Imagine if the universe didn’t produce any sort of conscious beings whatsoever. All that crazy shit going on in the universe: all the black holes, stars, supernovae, planets, multiple light year wide nebulae, 100 billion-ish galaxies and no one or nothing would ever know about it. What a waste.
Would that be a huge bummer? How could it if there was never anyone or anything to be bummed about it in the first place?
Or is there some sort of intrinsic value to there being a universe, independent of whether or not there’s anything around to witness it?
Or is a universe without consciousness functionally the same as there being no universe at all?
Or is consciousness somehow fundamentally baked into the universe? Maybe we since we only experience consciousness through the aperture of a brain and nervous system we can’t really grasp what another form of consciousness would look like without all that stuff. Maybe the universe is constantly observing itself everywhere at all times.
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If you assume that only a living thing can be conscious, if all living things on the planet were to die at the exact same moment, would it really be a tragedy?
There would be nothing to even register that it happened… nothing would ever know. Likewise, there would be nothing or no one around to feel any sort of sorrow or loss. Can something even be bad if it literally never causes any negative impact whatsoever on a conscious being?
If that’s the case, then a mad scientist instantly killing every living thing on the planet is infinitely less morally reprehensible than someone using the last square of TP and not putting a new roll on the thing. Kinda mindblowing if you think about it.
I can’t imagine that anyone is going to read this whole thing. To anyone still reading, what’s wrong with you? Don’t you have anything better to do?