The Zombie Universe

A thought experiment

NOTE: THIS IS RAW, POORLY EDITED, AND PROBABLY ONLY INTERESTING TO YOU IF YOU ARE OBSESSED WITH CONSCIOUSNESS LIKE ME.

Let’s do a fun thought experiment! I call this the Zombie Universe experiment.

Imagine a Universe much like our own. It has stars, planets, and galaxies. It even has simple life on some of the planets. But unlike our own, none of the living things in this universe are conscious. They experience nothing - no sights, no sounds, no fear, no pain, no pleasure, no darkness, no light - nothing. There it is nothing it is like to be any of the creatures in this fictitious universe. It is a Zombie Universe.

In what way could such a universe be said to exist? I would argue that it does not exist. Nothing that happens in our thought-experiment universe makes any difference to anything else. The sun could go supernova and not a single of the unconscious organisms on Zombie Earth would see the flash, or feel the sunburn just before they were vaporized.

The philosophy of that which exists is called ontology, from the Greek root ontos, meaning “of being” or “of that which is.” Different philosophical and scientific frameworks propose different ontologies. For example, in Christian theology the Trinity and angels exist. In the scientific theory of General Relativity, spacetime, the metric tensor, and events exist. Philosophical systems aim to explain the world by positing the fewest number of entities. The fewer the number of required entities such as Gods, fundamental particles, or forces, the more parsimonious the theory, and the more powerful the ontological framework.

Another way of saying something exists is to say that a thing is ‘real.’ The definition of ‘real’ that I have adopted is that something is real if that a thing can make a difference. If something cannot make a difference to any other thing, it is not real, it does not exist. Only that which is in relationship is real.

Is there any way that anything can make a difference if it does not somehow effect the consciousness of some sentient being? I would propose an ontology in which only that which effects consciousness in some way can be said to exist.

It is possible to propose other ontologies and try to define that which is real in other ways. But how would you know about those entities unless they somehow affect your conscious mind? This would inevitably lead back to the ontology I’m proposing - only that which can affect consciousness is real.

Now, it may be that for billions of years there was no consciousness in the Universe. But as soon as consciousness emerged, everything in the Universe which conspired to bring that consciousness into existence “made a difference.” In other words, just because something may not be in relationship with consciousness right now, if it is in the future, it is real.

Let’s shift gears for a minute and explore a related idea. We experience the world in a particular human way shaped by our sense organs and brains. Bats, dolphins, and earthworms presumably experience the world in entirely different ways due to their physiology.

But what is the world like in and of itself, apart from the conscious experience of any creature that lives in it?

It is not like anything. There is only consciousness and the void.

In this view the world does not have colors, our minds create color. The world does not have sounds - our mind construct sounds from nerve impulses in our cochlea. The world may not even have space and time - our minds generate a 3D construction which we use to represent whatever is ‘out there’, and we experience time by comparing the memory of the previous state of our inner simulation with the current state.

Take a minute to sit with this. The world is not like anything in and of itself. It only has properties as representations in the minds of its conscious inhabitants.

I am not saying the world does not exist or that it is not real. It is real because it makes a difference in our experience - but it is real only because it makes a difference in experience. Like the Zombie Universe we started with, our own Universe also has no independent existence, except in the minds of sentient beings.

But there is a way in which this picture could be wrong: Panpsychism. This theory believes that there is something it is like to be even the most fundamental particle in the Universe, albeit something very simple.

If this is the case then the world is like something in and of itself. And there is something deeply parsimonious about the panpsychist view: it eliminates the need to explain consciousness by making it fundamental.

In the view presented above in which the Universe is not like anything except in the minds of conscious beings. This view has a difficulty in that you need to explain why certain configurations of atoms become conscious. This problem goes away in the panpsychist universe, because consciousness is fundamental. There are other problems to be sure, but none as daunting as explaining inner experience.

Finally, it should be noted that the biggest challenger to the panpsychist view comes from the computational camp. To put it simply, this view holds that it is not matter which is conscious, but the simulations running in the brains of humans and animals which are conscious. For the computationalist there is nothing it is like to be a human brain - but there is something it is like to be the simulation running on that human brain. An implication of this view is substrate independence which states that any computational system, regardless if it is a brain, a silicon chip, or a system of vacuum tubes - if that system is running the right type of simulation, it will have some inner experience.

This is either a profound insight or it is total nonsense. I’ll have to take this one apart in another post…