Quote:
Sternwallow wrote
So, here we find ourselves with a thing, some 42 Billion light-years deep and likely even more than a hundred light-years deep according to some recent estimates. It is close to 13.7 Billion years old and it is undergoing accelerated expansion into an endless heat death where eventually even the black holes will evaporate to nothing. It is made of nothing but space down to some 8 decimal places or more, where the actual hearts of quarks reside. All of the material that makes up these consciousness, other than their Hydrogen and a bit of their Helium are the ashes of exploded stars, not part of the original big explosion. The tiny pocket of space where this key consciousness is found is destined to be literally eaten by its local star in about 5 Billion years and its ordinary sized galaxy will be completely disrupted by a neighboring galaxy collision (Andromeda) in some few 4.5 or 4.7 Billion years.
The density of the local space measured in units of consciousness per cubic megaparsec is laughably tiny, a number so very small that it approximates the degree by which the critical parameters of the universe are not tuned to be absolutely hostile to our form of life.
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Lovely. I feel your posts should be accompanied by music -- something operatic. Wagner, maybe ...[Dang, I have only some thin arias by Ema Destinova from Lohengrin and the Flying Dutchman in iTunes. That won't do.]
But what I want to ask you is this, re the measure of consciousness in proportion to the amount of hostile space surrounding it: Why is this laughably tiny amount important ? I'm not speaking for our Monist friend here, but I can imagine a theist will look at those forbidding odds as evidence* that a certain mutated ape is very special indeed.
*I mean "evidence" in the theist sense, i.e., as "a sign" from the Eternal Ground of Being or what-have-you.
P.S. In the end I put on Gounod's "Faust." Doesn't do your prose justice but it seemed appropriately diabolical. And check out Gounod -- he could be your older, less attractive sibling:
