This is a response to this thread on Twitter: https://x.com/whigbobkendrick/status/1743844383714165074?s=61&t=uHGWh-oiEnXu09KtKoJkFA
As I mentioned before, I am writing a book on the modest topic: what is a universe? Universe is the real scope of your thinking here, so I will start with a few remarks on that topic. We are accustomed to thinking of a universe as the all-encompassing reality, and distinct from ourselves. We can muse about the existence of other universes as separate self-encompassing realities, like ours but with differences. Or we can posit another metaphysical realm that governs our universe, but in all these cases the universe is seen to be what exists prior to us. Really, what we view as the universe only exists in our minds. Of course, there is an existence outside our minds, but whatever that is, it is not our universe.
To be conscious is a radical act of reduction and creation. To start, our reality consists solely of a decohered environment, an unimaginably tiny slice of what lies beyond the gate of decoherence. What lies beyond that gate is the totality we can never know, but denies the properties of our universe. Consciousness begins with that fundamental reduction. Even with that, we can only perceive what interacts with the electromagnetic spectrum or imagine that for which we detect gravitational effects. Most of what exists does not so interact and we remain blind to it.
The acts of reduction and creation continue in our understanding. Our brains receive electrical impulses as raw material for sensations – the creation of perception of an event. The sensations are perceived in space and time, which itself is an artifact of our universal creation, not fundamental. In so doing we abstract from the sensation to ever higher concepts. Abstraction is the mental act of reduction. Our universe is a gross reduction imagined in our sensibilities and mentations. We construct small or temporary orders – a universal mise-en-scene updated by generations to suit contemporary tastes. It is our home; the comfort, support, and familiarity of where we dwell. In that sense it is reality for us; and we are right to take it seriously, rearrange the scenery and make it our own. But error and hubris also lurk in that sense. If our world changes in the reduction to Eigenstate, then fundamental reality also changes in the same way as our world, and we dream of multiworlds, like ours but different and orthogonal. The error is to think our reality is fundamental reality. We confuse the two as a matter of course.
Reality in totality, if such a word were apt, is different. If we were to die off as a species, our universe would die with it. Perhaps there would survive dog worlds, or rat worlds; but not our universe.
The talk of a universal mind falls into this error. What reality would it see? Our universe? Would it grasp the universal chaos as chaos, or amuse itself with endless creations of illusory patterns and orders? What about all the reality outside our universe? Would it include quantum reality?
But then, how do we understand consciousness? The only consciousness we know is reductive and ensconced in space and time. It cannot be separated in one isolated and static moment outside time because it consists of time itself. Our world is one of becoming – of waves, not atoms. There is no now without a then. That precludes deconstruction into atoms of facts.
It seems to me you are imagining something quite different from consciousness. Consciousness is more invention than grasp. We don’t even know our own selves. Most of our mental activity is unconscious or preconscious. That larger hidden activity is really us, but we have never met except in dreams, where space and time become are distorted and logic has no sway; and even then only fleetingly. The self we know is a novel in progress, being written daily until the day we die.
As for singularities as primordial concept exploding into extension, it find that interesting and bears future discussion, but I would at this point just add that the current consensus is that the universe, whatever that may be, did not inflate from a singularity but rather erupted from a flux in the chaos of a quantum field. Both Hawking and Penrose have moved in that direction. But then, the systematic explanations of physics come and go, all of them wrong but the best offering up world-changing insights. At least within the boundaries of our universe. The difference in our universe between singularity and quantum in relation to your interesting idea is that there is no mass in the endstate of maximum entropy, and infinite mass in a black hole.
Too Late for the Gods 