The fact that it is a standard symptom of schizophrenia ought give pause for thought. — apokrisis

That is perhaps the worst poisoning of the well i've seen in a long time. Well done. It's also a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of two separate concepts:

Schizophrenics are under the impression their thoughts and feelings are imported from an external consciousness.

The brain-as-receiver model says nothing about any of that, and instead, posits that thearising of consciousness at all is akin to a television receiving signals for any image whatever. Its reasonable, albeit totally fringe and unsupported.

But your response was childish and dumb.

It's also a complete and fundamental misunderstanding of two separate concepts: — AmadeusD

Nope. I was making the point that a hallmark of “consciousness” is that it is embodied and agential. And we know how that is so from having studied the neurobiology - the architecture of brains.

Schizophrenia appears to arise from a fundamental breakdown in the timing and integration of neural activity. The sense of authorship for intents and actions, and also the ability to filter sensation in normal attentional fashion, goes awry as there is not the proper traffic in “efference copy” information. In simple terms, the frontal motor areas may initiate actions, and the sensory half of the cortex doesn’t get its copy of the commands in time to cancel them out of the state of sensory experience it then produces.

This is why symptoms like thought insertion and thought broadcasting arise. The precise compensation of an “implicit timing” connection breaks down. Normally we can tell whether we are moving the world or the world is moving us as in the first case, our sensory areas knows in advance to subtract the predictable action from its interpretive response. In the second case, the self-generated action catches the sensory areas by surprise. It feels like an alien hand is now in control. Sensations are thrusting at us. Thoughts and ideas are being imposed.

So we know how the brain generates consciousness by solving all these timing issues. How it has an architecture that deals with the fact it takes time just to pass along the message of what motor action we have planned so our sensory processing can already take that into account. An integrated sense of a self in its world can then arise out of a tricky neurobiological interaction. And schizophrenia is the kind of disorder that really brings this fact home.

And then we have this other nonsense about the brain being an antenna tuned into a cosmic psychic frequency. A sloppy and lazy analogy that we are meant to allow for the sake of argument. A hypothesis that completely wastes our time when we should instead be marvelling at the biological intricacy of the neural engineering that so easily seems to sustain the “normal” mind.

Being embodied and agential seems so effortless that yes, maybe it could be just a broadcast picked up off the airwaves.

But then nope. The neurobiology to get the job done is what we should reserve our amazement for.

The brain-as-receiver model says nothing about any of that, and instead, posits that the arising of consciousness at all is akin to a television receiving signals for any image whatever. Its reasonable, albeit totally fringe and unsupported. — AmadeusD

Another interpretation of the "Cosmos Created Mind" is Kastrup's Analytical Idealism*1. discussed this alternative in his thread*2. I'm not sure I fully understand K's "reasonable" and diligently documented update of ancient Idealism. Also, in order to maintain a philosophical line of reasoning, and to avoid getting into Religion vs Scientism diatribes, I prefer to use less dogmatic & divisive terms than "God". But Kastrup is bolder, and more self-assured than I am.

I wouldn't expect empirical support for a theoretical philosophical conjecture, that postulates a Cosmic Mind of which our little limited logic-parsers are fragments. But what do you think of his Mind as "foundation of Reality" and Idealism as "ultimate Realism" theory? I must admit that it bears some general similarity to my own Holism/Information/Causation hypothesis*3, which follows the chain of evidence back to the precipice of space-time, and merely points a philosophical finger toward the abyss of ignorance beyond. :chin:


*1. Bernardo Kastrup's Cosmic Mind :
he posits that the brain is not a receiver or filter of consciousness, but rather an image or representation of a universal consciousness that has undergone a dissociative process. In this model, physical reality, including the brain, is an external manifestation or "outside image" of internal mental processes
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=In+Bernardo+Kastrup%27s+view%2C+the+brain+is+not+a+receiver+of+consciousness%2C+but+rather+an+image+of+a+mind%27s+dissociative+process.+

*2. In Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism, the "mind of God" refers to a single, undivided, and all-encompassing consciousness that is the foundation of reality. He uses the concept of dissociation, a mental process where a larger mind fragments into smaller, individual minds, to explain how individual consciousnesses like ours arise from this single cosmic mind. This "God's mind" is not impersonal but is, in this view, the ultimate reality, and the world we experience is an externalization of this mind.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1012470

*3. Creative Mind and Cosmic Order :
The traditional opposing philosophical positions on the Mind vs Matter controversy are Idealism & Realism. But Pinter offers a sort of middle position that is similar in some ways to my own worldview of Enformationism.
https://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page10.html

The "mind of God" refers to a single, undivided, and all-encompassing consciousness that is the foundation of reality. — Gnomon

- "undivided" but fragments.

- consciousness is a process and is thus not simple; it has system parts of thinking, planning, implementations, memory… Higher being may evolve in the future; the past is the wrong direction to look for it.

- Brahman myth again.

- Look up quantum field q-number table descriptions to approach the ultimate reality.

- Woo.

So right there is something exactly the opposite of your handwaving. We have a triad of constants that are in a pure symmetry breaking relation. A unit 1 story as they are all the fundamental units and may as well be set to 1 as “measured values”. — apokrisis

Sorry. But your notion of a "triad of constants"*1 that add-up to 1, sounds like "handwaving" to me. Not because it's wrong, but because it's over my head, as a layman. Besides, those "fine-tuned" constants*2 are interpreted by some scientists as evidence of an Anthropic Principle*3. Do you agree with that interpretation of pre-set or programmed initial conditions? Do you have a better explanation for the pre-bang existence of mathematical settings that are logically necessary for the emergence of animated matter? :smile:


*1. The triad of constants related in a pure symmetry breaking relation refers to the speed of light (\(c\)), Planck's constant (\(\hbar \)), and the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field (\(v\))
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=triad+of+constants+that+are+in+a+pure+symmetry+breaking+relation.
Note --- The "vacuum expectation value" is theoretical, not measurable. Do you view unsubstantiated theories as "handwaving"?

*2 Constants in science are fixed numerical values that describe physical quantities and are the same everywhere in the universe. They are either fundamental, like the speed of light (\(c\)), or used in experiments as "control variables" that are kept constant to ensure accurate results.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=constants+in+science
Note --- The Anthropic Principle seems to view your "triad of constants" as "control variables" to guide evolution toward the emergence of intelligent apes.

*3. The anthropic principle is the idea that the universe's fundamental constants have values that are necessary for the existence of life, which is why they appear "fine-tuned" for our existence.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=anthropic+principle+constants

The "mind of God" refers to a single, undivided, and all-encompassing consciousness that is the foundation of reality. — Gnomon
- "undivided" but fragments. — PoeticUniverse

"Undivided-yet-fragmented" may sound like nonsense, unless you are familiar with Kastrup's analogy of psychological Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder)*1. But I would interpret his description of the Cosmic-yet-local mind of God more favorably --- as rational philosophy instead of spooky "woo" --- by using terms like : Holistic, yet composed of Holons*2.

For example, scientists treat Atoms as fundamental units of reality, yet they seem to consist of even more elementary elements such as protons, which are imagined to consist of invisible Quarks*3 : a nested hierarchy of systems within systems. I've never seen a quark, but I accept the hypothesis as a logical inference from "indirect experimental evidence". Does that whole-part notion make any sense to you? Sounds poetic to me. :nerd:

HOLISTIC HIERARCHY
In structure's dance, a grand design,
Where systems within systems intertwine,
A nested view, a deep descent,
Through layers linked, omnipotent.

From simple cell to complex state,
A chain of being, small to great.
The root-bound earth, the tree above,
Each part connected, bound by love.

The universe, a cosmic whole,
Within it galaxies find their goal.
Each galaxy, a star-lit sea,
With solar systems, you and me.

The atom holds the proton's hum,
The quark, the part from which all's come.
A fractal pattern, ever true,
Reflecting order, old and new.

No level stands in solitude,
But fits within its multitude.
A box inside a larger frame,
Hierarchy is the constant game.

So see the order, clear and bright,
From deep below to soaring height,
The nested world, a wonder vast,
In structures built that ever last.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=poem+on+nested+hierarchy


*1.Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder) :
A condition where a person experiences two or more distinct personality states or identities, which may have different names, memories, and ways of interacting with the world.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=psychological+dissociation

*2. "Holistic holons" refers to the concept that reality is made of nested hierarchies of "holons," which are entities that are simultaneously both a whole and a part of a larger whole. This concept, introduced by Arthur Koestler, attempts to reconcile the part-whole dichotomy by viewing every entity as both autonomous in itself and a component of a greater system. A cell, for example, is a holon because it is a whole with its own internal structure and is also a part of an organ, which is part of an organism.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=holistic+holons

*3. While quarks have not been directly observed, their existence is supported by a wealth of indirect experimental evidence, making them a foundational concept in modern physics, not a fabrication.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=quarks+not+real

So we know how the brain generates consciousness by solving all these timing issues. — apokrisis

That's a somewhat different theory from all your previous ones. Are brains necessary for consciousness then? Is solving all these timing issues sufficient for consciousness?

I'm not sure I fully understand K's "reasonable" and diligently documented update of ancient Idealism. Also, in order to maintain a philosophical line of reasoning, and to avoid getting into Religion vs Scientism diatribes, I prefer to use less dogmatic & divisive terms than "God". But Kastrup is bolder, and more self-assured than I am. — Gnomon

'Idealism' is not ancient. The term first came into use with Liebniz, Berkeley and Kant. In hindsight, it is possible to describe some elements of Platonism as idealist, but it is not a term that was used in Plato's day.

As for Kastrup, I think he's worth reading, or listening to. He's an articulate defender of idealism.

'Idealism' is not ancient. — Wayfarer

:roll:

https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase_mobile?openform&fp=wcp23&id=wcp23_2018_0002_0001_0025_0035

I know that the Upanisads (for example) were described as 'idealist philosphy' by a German scholar, Paul Deussen. But the term 'idealism' only entered the philosophical lexicon with Leibniz, Kant and Spinoza. Once the term was introduced with its associated ideas, then precursors to it could be seen in Greek and Indian philosophy. But at the time, they didn't use that terminology and they didn't have the same categorical distinctions between mind, matter and idea, that modern idealism contains. "Idealism” in its systematic sense — the thesis that reality is in some way dependent on mind or spirit — only becomes a defined philosophical position in early modern Europe, with Leibniz’s monadology, Spinoza’s substance monism, and especially Kant’s transcendental idealism.

Once that vocabulary existed, scholars like Deussen and later Radhakrishnan could look back and identify idealist currents in Plato, Plotinus, and the Upaniṣads. But those traditions themselves never used the conceptual apparatus of Idee, Bewusstsein, or Geist — their metaphysical language was quite different.

The abstract noun “idealism” appears in French as idéalisme by the late 17th century and in English around the mid-18th century. The Oxford English Dictionary records its first philosophical use in 1702, referring to “the theory that external objects are known only as ideas.”

So, yes, there are ancient pre-cursors to idealism, but idealist philosophy really only appears in the early modern era. This is further discussed in the thread Idealism in Context (of which yours was the first comment.)

'Idealism' is not ancient. The term first came into use with Liebniz, Berkeley and Kant. In hindsight, it is possible to describe some elements of Platonism as idealist, but it is not a term that was used in Plato's day. — Wayfarer

I assume that in Plato's day they just called it Philosophy. Perhaps, you are stating the obvious, that modern versions of Platonic Idealism are not ancient. But I was referring to the general belief that A> Reality is fundamentally Mental*1, or B> that the Human mind's model of reality is as close to true reality as we are likely to know*2.

Was your own Mind Created World talking about ancient A or modern B, which is a more recent update of Platonism based on modern science & philosophy, or some combination of the two, which is my BothAnd position? Either way, I'd still lump it under the broad heading of Idealism. Wouldn't you agree? Or do you prefer a less black & white distinction between Mind & Matter? :smile:


*1. Idealism originated in philosopher Plato, who is considered the father of the philosophy. It has roots in Classical antiquity and has evolved through various periods, including the 18th-century German Idealism movement, but its foundation was laid by Plato's idea that "the world of ideas" is the most real and perfect form of reality
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=where+did+idealism+originate

*2. while idealism holds that reality is fundamentally mental or a product of consciousness. Realism emphasizes the importance of empirical observation and the tangible, physical world for knowledge. In contrast, idealism prioritizes ideas, thought, and mental constructs as the basis for reality and knowledge.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=idealism+vs+realism+philosophy

I assume that in Plato's day they just called it Philosophy. Perhaps, you are stating the obvious, that modern versions of Platonic Idealism are not ancient. But I was referring to the general belief that A> Reality is fundamentally Mental*1, or B> that the Human mind's model of reality is as close to true reality as we are likely to know*2. — Gnomon

These are very difficult distinctions. But the point of my other thread, Idealism in Context, was that the human sense of their relationship with the nature of being has fundamentally changed over the course of history. (This is an Hegelian theme). The ancients did not have the sense we do that the world comprised material objects being driven by physical causation. Because of their religious sense, the Cosmos was seen as in some sense purposeful or as alive, in a way that is very hard for us to grasp. The way I put it in the other thread was:

The earlier philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, building on Aristotle, maintained that true knowledge arises from a real union between knower and known. As Aristotle put it, “the soul (psuchē) is, in a way, all things,” meaning that the intellect becomes what it knows by receiving the form of the known object. Aquinas elaborated this with the principle that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.” In this view, to know something is not simply to construct a mental representation of it, but to participate in its form — to take into oneself, immaterially, the essence of what the thing is. (Here one may discern an echo of that inward unity — a kind of at-one-ness between subject and object — that contemplative traditions across cultures have long sought, not through discursive analysis but through direct insight). — Wayfarer

So here, at the risk of sounding trite, the theme is the at-one-ness of being and knowing. Not as an intellectual construct or as the idea in the subject's mind corresponding to the object in the external world but as a way of being-in-the-world. That innate sense we possess of subjective awareness in a realm of objects had not yet taken hold. (I suppose, in some ways, this can be related to Julian Jayne's 'bicameral mind' or to R M Bucke's 'cosmic consciousness'. )

It is often said that Aquinas is a realist - which is true, but he was a scholastic or Aristotelian realist, which means something completely different to what we mean by 'realist'. For Thomism, with God as Being, reality is inherently participatory, in a way that it can't be for us. It is ecstatic realism, if you like. But as the belief took hold that the Cosmos was not an expression of the divine Intellect, then physical reality was accorded the kind of inherent reality that scholastic philosophy would never grant it. This is the origin of the 'Cartesian division' and the pervasive sense of 'otherness' that characterises the modern mind. (See this blog post on Radical Orthodoxy).

So Berkeley's idealism was a reaction against the whole idea of matter as a mind-independent substance - something which wouldn't have occurred as neccessary in earlier philosophy, as material form was always seen in combination with the intelligible idea which was immaterial as a matter of definition (but emphatically not an 'immaterial thing'! :brow: )

This is why expressions such as “cosmic mind” are inherently misleading when taken to denote some objective existent, as if it were on par with scientific concepts like fields or forces. In classical thought, the divine intellect was not conceived as an object within the universe but as the very ground of intelligibility — the condition under which being and knowing are possible at all. To interpret it as a thing among things is already to have shifted into a different ontological register. Whenever such expressions are used, we risk reifying what was never meant to be reified — trying to understand the source of intelligibility from within the subject–object framework that depends upon it.

Do you agree with that interpretation of pre-set or programmed initial conditions? — Gnomon

I’m arguing not for pre-set material conditions but for Platonic strength structural necessity. The argument is that reality can only exist with a certain dichotomous or symmetry-breaking organisation.

Anything could perhaps be possible. But to become actually something, there is only the one kind of logical arrangement it could fall into.

The Planck constants of cGh - the speed of light, strength of gravity and unit of quantum uncertainty - are not about some specific material quantity. They are about the basic thing of a triadic structure of relations. The kind of self-organising or self-causing systems understood in particular by philosophers like Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce.

So if physics tells us that the Universe divides into the maths that describes its relativistic container and its quantum content, then right there we have the three things of the G that scales the relativist container, the h that scales its quantum content, and then the c that scales the integration of that which has been thus divided. The interaction between the tiniest scrap of coherent dimensionality and the way it is thus full of the hottest content – a situation which makes it inevitable that it would double and half its way to the opposite end of the spectrum that it itself has just opened up. The space will expand to some maximum extent in terms of how much drive is coming from a hot content itself cooling eventually into dilute insignificance.

You are thinking of initial conditions as a state of pre-existent material being. But I am thinking of them as a state of immanent logical structure. A very different metaphysics.

In this light, the Planck constants are logical constants rather than material quantities. It is the same as have 0 as the additive identity, and 1 as the multiplicative identity in arithmetic.

Give me a zero and I can break its symmetry by adding or subtracting.

The zero exists as that which is neither +1 nor -1, but already a start in those counterfactual directions.

More relevantly, given the growth of the Cosmos is geometric, one-ness then "exists" as that which anchors multiplication and division. It is the symmetry that gets broken by going off in those two opposed and complementary directions.

So the Planck scale encodes a "one-ness" as the symmetry that is revealed to "exist" because it did transparently get broken. It got broken by this doubling~halving story of a flexi-container with a diluting hot content.

And when we get deeper into the theory, we can see that this is the oneness of the Riemann sphere. A unit 1 geometry based on marry a real number translational symmetry with a complex number rotational symmetry.

The Riemann sphere has its foot in both the relativistic and quantum camp in that regard. But now we really are getting into the technicalities.

The point is think structural principles rather than material facts. The Big Bang has to have an explanation that goes beyond the contingencies of material being. It has to have the logical truth of a structural account.

That's a somewhat different theory from all your previous ones. Are brains necessary for consciousness then? Is solving all these timing issues sufficient for consciousness? — bert1

Is it really? Or are you just – as usual – always questioning and never listening?

I’m arguing not for pre-set material conditions but for Platonic strength structural necessity. The argument is that reality can only exist with a certain dichotomous or symmetry-breaking organisation. — apokrisis

Again, I had to Google your abstruse terminology to break it down into more commonsense concepts that an untrained amateur philosopher can relate to. For example, I can imagine "symmetry-breaking" as an event characterized by change from static balance (nothing changes) to dynamic dis-equlibrium (directional change occurs). But then, if you add "spontaneous" to the mix, it describes an event that occurs suddenly & without warning, like a Cosmos-Creating Big Bang with no pre-history. Hence, inexplicable and not accessible to Reason. It must be taken on Faith.

The only way I can make sense of such enigmatic language is to compare it to something I am already familiar with. For example, Plato's notion of Cosmos from Chaos, in which Cosmos is imagined as timeless nothingness, but with simple un-actualized Potential (Ideality) for transforming into complex organized Reality. Perfect symmetry is static balance, and Reality is dynamic dis-equilibrium (things change). Perhaps Chaos is the realm of perfect-eternal-unactualized Forms, from which emergent-space-time-real Things emerge.

Consequently, the precise mathematical initial conditions of the Big Bang were "set" by accident instead of by intention. Hence, there was no Intentional Mind (God), only the infinite Potential of random Chaos (Fate) to explain how our living & thinking world came to exist. Is that what you are saying? :meh:



*1. Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking :
The statement that reality can only exist with a certain dichotomous or symmetry-breaking organization has significant support in both physics and philosophy, where the move from a perfectly symmetric potential state to an asymmetric, ordered state is often seen as essential for the emergence of phenomena and complexity.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=reality+can+only+exist+with+a+certain+dichotomous+or+symmetry-breaking+organisation.

*2. Spontaneous vs Accidental :
Spontaneous events are unplanned and happen out of a natural, often sudden, impulse, while accidental events are unintentional or unintended
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=spontaneous+vs+accidental

*3. Platonic strength structural necessity :
In a Platonic sense, "strength" would be an eternal and unchanging "Form" that exists in a non-physical realm, independent of any particular physical structure. Any real-world, physical structure only partakes in this ideal Form to a limited and imperfect extent.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Platonic+strength+structural+necessity
.

Plato's notion of Cosmos from Chaos, in which Cosmos is imagined as timeless nothingness, but with simple un-actualized — Gnomon

The Timaeus sort of gets it. The basic idea is that rather imagining the Cosmos as either a sudden creation event or as an eternal existence, it arises as an evolving structure where form is being imposed on a chaos. It all starts from a confused everythingness - so confused in its expression that it amounts to a nothing. It lacks any orderly structure. And then that structure starts to appear.

With Plato, the structure is already final and familiar as it comes from some transcendent realm of the good and the ideal. The sun, the stars, the planets. The cats, the dogs, the mice. These ideas exist as the eternal shapes of things, and these shapes are like cookie cutters to be impressed on matter as like some universal dough.

But my structuralism is more like Anaximander’s Apeiron and Heraclitus's Unity of opposites. The structure is logical and evolutionary. Counterfactual and dialectical. The symmetry-breaking of a dichotomy. And so everything starts by identifying that first act of dichotomisation that could start to organise a world.

Anaximander's Apeiron sounds like a primal stuff, but it was more like the most primal state of unformed and unbounded potentiality. And the first symmetry-breaking that started to organise it into a definite state of somethingness was this raw possibility starting to separate in two counterfactual directions. Just as a random fluctuation, some part of the Apeiron could start to grow a little warmer. But with counterfactual logic, that meant it had to leave some adjacent part of the Apeiron a little cooler.

You get two for the price of one with this kind of logical symmetry-breaking. Both the something and its other thing. What starts to emerge in co-arising fashion is the larger significant thing of a widening state of contrast. The heat can keep getting hotter, and the cool keep getting cooler. And before long, this is triggering other symmetry-breaking change.

The cool naturally is damper. And the hot is naturally dryer. So now we have also the appearance of wetness as the increasing absence of the dry, and the dry as the increasing absence of the wet. With everything becoming increasingly divided like this, you get the four elements emerging. The warming and drying zone turns into the still a little bit cool and damp thing that is the air. Shedding its lingering cool and damp in this fashion, it thus gets really hot and really dry so turns into fire. The lightest element which therefore rises even beyond the light air to fill the heavens with its flames.

In counterfactual fashion, the cold and the damp goes in its shared counter-direction to congeal into first water and then earth. Being heavy – subject to gravity rather than levity – it all falls towards a common centre where it composes the Earth with its land and ocean.

So this is the metaphysics. A hierarchy of symmetry breaking. One kind of change builds on the others. Each change is a dichotomous splitting. And then as all these changes pile up on each other, we start to get a complexly developed world. The Earth as a clod of dirt and with its puddles of water. The sun and stars as fiery points of heat and light that have risen up as far as they can go. Being divided allows also for a mixing of the elements while also preventing their collapse back into the undifferentiated potential of the Apeiron that begat them.

And you should be able to see how the Big Bang has the same symmetry-breaking metaphysics.

In the beginning there was just some generalised notion of a potential. Logically there has to be at least the possibility of such a state of raw possibility because – well here we are. And then it was broken by being divided against itself.

Your favourite dichotomy is information~entropy. Order versus chaos. Form vs matter. Rules vs actions. So if you imagine that as the broken symmetry that had to develop out of some initial symmetry, how does that story go? If information is a difference that makes a difference, and entropy is a difference that doesn't, then what is the step that comes before that distinction arises? What is it for there to be just an Apeiron of difference where differences neither clearly yet count as making a difference, but also not clearly failing to count as a difference.

If you can account for that state – as perhaps a state of radical logical vagueness, Peirce's definition of that to which the PNC fails to apply – then you are starting to think about reality coming into existence not out of nothing, nor even out of an everythingness exactly, but something even less than that. The less than nothing which is a vagueness, an Apeiron, a state that has neither matter nor form as yet as that is what still needs to co-arise as a primal symmetry breaking.

So getting back to the Big Bang, I pointed out to how it is a tale of dichotomous symmetry breakings. Somehow relativity gives us the dynamical container – the spacetime ready to grow. And quantum theory gives us our dynamical content – the energy density or momentum uncertainty that will grow the container, but in doing so, begin to cool itself in reciprocal fashion.

Each direction is set up so that the symmetry breaking is not all done in a split second. It is a symmetry breaking that takes until the end of time to complete itself. The doubling~halving can just roll on forever as the Big Bang grows larger and cools down more. We are now down to just 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. But it will take about eight billion years to chop that number in half to 1.35 degrees K.

So the Universe is in some ways almost completely symmetry broken. A really long way from its starting point of 10^32 Kelvin. And yet also still relentless growing and cooling. It can't arrive at its Heat Death until it gets right down to 10^-30 Kelvin, presuming we can believe that dark energy sets this final limit on cosmic growing and cooling.

Anaximander imagined the world starting out of the self-organising separation of the warm and the cool. That rather presumed the existence of space and time as the stage where this rather material event could have happened. But still, it was the right logical idea. Symmetry-breaking as a developmental process feeding on itself. A division that continues until it reaches its own end. A division that also grows complexity in the process as new divisions can arise out of the old divisions and add all the material variety that we see. Starting with the four elements.

The Big Bang is based on cGh physics. A triad of constants. Or the set of basic relations that defines the basic symmetry being broken – the way G stands opposed to h as the measures of what is the cooling relativistic container, and what is its hot quantum contents. And c is the measure of the rate at which everything is being moved apart while also remaining in causal connection. The rate at which this mixture of dimensionality and energy density is thermalising.

The Big Bang is also the tale of all the topological phase transitions that rapidly complexify the initial symmetry breaking. First you get radiation. That cools and spreads enough to condense into a fine dust of gravitating matter. The dust clumps into balls that under pressure catches fire – becomes stars powered by fusion. That results in the production of heavy elements which get released in supernova collapses. Clumping of heavy elements makes planets. Eventually it is all going to get swept into blackholes and radiated away as the coldest and longest wavelength radiation possible.

So the same metaphysical picture. A symmetry breaking of the kind that can feed off itself and so persist until its time is at an end. A symmetry breaking that also is self-complexifying for a long time, but then eventually re-simplifies to its simplest end state. Anaximander's cosmology also reasoned that what arose would also collapse back into the great vagueness whence it came.

Another Greek metaphysical dichotomy or unity of opposites. Heraclitus's harmony and strife. Aristotle's growth and corruption. Order can grow, but then it can also decay. Information can arise out of entropy, but it can also return to entropy. Signal looms out of the noise, and can then get lost back in the noise again.

It is all about a way of seeing reality as a developmental process. The symmetry breaking that creates some seed of distinction. A primal contrast that is already growing as it is logically a reaction against itself. To go in one direction is not to be going in the other direction. And now there the thing of that other direction going in its own counter-direction. This logical starting point can keep going off in its two opposed directions forever, and even start complexifying to become full of such dichotomous symmetry-breakings. But it also can eventually exhaust itself. The Big Bang can become so spaced out and cooled down that it just runs out of puff.

So the symmetry-breaking that I have in mind is the dichotomisation that takes forever to reach its own natural end. The contrast that both grows and dilutes. It grows as it is driving itself apart in opposed directions. But that drive is also being sapped at a matching rate.

The result is a powerlaw curve. A doubling~halving trajectory that begins with a hot bang and ends with the coldest and emptiest whimper.

Ever a drunk in recovery/reflection, I'll drink to your fact-based, autopoietic story. :up:

I am interested in this topic, including a biosemiotic approach to the emergence of consciousness. I can't elicit replies from you about it, which is very frustrating, but what you do and don't want to engage with is obviously up to you. I wonder if you would be willing to recommend a paper or two specifically on this topic, focusing as much as possible on the move from unconscious processes, to those involving meaning, the development of a self-other distinction, developing models, making predictions, or however the argument goes, until we get to the necessary and sufficient conditions for experience. You have given some idea of this, but by no means in enough detail for me to be able to get the argument clear in my head. I have read Pattee's "Cell Phenomenology: The first phenomenon" which was very interesting. Are you aware of any other papers on this? I could ask AI, and I may yet, but I'm hoping it will be easy for you to point me in the direction of a paper or two. If you don't want to that's OK. It's not my preferred method of learning - I prefer a live specimen to examine, but we can't always get what we want.

The Timaeus sort of gets it. The basic idea is that rather imagining the Cosmos as either a sudden creation event or as an eternal existence, it arises as an evolving structure where form is being imposed on a chaos. It all starts from a confused everythingness - so confused in its expression that it amounts to a nothing. It lacks any orderly structure. And then that structure starts to appear. — apokrisis

Timaeus*1 observed that, in the real world, "nothing happens/changes without a cause". So he seems to assume that even the ever-changing Real world must have had an Ideal origin : a hypothetical god/urge/impulse with creative powers. That seems to be the presumption behind most of the world's religions. Except that the God is typically envisioned more like perfect order & absolute power, instead of "confused everythingness".

Most religious/philosophical worldviews have also postulated a logically-necessary First Cause from which space-time was born. Yet, in order to avoid getting into religious debates about which god, I tend to use the abstract-generic term "First Cause", or simply "Causation", without specifying any attributes, such as structure or personality. And First Cause or Prime Mover usually implies a transcendent source of causation.

Unfortunately, my trolling nemesis on this forum is an immanentist*2, who denies any beginning to space-time. Hence, there is no First Cause, or Demiurge or Apeiron*3. So the Real World is an "evolving structure" that has existed forever, cycling but never beginning or ending. Does that sound like a reasonable alternative to the current scientific evidence that space-time suddenly exploded from a mathematical point into a complex cosmos? Does forever causation make the Hard Problem of human consciousness irrelevant?

Heraclitus' Unity of Opposites*4 sounds more like a logical truism than an explanation of our evolving universe. Yet again, it seems to imply that Consciousness exists eternally in opposition to Unconsciousness, whatever that means. And one traditional name for that immortal Mind is "God" or "Brahma", serving as the whole of which our mortal minds are holons.

The topic of this thread --- Cosmos Created Mind --- could be construed as "form being imposed on chaos". Hence, Mind is a natural emergent biological process that originated in the sudden transformation of potential Chaos into actual Cosmos and subsequent evolution. Does that make sense compared to the other theories of Ontology and Epistemology? :nerd:



*1. Timaeus suggests that since nothing "becomes or changes" without cause, then the cause of the universe must be a demiurge or a god, . . . .
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=timaeus

*2. Immanentism : Spinoza's concept of an immanent God is that God is inseparable from nature and exists within the universe, rather than as a transcendent, external creator. For Spinoza, "God or Nature" is the single, all-encompassing substance, and everything in existence, including humans, is a modification or expression of this divine substance. This means God is the active force in the world, not a being that stands outside of it, making the world and God identical and interconnected.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=spinoza+immanent+god
Note --- According to physical science, the "active force" in the real world is Energy. Which causes all change, via impulse & inertia, but does not explain such immaterial processes as Life & Mind.

*3. Apeiron : Anaximander's apeiron is the concept of a boundless, indefinite, and eternal "first principle" from which all things originate and to which they return.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=anaximander+apeiron

*4. Unity of Opposites : Heraclitus's "unity of opposites" is the concept that seemingly contradictory forces are interconnected, mutually dependent, and part of a single, unified whole. This dynamic equilibrium is essential for the cosmos, as tension and strife between opposites like day and night, or hot and cold, create harmony and are the engine of change. According to this view, opposites define each other; a shadow needs light to exist, and a thing becomes warm by first being cold.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Heraclitus%27s+Unity+of+opposites.+

So the Real World is an "evolving structure" that has existed forever, cycling but never beginning or ending. — Gnomon

This story makes more sense – is more consistent with quantum cosmological evidence (as well as e.g. Spinoza's, Epicurus' & Laozi's spectulations) – than any of the other cosmogenic alternatives.

Does that sound like a reasonable alternative to the current scientific evidence that space-time [false vacuum collapse] suddenly exploded from a mathematical point into a complex [spacetime]?

It's not an "alternative"; (metaphorical) BBT might be just (our) observation-limit of the most recent phase-transition (i.e. symmetry-breaking event 13.81 billion years ago) in the "cycling" "evolving structure" of the universe.

Does forever causation make the Hard Problem of human consciousness irrelevant?

Well, that's a pseudo-problem at most (i.e. faux-epistemological fodder for woo-of-the-gaps idealists), so it's not even "irrelevant". :yawn:

The result is a powerlaw curve. A doubling~halving trajectory that begins with a hot bang and ends with the coldest and emptiest whimper — apokrisis

Great post!

This is why expressions such as “cosmic mind” are inherently misleading when taken to denote some objective existent, as if it were on par with scientific concepts like fields or forces. — Wayfarer

Scientists don't know what Energy & Fields are in substance, but only what they do in causal relationships between material objects. To avoid misleading, when I use the Quantum Field or Universal Gravity as analogies to the Cosmic Mind notion, I try to make clear that these "forces" are not "objective" and observable, but rationally inferrable from observed processes.

For example, Gravity, like all forces, is not a material thing, but a causal relationship between things*1. One theory even postulates that Gravity is negative Energy, i.e. Entropy*2. Yet again, those "forces" are measurable only in terms of inter-relationships, not directly. And relationships are mental, not material.

A recent blog post discussed the notion of Active Information, and noted that "Ironically, the primary methods of highly effective Quantum Physics are based, not on Matter, but Mathematics : Quantum Field Theory (QFT)*3. :smile:



*1. Cosmic energy is the highest form of all kind of life force that is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient- which exists in the earth cosmos, between the galaxies, and in the space. It is this energy that animates life and maintains balance in the entire universe.
https://siddhacosmic.org/profile/
Note --- This interpretation of Vacuum Energy is not my theory, but merely an example of various Cosmic Field/Mind/God theories drawn from scientific models. And it seems similar to the Non-local Consciousness concept in Dan Brown's novel. I'm merely exploring that non-mainstream cosmology in this thread, because it seems implicit in some forms of Idealism.

*2. Entropic gravity is a theory proposing that gravity is not a fundamental force but an emergent, macroscopic force driven by disorder and the tendency of the universe towards greater entropy.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=gravity+is+entropy

*3. Quantum Fields :
“QFT taken seriously in its metaphysical implications seems to give a picture of the world which is at variance with central classical conceptions of particles and fields, and even with some features of Quantum Mechanics.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/
Active Information blog post : https://bothandblog8.enformationism.info/page29.html

This story makes more sense – is more consistent with quantum cosmological evidence (as well as e.g. Spinoza's, Epicurus' & Laozi's spectulations) – than any other cosmogenic alternatives. — 180 Proof

Cyclic cosmology does seem to fit with the current science. But isn't that because time has yet to be brought properly within its models? Quantum physics still assumes the existence of a Newtonian notion of time and that remains to be fixed.

So eternalism becomes just an assumption baked into the theory, not something the theory explains or provides reasons for. And then a cyclic universe is a way to fill that eternity with something we can be more sure about – a Big Bang/Heat Death story of at least one Cosmos that self-organised itself into existence, but then also appears to permit the externalist to argue for an infinity of such cycles of birth and destruction.

However once we dig into cosmology, there is concrete evidence of how time itself must have an evolutionary development.

A big case in point is how the Universe starts out as a relativistic soup of radiation - a world ruled by c - but then with the Higgs phase transition, suddenly turns into a realm of co-moving matter dust. Particles gain the mass terms that now mean they all travel at some speed between “rest” and c. And so time is changed in the qualitative sense that mass lags the global rate of thermalisation and decoherence.

The radiation fireball decouples to become the cosmic microwave background, racing away - doubling and halving - at its rapid rate with its one speed. And a matter dust is left behind as a swirling gravitational cloud of particles moving at a sub-c rate and thus experiencing this new thing of now trailing along in the wake of the CMB. All sorts of different speeds or rates of change and interaction have become possible. The very nature of time has been transformed - even though this more complex temporality is what we see as our simplest possible Newtonian notion of time.

So time is scaled by c under special relativity. And it gains inner complexity by that speed limit being broken by mass allowing particles to drag behind the general rate of change to now have their own individual experiences of how time is passing from their own inertial or comoving frame.

Then another way time gets complexified is by it being broken superluminally. If the metric expansion is decoupled from the energy density dilution - as it is supposedly during inflation, or again at the Heat Death when dark energy eventually freezes the cosmic event horizon at a fixed distance - then again this is a phase transition from the simple SR light cone point of view.

You start with the simplicity of a Cosmos that just evolves at c. But then that can be broken by both the emergence of a super luminal structure and a sub-c rest mass or comoving level of temporal structure.

So my point is that what we know about the Big Bang should act as a constraint on our metaphysical claims. And we know the Universe was a doubling-halving symmetry breaking from at least is first billionth of a second. We can see it had a decoupling when the radiation dominated part split off and raced away, leaving a comoving dust diddling about at all speeds between 0 and c. We can surmise the appearance also of a superluminal aspect to temporality as both inflation and dark energy have good arguments behind them.

There is a lot to show the way our reality works. And it is a story of emergence rather than eternity. Of self-finitude and its topological complexification rather than infinity and a lack of meaningful physical development.

Both eternalism and emergence could be jammed together. And that is what cyclic cosmologies try to achieve. But my view is that is metaphysically confused. A ruse to stave off having to give a fully consistent account.

Our Big Bang cosmos has emergence stamped all over it. I have already argued here about how that can work. How the Planck triad of constants emerge in “unit 1” fashion, with space and time being baked into that in the way the Riemann sphere can describe. The sphere that Hawking employed in arguing time emerges in the fashion that when you stand at the North Pole, there is no further north you can stand. If you move at all, you are now rotating back southwards in mirror fashion.

Sure, some big names like Penrose and Bojowald are pushing cyclic cosmology. There is no reason not to have a go at other explanations.

But also, the Big Bang tells its own story. We have clear evidence of the nature of temporality evolving. Time seems irreducibly complex as we should know just by it having the universal speed limit of c baked into its Planckian initial conditions. And then by the fact this “unit 1” rate of change - this rate of events, rate of decoherence, rate of causality - is itself swiftly broken into both sub-c and superluminal sub-realms of spacetime.

Complexification is inevitable once the Universe makes its first symmetry breaking that defines “eternity” as a clock that is ticking in a period doubling fashion. Starting as hot as it is small and then doubling and halving in a forever-ised fashion.

Newtonian time is a clock that ticks out the same beat all the time. There is nothing thus to distinguish a beginning from an end. A second is always a second.

But the Big Bang ticks out a period doubling rhythm. It starts out dropping off a cliff in terms how fast it seems to be expanding and cooling. But 14 billion years on, the tick that once lasted a mere 10^-43 seconds as its first beat now takes a rather leisurely 8 billion years to achieve the same degree of thermalising change.

Time has slowed almost to a stop from that emergent perspective. And it will continue to slow and thus eventually become the moment lasting “forever”.

Scientists don't know what Energy & Fields are in substance, but only what they do in causal relationships between material objects. — Gnomon

Science has moved beyond the simplistic everyday notion of “matter” is what you should be saying.

They know that this notion is simplistic folk physics.

:up:

I have read Pattee's "Cell Phenomenology: The first phenomenon" which was very interesting. — bert1

And how did this change your opinions? What more focused questions will you be bringing to your interrogation of the “live specimens” that you have locked up in your padded cellar?

Do you know of any other papers on this topic I can read?

Yes.

It didn't change my mind much, mainly because of what seemed to be his definition of the phenomenal. Some of the questions I would ask i have already asked you in this thread. Questions about definitions, necessary and sufficient conditions, and the precise relationship between structural and functional concepts and phenomenal concepts. Also elaborations on concepts that are unfamiliar to me.

Please will you make a recommendation or two?

Scientists don't know what Energy & Fields are in substance, but only what they do in causal relationships between material objects. To avoid misleading, when I use the Quantum Field or Universal Gravity as analogies to the Cosmic Mind notion, I try to make clear that these "forces" are not "objective" and observable, but rationally inferrable from observed processes. — Gnomon

Right - so what you're saying is that 'cosmic mind' is analogous to the 'noumenal'. Agree they might be rationally inferred, but as such cannot be empirically validated.

So my point is that what we know about the Big Bang should act as a constraint on our metaphysical claims. — apokrisis

Do you think that the 'multiverse speculation' (that there are potentially infinitely many 'other' universes) can be or ought to be similarly constrained?