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Leslie’s Consciousness Inside an Infinite Mind

Philosopher John Leslie suggests that ethical requirements, when not overruled by stronger ethical requirements, are creatively effective. The cosmos they create is a collection of infinitely many minds, each infinite mind eternally conscious of all that's worth contemplating. Our universe is a structure inside one such mind, its reality consisting simply in its being contemplated.

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John Leslie

Professor Emeritus & Philosopher

John Leslie is British-Canadien Professor Emeritus, University of Guelph, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His publications include The Mystery of Existence (readings edited by him and R.L. Kuhn) and the following books. Universes discusses multiverse cosmologies and how the “anthropic” fine-tuning of our universe allows observers to inhabit it. Infinite Minds, developing Plato’s idea that a situation could owe its existence to its goodness, suggests that the cosmos consists of infinitely many minds, each infinite through thinking everything worth thinking. One of them has our universe as a pattern in its thought. The End of the World examines dangers which might soon prove fatal to humankind; a Doomsday Argument suggests that they have been underestimated.

Key Takeaways

Core Claim
Our universe exists as a thought within an infinite mind, sustained by its contemplation.
How It Works
Infinitely many divine-like minds create realities through ethical necessity, each holding countless possible worlds.
Distinguishing Idea
Conscious beings within these minds may be unaware they exist inside a greater consciousness.
Implications
Reality’s foundation is mental and ethical, not physical, with limitless alternative universes possible.

Leslie’s Consciousness Inside an Infinite Mind

Universe Within an Infinite Mind

How, though, would one's own consciousness fit into this scenario? Well, each infinite mind is “a single existent” in this sense, that its ingredients stand to it somewhat as a ruby's shape and its redness stand to the ruby; they couldn't exist independently, any more than could the particles in the Bose-Einstein condensates described by quantum physics.

But despite how all the parts of each universe which any such mind contemplated would exist—remember, solely through entering into that mind's contemplations—some of those parts could each have consciousness of its own. They could be conscious brains, or conscious computers. Being inside the existential unity of that mind wouldn't make these know that it was there that they existed, or what other things existed there. Conscious, when it contemplated us, of every quark and electron of your brain and mine, that mind could leave us in ignorance even of each other's existence (Leslie, 2001).

Unity, Quantum Processes, and Beyond

Similarly, our lives from birth to death could be eternally present to that mind's awareness whereas we could only guess what would fill our next few hours. Still, one's consciousness might itself be existentially unified at any given moment, perhaps thanks to quantum-physical processes. This could explain how the entirety of a painting, for instance, can be known in a single glance. Brains without regions that featured quantum computations, computers which weren't quantum computers, might be incapable of such knowledge.

Leslie concludes, “Innumerable further things worth contemplating would exist inside each infinite mind, many of them quite unlike our universe and its living beings. Examples could be utterly lifeless universes; universes very unlike ours in their physical laws, or obeying no laws at all; countless things of interest or of beauty, each not forming part of any universe” (Leslie, 2001).