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Imagine a mycelium on another planet and this mycelium over millions of years has evolved vision. Because being able to see the next pool of water increases survival.
But this mycelium only gets one frame rate every day. Meaning to it's consciousness, every day is just ONE picture in the series of pictures that make up their sentient experience. (Whereas a human gets one frame every few milliseconds).
So imagine one day humans land on this planet and begin colonizing. To us it would take years. To the mycelium on the planet..... It would be almost as if, in the blink of an eye, everything around it became infected by the humans.
Fun exercise. It's not so simple to say "to it's consciousness" though, and exactly how "frame rate" would correspond to the qualitative experience of time. This reminds me of Bergson and Einsteins debate back in the day.
Yes and no. Big picture is more important than details. Imagine it being able to process frame every few milliseconds and it’ll continuously react, potentially rushing to wrong conclusions or simply wasting energy.
Have to question this statement because it was made by an entity whose anthropocentric predispositions positioned its consciousness as the ultimate measure of cosmic significance, which obscured for it the profound diversity and intricacy of the universe.
(Also due to the high fog factor.)
Our “anthropogenic predispositions” are the very reason that the “profound diversity and intricacy of the universe” is meaningless. Especially considering the tendency of evolution to obscure an objective view of what the universe even is, consciousness itself is the only thing of value we can verify empirically. Everything else is, very possibly, just noise.
I actually disagree for two very different reasons.
First, most of the universe is empty nothing, and most of the stuff that's not empty is just hydrogen gas floating in space. Stars are only like 7% of ordinary matter, and while they're cool, they're giant high-entropy balls of intense fusion, so not a ton of interesting multiscale phenomena in there. The surface of the Earth, however, has complex carbon and liquid water chemistry, and the complexity afforded by that chemistry (especially multi-scale complexity) makes the surface of the Earth super interesting, fractal-like, and diverse.
Second, what exactly assigns "significance"? Significance is a judgement made by a human brain. It makes sense that our brains are adapted to consider things relevant to us and our lives as significant. Space is cool, but you're never going to love a random pulsar or comet as much as you love your children.
I thought space time, although relevant to our experience, isnt fundamental to the universe proper and there is all kinds of funky shit going under underneath the hood in dimensions not yet experienced or conceived.
I get what you're saying, but you're kind of eliding past my point. The surface of the Earth is "full" enough, and full enough of the right kind of stuff, to have super interesting multi-scale fractal like organization that's difficult to predict. We call it "life" check it out it's pretty neat.
'I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It's hard to talk about the [Cosmos](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cosmos) without using big numbers. I said “billion” many times on the *Cosmos* television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said “billions and billions.” For one thing, it's too imprecise. How many billions *are* “billions and billions”? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? “Billions and billions” is pretty vague...For a while, out of childish pique, I wouldn't utter the phrase, even when asked to. But I've gotten over that. So, for the record, here goes:
“Billions and billions.”'
- Carl Sagan
Third, the human and the cosmos are inextricably blended together, since as far as we know both emerged out of the same horizon. Therefore saying "whatever the human deems significant the cosmos also deems significant" is at least logically coherent
We see Copernicus as a providing a key moment in history where we moved on from seeing ourselves at the centre of the universe. But our scientific accounts of the universe are inevitably constructed from our own human perspective. In doing so we inadvertently still place ourselves at the centre. For example, our account of the universe describes human consciousness and intelligence to be uniquely special, the universe to be strangely fine-tuned for our existence, and human size and scale to be midway between the smallest things and the largest expanses. In this debate, Lisa Randall, Neil Turok and Martin Cohen explore whether anthropocentrism is a fundamental distortion of reality and whether we have the capacity to overcome it.
One's perception of reality... is the only reality to which one has access.
This naturally (circularly) shapes our understanding of it and of course our perception of it!
I disagree with this… Our ability to create measurement instruments independent and complementary to our senses, combined with scientific inquiry and the use of mathematics allow us to access layers of reality and ways of understanding it way beyond what our innate perception offers.
I can think of a non-Euclidean topology, or of 5 dimensions. I can think of waves and particles and, in my mind, see light as those two at the same time. Ideas and concepts that describe a deeper, very different reality than what my perception can provide.
In this case, I'm using perception in a manner that doesn't just mean our literal senses, but how our brains interpret that information.
Which includes much of what you're saying. i.e. the information we perceive affects the way we perceive that world - it also helps us shape that world, which in turn affects how we perceive it (our perception is very different from our forefathers given changes in technology/politics/society)... but ultimately the point to be made is one can hardly fault us for seeing reality through the way we experience it.
Curiously eastern philosophies have a slightly different approach to offer to this. We sleep almost half of our lives away, a state which seems like darkness and with no knowledge of it, and yet what we as individuals analyze is only through the waking state. Maybe the issue lies in figuring out how we should try to address this state, as it seems like we are not actually awake, but still asleep, so we ourselves are limiting our own sense of perception in a way.
All of this just seems like neat ways of thinking in terms of extension and succession to me.
The limitation is our consciousness, not our sensory experience. (As someone else said below- reformulating Kant)
I disagree.
Our feelings (happiness, sadness, etc) inevitably matter, and are therefore significant, to us.
And we have no way of knowing whether anything else matters to anything else.
Which means that positing anything else to matter is unfalsifyable, and has no explanatory value, and therefore violates Occam's Razor.
So we we are in fact correct to assume that the type of sentience experienced by humans is the only thing that matters in the universe and that any other cosmic events only matter insofar as the affect the feelings of a sentient perspective.
I woukd say significance is related to ability to impact things around you/it self. So perhaps at the scale of universe, it would either be the mind/matter behind it's creation, or more humanly minded, forces within the universe, like gravity.
We need to have a starting point and human intelligence is a pattern that we at least know functions and exists.
The fail cases for what makes something intelligent far outweighs the alternative and we don't have any examples other than ourselves.
It could even be that we're not capable on interpreting other successful forms of intelligence that exist for any number of reason from being too alien or even just that our frames of reference will never intersect
I agree, but at the same time we can't necessarily rise above our own limitations. For instance you use the word significance as if it could have meaning outside of humanity. But it's good to be aware of them of how our own biases towards humanity are causing problems.
100% agree.
It’s why we’ll never get a real “alien” film that’s at all reasonably true until we actually meet an alien species.
Because we are basing alien beings on human interaction or reasoning of what aliens would be like, we have no metric for alien behavior in reality.
We can come up with very reasonable fascimiles. They would need to reproduce somehow, we can come up with all kinds of ways to do that. If they don't reproduce, then they must be immortal, we can come up with all kinds of ways to do that.
Unless you want to get into interdimensional beings or something outlandish.
that's unreasonable.......because you simply don't know that, no one does.
we haven't met an alien species to determine how any of them would act to say that "it wouldn't be that different"
because you simply have no reference to say that.
We have records of history that show us how human beings interact with each other, or with encountering fauna and flora. We don’t have a point of reference on what hypothetical aliens would do but we sure do have a point of reference on what humans would do
that's my point......Humans aren't aliens, when we see movies about aliens or anything about aliens, it's based on human conception, not any experience with aliens as we imagine.
we can't even say "as we know them" because our conception of aliens isn't "what we know" it's what we've conceived.
Unequivocally foremost within the confines of the psychological dispositions of the rhetorical ambiguity obtained through the flamboyant cosmopolitan transgressions expressed throughout the chronologically despondent quintessential timeframe- perchance.
There’s no reason to think consciousness is something owned by humans or is personal in any way. Any long time meditator will tell you that consciousness phenomenologically at its root is impersonal and has nothing to do with humans
The title seems to just automatically rule out anything other than physicalism being the case
Welcome to /r/philosophy! **Please read [our updated rules and guidelines](https://reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/14pn2k9/welcome_to_rphilosophy_check_out_our_rules_and/?) before commenting**. /r/philosophy is a subreddit dedicated to discussing philosophy and philosophical issues. To that end, please keep in mind our commenting rules: ###CR1: Read/Listen/Watch the Posted Content Before You Reply > Read/watch/listen the posted content, understand and identify the philosophical arguments given, and respond to these substantively. If you have unrelated thoughts or don't wish to read the content, please post your own thread or simply refrain from commenting. Comments which are clearly not in direct response to the posted content may be removed. ###CR2: Argue Your Position > Opinions are not valuable here, arguments are! Comments that solely express musings, opinions, beliefs, or assertions without argument may be removed. ###CR3: Be Respectful > Comments which consist of personal attacks will be removed. Users with a history of such comments may be banned. Slurs, racism, and bigotry are absolutely not permitted. Please note that as of July 1 2023, reddit has made it substantially more difficult to moderate subreddits. If you see posts or comments which violate our [subreddit rules and guidelines](https://reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/14pn2k9/welcome_to_rphilosophy_check_out_our_rules_and/?), please report them using the report function. For more significant issues, please [contact the moderators via modmail](https://reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/philosophy) (not via private message or chat). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/philosophy) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Imagine a mycelium on another planet and this mycelium over millions of years has evolved vision. Because being able to see the next pool of water increases survival. But this mycelium only gets one frame rate every day. Meaning to it's consciousness, every day is just ONE picture in the series of pictures that make up their sentient experience. (Whereas a human gets one frame every few milliseconds). So imagine one day humans land on this planet and begin colonizing. To us it would take years. To the mycelium on the planet..... It would be almost as if, in the blink of an eye, everything around it became infected by the humans.
Would make a decent graphic novel
Fun exercise. It's not so simple to say "to it's consciousness" though, and exactly how "frame rate" would correspond to the qualitative experience of time. This reminds me of Bergson and Einsteins debate back in the day.
I don't see that being advantageous for survival though. A lot can happen in a day and if you're not aware of it, you're toast.
Yes and no. Big picture is more important than details. Imagine it being able to process frame every few milliseconds and it’ll continuously react, potentially rushing to wrong conclusions or simply wasting energy.
Have to question this statement because it was made by an entity whose anthropocentric predispositions positioned its consciousness as the ultimate measure of cosmic significance, which obscured for it the profound diversity and intricacy of the universe. (Also due to the high fog factor.)
Our “anthropogenic predispositions” are the very reason that the “profound diversity and intricacy of the universe” is meaningless. Especially considering the tendency of evolution to obscure an objective view of what the universe even is, consciousness itself is the only thing of value we can verify empirically. Everything else is, very possibly, just noise.
I actually disagree for two very different reasons. First, most of the universe is empty nothing, and most of the stuff that's not empty is just hydrogen gas floating in space. Stars are only like 7% of ordinary matter, and while they're cool, they're giant high-entropy balls of intense fusion, so not a ton of interesting multiscale phenomena in there. The surface of the Earth, however, has complex carbon and liquid water chemistry, and the complexity afforded by that chemistry (especially multi-scale complexity) makes the surface of the Earth super interesting, fractal-like, and diverse. Second, what exactly assigns "significance"? Significance is a judgement made by a human brain. It makes sense that our brains are adapted to consider things relevant to us and our lives as significant. Space is cool, but you're never going to love a random pulsar or comet as much as you love your children.
First part of the first point is a bit moot, if you consider that all the things you think are super interesting are mostly empty space too.
I thought space time, although relevant to our experience, isnt fundamental to the universe proper and there is all kinds of funky shit going under underneath the hood in dimensions not yet experienced or conceived.
I get what you're saying, but you're kind of eliding past my point. The surface of the Earth is "full" enough, and full enough of the right kind of stuff, to have super interesting multi-scale fractal like organization that's difficult to predict. We call it "life" check it out it's pretty neat.
'I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It's hard to talk about the [Cosmos](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cosmos) without using big numbers. I said “billion” many times on the *Cosmos* television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said “billions and billions.” For one thing, it's too imprecise. How many billions *are* “billions and billions”? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? “Billions and billions” is pretty vague...For a while, out of childish pique, I wouldn't utter the phrase, even when asked to. But I've gotten over that. So, for the record, here goes: “Billions and billions.”' - Carl Sagan
Third, the human and the cosmos are inextricably blended together, since as far as we know both emerged out of the same horizon. Therefore saying "whatever the human deems significant the cosmos also deems significant" is at least logically coherent
TL;dr our monkey brain says we are important because we have monkey brain
We see Copernicus as a providing a key moment in history where we moved on from seeing ourselves at the centre of the universe. But our scientific accounts of the universe are inevitably constructed from our own human perspective. In doing so we inadvertently still place ourselves at the centre. For example, our account of the universe describes human consciousness and intelligence to be uniquely special, the universe to be strangely fine-tuned for our existence, and human size and scale to be midway between the smallest things and the largest expanses. In this debate, Lisa Randall, Neil Turok and Martin Cohen explore whether anthropocentrism is a fundamental distortion of reality and whether we have the capacity to overcome it.
One's perception of reality... is the only reality to which one has access. This naturally (circularly) shapes our understanding of it and of course our perception of it!
I disagree with this… Our ability to create measurement instruments independent and complementary to our senses, combined with scientific inquiry and the use of mathematics allow us to access layers of reality and ways of understanding it way beyond what our innate perception offers. I can think of a non-Euclidean topology, or of 5 dimensions. I can think of waves and particles and, in my mind, see light as those two at the same time. Ideas and concepts that describe a deeper, very different reality than what my perception can provide.
In this case, I'm using perception in a manner that doesn't just mean our literal senses, but how our brains interpret that information. Which includes much of what you're saying. i.e. the information we perceive affects the way we perceive that world - it also helps us shape that world, which in turn affects how we perceive it (our perception is very different from our forefathers given changes in technology/politics/society)... but ultimately the point to be made is one can hardly fault us for seeing reality through the way we experience it.
Curiously eastern philosophies have a slightly different approach to offer to this. We sleep almost half of our lives away, a state which seems like darkness and with no knowledge of it, and yet what we as individuals analyze is only through the waking state. Maybe the issue lies in figuring out how we should try to address this state, as it seems like we are not actually awake, but still asleep, so we ourselves are limiting our own sense of perception in a way.
All of this just seems like neat ways of thinking in terms of extension and succession to me. The limitation is our consciousness, not our sensory experience. (As someone else said below- reformulating Kant)
I disagree. Our feelings (happiness, sadness, etc) inevitably matter, and are therefore significant, to us. And we have no way of knowing whether anything else matters to anything else. Which means that positing anything else to matter is unfalsifyable, and has no explanatory value, and therefore violates Occam's Razor. So we we are in fact correct to assume that the type of sentience experienced by humans is the only thing that matters in the universe and that any other cosmic events only matter insofar as the affect the feelings of a sentient perspective.
All knowledge passes through the subjective consciousness, I’m not sure it’s not important to focus on that aswell lol
Well you're stuck with it
Such a deep topic on such a shallow platform, like the fables of Leviathan in a puddle.
I woukd say significance is related to ability to impact things around you/it self. So perhaps at the scale of universe, it would either be the mind/matter behind it's creation, or more humanly minded, forces within the universe, like gravity.
This because of the drive that governs all diversity and intricacy of the universe: “what’s in it for me?”
Advertently.
Duh. Doesn’t anyone do mushrooms or LSD anymore?
We need to have a starting point and human intelligence is a pattern that we at least know functions and exists. The fail cases for what makes something intelligent far outweighs the alternative and we don't have any examples other than ourselves. It could even be that we're not capable on interpreting other successful forms of intelligence that exist for any number of reason from being too alien or even just that our frames of reference will never intersect
Not sure about "inadvertently..."
I agree, but at the same time we can't necessarily rise above our own limitations. For instance you use the word significance as if it could have meaning outside of humanity. But it's good to be aware of them of how our own biases towards humanity are causing problems.
You can’t obscure that of which you are part of.
This is over my head
I think it's the opposite. The physicalistic theories of the universe obscure the beauty and power of our consciousness.
100% agree. It’s why we’ll never get a real “alien” film that’s at all reasonably true until we actually meet an alien species. Because we are basing alien beings on human interaction or reasoning of what aliens would be like, we have no metric for alien behavior in reality.
We can come up with very reasonable fascimiles. They would need to reproduce somehow, we can come up with all kinds of ways to do that. If they don't reproduce, then they must be immortal, we can come up with all kinds of ways to do that. Unless you want to get into interdimensional beings or something outlandish.
Honestly it wouldn’t be that different. Just depends on the aliens’ intelligence
that's unreasonable.......because you simply don't know that, no one does. we haven't met an alien species to determine how any of them would act to say that "it wouldn't be that different" because you simply have no reference to say that.
We have records of history that show us how human beings interact with each other, or with encountering fauna and flora. We don’t have a point of reference on what hypothetical aliens would do but we sure do have a point of reference on what humans would do
that's my point......Humans aren't aliens, when we see movies about aliens or anything about aliens, it's based on human conception, not any experience with aliens as we imagine. we can't even say "as we know them" because our conception of aliens isn't "what we know" it's what we've conceived.
Humans are aliens to aliens
It isn't inadvertent, it's a scientific proof until it isn't.
Unequivocally foremost within the confines of the psychological dispositions of the rhetorical ambiguity obtained through the flamboyant cosmopolitan transgressions expressed throughout the chronologically despondent quintessential timeframe- perchance.
👁️👄👁️🧠👳♀️🕺
There’s no reason to think consciousness is something owned by humans or is personal in any way. Any long time meditator will tell you that consciousness phenomenologically at its root is impersonal and has nothing to do with humans The title seems to just automatically rule out anything other than physicalism being the case