Required:
The Paradox of Consciousness
You will need to read that required link up there 👆
It appears that consciousness itself is the same paradox.
Your brain interfaces with the world solely through sensory inputs. Electrical signals. You could theoretically hook some wires up to where your visual nerves connect and produce simulated vision in your brain that is indistinguishable from what your eyes produce. You could do this with every sensory path that enables you to perceive the ‘external’ world, similarly to how the Boltzmann Brain operates.
Probing further, because of the x Measurement Problem, modern physics cannot explain why the quantum wave function collapses into a quantized state only when it is measured. In other words, the data outside may remain as just that: data, in the form of x Quantum Soup, until it is observed and ‘generated’ internally by a conscious observer.
This is to say that if measurement is in fact what causes the wave function to collapse, it means that consciousness precedes reality, not the other way around.
This is to say that the universe, as you know it, is not external at all, but generated inside of your brain. There seems to be an external universe, a data interface (sensory organs), and another generated universe internally.
The external universe is thus the sum of all the observer perspectives, which can effect and interact with itself.
In other words, the universe is generated inside of your brain, that exists in a consistent universe outside of your brain, which contains it. ⇐ (loop)
The inside contains the outside which contains the inside which contains the outside.
Does the universe contain consciousness, or does consciousness contain the universe?
Both.
As in they are the same thing, and this is a classic self reference.
This of course means the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is…
- statement
- negation
- negative statement
- double negation