On Fred's, Did Consciousness create the Universe?

[Aethelwulf]

One idea that has been recently proposed by the pioneer Fred Alan Wolf, is that consciousness created the Big Bang. He is possibly well-known by many as being one scientist who has shined importance on the role of the observer and how things do not exist until they are observed. What you will find in many of his books however is that they don't actually define observers very well -- and anyone left after reading his books might believe that only human observers actually collapse the wave function and create the world around them.

 

It is true a thing does not really exist until it is pulled out of its wave function. The smearing of possibilities however can collapse without the aid of a human observer; particles are capable of collapsing the wave function as much as a human could theoretically observe a particle and pull it out of it' superpositioning. The idea however that the Big Bang was created using consciousness is something I will challenge in this thread. In Fred's model, he states that consciousness was involved in the beginning of space and time. He further expands on this model by saying observations made today in the present are sending signals back in time in the form of waves which are shaping the past universe. He manages this by introducing the Transactional Interpretation - waves which are moving to and fro time where there is no preferred directionality to time.

 

But how he can say consciousness was present at the Big Bang is a bit of a mystery. He did mention this in his book ''Parallel Universes'' where the mind of God, is the ''spillage of conciousnes minds'' in a universe. So does he believe that the creation of the universe is synonymous with the idea of ''consciousness''? It seems like he does.

 

 

Consciousness could not have had a direct role in the beginning of the universe and to explain why, we will use some objective facts which we can infer from science today. One of these facts involves the idea of an ordered set and treating the universe as a type of causally ordered set which is an idea which was used by Fotini Markopoulou http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9811053 .

 

Before we venture the idea I have had to tackle Fred Wolf's conjecture, I will say this approach depends on two things:

 

1) That the idea consciousness involves living creatures or beings and that death is the end of consciousness

 

2) That consciousness is understandable as a late phenomenon in the universe

 

Recently I have had some talks about what God is... if he or she existed. It is of course, a very ill-defined subject matter. This isn't a question of course, Fred tackles, but it does some evident that his approach is based from consciousness through the eye's of human beings - the consciousness he speaks about is the same kind of consciousness we may think about when we come to think about our own sentient existences and awareness. But on the order of things, we only came into the picture of things a couple of hundred thousand years ago - on the scale of evolution we are quite late phenomenon. Indeed, the first lifeform on Earth appeared (Abiogenesis) was a single prokaryote which according to our current scientific understanding, evolved from a soup in the primordial sea around 4 billion years ago. But consciousness on Earth had some way to evolve to the complex systems we have today involving the intelligent human civilization. Even if there was any other intelligent forms of life in the universe (which there most likely is), there is also a limit on when they evolved as well. Around 4 million years after the Big Bang, planetoids had been able to form stable orbits round their star-systems, entire galaxies had just started to form, but it was still a violent place (the universe) to live in. Before this, the universe was extremely volatile, the chances of life would have been very thin. Going back even further, when the universe was just a young thing, the universe was engulfed in a great soup of radiation called the Radiation Era. It wasn't until after 10,000 (some information might give it at about 400,000) years had the universe sufficiently cooled that matter began to dominate radiation - when it had, this would have been the processes known as Geometrogenesis.

 

So, the universe around the Big Bang certainly could not have sustained life as we know it, or consciousness as we know it. There is of course the argument that Fred Wolf could define God as ''not really a living creature'' but then how do you argue it in favor of a God being the spill of consciousness, if indeed consciousness spilled so late in the evolution of the universe?

 

 

In order to tackle a mathematical way to view this order, We appeared in the matter-dominated regions. This means that if we where to sum the universe up as a set which has a ''causal nature'', then consciousness would be a sub-set. No subsystem can model precisely the larger system it is made of - and this seems like a statement which would work well since whilst we are capable of ''taking in the information'' of the objective world around us, the mind never truly models the larger system it is made of with 100% accuracy. Of course, this is not hard to realize when you consider that we have an incomplete information of the universe at large anyway, and even if we could observe the whole universe, certain information will always be restricted due the uncertainty principle.

 

So, for this ordered set, we shall denote the universe as [math]\mathcal{A}[/math] and consciousness as a set [math]\mathcal{B}[/math] and that [math]\mathcal{B}[/math] is a subset of [math]\mathcal{A}[/math] such that

 

[math]\mathcal{B} \subsetneq \mathcal{A}[/math]

 

In this simple notation, we have a case to present consciousness with an order in the universe. To understand such a causal event, is that for a partially-ordered set,

 

there may be an element [math]E[/math] that is later than every other element [math]Q[/math] such that [math]p \leq E[/math] for all [math]p \in \mathcal{C}[/math]

 

where [math]\mathcal{C}[/math] is our causual set.

 

This is such a case such a ''supremum'' gives the universe a beginning state which all other states continue from. In such a model, we may give a ''strict'' inquality for consciousness .

 

We therefore have provided a unique way to show that consciousness could not have had anything to do with the Big Bang (if this is indeed modelled accurately to how we know consciousness exists). It can be argued that God has a type of consciousnesss that does not require the assistance of biological lifeforms, which is all and well... but as has been discussed, God is an ill-defined concept in regards of definition and speaking of consciousness for God is quite limited - and perhaps not even acceptable. I have in my own time, decided that if a God did exist, he would not be an artifect of a thinking sentient being. It could be just some sort of unified type of information which brings about a type of super-order - the kind of order which might have set into motion all types of order we may find in a causal theory of our universe... a driving force if you like of all events. But that is quite speculative, the nature of this post was just to show that if consciousness in Fred's eyes is based on what we know, then it is unlikely consciousness had any role in the Big Bang.

Edited July 2, 2012 by Aethelwulf

[robheus]

The problem is that if you extend the notion of consciousness to the realm of the physical reality, the cosmos, then at some point you must assume everything is conscioussness. But then also nothing is consciousness. Because for every quality we can detect, we always need to detect a difference. We know light exists because there are places which are dark (where there is absence of light). If everything is light, then in a sense, there is no light, because we can only detect a difference in light, not light itself.

[Aethelwulf]

The problem is that if you extend the notion of consciousness to the realm of the physical reality, the cosmos, then at some point you must assume everything is conscioussness. But then also nothing is consciousness. Because for every quality we can detect, we always need to detect a difference. We know light exists because there are places which are dark (where there is absence of light). If everything is light, then in a sense, there is no light, because we can only detect a difference in light, not light itself.

 

But consciousness is an artifact of physical statistical averages, inside your head. The physical nature of consciousness is almost certainly intertwined with the physical nature of the brain, this is a well-tested fact of nuerobiology.

 

If one was going to take a philosophical step and say, but anything which has meaning is understood by only things capable of understanding, then that's a hard philosophical stance to argue. I will argue though, that even in absence of beings capable of understanding the surrounding environment, the universe trucked on regardless.