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

I sometimes wonder if there's an entire thriving universe out there made of dark energy and dark matter, and those dark scientists are trying to figure out where the missing 5% of the universe is :)

Im a biologist and we havent even figured out how photosynthesis works exactly. it appears superposition is involved... I think the most important thing is to keep asking questions even woo woo ones, and testing them...and be nice to your plants

I always thought that stars could actually be living beings. They're born in stellar nurseries, grow to a fully adult form, have complex processes going on inside them, they grow old and die and upon their death they seed the surrounding area, producing offspring stars.

The 'Big Brain Universe' theory is something I've ALWAYS considered as extremely possible...

“We need to make sure that something is actually looking back at us, and we’re not just seeing our own reflection” hell of a good quote

I read a book called "The Mind of God" by Paul Davies, in the 'holographic universe' realm of theory, and something that stuck with me was the idea that 'thoughts' and consciousness neither originate nor store in the physical brain but the brain acts like a Receiver for consciousness that is transmitted from the universe. While the scientific world has moved on from the theory, there's something about that idea that resonates to me.

The eye is a little more sophisticated than just seeing color and objects. There are certain mapping of the photo receptors that pre-interpret shapes before sending that information to the brain. Certain objects get priority - eyes, for example. If someone is watching us, we're hardwired to notice that.

HUH, I had no idea this had a name! I used to trip a lot on DXM (dissociative/psychedelic) and I would often spend that time thinking about myself, the meaning of life and other complex questions. I am not religious, I think maybe I was looking for something spiritual, but I remember seeing and coming to the conclusion that everything is conscious, just different levels of sophistication based on the complexity of the container (a human brain being more capable than say a chair). It made so much sense, it answered a lot of questions that I had and brought me peace. It made me feel calm about my fragile mortality, that my body would die one day but my consciousness would continue on. Even though I'm not religious, I have a hard time believing I simply won't exist one day. Existence is all I've ever known.

The idea that pure consciousness could exist in isolation without any mechanisms for memory, knowledge, or the ability to sort stimuli into qualia is Lovecraftian as hell

I like the idea of panpsychism because it has the beautiful implication that we are the sensory organ that reality evolved to understand itself.

Your gut bacteria thinks it is impossible for joe to exist.

I've had this theory since I was 10 years old. It's so refreshing to know that my thoughts are not too crazy.

😂It's funny, when I was a kid (I was a weird kid) I would thank lightbulbs for working, apologize to doors for slamming them, that sort of thing. I even hated throwing things away because I didn't want to hurt its feelings. So, I guess what I'm saying is, I KNEW IT! KNEEL BEFORE MY CHILDHOOD DISORDERS!

I remember a futurama episode where bender gets lost in space and becomes a god/planet. he ends up meeting a conscious cosmic cloud/being which he asks if the being considers itself god. That episode is probably one of my favorite, and the creators using a very interesting theory.

I love this. I've believed this since the 90s when I saw the Babylon 5 episode where they said "The Minbari believe the Universe is sentient in a way we will never truly understand, and we are the universe breaking itself apart to try and understand itself." There are too many "coincidences," and things like the strong and weak nuclear forces being absolutely perfect for life to exist, to believe there couldn't be something more going on. I've also always thought that picture of the galactic web, or universal web, or whatever it is called, looks so much like neuron pathways and that the universe is just a giant brain, or maybe a regular sized brain that we just perceive as giant as we think about ourselves and explore ourselves. Thanks for the video.

I’m a firm believer that “Every system is made up of subsystems, and every system is a subsystem of a larger system. We just have limits to what we can see and imagine.”. It’s clear that looking at the map of the universe, we are dealing with a very neuron like structure. Just because we can’t see past our universe, doesn’t mean that our universe isn’t just a cell of a larger system of universes. We very well could be the Higgs boson of that larger system.

This is a photon, his name is Jim.

I once loved a short novel that described clusters of conciusness created by randomness as actual aliens. At some point I remeber one of them stating that their form of intelligence is common and organic conciousness is actually far rarer. Considering that the way they came into existence was determined by randomness among the information out there but it is still less conditional than organic life, it made a lot of sense. I love the concept.

I've given this a lot of thought and kind of fell into the conclusion that "it is relative". I personally don't like to use the word "consciousness" because people attach a bunch of stuff to it that is usually human specific and not actually required to create a general definition. However, if we use the word as it is constructed in the English language, meaning the word conscious and the suffix ness, then I like that definition since it basically comes out to something like "the ability to perceive and respond to one's environment". Dr David Wulpert has a nice definition of an observer and it is something like "an observer is a system that acquires information from the environment to stay out of quantum equilibrium" and a "natural system"(what the observer observes) is "a system that is always in a state of quantum equilibrium". Meaning a falling chunk of rock isn't an observer because it just basically follows the path of least resistance but if I want to remain an observer I had better move out of the way. Everything is a combination of something smaller and at every step it requires some sort of "self-other" recognition that is relevant given the scale. If we try to describe that in general terms it comes out to look fairly analogous to computation on both sides but one is reversible and the other isn't. Some fairly recent research seems to suggest that the edge of the universe may act as a sort of observer and black holes may also act as some sort of observer. What if consciousness is the opposite of light in some sort of fundamental way? Once an observer has observed it can't un-observe and that could be described using something like a light cone.

Honestly when you think of the universe, it makes sense that a conscious could be born out of anything of any size as long as the properties that builds it makes sense for them