Cosmic Consciousness: meta-cognitive or non-meta-cognitive?

[AshvinP]

Even BK admits he doesn't have a solution to cosmic fine-tuning. Describe how a non-metacognitive entity evolves to produce this universe, accept a meta-cognitive subject with sufficient knowledge, or embrace the infinitely infinite Multiverse.

By cosmic "fine-tuning", we are talking about the parameters of physical constants being within the very narrow range of values necessary for life, right? If MAL is a comparable to a living organism with instinctive will, then we should expect to find the values within that range because MAL cannot be anything other than what it is. Now if we are talking about parameter values which are necessary specifically for human life, then I would grant that argument for meta-cognitive is more convincing. Is that the argument?

[Lou Gold]

Let me risk offering a potentially stupid question from a storytelling non-philosopher:

How about an instinctual being called "LIFE" that endlessly creates noncognitive, cognitive and meta-cognitive entities and living processes that interact (via tensions, check-and-balances, etc) dynamically in a never-ending unfolding in which a process full of choices and not a product is the perfection? "World without end."

[Brad Walker]

True cosmic fine-tuning is the parameters to create technologically advanced civilization, more than mere consciousness or life. There's also noetic fine-tuning, the unexpected and unexplainable features of consciousness beyond bare awareness.

[Brad Walker]

Omniscience isn't necessary, just the capability of extrapolating of billions of years of googolplexes of possible worlds.

[Simon Adams]

Surely it get’s a bit tricky if you’re positing this ‘one thing’ where the universe is the representation of itself, and most of this fine tuning is necessary for the ‘thing in itself’ to exist?

I guess you could have a kind of duality where there is the ‘thing in itself’ is repeatedly trying different ‘settings’ for itself until it produces a reality with an underlying set of laws where it’s representation can exist, and then is capable of sustaining biological life. I see some challenges to some of the basic principles with that scenario.

A fundamental part of this problem is that time itself started with the physical universe in which it seems that much of the fine tuning (arguably including all the key constants) were already set. If they were different, even if time was produced it would end - often very quickly. So how does something that is ‘raw phenomenal consciousness’ instinctively try different fundamental ‘settings’ before time exists? This idea of evolving via trial and error seems like a natural idea to us, but that’s because we do everything in time, and think of temporal processes.

Ignoring the fine tuning part, the question of what it means to be the first cause, before time, and therefore eternal has some fundamental implications. I don’t know much philosophy, but I am confident that this is not the same as mind at large.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Ignoring the fine tuning part, the question of what it means to be the first cause, before time, and therefore eternal has some fundamental implications. I don’t know much philosophy, but I am confident that this is not the same as mind at large.

This too is where I stumble upon a seeming intractable problem, in that metacognitive teleology seems all tied up with spatiotemporal considerations, whereas the most primal state of irreducible uncaused awareness absent any subject><object dynamic transcends spatiotemporal considerations, and 'in the beginning' becomes a moot point, for can primal ideation be said to have a point of origin in time if spacetime is an idea? Which brings it back to an everpresent origin of never-ending novelty, an infinitude which I'm not sure is going anywhere at all.

[Lou Gold]

Surely it get’s a bit tricky if you’re positing this ‘one thing’ where the universe is the representation of itself, and most of this fine tuning is necessary for the ‘thing in itself’ to exist?

I guess you could have a kind of duality where there is the ‘thing in itself’ is repeatedly trying different ‘settings’ for itself until it produces a reality with an underlying set of laws where it’s representation can exist, and then is capable of sustaining biological life. I see some challenges to some of the basic principles with that scenario.

A fundamental part of this problem is that time itself started with the physical universe in which it seems that much of the fine tuning (arguably including all the key constants) were already set. If they were different, even if time was produced it would end - often very quickly. So how does something that is ‘raw phenomenal consciousness’ instinctively try different fundamental ‘settings’ before time exists? This idea of evolving via trial and error seems like a natural idea to us, but that’s because we do everything in time, and think of temporal processes.

Ignoring the fine tuning part, the question of what it means to be the first cause, before time, and therefore eternal has some fundamental implications. I don’t know much philosophy, but I am confident that this is not the same as mind at large.

Simon, thanks for responding. I confess that philosophically this is above my paygrade but I'll give it a shot. Intuitively, I'm imagining a situation where the One has been tossing aspects of itself into a brew only with the instinctual intention of reproducing itself, starting in the unmanifest realm of potential. When the potential arrives at the point that the conditions support a Big Bang, there is one and the manifest conditions now support another process of unfolding manifest biotic life within these favorable conditions. Sheldrake, for example argues that the Sun is a metabolizing being. This would be a condition (among others) supporting the emergence of metabolizing planetary biotic life. In such a scenario, the One is simply instinctively expanding or reproducing aspects of Itself in a non-planned process that we call creativity. My "proof of concept" comes from listening to the extraordinary young "musical creative" Jacob Collier. When asked in an interview what he wants to be at age 30 he says, "Alive." When asked if he has a plan, he says, "If I have a plan, it won't happen." During Jacob's earlier stay at MIT he says that in his personal development he never practiced. He just explored his curiosity playfully. The arranger-composer at the Media Lab says at a later point in the documentary, "It's really inspiring. It makes me think there's real Divinity in the world." In other words, Creativity wants to create and does so!

[Simon Adams]

Hi both

I get what you’re both saying and I think they’re both feasible arguments. It comes down how our wider view of everything fits everything together, many different but inter-related conclusions fitting together to form a conceptual image of what is arguably indescribable.

I guess the only direct example of mind we really have is our own, even when we can sink below the ego such that it doesn’t in any way match the description of a separate ‘thing’. So there are two different ways of using this one example we have with the claim that we are ‘made in the image of god’.

When we are born, we are simple awareness. When a baby is hurt it reacts as if the whole world is in pain. Over the first couple of years, we start to associate ourselves with the body. It seems to me that this builds the subject-object distinction, the ego if you like (I’m over simplifying here, but let’s keep it simple if possible). So our metaconscious mind space is the terrain between our simple self, and something that emerges out of that self as an association with it’s own representation. This then gives us the ability to think, speak and act in the world, to be a creative force above and beyond our instinctual responses.

Now if I understand where you both - and probably BK and almost everyone else here are broadly coming from - if we use this to understand the wider picture of the universe, you have the physical universe as effectively being the body of the one mind. Whereas from my perspective, the universe is the creative result of the words and actions.

The simile does break down a bit for my version of this because when we speak and act in the world, it doesn’t have the same type of potential. Yes we can have sex and ‘create’ new life which goes on to have it’s own creations in the world, but in my view there is a categorical difference in that we don’t have the ability to create being itself (as in the case of the world soul and ourselves). In both cases the universe is not fundamentally made out of a different substance, and from an ontological understanding of what science is telling us they are very similar. On the other hand, at a fundamental level they are significantly different. Yours is definitely the more parsimonious view so I can understand why you prefer it, but it just doesn’t fit with things I feel confident about from my own life.

Just as an aside Lou, I do have a lot of sympathy for Sheldrake’s view that each planet and each star has it’s own ‘conscious’ identity. Whether or not you still need a “universe soul’ on top of these in that case is something I’m still thinking about.

[Soul_of_Shu]

If Ideation as the ontological imperative is fundamental and uncaused, then of the seeming infinitude of novel ideas comprising the cosmos which one was not inevitable?

[AshvinP]

True cosmic fine-tuning is the parameters to create technologically advanced civilization, more than mere consciousness or life. There's also noetic fine-tuning, the unexpected and unexplainable features of consciousness beyond bare awareness.

Once we get to consciousness and simple life, BK may argue that a Darwinian evolutionary process (acting on conscious activity) can adequately handle the move to advanced life. I am not sure about that, but it does seem a pragmatic Darwinian selective process (as envisioned by William James) can do a lot of explanatory work in that regard. Not to mention epigenetic processes which we are only beginning to explore now.

Could you elaborate on the noetic fine-tuning argument?