Re: The Experience of God
Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2022 3:26 pm
True, for a long time it seemed as though the precise number of planets, and their orbital periods, must have been important basic principles. Conceivably we will someday learn that the particular set of gauge symmetries we see in what we think of as "the universe" are only the combination we happened to get in our little corner of circumstances. Or perhaps there really is some basic logical reason why U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3) is how it was bound to come out, because it's 1-2-3 ta-da, or something. Perhaps even the fine structure constant has some logically necessary value, like pi or e.
If we're going to be optimistic enough to think that science might some day understand consciousness, then I think we can be optimistic enough to think that we have already at least figured out what kind of problem it is. The difference between being conscious and not being conscious is not like the difference between having eight planets or nine in your solar system. It's like the difference between being on fire and not being on fire.
What very well could be, on the other hand, is that what we think of as consciousness is really just one of many very different yet roughly comparable phenomena that can and do all happen in different kinds of complicated biological structures, and that our particular flavour of these phenomena was simply the particular flavour that happened to occur on our planet. We got our form of consciousness, rather than any of the other flavours of this kind of phenomenon, for reasons of detailed circumstance like those that determined our number of planets.
Back on the first hand, however: "simply happened ... because of circumstance" is still going to refer to an interesting story of how things turned out in this part of the universe. There are zillions of other solar systems, and the coalescence of gently rotating clouds of dust and gas into different patterns of large orbiting lumps will have been a deterministic process in each one of them, governed by the same basic laws but also working out differently. Saying that "it just happened" that we have four outer gas giants and four inner terrestrial planets is like saying that it just happened that George shot Lennie. Yeah, there are lots of other stories out there, but that's how this story went, and it went that way for reasons.
If we're going to be optimistic enough to think that science might some day understand consciousness, then I think we can be optimistic enough to think that we have already at least figured out what kind of problem it is. The difference between being conscious and not being conscious is not like the difference between having eight planets or nine in your solar system. It's like the difference between being on fire and not being on fire.
What very well could be, on the other hand, is that what we think of as consciousness is really just one of many very different yet roughly comparable phenomena that can and do all happen in different kinds of complicated biological structures, and that our particular flavour of these phenomena was simply the particular flavour that happened to occur on our planet. We got our form of consciousness, rather than any of the other flavours of this kind of phenomenon, for reasons of detailed circumstance like those that determined our number of planets.
Back on the first hand, however: "simply happened ... because of circumstance" is still going to refer to an interesting story of how things turned out in this part of the universe. There are zillions of other solar systems, and the coalescence of gently rotating clouds of dust and gas into different patterns of large orbiting lumps will have been a deterministic process in each one of them, governed by the same basic laws but also working out differently. Saying that "it just happened" that we have four outer gas giants and four inner terrestrial planets is like saying that it just happened that George shot Lennie. Yeah, there are lots of other stories out there, but that's how this story went, and it went that way for reasons.