no utility, no purpose, then why
would it be conscious?

At least in biological life, there is an internal purpose - that is - to live
and self reproduce. The consciousness of the universe would not have such
needs, and with their loss, it would lose all that evolution achieved.

------
pavement
It sure is, and no less than several billion times over, at least, depending
on how you count, and that's just on this planet alone.

------
carapace
"Is the Universe Conscious?" on nbcnews.com has to be some sort of cultural
milestone.

~~~
kwoff
Yeah the NBC News article, from June 2017, someone "recently published a
paper" \-- in July 2016 (I suppose on a cosmic scale...). At the risk of...ad-
hominism, the site they linked doesn't inspire confidence. For one thing, the
peer-review process:
[http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/about/editorialPolicies#peerRe...](http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/about/editorialPolicies#peerReviewProcess)
is basically two editors from the same company, and eventually one or more of
a group of "advisors" (
[http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/about/displayMembership/3](http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/about/displayMembership/3)
), 7 out of 17 being "Independent Researchers".

------
modzu
a "dominant" theory of consciousness is a bit of a misnomer

that is to say,

\- most scientists would hesitate to say they have a clue

\- philosophers have all kinds of ideas but all with epistemological issues

\- your average joe would probably equate consciousness with the "soul"

------
sgarrity
Yes?

