[Melchior]

Originally Posted by Anagogy

Consciousness is existence and existence is life and life is joy (unless you are resisting that joy). You are here to experience (which is also intrinsically connected to awareness by the way). You are here to experience and move through joy and love in all of it's forms. Expansion = joy. Contraction = being miserable.

If you can't experience joy or love, does that mean that you aren't alive? Maybe I'm misinterpreting those words, but I'm fairly certain that there are quite a few microorganisms that are considered to be alive, unable to feel joy as we do, react as we do, love as we do. There are also things that exist, or perhaps appear to exist to what we attribute as consciousness, that aren't 'conscious' as we are, but instead labeled as inert, dead, etc. like the detector in the double slit experiment that was discussed above. Are these things unable to exist without 'us' in a sense allowing them to exist? I guess what I'm trying to say here is that things like consciousness and love aren't something necessarily universal, but perhaps more of an 'evolutionary abstraction', developing and emerging out of a universe more chaotic in nature. Maybe that's the reason why, evolution (although, not necessarily joy ).

Originally Posted by seeds

The universe without consciousness is like a computer without a monitor.

The software program could be running, but without the monitor there would be no way of displaying the ultimate phenomenal attributes that the software describes.

Without consciousness, the entire universe would exist as a vast field of quantum information with nothing to transform that information into reality.

Without consciousness, there would be absolutely no purpose to a rose's color or fragrance, or the taste and feel of a lover's kiss, or the sound of music – all of which would be non-existent without the presence of consciousness to create, experience, and enjoy.

seeds

I suppose, it's like consciousness interfaces with reality, but is actually somewhat separate from it, perhaps to the extent of unplugging the monitor and connecting it/reinterfacing it to a different computer kind of thing. I think that's what has been thrown my way for pretty much the entire duration of this thread. Going off of my previous comment about evolution, what would you say to the scenario where regions of the computer/software becoming 'self aware' based on the operation of the 'software'?

Originally Posted by Anagogy

And I would like to say, "Well, why not?".

Can you imagine a more beautiful and satisfying purpose than eternal expansion, eternal joy, eternal experiences, eternal creativity?

If you are asking WHY things exist, the answer is very simple. So simple, in fact, that your logical mind will cry out that it wants a more complex answer, because our egos LOVE complexity. The ego is all about denial of divinity and in denying divinity, we are denying knowledge, and in denying knowledge, things seem mysterious or unknown, or hard to understand (in other words, "complex") .

But it is actually very simple and here it is: everything exists, because nothingness cannot.

Nothingness is nothingness. It has no reality. SUBSTANCE (not the lack thereof), is ALL that CAN be. This is why ABUNDANCE is the natural state of the universe, as opposed to LACK.

Existence has always existed and always will. Nothingness has never existed, and NEVER will.

Clever word play there. This immediately reminded me of Vacuum Energy, btw. I think though, that nothing can 'not' exist the same way that everything does exist. This is because there is essentially no point in asking the question of if nothing can exist because if it exists, it can't be nothing. it can only be nothing if it doesn't exist... hooray for circular arguments, sometimes, they're the only way to go... you probably already get what I'm saying here though, seeing as you wrote the above comments.