Quote:
Originally Posted by Do0rDoNot
You're part of the universe and the universe is defined as the collection of all its parts.
So you are part of the universe experiencing itself. You have nothing but your experience of the universe to go on when making inferences about the universe.
So why would you just assume that the universe is dead, material objects in space and time instead of reasoning from the only thing you actually know about the universe (yourself-a living material object)?
It doesn't even make sense to assume that the universe is different from your experience of yourself. All our inferences about the universe as a whole beyond our experience of ourselves are based in what we classically have wanted to be true, not what we know to be true.
You remind me of a proverb: "a rock cannot fly, my mother cannot fly, therefore my mother is a rock."
Your point makes no logical sense. Self awareness is the result of evolution and our brains developing over millions of years, the sense of self awareness is an illusion, unless you consider it as a soul like entity, not in any way connected to our physical and neurological attributes, in which case I think the logical argument can't even be made because then you already reject objective knowledge and fact.
Who has ever defined the universe as the sum of its parts? You don't define a cake as "flour, eggs, sugar, time in oven" but as something functional or material, that is also the same with the universe, it is "that, which is, the WHOLE" (not each part, individually). There are credits in a movie but credits aren't a movie.
And regarding the functional the universe is what exists in a physical and material sense, with limits and possibilities and LAWS.
And that is key. The human consciousness exists as something separate from natural laws, not as something that is integrated in material existence - despite being the result of processes. For something to be self aware it needs to be not purely mechanical. Self awareness arises from connecting and sequencing experiences through memory, conceptualisation (language) and other cognitive functions, something that is not doable without a brain. When you are brain dead you're not self aware.
A rock isn't self aware, so then the universe can't be either, can it? Nobody - or nothing - are truly aware of themselves, we understand patterns and tendencies and we learn, but we are only aware of what's going on because we have social conventions such as language and the capacity to view ourselves from the perspective of the other.
Self awareness had to be existing in physical and material form for you to make that inference, and even then it would not hold logically.
Saying the universe is self aware is essentially saying God exists, because there is nothing but an omnipotent, non-material entity that could be aware without meeting the physical requirements for awareness (a huge brain and mental and social processes).
It is no new idea that God doesn't exist as a specific entity but thst he lives in everything and that the universe is self aware, but you simply can't draw the conclusion logically like you do in your opening post.
Awareness is an ongoing process of synthesis, it is not stable in the sense it would have to be to be in any way viable in a grand scheme of things.