That's great Kenny, I'm always happy to accept any donations. I agree that consciousness may not be there in mere rock, though is present in all life forms.
We need to make sense of how that first set of life forms then became conscious, if before them all that existed was non-conscious space material. I doubt anyone can say for sure, but that is the missing piece of the puzzle for me, and why I still cling to the abstract idea that this consciousness possibly existed in some other form.
In other words, I still struggle to understand how life comes from nothing, or from lifeless origins. All we know is life coming from life. Let's meditate on that one hehe.
In my opinion, physics and chemistry explains where everything comes from, after the oldest thing that we know of - "the whole universe was in a hot dense state". Before the big bang, no one knows. That hot dense state may have just popped into existence from a quantum vacuum, or was created by a big collapse of a previous universe. Or something else - there is no shame in stating, I don't know! We may never know, or future generations of people and/or AI may figure it out.
After the big bang, atoms appeared. Eventually there was Hydrogen and then Oxygen. Attraction brought them together into a molecule of water. But it didn't have some of the properties of water we now know. One molecule of water isn't "wet" and doesn't "flow". But these properties emerge from multiple water molecules.
More chemistry, and finally some molecules that could clone themselves using surrounding material, and therefore we had self-replication. Surround that in a membrane and add some energy producing chemistry, and we have a cell - Life.
Some cells could receive electrical signals from neighbors and send out its own signal once a threshold of summed inputs was exceeded. These first neurons don't think or feel only because they don't have enough other neurons to talk to. once there are many neurons, then we have a feedback loop and some sets of neurons can know what others are doing, and the owner of this neural net becomes self-aware.
Eventually people evolve and we devise a way to communicate complex concepts. We become aware that not only are we conscious but so is everyone else. At first it seems miraculous and we expect it only came from supernatural sources. But now, there are good ideas on how and why consciousness came to be. Soon we'll create conscious robots and there is nothing like creating something to force one to understand exactly how it works.
That's one reason why I've been working on a virtual world where players can virtually exist and interact with the world and the other players. It allows me to be God in some sense and create my own universe in some sense. If you want to know God, be God!
All just my thoughts and opinions. Others may have other thoughts and opinions but I will still love them! We need to love and respect others who have different thoughts and opinions if we want to be around as an advanced civilization for many years into the future.
Wishing you, and all readers, all the best!
!ALIVE !PIZZA !BBH !UNI !LADY
Hey there Kenny, the theory of evolution is the closest we can come to trying to make sense of our origins as living beings. It still sounds fantastic though and will remain a theory.
Nevertheless, here we are as people on earth, with far more in common than different. Therefore naturally we should see ourselves more as brothers and sisters than as alien to each other. Especially now that we have shrunk the planet to a global village. Respect for all life should be our priority, though we have not reached that level yet, or if we did once, we have lost it again. Let's be the best version of ourselves.