‘…try to imagine a world in which a sunrise cannot occur. The earth has always revolved around the sun, but the sun only rises over the horizon from the viewpoint of an observer. It is an inherently perspectival event. The sunrise will forever be trapped in experience.’
From The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms
The quotation above intrigued me, puzzled me. It needed some sorting out.
According to what we are told by scientists, the universe had been in existence for billions of years before not only humans came along but animals of any description. Stars, planets, rocks, water were around but nothing in the category of animals.
Animals and humans have organs of perception. They are conscious of their environment. They see, hear, smell and so on.
Take seeing as an example of perception. From where I am now I can see through a window at the street and the sky. If I walked along the street, I would experience a different set of things from a different position. There are over seven billion people alive at the moment. Each one, if awake and looking around, is perceiving an environment from the place where they are at that moment. A baby in a cot in China, an astronaut on a space station, a commuter on a train. For each one there is a particular location from which they are viewing.
Now if we go back in imagination to a time before there were any animals of any kind which means to a time when there were no conscious observers, what would the universe look like? Here is my problem. I want to picture the scene but when I try to do so, I realise that any example that may come to mind is a scene that is being viewed from a particular place. There has to be a conscious being located somewhere with a mind observing, doesn’t there? But if there were for all those billions of years no conscious observers, then there were no points of view from which to observe. An artist might paint a speculative picture of the early universe but for any painting of a scene it is a prerequisite that there must be a stance, a location from which it is seen. Think of actual artists who paint a landscape, a portrait, any form of representational art. Whatever it is it is always depicted from a particular position.
This puzzles me but does it amount to anything significant? I do not know. Does it make sense of the quotation at the beginning? Well, as we experience it, because of the earth’s rotation, a sunrise occurs at different times of the day in different places. What time of day it happens to take place depends on where on the earth you happen to be located. But only a conscious being can have a place with a point of view. No point of view then no sunrise or sunset.
The universe in the ages when there were no conscious observers, a strange place. Not only no sunrises and sunsets, but no colour, no sound just shapes forming, moving, expanding, colliding,exploding, dispersing.
Consciousness and Other Matters 