Hi, I've been a non-participating member for a while, and I probably can't make the chat, but here's something to think about
:
Consiousness is a practical means to an end, and the problem understanding this is that "free thinkers" separate themselves from nature, like creationists do.
Everybody was so quick to dismiss Einstein's concept of an underlying structure that gave method to nature's madness. What a joke... he never abandoned his belief in his finite universe because it was "closest at hand to General Relativity", and that's a rule that should have carried a lot more weight than it did. I say that because modern physics is over the edge when an increasing vacuum doesn't increase negative pressure, so nobody has a clue what impetus is actually running the show, bringing about "emergent properties"... like consciousness, as a necessity to the ever increasing earnest of the grand-scale thermodynamic process.
Imagine that every banded spiral galaxy that exists in the middle of the relevant spectrum of potential has life on it, and then think of what "self-awareness" might mean if we all become aware of each other simultaneously, in context with the linked photos of large scale stuctured "neurons":
http://photos12.flickr.com/18135101_1ef7723b85_b.jpg http://photos13.flickr.com/18135102_07a58fd89d_o.jpg
Those structures exist in direct defiance of the copernican cosmological principle, and in support of an anthropic principle as a "biocentric" principle, that is actually a thermodynamic principle that defines the mechanism that constrains the forces of the universe to an almost perfect balance between diametrically opposing runaway tendencies, which produces a grand-scale ecosystematic structure that enables it to evolve with the greatest possible efficiency, in one-direction-only.
The apparent
precarious balance that is common to all of the known anthropic coincidences is actually defining the subtly-tipped balance that's common to all ecosystems, so that the universally applicable principle is actually biocentric in nature, extending across the universe and bringing the forces to bear on a specific plane of life ...so that a very fine layer of sentience arises within observed biotopes of inhomogeneity that are observed to exist in the large scale structure of our universe.
... " so that a very fine layer of sentience arises "....
You asked...
