Is consciousness the single fundamental thing in the universe ?

Consciousness is not separate from sub-conscious , that is why there is no infinite loop. (even in computers there is no infinite loop as it stop when the power runs out)

Consciousness of something is thru something , that is why you have the same spatial and tactile experience in waking and dreaming.
Waking reality is a controlled reality-mediated-and-participated lucid dream.

To be objective one have to have the right kind of biases and subjectivity with considerable mediation of critical thinking and data.

There are 4 levels
1
The world. the material.
2
Experience with subconsciousness and consciousness as part of it. the mental.
3
The world as experienced. everyday waking reality.
4
Artificial constructed world. for example science.

Because being an experiencing being means you have to know thing thru experience , one can only know 1 with 4.

Experience and subconsciousness and consciousness are TOOLS by which knowing can happen.

a reply to: dude1
What if there is no knower separate from the known?

What if there is just what there is with nothing separate?

But there is. And its how we know things.

no knower separate from the known

What is the point of that ? Its like asking what if your watch were broken , there would not be any measuring of time , so what is the point ?

a reply to: dude1
The assumption is that there is a you (the knower) separate from what is appearing (the known).......but what if life/consciousness/reality is one without a second?

Just what is....no separate parts at all.

Check out Advaita Vedanta or modern name 'non duality'........it means 'not two'.

When the two become one the kingdom shall be revealed.

originally posted by: gosseyn
Lately, I have been interested in the theory of Donald Hoffman which says that consciousness in the single fundamental entity in the universe and that everything we perceive is an interface between us and.. ..something

If consciousness is the only thing then why then add on you or us?

There is a presupposing of something that doesn't exist.....a separate self!

What kingdom ? Some artifact of a level of our perception system ?

I'm sure someone can find usefulness in a partial working clock or some spring hanging out [like Advaita Vedanta] , but that is not the proper function of the clock.

The assumption is that there is a you (the knower) separate from what is appearing (the known)

Are you disputing the existence of a separation and such things as knower and known ? your use of those word seems to contradict that claim.

The only reality is God.
Everything else is His imagination, conceived by a mathematican and fabricated by an artist.
Consciousness is God's awareness of Himself.
As only God is, consciousness cannot be divided into some thing that is NOT consciousness; there is nothing but God. Hence, materialism is false.
Consciousness is not epiphenomenal. It always was, is and will be. Epiphenomenalism is the belief that physical and biochemical events within the human body (sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions, for example) are causal with respect to mental events (thought, consciousness, and cognition). This denies the possibility of survival of death, awareness outside the body when the brain's neural activity is flatlining, and many other mental phenomena reported by honest people in the journals of parapsychology. If a theory is contradicted by reported facts, you don't deny these facts; you throw away the theory. Epiphenomenalism is the shallow conceit of goldfish swimming about in a glass bowl they think is the universe.
Because (whatever neo-materialsts Penrose and Hameroff may say) consciousness is irreducible to events in the space-time continuum, it cannot be modelled in the customary, scientific manner that reduces something to its parts. Nor can it be created artificially. The AI dream conflates creation with simulation. The two may be indistinguishable in practical terms but are poles apart, philosophically and metaphysically speaking. They amount to a category error.
However, consciousness (or, rather, all possible variations in divine consciousness) CAN be mapped. Each variation has its own domain of functioning. The physical universe is the domain of information exchange and storage mediated by (mostly) the electromagnetic field. Hoffman is correct in thinking that it is but an interface with something else. But what is this "else"? When you have a map of all the possible forms of consciousness and their respective domains, you can answer this question. Hoffman cannot answer because he does not have this map, although he would, no doubt, be willing to admit that it can exist in principle.
Consciousness is not merely fundamental; it is irreducibly everything. Like a fractal, its mathematical map can be found in certain mathematically complete systems. Amazingly (but not surprisingly), every embodiment of this map is isomorphic to one another: every component of one has its unique counterpart in every other map. Such isomorphism could not exist unless it was the product of a transcendental intelligence. To attribute it all to coincidence would be merely an ideologically-motivated act of denial beyond all rational justification.
The isomorphism exhibited by different instances of the universal map of consciousness enables the conceptual unification of the religious traditions that provide partial renditions of this map. It also builds a bridge between scientific accounts of reality and the superphysical realities that science on its own cannot deal with because its own philosophical presuppositions deny their very existence. For example, some of you will be interested to discover that superstring theory (or, rather, M-theory) emerges as an ingredient of the mathematical structure of the map of consciousness. It implies that superstrings express the very signature of God as the physical manifestation of His consciousness because this signature can be identified, being common to all other isomorphic representations of His consciousness. This isomorphism has not been assumed but has been proved rigorously. The religious notion that "God is all" receives astounding, precise, mathematical confirmation. For example, the presence of the mysterious "perfect number" 496 at the heart of superstring theory is readily explained, as is why there are 10 dimensions of space-time but 26 dimensions when supersymmetry is excluded. In fact, the complete mathematical structure of E8, E8xE8 and the 8-d Gosset polytope representing E8 can be shown to part of the beautiful mathematics of this map of consciousness.
Such contact with theoretical physics, microbiology etc is possible because this map is a blueprint for all possible manifestations of God, whether a superstring, a human being or beyond..... What are still scientific mysteries can now be explained in terms of a meta-theory that embraces not just theories within one branch of science but different branches of science. The map of consciousness generates the true "theory of everything," not just the materialistic version for particles and fields that theoretical physicists wrongly think applies to everything. It reveals what is projecting so to speak, onto the "interface" that Hoffman rightly points out is merely the phenomenal world that they encounter.

a reply to: micpsi

and many other mental phenomena reported by honest people in the journals of parapsychology

honest mistake is still a mistake.

Because of the mediation to material reality thru the mental , one assume that only the mental is real, that consciousness is the basis of the apparent reality , basically that the world is a dream.

AI dream conflates creation with simulation

If you simulate a function it is the same as the function in the real world , drawing a circle in the real world is the same in the simulation.

a reply to: dude1
No dream.... no dreamer.
Just dreaming

One without a second.... not two.

originally posted by: odzeandennz

Our limits simy mean that, we have our limits and the universe doesn't care about our limits, it goes on with or without us.

not sure I grasped the entire post but if it boils
down to this I pretty much agree. for what that's
worth LOL

a reply to: Itisnowagain

With or without a dreamer its still a dream.

With a dreamer it has more capability then merely without. and 1 is bigger then 2

It all boils back down to personal/subjective versus consensual/objective.

All I personally have is a subjective experience of reality. I process sensory input and cobble together a kind of reality structure that allows me to function and not immediately die. But because my senses are so limited, I must allow that "real" reality is probably not the way I perceive it. And I obviously don't and can't know the truth of it.

But when I've been unconscious from accidents and surgery the universe goes away. There isn't even a perception of time like you experience during normal sleep. There's just nothing. A fraction of a second equals a thousand trillion years and more. Once I woke up I was able to reboot my reality, but if I had died the nothing would have continued literally forever although that concept wouldn't mean anything to me.

On the other hand, to someone else or everyone else, I'm just dead meat that will eventually be forgotten like the billions of other people who have ever died. But as far as I'm concerned, they cease to exist when I do. So yeah consciousness is kind of important because there is no such thing as an objective experience of reality, and there is literally nothing without it.

a reply to: dude1
If there is a dreamer it is God.
God is dreaming.

The assumption is that you (as a separate thing in the dream) have power or control..... you don't.
The character that is the supposed you is dreamt..... just part of the scenery.

What if our consciousness is spiritual in nature, ie non material. We are trying to explain the spiritual with material tools.

Doesn't science for the most part embrace the material and deny the spiritual? If so, they will never explain consciousness. Maybe that is part of the beauty of this reality, not being able to simplify it down to such meaningless and pointless material explanations. Maybe that is exactly how this reality was designed in the first place. Poor scientists, so much memorized and regurgitated information being 180 degrees opposite of how things truly work, or not.

I

a reply to: ClovenSky
The material and the spiritual maybe just two different names for the same thingless thing......
What is appearing is not made of anything.

a reply to: Itisnowagain

We are in the mind of the all. Matter can neither be created no destroyed and under those rules, imagination is the only explanation left.

Does it really matter though? We are still here and reality doesn't change to suit one's beliefs. Whether this is a simulation, imagination of god or a hard coded material world of the scientists, it continues doing what it has done for a while now.

a reply to: Itisnowagain

Hmmm, like 2 sides of a coin still being part of the same whole. If that were the case, would the spiritual be able to survive without the material? That would possibly mean no pure spirits. Or would that rule only apply to creations like this reality and earth? That after our material host expires, we could exists in a purely spiritual form?

a reply to: Itisnowagain

Not a relevance difference. If its you or the next door neighbor that is the dreamer , does it matter ?

a reply to: dude1

It would kind of matter, maybe significantly. If each of us were able to dream a little dream and create reality, that would be a completely different paradigm than one god or the one or the only one and they created this reality through their imagination, including us. We independent souls creating realities wouldn't simplify anything, only make conceptualization much more difficult, at least for me.

a reply to: ClovenSky

"you or the next door neighbor" it's just one dreamer as you requested.

And we do dream and create "reality".