Thank you for your excellent clarification. One question: did I sound like a kook when I said that dark matter and energy is like the unconscious of the universe?
No worries comrade, and no not at all man! It's sad that spirituality has been ridiculed and made to sound nuts, it's a lingering casualty of imperialism which people on the left really need to do more to unpack. I think that the fact we can't currently detect and analyse these forms of matter and energy doesn't mean they're any less a part of the consciousness of the universe as any other matter. There have been many forms of matter and energy that at some point we couldn't detect, until the sensitivity of our detection methods improved and then we could, and this may well be the case for this matter and energy we predict to exist.
If I'm interpreting your definition of unconsciousness correctly, I think the closest thing to it for me is the vacuum state. For example in the electromagnetic field, packets of energy in regions of the field are photons. These photons are part of the universe's consciousness, but have this empty space in the field between them at which no photons exist and the energy is minimum, a "vacuum state". It's these vacuum states within every quantum field that I'd consider the universe's unconsciousness. It coexists with the conscious aspects and is required to define them, but can never be directly detected because there's nothing to detect, it's just an underlying quality of spacetime allowing for the existence of everything else - hope I understood what you meant by consciousness and unconsciousness but please let me know if not!
Sweet, no, thank you, you got it. I’ve also read that given enough time, these vacuum states can produce something called quantum tunneling which could potentially give birth to new universes once our own universe becomes so old that even the last surviving black holes evaporate and time basically stops because nothing will be changing anymore. How this relates to consciousness or unconsciousness I can’t really say, except that as the universe dies it could also give birth to new life, which has a nice dialectical sound to it.
Thank you for your excellent clarification. One question: did I sound like a kook when I said that dark matter and energy is like the unconscious of the universe?
No worries comrade, and no not at all man! It's sad that spirituality has been ridiculed and made to sound nuts, it's a lingering casualty of imperialism which people on the left really need to do more to unpack. I think that the fact we can't currently detect and analyse these forms of matter and energy doesn't mean they're any less a part of the consciousness of the universe as any other matter. There have been many forms of matter and energy that at some point we couldn't detect, until the sensitivity of our detection methods improved and then we could, and this may well be the case for this matter and energy we predict to exist.
If I'm interpreting your definition of unconsciousness correctly, I think the closest thing to it for me is the vacuum state. For example in the electromagnetic field, packets of energy in regions of the field are photons. These photons are part of the universe's consciousness, but have this empty space in the field between them at which no photons exist and the energy is minimum, a "vacuum state". It's these vacuum states within every quantum field that I'd consider the universe's unconsciousness. It coexists with the conscious aspects and is required to define them, but can never be directly detected because there's nothing to detect, it's just an underlying quality of spacetime allowing for the existence of everything else - hope I understood what you meant by consciousness and unconsciousness but please let me know if not!
Sweet, no, thank you, you got it. I’ve also read that given enough time, these vacuum states can produce something called quantum tunneling which could potentially give birth to new universes once our own universe becomes so old that even the last surviving black holes evaporate and time basically stops because nothing will be changing anymore. How this relates to consciousness or unconsciousness I can’t really say, except that as the universe dies it could also give birth to new life, which has a nice dialectical sound to it.