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Existence and Consciousness · Acedra
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Existence and Consciousness
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0:01
There are two great mysteries which have captivated the human imagination for thousands of years. The first of these is why the universe exists at all. Why is there something rather than nothing? In many ways this is a primordial question and has been raised by thinkers of every culture. And yet this ultimate mystery of existence is all but eclipsed by another mystery, --That conscious minds exist to perceive it and bear conscious witness to the universe.
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While it is present to every waking moment of our lives, nothing is more mysterious than the fact that reality allows for conscious experience. Consciousness is the gateway of all value meaning and significance in the universe, and yet no scientific consensus has ever been reached about how and why we have it. An ancient idea is that the mystery of consciousness and the mystery of existence are intimately connected, and perhaps surprisingly, there are now growing numbers
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of philosophers and scientists who take this possibility very seriously. It is this possible connection between these two great mysteries that we will explore today. The Mystery of Existence. Over the last century cosmologists have learnt a great deal about the early universe. By analyzing cosmic background radiation cosmologists peer deeply into the past inferring the state of the universe in what is thought to be its first fractions of a second. But where did it all
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come from? What caused the universe? What happened before the Big Bang? The physicist Stephen Hawking cautions that this is the wrong question. The beginning of the universe was itself the beginning of time. To ask what came before time is meaningless -- like asking what is north of the North Pole. And yet for many this answer fails to satisfy. Why did the universe burst forth into existence and what shaped it to be the way that it is? Physicists have proposed that the spark of
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existence had its origin in a quantum fluctuation triggering an explosive chain reaction leading to the still evolving universe we inhabit today. This narrative of existence however, presupposes the laws of quantum mechanics. It leaves entirely unexplained why the primordial situation should be constrained by quantum physics. It is here that we encounter the central problem which haunts the
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mystery of existence. --Every time we propose the existence of a new initial state or cause, another one is required to explain that. Instead of explaining existence, we find ourselves simply adding more to that which needs to be explained. The same presumably goes for consciousness. To those who claim consciousness to be fundamental to reality, there is the challenge of explaining how consciousness might avoid the same problem of infinite regress. Why placing it at the
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foundations of nature doesn't simply add yet more to that which needs to be explained. In recent times the possibility that consciousness is fundamental to reality has re-entered the academic conversation and gained new respect from philosophers and scientists alike. There are a number of reasons for this which I've explored in other videos, but to summarize very briefly, --- in recent decades it has grown ever more conspicuous that the materialist
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understanding of science seems entirely unequipped to explain how and why consciousness exists. --That our consciousness, the most undeniable fact of reality, could so entirely evade our scientific paradigm, has been taken by some as a conspicuous sign that materialism, while fantastically useful, is not an exhaustive account of nature, and the what we have called consciousness, may in fact represent a deeper part of reality than previously imagined, at least by most modern
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scientists. "If you can't explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals; space, time, mass, charge then as a matter of logic you need to expand the list. The natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental. A fundamental building block of nature. Part of the motivation for this view comes from the fact that standard science provides only
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an external and behavioral accounts of reality. Its intrinsic nature -- what reality is in itself, is not provided by physics. Furthermore the imminent reality of consciousness is the only intrinsic nature we know of, and in several respects it seems to be an attractive candidate for also being the intrinsic interior nature of reality itself. But if consciousness is in some way fundamental to reality, how might this shed light on the mystery of existence?
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This question was explored by philosophers in the late 18th and early 19th century, when a movement known as German idealism rose to prominence in Europe. As the movement progressed a core circle of thinkers argued for the absolute primacy of consciousness. Among other notable thinkers philosophers Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg Hegel urged that a deeper understanding of consciousness is necessary to understand why anything exists at all. It was Friedrich Schelling
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who first drew a direct parallel with the absolute ground of existence and the essential structure of consciousness. Existence, Schelling theorized must be self-grounding. What this means essentially, is that the primordial basis of reality must somehow be the cause of its own existence. To avoid the problem of infinite regress, an ultimate ground must be supposed --of which self-existence
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is part of its intrinsic nature. So what does this have to do with consciousness? The philosopher and mentor of Schelling, Johann Fichte had previously argued that a unique feature of consciousness is that it does not appear grounded in anything beyond itself. The conscious self is self-producing insofar that it exists only in and to itself. As the contemporary philosopher Douglas Hofstadter has put it, (quote) "It is almost as if this slippery phenomenon called self-consciousness
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lifted itself up by its own bootstraps -- almost as if it made itself out of nothing." (end quote) In a similar way the philosopher Peter Sas described self-consciousness as like a (quote) "magical matryoshka" -a Russian nesting doll which also magically contains itself. It was precisely this quality that schelling realized must be an attribute of the ultimate ground of existence. Furthermore, this was a quality that could be found nowhere else but in consciousness. Today,
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centuries later, the philosopher Freya Matthews defends a position very similar to Schelling. Matthews has pointed out that the self-causing principle behind existence must be reflexive meaning, that it directs back into itself. Any truly self-causing principle must be in essence "about itself" and yet this property of "aboutness" known to philosophers as "intentionality" is another property found nowhere else but in consciousness.
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(Title) Something From Nothing. Could anything ever really come from nothing? Perhaps the concept of a true nothing is simply an idea --represented nowhere in reality. Perhaps instead of beginning with nothing, the challenge of explaining existence should instead focus on defining a self-existing ground at which explanation can finally end. As we've already seen, physicists have proposed that the true ground floor of reality is the seething quantum realm
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of particles foaming in and out of existence. While this level of reality surely exists, there is no clear reason why the primordial situation should be constrained by quantum physics. A deeper level of explanation seems to be required. One possibility is that consciousness is the absolute ground of existence. And while this would add yet another level of existence, as we have seen it offers the benefit of actually posing an explanation for its self-grounding
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self-existence. How quantum physics came to be the ground of reality calls out for explanation, whereas consciousness in theory, can explain itself. If this is the case, we might wonder how such a necessary self-grounding consciousness could give rise to quantum physics and everything else. How could something as intangible as consciousness ground and connect with the laws of physics? Respected physicists have long defended, albeit controversially,
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that a connection point does exist between consciousness and quantum physics --notably in relation to observation. It seems that in all quantum experiments, the state of a system is always defined by the information that can be made available to observers. In quantum experiments the choice to observe has the effect of defining the state of the system, which would otherwise present itself in a "superposition" of all possible states, and in which, producing very different
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experimental outcomes. While the interpretation of this very strange finding is hotly debated, leading physicists, both past and present, have pointed to consciousness as playing a central role in quantum measurement. Is it possible that the universe exists through self-observation? is the universe, as the physicist John Wheeler once called it, a self excited circuit --in which consciousness gives meaning and thus reality to the world? In the past arguments that
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consciousness is fundamental to reality have been dismissed because in the physical world there is simply no room for consciousness to play a role. No "consciousness forces" or "mental particles" have ever been discovered. But as the philosopher David Chalmers has pointed out, in the quantum world this is simply no longer the case. And while a taboo surely exists around the subject, in
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quantum physics there nonetheless exists (quote) "A giant causal opening that is perfectly suited for consciousness to fill." (end quote) A role for consciousness in quantum measurement, Chalmers points out, finally provides this fundamental property of consciousness with a fundamental role to play. It is worth keeping in mind that it remains a complete mystery what physical laws are actually describing. The intrinsic nature of the world, what reality is in itself, is entirely
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unexplained by physics. It is therefore at least possible the physical laws, including quantum mechanics, are in fact rooted in consciousness. While the infamous claim that consciousness collapses the quantum wave function may be wrong, it is a possibility we cannot yet rule out, and as we shall now explore, it is one which offers a unique account of existence -- as arriving in a mysterious way from its future. (title) Future Origins Another baffling discovery of quantum
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physics is that in the quantum world future events can affect earlier events. Time can effectively double back on itself. More broadly, this opens the striking possibility that the birth of the universe could have been caused by its future. This was an idea proposed by the physicist John Wheeler and later developed by the physicist Paul Davies. Wheeler pointed out that observation of a
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quantum system not only defines the state of the system in that moment but also defines its entire history. It is as though the act of measurement produces histories which are consistent with the present choice to observe. As wheeler once famously remarked, (quote) "We decide what the photon shall have done *after* it has already done it." (end quote) In recent decades this surprising fact of quantum physics has been demonstrated many times in laboratories, and as wheeler argued,
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there is no reason to doubt that this principle is true of the entire universe -- that observations made now, or perhaps even in the distant future, stretch all the way back to the beginning of the universe, and thereby established the necessary conditions in which observers can exist. If so, we as observers are in a mysterious way participators in the existence of the universe.
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Along these lines, Davies has also argued that it is at least plausible that the long-term evolution of consciousness will one day pervade the entire universe, that through the spreading and development of conscious minds, perhaps over billions of years, the universe is destined to eventually realize its total mental potential. In a resulting cosmic "Omega Point" the entire universe finally becomes fully self-observed thereby satisfying the conditions of its own
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existence and retro actively creating itself. (Davies) "Part of this weirdness of this quantum physics is that observations which are made now, can affect the nature of reality as it was in the past, and in the same way observations made in the very far future, maybe a trillion years hence, can affect the nature of reality today and back in the Big Bang. So if you buy this whole quantum physics package, and you have this universe saturated by mind or saturated by observers,
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then indeed the whole character of the universe, including the emergence of its laws and the nature of its states, become inextricably intertwined with its mentality, with its mindfulness." Davies admits that this is a highly speculative idea but it is nonetheless consistent with what we know about quantum mechanics and not an idea we can yet rule out.
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(title) Existence from Value. Another possible connection between consciousness and the mystery of existence lies in the relationship of consciousness with value. Philip Goff is among the recent wave of philosophers defending the fundamentality of consciousness. Goff has also suggested that the animating force of reality may be mysteriously connected to its value. Goff reminds us of an insight first made by the philosopher David Hume in the 19th century. Hume
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observed that we simply do not perceive causes in nature. While we perceive a flow of events, our apparent perception of causes is an illusion. Similarly science does not actually reveal causes in the world. Goff points out that once we truly recognize this, we are free to consider an alternative possibility: that natural necessity -- the animating force of existence, is not material or mechanical, but in fact follows from its value. Goff considers that such a view might also help
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to explain why, against all of the odds, the universe seems finely tuned to allow for what he calls (quote) "a universe of great value" in which conscious, value-sensitive beings can evolve. In the last century cosmologists have learnt that slightly changing any number of precise values in the laws of physics has the immediate effect of obliterating all possibility of life. Among all of the intelligible arrangements of nature's laws, the probability of a life friendly universe is,
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in fact, trillions to one. This provocative discovery has led to the proposal by some of a "multiverse" -- trillions of other universes, the existence of which can nullify the apparent specialness of the universe. But as Goff and others have argued, fine-tuning may actually be an indicator of the deeper significance and necessity of consciousness on the metaphysical landscape. The philosopher John Leslie explored this possibility in his 1979 book Value and
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Existence, where he argued that, because of the problem of infinite regress, no physical mechanism will ever be adequate to explain the universe's existence. To solve this mystery we must go beyond materialism and consider there's something very different -- more akin to value, is the animating force of reality. If so, a universe capable of supporting value-sensitive conscious minds might have been a metaphysical necessity. Is it possible, as the 20th century philosopher Alfred
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North Whitehead believed, that (quote) "Existence itself is the upholding of value intensity" (end quote) The view that value is the animating force of existence is a perspective with deep philosophical roots both in Western and Eastern systems of thought. Plato in particular believed that the animating first-cause of existence was its "goodness." For Plato, existence itself held intrinsic value over non-existence, and that this latent value was the generative force of reality.
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While the human understanding of the universe has progressed a long way since the time of Plato, there are nonetheless philosophers today who argue that Plato was essentially correct -- that the underlying nature of the universe is more mind-like than classically physical, and the true creative force of this reality is its value. Consciousness is the vehicle of all value, meaning, and significance in the universe. To put it bluntly, without consciousness nothing matters.
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But is it also possible, as we have explored today, that without consciousness, nothing would exist? (essay ends) Hi everyone! I hope you found this interesting. -- Another highly speculative episode. Of course it is impossible to completely explore an area like this in a relatively short video, but I am very curious to know what you think about this deep question of existence, and the possible connection to consciousness. --So let's talk about it in the comments. If
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you enjoyed the video please give it a "like" perhaps consider sharing it. I also really want to thank my supporters on patreon who are helping me to turn waking cosmos into a full-time project. Thank you very much to those of you who are subscribed over on my patreon. If you're not beat you'd like to support my work, the place to go is patreon.com/waking cosmos. Alright! That is about it from me today. I will see you next time for another episode of Waking Cosmos -- exploring the
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nature of consciousness and its place in reality. Until then I hope you have a beautiful day!
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