[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is the other topic of consciousness. Go ahead.
Rick Rosner: All right. We know that existence is inevitable because the rules of existence, the rules that prohibit certain kinds of existence, particularly contradictory existence aren’t all encompassing enough to stop existence. We’ve postulated that anything that can exist does exist within its own universe. And we know from our own universe that at least one universe exists which is not terrible proof of the potential existence of other universes under the rules of existence which are not sufficient to make nothing exist. It’s not true that nothing can exist under the rules of existence and you can probably use a similar but not exact form of reasoning for consciousness popping up all over the place, You can call it a substrate, that there’s order within existent systems within our universe and within other possible universes and we know, given the hardware and software, that order is often exploitable.
Being able to exploit order the way living beings do to find order in the exploitable order in the environment which allows you to exist; that’s what living beings do. We know there’s a constant push to exploit order because exploitable order isn’t everywhere but it’s in a lot of places, exploitable order for instance exists in places that have negative entropy that can shed waste heat like planets. On average, every star has at least one planet probably more than that. So you could argue that most stars are surrounded by locations with negative entropy which is exploitable order. And given the sheer number of places with exploitable order, it’s just statistically inevitable that the means to exploit that order, the means for life to originate and become increasingly sophisticated and exploiting order, we know what happened at least once here on earth.
And the context, the physics of it and the number of contexts in which it could happen are such that it’s just statistically unlikely to the point of impossibility that beings exploiting order would pop up all over the place in great number, not everywhere, not every planet, not even one planet in a hundred perhaps can support life, well spontaneously originating life. Maybe not even one planet and a thousand but since there are 10 to the 22 stars in the observable universe, the fraction of planets on which beings happen to arise that can exploit order has to be some huge number…
It’s similar to the argument that things can not exist, consciousness can not arise in a bunch of places. It’s a form of ‘can not’ argument. The forces that would preclude consciousness for of popping up in a bunch of places aren’t powerful enough, aren’t pervasive enough to stop it.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 