Philosophical Message

[Moonchild]

On another forum, a friend of mine posted the following:

 

Here are some ideas of mine excerpted from other threads that point to intelligence as a continuum. We should apply differing levels of respect as appropriate to such other critters as we run into them. Consciousness immensely affects the universe!! It's almost like a force unto itself. It's the universe attempting to get control of itself.

 

Consider the proto-stellar cloud in semi-stasis with collapse being initiated by a compression wave from a nearby explosion from a supernova. At first the controlling forces are those attributable to gravity, electricity, and magnetism (for now thermodynamics is considered to be a manifestation of the latter two interacting with gravity). Sometime later molecules with special electric charge controlled affinities for each other and being cast about in the mess form special conglomerates that eventually lead to living organisms (either in the cloud or, later, on the planets or moons).

 

These special conglomerates in the mess do not represent a new force, rather they introduce a special organizing process both causing and being dependent upon sets of strange attractors within the mess (directing the degree of order in the chaos) to produce a "quasi-discriminating" effect favoring the building of ever more complex carbon based molecules leading eventually to self replication. This causes the three dominant forces to be applied to the mess in a more orderly way and different from what was happening prior to the exercising of the affinities. Normally, we do not ascribe consciousness to this level of organization, but this prerequisite has put us on our way first to microbes thence to multicellulars thence to consciousness.

 

Sometime later (much, much later by human standards) some of the conscious critters develop technology and begin to mold the universe into configurations of their liking including the building of planets, the moving of stars, the unwrapping of black holes, configuration control of clusters of galaxies, managing cosmological expansion, etc.

 

It may be useful to consider that choice is enabled by consciousness in order to reduce the effects of chance (chaos) and to promote a tendency to order.

 

Consider humanity as an organism where each individual human is the equivalent of a cell in a multicellular organism and is loosely coupled to the total of humanity via "collective consciousness" (CC). CC is not being used here in any metaphysical sense though there is an influence from the practitioners of metaphysics. Until the proliferation of the internet, CC was fueled primarily by print media, radio and television and to a lesser degree by rabbis, priests, ministers, etc. Now the internet has provided a quantum leap in tightening of the cross-coupling of each human with a small subset of humanity consisting of close acquaintances and to a lesser degree to all of humanity. This provides a strong tendency to drive the thinking of each human toward a mean (average) set of premises and ideas with ever smaller deviations on the part of each human (less freedom via constructive brainwashing).

 

Consequently we can each arrive at a commonality of acceptance of the nature and severity of problems and the likelihood of the effectiveness of proposed solutions. This allows us to become increasingly aware of and agree on problems and to set priorities for their solutions in ever higher degrees of agreement. Our drive to survive and protect ourselves from the vagaries of the universe will propel us off the planet and on to the road to controlling the expansion of the universe and shaping its other characteristics as we discover them.

 

All this began when the effort of prokaryotes to eat each other ended in a tie producing eukaryotes leading to the multi-cellulars. Since there is no known uniqueness to our solar system (earth/moon distance and mass ratio notwithstanding), it’s reasonable to expect that this is happening throughout the univers

[Uncle Martin]

So now that we have your friends thoughts,... please tell us what you have to say on the subject. We can't refute your friend, as he/she is not here to defend his/herself.

 

What do you think?

[Moonchild]

I would not post this here, Marty, if I was indifferent about it. This post is one of the best I've seen regarding consciousness. The user who posted it (on universe today) is called Gourdhead.

[Tormod]

I edited your post for readibility. When you copy something from Word, sometimes a lot of stuff comes with it. It even included a tracking gif which could be used to see who read the post (don't know if you were aware of that or not). In an upcoming version of the forums all HTML in posts will be turned off...