Satan-anon

Ah the "God of the gaps" argument and the weak anthropic principle, classics. I used to rely heavily on those, but anymore I can't ignore the fact that consciousness is something extraordinary, and that if we are able to create reason within the universe, then it's not exactly a leap to suggest that reason is an essential part of the universe. You can say the universe simply is, but *why* is it? *Why* is there a universe which is capable of perceiving itself through living creatures? Yes, we the sapient, sentient beings inherently have to find ourselves in one, but that doesn't mean that a universe should exist that we can experience. The fact that we're here is astonishing. The universe could very well exist in an abstract superposition perpetually, absent of any observers, yet here we are. There's this line of thinking that became popular in science over the last twenty years or so, that it doesn't need to explain things like *why,* or that there is no why, or that it is simply unknowable and therefore not worth speculating on. But the greatest minds in all of human history were ubiquitously not atheists until the Stephen Hawking era. A lot of physicists actually saw their discoveries as evidence of God, not the other way around. Dismissing the universe as a random chain of events that just happened to lead to the single most confounding thing imaginable -- conscious experience -- does a disservice to the foundational purpose of science: to find answers. At the risk of invoking a compositional fallacy, the fact that consciousness exists in humans can absolutely be read as evidence that a similar property is held on a more macrocosmic scale, in the same way that gravitational effects can be measured between both blood cells and galaxy clusters. Fractal iterations of the rules of reality, i.e. the laws of physics, tell us that Hermetics were absolutely right about one thing: as above, so below. Consciousness is baked into our universe. Concepts -- as in concepts themselves, the *concept* of a concept, abstract thought -- on the surface don't seem to need to exist for a system of quantum oscillations to interact with one another, yet those quantum interactions have apparently given rise to intangible things like thoughts and ideas; so it's entirely possible that thoughts *are* a fundamental ingredient of existence. We can't separate the substrate of quantum particles from the reality that we experience, and we can't separate the reality that we experience from that substrate of quantum particles. This leads to the strong anthropic principle, where maybe a universe *must* give rise to conscious observers in order for existence to be a "thing." If consciousness is then a fundamental necessity for the universe to exist, then it -- or something similar on a larger or simply different scale -- is very likely to be a fundamental component of whatever causes a universe to burst into existence in the first place. I look at things like M-theory and its 11th dimension, and thinks like eternal inflation and the speculations around how the inflaton field should work, and I see a vast, infinite, all encompassing magnum opus of reality that includes everything that can and will ever be, and everything that can't. I mentioned fractalization earlier, and the most fascinating thing about it to me is that there is an internal "infinity" of sorts that mirrors ideas like the 11th spatial dimension and the inflaton field: imagination. The amount of thoughts a human mind is capable of generating is *literally* infinite, especially if you look at the whole of humanity as a collective. If we follow the postulations of M-theory, the spatial dimensions between 6 and 10 are where all possible and *impossible* realities reside, with their own nested sets of lower spatial dimensions and the temporal dimension. Things like Boltzmann universes -- configurations that would be impossible under normal circumstance and could only arise through astronomically unlikely statistical mechanism -- universes of last Thursdayisms, universes that would pop up *in media res* so to speak, in the middle of something that would be impossible in ours but exists for a brief window of time before collapsing in on itself, they would all exist in an abstract, distant space and time. It would encompass all imaginable and unimaginable compositions of atoms, include laws of physics that are nothing like our own. But the implication of that is that every mental image a living creature can ever produce *exists* in that space, that it *is* itself one of those Boltzmann universes. Our act of thinking about it makes it real to us, and the mechanism by which we are able to think about it is encoded in that higher dimensional space. And, in a similar fashion, our experience in this universe is defined by our cognitive experience of it. To nod toward the Hermetics again, it's as within, as without. And when I look at all of those connections, how astonishingly beautiful and intricate the picture becomes, I simply can't reason away that there has to be something that can only be described as a "higher power" behind it all. Because consciousness is a fundamental part of the universe, and that means we have a pretty decent reason to assume there's something analogous to it on a higher level. (Sorry this is long as shit)