The problem with a cause outside of spacetime and temporality is a subtle, yet pathological one.

In order to "cause" anything, you REQUIRE time. There needs to be a 'before' and 'after' the event. Being outside spacetime prohibits causality. Furthermore, a MIND cannot work outside of spacetime as a mind needs to make decisions/perform actions, both functions requiring time to exist.

I don't see any reason why it would have to be minds.

Understand though, the premise itself moves the idea past our ability to speculate, so I can't place any limits on what may or may not be if that were the case.  If something 'transcendent' exists, by nature I don't think it could be knowable by minds with our limitations.  It would literally be something we could not comprehend.

"Transcendent" means purely conceptual. If you are 'beyond' space and time, or any equivalent dimensionality, you are nothing, or at most, an idea within a mind within a reality, ie something with some equivalent of space-time.

Even if some entity was beyond our realm in some sense, it would still be part of what exists, and could not be responsible for this existence, therefore even if it managed to create our corner of existence, an explanation for how it came to exist is still required. IOW you have an infinite regress, so there is no logical way out of this, no matter what you claim about the nature of that part of existence this being inhabits.

Well, for what it is worth, I think that we get on shaky ground when we try to use the word universe as meaning “all that there is”. Doing that leads us into all of the problems which are associated such as where was god? Who made god? And what did god make the universe from?

Granted, it is an odd philosophical quandary but why not say that the universe is only some of what is? Done that way, we can get to such matters in a somewhat different manner. Follow me out on this.

The definition of “everything that is” has changed over time as our understanding of the subject has grown. One early version holds that “everything” was the earth, sun and moon. The stars were considered to be on the outside in some way. So sure, if there is something external to the universe, then you can work on understanding the questions in my first paragraph.

Later on, it was recognized that there are a few star like things that move around in the sky in ways that the real stars do not. We call those planets. With that, the universe became bigger, so to speak.

Then, in the 1800's, we learned how to measure the distance to stars. Again, the universe gets bigger. After that, for several decades, the idea of the universe cam to embrace the galaxy. And we had a general idea that there was nothing outside the galaxy, which lead to Einstein proposing the cosmological constant. Huge whoops there.

In the 1920's Hubble and Humason showed that the universe was much larger than even that. A couple of generations of astronomers have added to the general knowledge base so that we think of the universe as being the set of all the galaxies.

A certain consequence to that requires that there was a beginning to all of the stuff that we currently consider to be the universe. OK, so tell me how it matters if time had a beginning if the whole set of stuff is only a subset of some larger thing? I freely grant that it is an odd question but it is one that is on the bleeding edge of physics and might turn out to be true, pending certain results from the LHC.

If the LHC results come out the way that some physicists are expecting, then sure, time had a beginning but there would also be a sense under which a “before time” thing would make sense. That thing would have the property of an infinite regress. It would also have implications of continuous creation that would be pretty much automatic.

This would bring us back to the general question:

If the universe has a cause, does it need to be a mind?

Really, no. What we are calling the universe can be caused by events which take place in a larger scenario but could still be random events.

These days I believe in bypassing the attempt by Theists to portray God as existing in some separate 'transcendent' realm, so they can argue he doesn't have to abide by the 'laws' of nature, or otherwise avoid some annoying limitation of 'reality' as we know it.

Transcendent simply means beyond our normal or ordinary experience. Given we are very definitely finite in our perceptions and imaginations, that would not be all that hard to find. Quantum Mechanics and Relativity would lie on the border of the 'transcendent', at the very least. Absolutely no reason to assume 'non-physical' or 'supernatural' or anything else of that nature.

I am not restricting myself to the Big Bang Universe.

I refer to the totality of what IS. Whether a single Big Bang, a succession of them, a swarm of them in a multiverse, whatever.

Time is a perception by such beings as ourselves of a particular dimension of reality, which seems to lend itself to some kind of directional progression. In a Timeless context, I still can conceive of a connected chain of states along a particular dimension, with adjacent states constrained by laws which are equivalent to what we would perceive as 'causality'.

From an appropriate point-of-view, what IS may be regarded as a 'static' structure. It exists. The alternative is true 'nothingness'. We exist, therefore that option need not be considered. Coherent existence of any kind involves constraints, boundaries, as between one entity and another, as described by the Law of Identity. Order and consistency requires that something cannot simultaneously 'be' and 'not be', or overlap with that which it is not, according to the Law of non-contradiction.

It has been argued that these fundamental 'Laws of Logic' are empirical in some way, but until someone can come up with a serious and equally fundamental grounding of conception, we have no alternative but to start with them.

The question of how it arose does not itself arise. It would be absurd to propose 'something' other than an abstract fundamental principle of reality 'caused' it to exist, otherwise you are immediately back in infinite regress land.

Mind you, infinite convergent regress is a mathematical possibility within finite realities, ie an infinite summation of entities, durations, whatever, where each prior element is finitely smaller that what follows it, sums to quite finite totalities. Such a sequence would go back into an infinitesimal scale. If some version of Quantum Mechanics holds universally, below a certain scale things simply blur into Uncertainty.

Just my usual 'random' thoughts...

This is nothing but mental masturbation.

Human consciousness is a result of biological evolution. Consciousness is an emergent property of biological processes, nothing more.

What you are doing is simple anthropomorphism(assigning human qualities to the world around you).

While no one knows what happened before the big bang, we do know the results of it and none of what exists now came from a consciousness, but a process.

Much like a hurricane doesn't consciously form or chose a path. A hurricane is a manifestation of smaller processes that lead to the bigger pattern we call a hurricane.

Whatever came before the big bang would be just as much an object and proccess, not a who, but a what.

There is no need for thinking for the universe to manifest nor will there be any thinking when it reaches heat death in the future.

No different than the smaller componants of heat and climate and water temperature that lead to a hurricane and the death it hits when it too, runs out of fuel.

Don't let your "sense of awe" lead you to new age bullshit. This is just as bad as when theists let their sense of awe lead them to comic book super heros.

Life and the universe are the product of a WHAT, not a who. The universe has no capability of being a villain or a hero. Most of it is hostile to biological life and has plenty of nasty things in it that have affected our tiny dot throughout it's history. It is neither caring or apathetic or mean. It is a process, not a who. The universe is not a giant brain or a god, it is a thing, just like a rock is a thing.

Information is tied to material structure, at the basic level it is a description of the position and momentum of all the matter particles within a given volume of space.

This version of information is a quantity which is not dependent on the 'complexity' of the physical structure, just the number of particles. Of course the more particles there are within a given volume, the more complex the possible patterns and structures it may manifest.

By this definition, an immaterial realm has zero information, so if a mind is somehow dependent on information, an immaterial realm cannot have 'mind'. Consciousness is an emergent property of a particular kind of complex structure, and is totally dependent on that structure, which in turn is totally dependent on the properties of matter, ie its persistence and stability of form.

Massive amounts of evidence from ongoing studies of mind and consciousness completely support this, that the mind is a product of the brain/body complex, as an emergent property of complexity, which does indeed depend, in a sense, on a large amount of 'information', ie available particles, to support that complexity. But it is dependent on a very special kind of 'complexity', which may be described as a kind of 'meta-information' which is a description of the organization of the basic 'information', related to its entropy. Meta-information, complexity of structure, like entropy, is not conserved.

Consciousness seems to be an emergent function of basic mind, which assists the creature to handle unfamiliar situations, and to facilitate interactions with other similar individuals in a social group, via the 'mirror neurons'.

The idea of consciousness as a fundamental is a primitive idea harking back to the concept of the nature of everything being due to an 'essence'. Whereas modern thinking is that the nature of something is a function of its structure. It used to be thought that the basic properties of different substances were due to them containing different proportions of the four 'elements' of earth, air, fire,and water. But we now know that material substances of all kinds, including gases ('air') are composed of the same basic structures ('atoms'), and different substances have their different attributes due to the differences in the arrangement of the particular kinds of atoms they contain, And that the different atoms, the actual elements, are distinguished by the different numbers of the same three particles they contain.

Structure is primary for determining properties, not what it is made of. Different atoms, and different mixes of atoms, facilitate different kinds of structure.

Comparing consciousness to something like gravity is completely inconsistent with its dependence on information complexity and structure.

I looked up David Chalmers, Damn, he looks like a younger version of myself, although I didn't wear my hair long back then, or have facial hair, but if I had, that's how I would have looked. Also Australian, of course...

Even so, I'll go with Dennett.

I may find time to read some of Chalmer's stuff - heck, another thinking Australian who looks a bit like me has to be worth some attention...

But seriously, I don't see anything compelling in what you convey of his angle on this.

It at least partly amounts to a bit of labelling, to fit the observations into a particular personal world-view.

I am comfortable with regarding personal experience as "what the process of consciousness 'feels like' from the inside". YMMV.

This is a pretty cool theme for me 

Yes there is no reason for It to be a "mind". From the very little I know about physics I say we need a First Cause to make sense of the Universe (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tB1jppI3fo) Or we are doomed to never make sense of it.

One the face of it this FC doesn't need to be a "mind". However when I'm faced with the Universe fine tunning problem I'd say that this FC had an intention... thus hinting a "mind". If this is not true then it begs for M-Theory to be true... On the other hand... if it is true it's "turtles all the way down" again.

From what I've learned by talking in here we have to be carefull when we speak words like transcendental. Because if "transcendental" is what BobSpence think it is then it does not exist, however you put it. Even considering there would be such a thing as "God" it would not be transcendental. It merely rests outside our current awareness of it. I agree with this definition given the semantics religion usually uses.

The same thing goes with the "Universe" word. Physicists like to talk about multiverses sometimes. So we have to be CLEAR about it. If when we talk about "Universe" we mean everything in Existence or we just mean this "reality show" not comprehending other possible universes predicted (speculated) by M-theory. Again, if we by Universe, mean everything in Existence if something such as a "God" exists it cannot be outside the Universe.

Mind may have a different and very weird nature that we are not aware off. On this I'm behind the work of Penrose and Chalmers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo

The true nature of time, I think, is very counter intuitive. It tricks even physicists. Time in QM is very weird and it seems that past and future are the same.

NDE reports seem to support Penrose defense on the quantum nature of the mind. They often say that they were in a "state outside of time". Actually what surprises me is that the more I look at NDE reports the more I'm convinced that these people are actually reporting an experience existing (having awareness) in a quantum state of being. More than many say that trying to put in words what they have experienced is almost impossible. Given the nature of quantum mechanics this is to be expected...... Alice in wonderland surreal world is too sane for this 

From the research on NDE, the unrelated Penrose work, thoretical nature of the mind by Chalmers, my personal experience, among other things points to me that there is way more to "us", our conscient nature, than what we are aware about. 

Having said this I'd like to say that there are no supernatural phenomenons only preternatural ones.