What the Fuck is up with Consciousness?
And Time And Reasoning And Morality And AI And Meaning And
I’m conscious, and unless I’m mistaken, you are too.
What the fuck? Why does the universe have perspectives in it? What is going on?
A human can reflect on himself and his thoughts and actions. But that’s not where consciousness comes from — animals are conscious and don’t reflect. A dog is surely conscious, but it can’t reflect on itself. Or at least, it can’t do it well. Somehow I got stuck with the linguistic version of existence.
Abstract reasoning was one thing I thought was strictly human. I even thought it might be the source of consciousness. Now silicon is better at abstract reasoning than most humans. They’re probably not conscious, right? Of course, they can feign consciousness extremely well. What? Anyone who says they’re just predicting the next token fails to recognize we’re just neurons traveling in a system at maximum 200 Hz. What’s the difference? Surely we’re just atoms?
By the way, back up. 200 Hz maximum? The leaders of civilization and the conquerors of all known existence (for now)? Every disappointment from a canceled wedding, every weep from the death of a lover, every small joy of a child seeing the ocean for the first time. It’s all electricity running through meat at 200 Hz. A neuron updates every 5 ms. CPUs are in the tenths of nanoseconds. Oh, that’s only 15 million times faster or so. If AI had destroyed the world for being smarter than every human back when America Online dominated the Internet, I certainly wouldn’t have been surprised.
Except maybe we all have a beautiful soul in another world that doesn’t do anything but provide the sense of consciousness. A nice idea. Some people think you can prove these souls exist just by thinking about it — I probably disagree. Speaking of disagreements, 84 % of the world is religious: 31 % Christian, 25 % Islam, 15 % Hindu — I’m canceling the universe until we can figure this shit out. The most fundamental beliefs of existence, what created us and why we’re here, and everyone disagrees and is positive they’re right. It sure seems like how we should LIVE OUR LIVES AT ALL is dependent on the FUNDAMENTAL MAKEUP OF THE UNIVERSE. Let me be clear; I’m not pointing and saying “how can someone believe in God.” I’m shocked that this is the type of thing that can have any disagreements at all. Imagine if 31 % of people thought time moved backward, 25 % thought time moved forward, and 14 % experienced time unmoving forever. This strikes me as similar in importance to whether God exists. The fact that we haven’t sorted this out is frankly insane and probably should induce a state of epistemic terror where you question every single one of your beliefs. Luckily, all of my beliefs seem very correct when I think about them. How fortunate I happened to be born into a consciousness that only believes the correct things. What a coincidence.
Universal time does not exist. When I’m running past you looking up at the Andromeda Galaxy, and you’re looking up right next to me, we’re seeing events that are hours apart because of relativity. Local time is the only thing that exists. My conscious experience could last for thousands of years longer than yours if I’m going fast, because space and time and SPEED are linked. Global time doesn’t exist. Don’t think about how that impacts the other conscious beings on this planet, to whom we extend the luxury of believing they’re experiencing life at the same time as us. Yeah, that luckily doesn’t have any implications at all.
For atheists, yes, you’re for sure prepared for non-existence forever and know what it’s like. “You were dead for 13 billion years before you were born; you know what it’s like!” No, I wasn’t around then; I do not, in fact, know what it’s like. For religious folks, imbued with the glory of God, I implore you to look at His kingdom and realize how much more there is to see. Maybe you should be paralyzed by wonder all the time. As for Heaven forever? Forever is a long time. I don’t know what I’d do after 10^80 years myself. I don’t know what I’d do after 100.
You can’t prove the past exists. You can’t prove the future exists. The present is seemingly all that exists, but it goes away for some reason, and you can’t prove the present that just happened actually happened. There are paradoxes in even the simplest parts of logic, like induction and movement. Someone in the world has just made a post about whether 22 and 19 is too big of an age gap in a relationship. We live in a madhouse, and all the inmates think they’re sane.
By the way, morality is a mess, and anyone who’s looked into it knows that all the good-sounding solutions lead to repugnant conclusions. Utilitarianism, one of the simplest and most obvious rule sets (more good is, in fact, good), is famous for leading to a conclusion named the Repugnant Conclusion. Meanwhile, the vast majority of conscious beings on Earth suffer for most of their existence. Life is terrible in the wild, and humans farm animals that have terrible lives. Hopefully only humans have souls! Otherwise this all seems bad.
Because we know we exist, we can use that as a data point to compare what makes it more likely we exist. For example, it’s more likely you’d live in India than be, specifically, Taylor Swift; there are so many more people in India, right? That makes sense. This is called anthropic reasoning. Well, there are maybe good anthropic reasons to believe you’re in a simulation.
believes there are maybe good anthropic reasons to believe God is real. There are maybe good anthropic reasons to believe everything is math and everything possible must exist. Imagine we gain the ability to simulate anyone in history in the far future, and 10,000 people simulate the best person to ever live. Well, then there’s a 10,000× chance you really are a unique, special snowflake just by virtue of experiencing consciousness while reading this right now.Quantum Mechanics.
Oh yeah, there are fungi that make people believe they are God and understand everything, except they agree they didn’t understand everything when the fungi leave their bodies and they look at their notes app and realize they wrote “chicken lasagna” as the true face of God. These fungi seem to affect the innate perception of time, except surely they don’t actually.
Free will can’t exist, except maybe it does—except maybe it’s the wrong question to ask.
Where are emotions in the brain? Which pattern reveals the love I hold for my mother with cancer? Where is meaning in the world? Why can’t I know what meaning in the world is?
Why am I not a bug? Why am I not a superintelligence that has at least figured out what in the hell consciousness and time are—the two most fundamental parts of existence? I’m a being that can reflect enough to know that something is deeply fucked.
The worst part: I can imagine someone nihilistic, religious, enlightened, existentialist, reading this and saying, “tsk tsk, he’s just learning about where real meaning comes from.” Convince me, please. Any answer for what the meaning of life is should be obvious and undisputed, like the air we breathe and the pulse that thrums in our veins.
Imagine a child and an adult resting on a hill near their house. It’s almost midnight—later than the child has ever stayed up since they started school two months ago. The child looks up at the stars and is amazed. The child sees a thousand candle-flames pinned to the ceiling of forever. The adult simply sees normality. The adult has seen the same stars their whole life and knows they will see small bits of light. Of course, the adult does not understand. They think they do; they took a class 30 years ago, where they were barely paying attention, and they remember that the stars are hydrogen or something. The fact that they are not a chemist and do not understand what that means does not bug them. The adult muddles through the mundanity of life every day and generally knows what they’ll experience day to day. How comfortable. How quaint. They have achieved the tiniest victory—making life boring. The fact that they understand nothing about every fundamental aspect of existence does not bug them. Imagine a caveman declaring himself god-emperor over the universe, understander of everything, because he discovered fire. This caveman has less knowledge than an elementary schooler today, by an order of magnitude. The adult’s death of curiosity is premature. The child looking up at the stars in wonder is clearly more honest about their position in the universe than the adult.
Something is off in the universe.
I ask: What is all this?
…
…
(This is my first post! If you like it, please subscribe for free, it’s tough to grow a community early. Commenting would also be amazing too, I like discussing! Not to get greedy and ask for 3 things but I think restacking might be the best way to get the word out there? If people subscribe and the restacking improves outreach that means they like this and I can spend more of my week making philosophy/morality/AI/pretentious thinkpiece related content. Welcome to Starlog, by Kyle Star! Happy to have you.)
Nice post! My favorite part was “Quantum Mechanics.” 😂 funniest thing I’ve read all week. Very apropos.
I think a good meta-argument, relevant to your post, for atheism (or specifically against a benevolent god) is the widespread disagreement you cite:
1. There’s widespread disagreement about God’s existence.
2. There must be powerful evidence or extra-evidential motivators working for one or both sides of the debate. So, for the sake of this argument, let’s investigate a possible motivator that could making one side’s thinking cloudy or covertly dishonest.
3. Those who believe in God’s existence almost universally think God is good and has goods plans for their future. God is a source of hope for them, typically.
4. Humans are prone to wishful thinking and optimistic bias. For instance, people think they are less likely to lose their job, less likely to get divorced, less likely to become alcoholics, less likely to get cancer, etc. than they actually are. And they think they are more likely to achieve career success, succeed in new business ventures, experience improvements in their personal relationships even without exerting extra effort, etc. than they actually are. Basically, people appear to be hardwired for hope. This isn’t surprising from an evolutionary perspective (disclaimer: I’m not an evolutionary psychologist). As I see it, a self-aware, emotion-driven species wouldn’t get very far if it couldn’t feel hope for the future, as hope is very important for motivation. No hope —> no motivation —> no productive action —> poor survival/reproductive outcomes.
5. Atheism does not offer hope to its adherents the way belief in God does.
6. Per 1-5, people are more likely to falsely believe God exists than they are to falsely believe God doesn’t exist.
Not sure if this meta-argument is strong enough to dissuade us from relying more on “object-level” arguments. And theists levy all sorts of meta-arguments as well, but I think they’re generally pretty bad.
Anyway, thanks for a great read. It really hit hard. I also think people are insane for not being in a constant state of disorientation, or even panic, over the epistemological ambiguity of our existence.
just thought about this from an anthropic perspective: the fact that i am not born in the future is possibly (though not definitively) foreboding. I hope we make it through lol