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Comment by Borg3

3 days ago

Hehe yeah.. For me, its just inverted search for the God. There must be somethink behind it, if its not God, then it must be simulation! Kinda sad, I would expect more from scientist.

The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions...

>The big riddle of Universe is, how all that matter loves to organize itself, from basic particles to Atoms, basic molecues, structured molecues, things and finally live.. Probably unsolvable, but that doesnt mean we shouldnt research and ask questions...

Isn't that 'just' the laws of nature + the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Life is the ultimate increaser of entropy, because for all the order we create we just create more disorder.

Conway's game of life has very simple rules (laws of nature) and it ends up very complex. The universe doing the same thing with much more complicated rules seems pretty natural.

  • Yeah, agreed. The actual real riddle is consciousness. Why does it seems some configurations of this matter and energy zap into existence something that actually (allegedly) did not exist in its prior configuration.

    • I'd argue that it's not that complicated. That if something meets the below five criteria, we must accept that it is conscious:

      (1) It maintains a persisting internal model of an environment, updated from ongoing input.

      (2) It maintains a persisting internal model of its own body or vehicle as bounded and situated in that environment.

      (3) It possesses a memory that binds past and present into a single temporally extended self-model.

      (4) It uses these models with self-derived agency to generate and evaluate counterfactuals: Predictions of alternative futures under alternative actions. (i.e. a general predictive function.)

      (5) It has control channels through which those evaluations shape its future trajectories in ways that are not trivially reducible to a fixed reflex table.

      This would also indicate that Boltzmann Brains are not conscious -- so it's no surprise that we're not Boltzmann Brains, which would otherwise be very surprising -- and that P-Zombies are impossible by definition. I've been working on a book about this for the past three years...

      11 replies →

> The big riddle of Universe is, how

A lot of people are more interested in the Why of the Universe than the How, though.

How is an implementation detail, Why is "profound". At least that's how I think most people look at it.

  • Yeah I guess... But such question is not really intereseting.. Answer is simple, there is nothing behind it.. and people arent confortable with that answer. Hence "How" is more interesting and scientific..