Occam's razor. In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions. In essence, they provide guardrails to keep discussions centered within the realm of reason when venturing to the edge of our knowledge and beyond.
Except it fails the deeper you go in understanding physical phenomena.
We should not exist per Occam.
If you can hold on your awareness that the atoms of your body are not 'matter' but signatures of energy bound in a field, then the physical brain is much harder to consider the real and constructing element of reality.
I think many of these discussions are just measuring the difference in what we each perceive as the lowest building block.
Everything we are is wavelengths of energy. This isn't something metaphysical. Electron, proton, nuetron are all combinations of quarks which only exist independently as a discrete quantized energy in a field. The orderliness of the field is dependent on how much energy is exchanged for (converted to) mass. What is mass? Voltage - per modern understanding of physics. So the defining characteristic of reality is potential.
If we exist in this way as a consciousness then there is every reason to believe consciousness is pervasive in the universe
We barely exist. Our history spans only a brief part of the Universe's history, we are confined to an infinitesimal bubble of all the space that is available. When we consider the Universe as a whole, Occam is correct. We are not even a rounding error.
But also: the Universe itself should not exist, per Occam. Yet it does. And we do. So let's work with that.
Yeah, it's interesting to think about. I've often wondered what would happen if a structurally identical configuration of matter and energy representing "me" manifested somewhere.
Taking it further, is the atomic world the only medium where this "me" could be represented? What if there were a perfect digital model of "me"? Would that be conscious?
What other mediums might be able to support something similar to our notion of consciousness?
> What if there were a perfect digital model of "me"? Would that be conscious?
If it is a perfect digital model of you, yes. Since you feel consciousness, the digital copy must also feel it. Otherwise it would not be "perfect".
In the case of the model, "feeling" means that some bits (probably a big number - billions or trillions) inside the model would flip their state.
> What other mediums might be able to support something similar to our notion of consciousness?
I believe that the mind is sustained by a particular set of physical atoms. A human brain is ~1.5 liters of water plus ~0.5 kgs of other stuff.
In theory you could represent consciousness using whatever else physical objects you wanted. In practice, the mind-bogglingly big numbers and processes involved that make it difficult. If you used grains of sand to represent atoms, each neuron would take ~450 liters / 16 cubic feet of sand to model, assuming that you can make each individual grain of sand act as an atom.
There's also the fact that modeling how atoms behave exactly seems to be extremely computationally expensive. Apparently Quantum Mechanics don't like being modeled on a non-quantum computer, and you rapidly reach the "you would need a computer the size of the whole universe in order to model that" limit very quickly. So your grains of sand would need to be Quantum-aware Grains of Sand.
You might end up needing a Jupiter-worth of grains of Quantum sand. I don't recommend using this approach. Definitely don't try to model the human brain using pebbles.
Why even go beyond 1? It feels like people want there to be something more