Is The Universe Just A Giant Brain? Some Scientists Think So.

this is a photon or at least a visual representation of a photon and this is a slit and a piece of paper two of them actually and this is the famous double slit experiment I'm sure most of you know what happens next if nobody's looking the photons will arrange themselves in the back wall in a waveform pattern indicating that they traveled through the slits in a superposition of states and if you add a sensor to one of those slits to try to determine which slit it goes through the pattern on the back wall becomes two groupings indicating that the photons travel through the slit as a particle if you're somehow not familiar with a double slit experiment I've got a video on it you can go check it out for context but long story short when the particle is observed its superposition collapses down to a particle state it's one of the weirdest things in quantum mechanics and often when scientists or science communicators describe what happens here they say things like it chooses which slit to go through or it reacts to an observation this is a massive oversimplification of what happens but it gets the idea across it kind of like when people say that Evolution chose to change an animal or a species in some way to adapt to their environment obviously there's no being called Evolution making a choice here you know it's just a manner of speech some scientists and philosophers are starting to consider what if that's exactly what's happening what if that Photon or particle is making an actual conscious choice because everything is conscious [Music] double slit experiment is a good example of matter acting weird at the tiniest scales but there are weird things happening at the biggest scales too take dark matter and dark energy this this Pandora's cluster the lights you see are stars and galaxies from at least four different galaxy clusters the whole mess collided sometime in the distant past and here's a composite shot including x-ray information in red and the total mass concentration in blue notice how the blue mass is where there's no Optical light that's dark matter in fact 75 of the mass in Pandora's cluster is dark matter it's thought that dark matter makes up 27 percent of all the mass in the universe and most of the rest of the universe is dark energy and nobody really knows what dark matter is same goes for Dark Energy so in a real sense 95 of what should appear in our telescopes is a mystery so there are huge Mysteries at the smallest end and the largest end of the scale it'd be nice if all of these Mysteries had something in common like there was some one effect that could explain everything but we can't seem to find it I mean if the universe was a person I think it was just messing with us it is one theory that attempts to explain the unexplainable in science is pan psychism the basic idea is as simple as it is controversial everything is conscious Galaxy clusters conscious fundamental particles conscious a guy in a coma it's complicated but all the cells in his body and all the molecules in those cells are in some way conscious the appeal of pansychism is its ability to explain Mysteries as a choice you know maybe dark matter and dark energy don't exist and we only think that they do because the stars in the galaxies choose to act a certain way same for fundamental particles maybe quarks and electrons and photons maybe they aren't that mysterious at all because they're making actual choices yeah I know just hang with me for a second I've touched on pan psychism before in my video on the general resonance Theory Of Consciousness Tam hunt the co-author of GRT offered a definition of Consciousness in a recent paper that helps to kind of demystify pan psychism a little bit according to Tam Consciousness refers to quote the capacity for phenomenal or subjective experience in this context phenomenal means something that is sensed and subjective implies a point of view so we say a thing as conscious if it can proceed from its point of view like I can perceive lots of things sights sounds smells which I swear one of the dogs keeps peeing in here see the dog is conscious they made a choice to pee in here now obviously fundamental particles don't perceive the way I do but they do have properties like electric charge that are acted on by their environment electrons are attracted to positively charged particles and repelled by particles of negative charge that attraction and repulsion that electrons do that could be seen as perception and the fact that that attraction varies with distance suggests that electrons have a point of view so you could say that about pretty much any object that has properties and interacts with things this even applies to theoretical objects like magnetic monopoles and the strings of string theory but how do we go from perception and POV to you know the Consciousness that you and I have um there are different theories that have different ideas I've already mentioned my video on resonance but let's just do a quick review in the general resonance Theory Of Consciousness objects that vibrate in synchronized ways help develop a shared resonance and this allows them to combine their Consciousness perception and then more complex Consciousness like our own that results from all that smaller simpler Consciousness resonating together sort of a sort of an emergence Theory a somewhat similar theory is called IIT the integrated information Theory this was developed by Julio tanoni now this Theory doesn't go all the way down to fundamental particles like General resonance Theory does but it does kind of speak to you know how a system communicates to create Consciousness it also proposes a measurement of Consciousness they call it Phi and actually what five measures is the integrated information of the Theory's name so what I mean by integrate information so like color and shape that's one example of integrated information so like our eyes don't see red or round they see red wavelengths of light and then depth cues tell us that the red thing curves away from us and therefore is round redness and roundness are just Concepts that our brain has to combine or integrate to show us a red balloon so an IIT integration is physical it's a it's a physical thing that happens in our brains and our neurons do it by exchanging neurotransmitters now in theory an artificial intelligence could do the same thing by passing electrical signals through its circuits instead of neurotransmitters through neurons but most computers are built in a way that prevents them from reaching higher States Of Consciousness that's because the human brain is structured to do a lot of parallel processing our perception of a red balloon for example it's processed in various parts of the brain simultaneously with all those parts communicating with each other most computers can't do this because of the structure or the processing units but what that implies is that as smart as these AIS are getting they can never quite achieve human-like Consciousness that is if they're running on normal computers but neuromorphic computers computers that are designed to be more like a human brain can maybe there have been some recent attempts to create neuromorphic computers uh darfa funded a project called synapse about 10 years back and IBM uses neuromorphic chips in its Summit supercomputer by the way some it's being used to help crack nuclear fusion so um who knows maybe we'll get artificial Consciousness infusion energy at the same time that'll be a fun news cycle seriously neuromorphic computers are way too deep of a topic to get in here but what it basically means is that they have a better chance of developing a Consciousness like ours than your typical you know scaled up Dell computer anyway GRT and IIT those are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to pan psychism there are theories out there about the role of vacuum energy uh Quantum fluctuations and what that plays in Consciousness Roger Penrose was all about that last one yeah penrose's theories were all about microtubules so like biological cells they're partly held together by these tiny flexible cylinders they're called microtubules and he speculated that in those microtubules certain components could exist in a state of quantum superposition and if that's the case then they could also be entangled and those entangled particles could allow for some emergent effects according to Roger Penrose now there's some debate as to whether or not Penrose believed that Consciousness could exist outside of you know biological organisms with the microtubules and whatnot uh you know whether it's scaled across the universe that kind of thing the most confident statement we can make is that he didn't rule it out so the universe may or may not be conscious but you can be conscious about what you eat what today's sponsor hellofresh see what I did there if you're conscious of calories there's the fresh and fit menu 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star maker that gave him the idea that same book also describes a universal Consciousness made up of linked Minds this sparked an idea and Dr Matt Lawson he looked for a way to test if astronomical objects would be conscious in his 2016 essay canpan psychism become an observational science he points to the observational data that quote cool less massive stars Circle the Galaxy Center a bit faster than hot more massive stars He suggests this could be happening in a couple of different ways one is that they're flinging their energy in One Direction More than the other basically directed radiation pressure the other is what he calls unipolar Stellar material Jets so this is where material kind of spirals into a massive object like a black hole or a star and it sort of fires it out at the polls probably seen animations about this but this usually goes in both directions but if it went in just one it could move the star slowly over time in the opposite direction and last but not least Matlock suggests that psychokinesis may be doing it like you know psychokinesis he had missed this as controversial but if pan psychism is a thing and psychokinesis is a thing it's a couple of big ifs but if it were it wouldn't take much to change a star's velocity over the course of say a billion years like he suggested it wouldn't require more Consciousness than say a developing embryonic cell yeah okay it's time so look are we doing science here or not because if we're doing science we got to be able to test this and there are people working on that in a recent paper the authors discuss ways that we could maybe measure Consciousness and they proposed mcc's or measurable correlates of Consciousness and there are several subcategories of mcc's the main ones being bcc's behavioral correlates of Consciousness nccs or neural correlates of Consciousness and CCC creative correlates of Consciousness and they argue that the existence of any or all of the above suggests that the subject is conscious it's the neural correlates of Consciousness that have gotten the most attention in fact uh one of the early researchers this back in the 90s was Francis Crick the DNA guy Craig worked with another well-known scientist Christoph Coke he's a neurophysiologist who embraced IIT as the best current theory of Consciousness he's also embraced vegetarianism because you know the meat might mind yep Creek and Coke that's it's not a comedy duo Cricket Coke that sounds like a Coca-Cola ad at a cricket match but for example they worked with the original IIT theorist to Noni to try to sort of calculate consciousness of a worm by considering all the different ways that information could flow through its neurons this is hard enough it would be next to impossible to do this for humans but they're working on finding patterns in eegs that could you know show that different parts of the brain are communicating then there's behavioral correlates of Consciousness this obviously has to do with the behavior of things in physical space and this could be everything from a cat purring when you pet it to a mosquito being drawn to carbon dioxide in the air maybe even photons and double slit experiments now really interesting brands of this has been applied recently in terms of the behavior of AI with several programs passing the Turing test in the last decade and the last one I'll talk about here is CCC the creative correlates of Consciousness does the subject in question have the capacity for Creative expression like it makes me think of the movie uh Cave of Forgotten Dreams that kind of makes the argument that it was only when humans began painting on Cave walls and and recreating what they saw in the world that we truly became human which is an interesting thought to me you know you know as a creative person of course today AI can recreate images too so does that count I think that's an interesting question and there are more of these correlates out there but we do have to be careful to be objective because we have a tendency as humans to anthropomorphize things you know we tend to project ourselves onto the world so we need to make sure that something is actually looking back at us and that we're not just seeing our own reflection and things so look this is definitely alarm territory um especially when you get into the idea that stars are consciously moving themselves around which I think is part of the plot in The Fifth Element where are you I'm far now yeah on that level pan psychism it isn't so much a Theory of Everything Is it is it something that fills the gaps in our current knowledge uh one of the many things we'd come up with and you know talking about Consciousness emanating from vibrational subatomic stuff that that that gets that gets pretty icy um but you know who knows as we come to better understand Consciousness and we come to better understand the fabric of space-time we might find some connections there and besides if it did turn out we're all just part of a universal Consciousness it might help us feel more connected to each other that's not a bad thing all right big thanks to the answer files on patreon and the channel members who are hoping to keep things running around here forming an awesome Community I cannot thank you guys enough got some new members need to shout out real quick we got Cody sanat Anthony price Jennifer M enter attack uh Philip Krieger men guy Joseph frapkin shrugs the straight face clown uh Matthew Landry Matt uh Daniel Sheed Scott Holloway and Charles Grodin Gordon not Charles Grodin that's an actor anyway Charles Gordon thank you guys so much and uh if you would like to join them get early access to videos access to exclusive live streams and get a little thing bite next to your name that makes you a little bit special in the comments uh just hit the little join button down below please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check this video out 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,035,706

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: _SKka5jlNxA

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023