The Sudden Dawn of the Cosmos and the Constancy of Physical Laws

How do you know this? This is the core of your argument but you fail to present objective reasons for it. Apart from the fact that you switch from the emergence of consciousness to the generation of qualia (about which there is dissent among scientists and philosophers of science as to whether they actually exist), you make the mistake of stating as fact the object of your own incredulity.Let's look at some real facts:
- you are conscious;
- your brain is a physical object;
- some physical and/or chemical causes influencing your brain can alter your conscious experience;
- a physical blow to the head can render you unconscious.In short, consciousness has all the hallmarks of being rooted in physical causes. The details of how it happens may still be sketchy, but we have ample reason to suspect that consciousness is an emergent property of the workings of the brain.William Thomson, also called Lord Kelvin, the pre-eminent scientist of the late 19th century, is known to have promulgated that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. Your statement is reminiscent of this mistaken certitude. An apt reply to it would be what Darwin said in the quote below, which I have used for many years as my signature quote on this site, and which has proven wonderfully pertinent to many a discussion here.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

No, our current understanding is that the universe does not in fact have "Laws". Not merely that we haven't found them, but that there are in fact no such laws in general. The universe's behaviour is described by statistical relations, meaning certain events are more or less probable.
At the quantum level it's the total opposite of what you have said as in fact there is far less consistency at that scale, the statistical nature of events is much more apparent than at our scale.

Since they've come up on this thread a bit I just wanted to mention that virtual particles don't actually exist. They're a mnemonic device to help in setting up QFT calculations, but the theory doesn't really say there are particles popping in and out of existence from the vacuum.Also in general QFT doesn't really give much objective content to particles or atoms. The number of particles in your body for example is observer dependent with no objective value.It was also mention above that the spin value of an electron upon observation is an example of something which does not follow from previous physical facts, but merely has probabilities of assuming various values. This is 100% true, just to add that all probabilistic events in quantum theory have this character, i.e. the random events of quantum theory are outcomes of observations. The theory doesn't deal with events occurring independent of observation. If somebody doesn't measure a given property of a particle, then that property has no value, not even a randomly selected one.

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sillyjisms

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Brilliant.Edited by Larni, : No reason given.