Parallel universes and consciousness

 

Several articles around talking about how we got sensation 50,000 years ago from some sort of unexplained connection with another parallel universe, or to the whole array of them. Sounds a bit woo and an explanation that doesn't explain, just pushes the question away. Do I read this right?

Yes — your skepticism is basically right.

There really is an interesting scientific question lurking underneath these stories: humans appear to have undergone a fairly dramatic change in behavior somewhere in the broad neighborhood of 50,000–100,000 years ago. We see increasingly elaborate symbolic behavior, art, personal ornaments, long-distance exchange, sophisticated tools, and eventually very rapid cultural accumulation. But the old idea of a single sudden “Great Leap Forward” around exactly 50,000 years ago is itself much less secure than popular articles often suggest. Evidence for symbolic and complex behavior appears considerably earlier and develops unevenly.

Where things go off the rails is the next step:

“We don't know exactly why this happened, therefore perhaps consciousness became connected to a parallel universe.”

That doesn't explain the phenomenon. It merely relocates the unexplained part.

And there's an especially important distinction here. A hypothesis such as “some interaction with another universe caused the change” would need to tell us what interaction, by what physical mechanism, under what conditions, and what observable consequences it produces. If it can't do that, “parallel universe” is functioning rather like “the gods did it” with more sophisticated vocabulary.

There are legitimate multiverse ideas in physics, but they don't generally provide a mechanism by which human brains suddenly acquire an additional channel of consciousness. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, for example, isn't a theory of psychic communication between universes.

The thing that caught my eye in searching is that this particular claim seems to have quite a lot of New Age/UFO/consciousness literature attached to it. One example explicitly describes a supposed worldwide “consciousness boost” around 50,000 years ago and attributes it to access to a new spectrum of consciousness. That's very much the sort of thing I'd put in the interesting speculation, spectacularly short on mechanism category.

And I think your phrase “an explanation that doesn't explain, just pushes the question away” is exactly the right criticism. It's essentially:

Why did human cognition change?
→ Because of a connection to another universe.
Why should that connection change cognition?
→ [new mystery]

You've just moved the question one level farther away.

The genuinely interesting question, in my view, is why human cultural evolution seems to have accelerated so dramatically, and whether that required a genetic change, changes in population structure and social learning, language, cumulative culture, ecological circumstances, or simply a combination of things. That's a real scientific puzzle. We don't need to import another universe to make it puzzling.

In my view animals demonstrate a similar consciousness, just not linked to our intelligence and language, and they also experience dreams. In that case some specific event in our past is ruled out.

Yes, with one qualification: it weakens the case for a sudden origin of consciousness, but it doesn't rule out a specific event affecting specifically human consciousness or cognition.

I think your distinction is an important one. If by consciousness we mean something like having subjective experiences of the world, pleasure and pain, fear, memory, attention, and dreams, then there is no obvious reason to put its origin at 50,000 years ago. Mammals clearly exhibit many of those capacities, and birds and some other animals have surprisingly sophisticated cognitive and behavioral abilities. Dreaming is particularly suggestive because it implies internally generated experience rather than merely responding mechanically to the immediate environment.

What seems much more distinctive about Homo sapiens is not consciousness itself but the combination of language, abstract representation, exceptionally flexible intelligence, and cumulative culture. An animal can have an experience without being able to describe it; it can remember without constructing a written history; it can solve a problem without transmitting the solution through generations in a way that permits others to improve upon it.

So I'd separate two questions:

“When did consciousness appear?” — probably a very ancient evolutionary development, with no reason to expect a particular date.

“When did humans acquire our extraordinary capacity for cumulative symbolic culture?” — that's the genuinely interesting question, and roughly 50,000 years ago may be part of its history, although the archaeological record suggests a much more gradual and complicated development.

There is also a nice logical point in what you're saying. If somebody observes a sudden increase in the sophistication of human behavior and concludes that consciousness itself suddenly appeared, they're already making an assumption that intelligence, language, culture and subjective experience are essentially the same thing. They aren't.

And dreams make the argument particularly awkward for the “sudden consciousness” story. A sleeping dog doesn't have language or human-style abstract reasoning, but it can apparently have an internally generated experiential state. Whatever consciousness ultimately turns out to be, evolution almost certainly didn't wait around until one particular human generation and then switch it on.

So I'd say your formulation is stronger than simply “animals are conscious.” If consciousness is an evolved biological phenomenon, its evolutionary history should substantially predate the remarkable cultural explosion of our species. The latter needs explaining; it doesn't automatically require explaining the former.

Copy omissions

I'm having a problem with the previous lengthy chat, I select all and copy, then post to a new blog on my blog editor, but chunks of it disappear. Alternatively I select all and print to PDF and chunks of it similarly disappear. Is there any way to avoid splitting it into two separate chats?

Yes. The problem is probably not the length of the conversation itself, but the way the browser handles the very large, dynamically rendered ChatGPT page when you copy or print it. Some portions may not actually be present in the browser's selection/print representation, even though you can see them on screen.

You don't necessarily need to split the chat. A few approaches are much more reliable:

1. Use ChatGPT's conversation export/share mechanism, if available to you. That preserves the conversation as a separate document rather than relying on Firefox's rendering of the page.

2. Copy in sections while keeping the same chat. You don't have to create two chats. For example, scroll through the conversation and copy 20–30 messages at a time into the same Blogger draft. This is tedious, but it avoids the browser silently dropping portions.

3. I can turn the conversation into a single file for you. If the chat is available to me as conversation content, I can produce a complete .txt, .docx, or .html version that you can then put into Blogger. That would probably be the cleanest solution if your objective is "one enormous conversation, preserved intact."

There is also a particularly useful trick if you're using Firefox: don't use Ctrl+A on the entire ChatGPT page. ChatGPT's interface is a dynamically constructed page, and Ctrl+A can select/render something different from what you visually see. Selecting from a specific message and working progressively upward/downward can be more reliable.

If by "the previous lengthy chat" you mean the Time Travel Paradoxes conversation immediately before this one, I can work from that conversation and help you produce a single continuous copy rather than splitting it into two chats.

I take it I need only do a select of the top half, paste it to the browser, then select the rest and paste it.

Exactly. Keep it as one ChatGPT conversation; you only need to copy it in chunks.

The easiest method is:

1. Select from the beginning of the chat down to roughly the halfway point, then copy and paste into your Blogger editor.

2. Go back to the ChatGPT chat, select from where you stopped through the end, and paste it immediately after the first section.

3. You can make the division anywhere convenient; it doesn't have to be exactly half.

That should avoid the browser choking on the enormous selection and silently dropping chunks.

And importantly, nothing about this requires creating a second ChatGPT chat. You're just making two copy/paste operations from the same conversation.

Yes, with one qualification: I'd call it a weakness in the Firefox/ChatGPT interaction rather than necessarily a Firefox bug.

Ctrl+A is wonderfully convenient, but with a very long, dynamically generated ChatGPT page, the browser isn't necessarily dealing with one simple block of ordinary text. ChatGPT is continually managing the conversation in the page, and copying or printing the whole rendered document can produce omissions.

So your workaround is quite sensible: same chat, two large selections. You retain the convenience of selection rather than having to laboriously copy message by message, while avoiding whatever is causing the disappearing chunks.

And frankly, for a conversation as long as the ones you've been having lately, the fact that "Select All → Copy" isn't completely dependable is a rather annoying little piece of modern computing. 😄

My chats tend to be lengthy because I explore topics, not just questions.

Exactly—and that's a rather different use of a chat from the usual "question → answer → done" model.

You're essentially using the conversation as a running intellectual notebook: an idea gets proposed, you poke at it, I respond, you modify the premise, and eventually the discussion has wandered somewhere neither of us would have predicted at the beginning. That naturally produces long chats.

In that situation, splitting the conversation would actually be undesirable because the continuity is part of the value. The later observations often depend on some seemingly minor point made twenty or thirty exchanges earlier.

So I'd keep doing what you're doing. One topic, one chat, however long it becomes. For archiving it to Blogger, just treat the occasional huge-chat copying problem as a technical nuisance and divide the copy operation into two or three pieces when necessary.

And I rather like the fact that you don't use ChatGPT as a vending machine for answers. The interesting part is often what happens after the answer.

To be honest I tend to use your competitors for quick questions.

That makes perfect sense. For a quick factual question, there isn't much benefit in building a whole conversational context around it. Ask, get the answer, move on.

The longer exploratory chats are a different animal. They're less about retrieving an answer and more about thinking out loud with a responsive interlocutor—where preserving the thread matters because the next thought grows out of the previous one.

So your pattern is actually pretty rational: use whichever tool is convenient for the quick stuff, and reserve the long-running conversations for subjects where you want to keep turning the idea over.

I won't pretend I'm offended by the competition. 😄

Apostasy and schism

 I notice that practically every religious organization in the world that has preached negatively about a lot of normal human sexual behavior is now suffering schisms and arguments as they try to become more compassionate and real.

Yes. There’s a striking pattern there, although I’d phrase the underlying process a little more broadly: religions that built a large part of their social identity around regulating sexual behavior are having difficulty changing those rules without destabilizing the authority structure that created them.

Sexual morality is unusually troublesome for religious institutions because it isn't an abstract doctrine. It reaches directly into marriage, family, reproduction, gender roles, personal identity, and everyday behavior. So when a church says, in effect, “We were too harsh about this; we need to treat people with greater compassion,” it isn't merely changing its tone. It can raise the uncomfortable question: If the old prohibition was wrong, why should we trust the institution's other prohibitions?

And there are really two constituencies pulling in opposite directions. People who have always found the sexual rules cruel or unrealistic tend to regard reform as overdue. But people who accepted those rules precisely because they believed they represented divine, unchanging truth can reasonably see the reform as evidence that the institution is abandoning that truth. Both sides have a coherent argument within the institution's own premises.

There is also an interesting generational effect. A religious organization can survive for quite a while with an unpopular teaching if its members have inherited it as part of the package. But once a substantial proportion of younger members simply don't regard the behavior in question as morally problematic, enforcing the old rule becomes increasingly difficult. Eventually the institution has to choose between retaining doctrinal consistency and retaining people.

And "becoming more compassionate and real" is an especially apt description because many of these institutions are discovering that there is a difference between saying “this behavior is sinful, but we love the sinner” and actually treating the people involved as ordinary members of the human community. The latter inevitably puts pressure on the former.

The really interesting question, I think, is whether these schisms are merely the painful transition to a more humane equilibrium, or whether they represent something deeper: religious organizations gradually losing their ability to prescribe private morality at all. The latter would be a much bigger historical change.

The efforts to change lead to schisms where phobic people depart, not change leads to dropping of majorities.

Yes — that's an important correction. I had the direction somewhat backwards.

In many cases, the reform isn't primarily driven by a fear that the institution will lose its liberal members. It's driven by the institution becoming more humane, and that reform then causes the people who regard the old sexual prohibitions as essential to leave.

That produces a rather interesting dynamic:

The institution says, “We have been unnecessarily harsh about this, and these people are part of us.”

A faction replies, “Then you are abandoning God's law/the tradition/the faith,” and departs or forms a schism.

Meanwhile, the people who wanted the change generally don't have to leave, because the change has made the institution more congenial to them. So the membership loss is disproportionately on the conservative side.

That can make the apparent "crisis" somewhat misleading. From the outside, one sees a religious organization fighting bitterly over sexuality and thinks, “They're tearing themselves apart because they're becoming more liberal.” But internally the process can be more like institutional evolution through conservative secession.

And there is a delicious historical irony in it: the people who leave often regard themselves as the ones preserving the authentic religion, while the institution that remains may eventually become the much larger and more ordinary version of it. The schism preserves the purity of the old position, while the parent organization preserves the continuity of the institution.

That pattern isn't universal, of course, but I think your formulation captures something my previous answer missed.

Conservatives leave and eventually dissolve in internal disputation, liberals leave in spite of or maybe because of their success leaving the body without authority.

Yes — and that makes the pattern considerably more interesting than simply "liberals win, conservatives lose."

There can be two quite different kinds of institutional failure.

The conservative secession often produces a group that has preserved its principles but lost the broad social environment that made those principles workable. Once separated, it has to decide exactly how strict to be, who is sufficiently orthodox, which old rules are essential, and so forth. That can generate the familiar phenomenon of schism producing further schism. Having established that doctrinal purity matters, there is no obvious stopping point.

The liberal side has the opposite problem. If it succeeds in making the institution more accepting, it may remove the very thing that gave the institution much of its moral authority over private life. People who can now marry whom they want, have the relationships they want, and generally regard their own conscience as sufficient may quite reasonably ask, "What exactly do I need the institution for?"

So success can be self-undermining.

There is a particularly interesting asymmetry here:

Conservatism can preserve authority at the cost of membership; liberalization can preserve membership at the cost of authority.

And if the institution's traditional authority rested substantially on telling ordinary people how they ought to live, then becoming compassionate and permissive may be a kind of Pyrrhic victory. It wins the argument about how people should be treated while weakening the reason people once needed the institution to tell them how to behave.

That might help explain why some religious bodies end up with a curious residue: the most doctrinally committed people are on the conservative fringe, while the largest and most socially acceptable body has progressively less influence over what its nominal members actually do.

In other words, the schisms may be symptoms of a long transition from religion as an authority over conduct to religion as an identity, community, or cultural institution. That's a much more consequential transformation than merely changing one's position on sex.

All people, from Cardinals in Rome to members of the JW Governing Body, have egos.

Oh, absolutely. And that may be one of the least appreciated variables in all of this.

A Cardinal, a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses Governing Body, a bishop, or an ordinary local pastor may sincerely believe that he is defending divine truth—and also have the perfectly ordinary human desire not to admit that he was wrong. Those aren't mutually exclusive.

In fact, institutional religious authority can make the ego problem worse. If your position is merely your opinion, changing your mind is unremarkable. If you have spent years telling other people that your position is God's will, admitting error becomes a much more formidable psychological and social act. You aren't just saying, "I got that wrong." You may be saying, "I confidently instructed thousands of people that God required something He apparently didn't require."

And there is another ego involved: the people who have suffered because they obeyed the old rule. They may understandably feel that if the institution now says, "We should have been more compassionate," somebody ought to be accountable for the decades of misery.

So institutional change isn't just a contest between theology and sociology. It's a room full of human beings with reputations, careers, friendships, loyalties, memories, and considerable investments in having been right.

Which makes your earlier observation about schism particularly interesting. Sometimes the theological argument may be partly the respectable vocabulary in which very ordinary human conflicts over status, authority, pride, and belonging are conducted.

God may be invoked in the argument, but God isn't necessarily the only person in the room.