If existence is infinite, anything that can evolve will, and so there must always have been beings infinitely more evolved than ourselves. However often they came into being, they must've made their way here over an infinite amount of time, but choose not to change us because whatever new information we can come up with ourselves is just as valuable to them. Anything that creates information on its own must have a consciousness of its own, and only within them does all our information become one. If everything has some consciousness, they'd have to make everything part of them to make all consciousness one, so that there would be no universe left to be conscious of if they did. They cannot give anything to us, but whatever we do, we are always giving to them just by existing, far more than we can ever give each other or ourselves. And yet their being there can itself be part of our evolution once we just know that they're there, for when we know that they're always there throughout everything and everyone, we can feel connected to them all around and within us, and through them, to everything and everyone that they're connected with.
I really like the idea behind this post, but I think a deconstruction is necessary.
ReplyDelete1. How do you define consciousness? Is the universe conscious on its own or does it require a self-aware being for consciousness to be born?
2. The universe is infinite in largeness =/=> the universe is infinite in smallness. Did you mean to say that an infinitely small subset of the universe can be created?
3. In the last sentence, I think you should have said "the former is a subset of the latter".
4. "If existence is infinite" should be stated more clearly as an axiom. Depending upon your definition of infinity, existence might not be infinite - some definitions of infinity would require that every possible world is simultaneously manifest, including the world where I'm not writing this post right now. Other definitions of infinity would require much less - for instance, there are an infinite number of real numbers in the interval (0,1).
5. Existence being infinitely conscious does not require that existence is omnipotent - or that it has the *power* to make all beings infinitely conscious like itself. Also, I'm not sure if you contemplate whether existence is omnibenevolent - there are no ethics at such a large scale.
6. At a semantic level, I'm not sure infinite consciousness is possible - consciousness requires a divide between the knower and the known, between illumination and darkness; I can't conceive of a way in which humans could be infinitely conscious.
7. You didn't get to the concept of evil. Are you saying that evil is a necessary component of a divided consciousness, that some parts will be enshrouded in darkness and that darkness will beget/is by definition evil?
8. The link is broken.
Thanks for your comment. This post is all very hypothetical, and built on yet other hypotheses discussed earlier in this blog.
ReplyDelete1. No one has been able to come up with a definition of life and I think the same is true for consciousness. Oparin said that living and dead matter aren't distinct, and it's impossible to say where it began, from organic molecules, or atoms, or the beginning of time. I'd say every connection creates some infinitely small amount of consciousness. This doesn't mean the universe necessarily has a consciousness, but that everything in the universe has a consciousness and it would therefore be impossible to save every consciousness in the universe from its relative unconsciousness. The difference in consciousness between us and a godlike entity would be as great as that between us and an insect, or even an atom. And we wouldn't want to be an insect, as it would mean we could practically just as well be dead, but does that mean we should free their consciousnesses from their oblivion? There would be no REAL universe left if we did so. To a godlike entity this wouldn't be much of an obstacle, as it could just simulate the real universe, but apparently (if the universe IS infinite) it's impossible to do so without giving every individual part of the simulation a consciousness all over again. So the only solution would be to do away with the universe altogether and let it exist only as a memory. The fact that this hasn't happened means that there must still be new things we can come up with, even if they're new only by an infinitesimal amount.
2. I meant infinite in detail: the smallest particle must be infinitely small, since it's impossible to be at a finite distance from the beginning of an infinite series (of sizes) if you exist at a random point on that series. If existence is infinite, our universe must be part of an even larger universe, albeit an extremely slow-moving one (from our perspective).
3. No, the most complex out of a series of information systems contains less information than the set of all information systems.
4. Are there, though? In the physical world there are only as many numbers as you can come up with, since they're just pieces of information in our brain. The number of particles and possible combinations between those particles in the universe may well be finite if its size and detail is finite, so that any number above that would not really exist in the physical universe, only in theory.
5. I didn't mean that existence itself is infinitely conscious — although if there are an infinite number of force interactions between the universe, and interaction is what creates consciousness, there might well be a consciousness covering an infinite extent of the universe, although it wouldn't be self-conscious. I was talking more about infinitely conscious life forms, much like ourselves, that would have evolved over an infinitely long period of time before us and would have developed infinitely complex technology.
6. Not humans, no. I don't think any particular entity can be infinitely conscious, but there is always an entity more conscious than the one below it: the series goes on forever.
7. I said the right thing to do would be to make us as conscious as it, since consciousness is life and unconsciousness is death, and moreover all problems arise from a lack of consciousness of a solution. I'll elaborate on that.
Thanks for the feedback.