You're an electrified hunk of fat piloting a meat-covered skeleton riding on a damp rock that's hurling through space and time.
It's weird that we, as people, think that our being or self ends at our skin. And we're just a consciousness controlling a meat cube.
What about all the bacteria living on and inside of us? People would die without their microflora.
What about our subconscious/unconscious doings/thoughts? Are we in control of them? Or are they in control of us? Could consciousness be an illusion? One created by our senses' interpretation of external stimuli.
anyways this sandwich tastes great
Be fair. You are an abstraction layer; a subsystem running on that electrified hunk of fat. There's plenty of stuff that evolution has delegated as non-conscious functions of the fatlump.
So you're saying humanity is a mecha space opera?
Yes.
“At thе end of the day, your brain is just a meat computеr in a bone cockpit piloting a skin robot You think the world makes sense? Nothing makes sense! So you might as well make nonsense!”
And I want off.
I never understood this weird hangup, it's like people struggling to reconcile free will with deterministic actions to a being outside normal time. Of course you'll make the same choices if you rewound time and changed nothing... You're the same, the universe is the same down to the last particle - how does that conflict with the idea of agency?
Consciousness is an emergent property. One neuron is complex, but 1000 can do things one could never do alone. Why is it so surprising that billions, arranged in complex self organizing structures, would give rise to something more than the sum of its parts?
Maybe there's a quantum aspect to it, maybe there's not... It seems like it's all based in this idea humans are so extra special that surely there must be special laws of the universe just for us
Maybe there's a quantum aspect to it, maybe there's not...
I see what you did there, intentionally or not.
Heh. It was unintentional, next time it won't be
To be honest the thing that confuses me is that I am conscious. That’s weird, how am I aware, there is no explanation of this. Assuming we pretty much understand all physics and science and there isn’t anything surprising around the corner. Consciousness has to be a physical thing, a computation. But that’s weird as hell too? What rule of the universe governs whether or not something is aware. A brain could do everything it does now without being really aware just pretending. And if that’s true does that mean it’s just the flow of information that can become conscious? Could anything become conscious? If I made a marble Rube Goldberg machine complicated it enough and doing the right calculations could it be conscious?? It feels wrong it feels like we are missing something
This is exactly what puzzles me. Or at least you seem to be talking about what puzzles me. The problem is that when I mention this to others, most missunderstand what I mean by "being aware" or "conscious", and im not sure its possible to refer to this phenomena in a much better way. But that is exactly the argument i usually make, that an automata could behave exactly like me, following the supposed physical laws, but without being aware, or having any sensation, without seeing the images, hearing the sounds, only processing sensorial data. Processing sensorial data isnt the same as feeling/hearing/seeing it.
We absolutely are missing something. Clearly it requires more than just a lot of intelligence, otherwise we'd have seen a computer become sentient by now instead of ChatGPT proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that they absolutely will not be anytime soon.
Consciousness is the AI assistant in meat mecha suit.
It seems like we make decisions, but we don't. Think of a decision you've made - you think over it, you sleep on it, you imagine outcomes and might decide intellectually - but you don't lock it in. That just happens - sometimes it even flips at the last second, and you don't know why you did it - for better or worse
Our brain does a lot of preprocessing - vision, hearing, balance, walking, language...
Our conscious minds preprocess time. It turns our senses and our experiences into stories, abstract predictions, laterally pattern matching, and ultimately - analysis and recommendations
Also, I am very interested in the question of, why me? Why am I in charge of this body's consciousness. How was it decided that of all conscious being that ever and will exists, I am conscious of this world from my point of view, at this point of time.
This is the only existential question I can't seem to let go, especially since I am a non-theist. It will be easier to answer if I am a believer, or at least spiritualist.
Yep. This was the issue people took with Chomsky's approach to language, basically the same sentiment. Humans are "special" in some way. It underlines the basis of almost all cognitive, neuroscience, and language research for decades.
It's crazy to me how much this holds us back, and the amount of cognitive dissonance involved
Take pets. We look at them acting shifty around the sock they know they aren't allowed to play with, and say "she's thinking about it". We avoid words like "walk" because they've understood one of the meanings of it. And usually not just the meaning, but the difference between tone and context - most won't react the same to "should we take her for a walk" and "is he able to walk". My mom's dog knew all of our names, and the difference between "soon", "tomorrow", and "the day after tomorrow" - she would watch the door all day on the right day
And yet, most people will share all of these observations and turn around to dismiss it as "she's just a dog". For them it's just association and behavioral conditioning, but the same things are different for humans because we're extra special. Clearly her acting shifty before stealing the sock isn't planning or considering, it's instincts fighting against training
But only humans can ever understand, only we make choices. Because we're extra special
It seems like it’s all based in this idea humans are so extra special that surely there must be special laws of the universe just for us
I never got that argument against the soul as it were. What makes you think that these special laws would only exist for humans? Aren't there plenty of people who believe all things have some kind of soul or spirit? Isn't that most Eastern Religions and quite a few Western Pagan ones?
consciousness is stored in the balls
Next to the microplastic.
hm, but how do you explain post-nut clarity then?
Calling it a lump of fat is a bit like calling the Milky Way a very sparse field of hydrogen
That's true tho
Right, but it doesn't capture the whole story, namely that it's arranged in a very particular way
It's accurate, but not precise.
Sorry Natural Intelligence bros, but meat can't think. You've been duped into thinking human beings are conscious by Big Omega 3. Intelligence can only exist in computers using real electricity. Not that piddly ion pump stuff.
What about photons, hmmm? They're used for quantum computing and don't (technically) need "real electricity".
The brain is not a "lump of fat". If you desiccate the brain, most of what's left are lipids, yes, but at that point you are not conscious anymore. The brain is a mix of proteins, carbohydrates, water and fat.
A lump of mostly fat then? Seems needlessly specific.
I’M NOT FAT I’M JUST BIG BRAINED!!
Mostly water, in that case
Also fairly sure that electrical impulses alone cannot account for consciousness. If that were "all" there was to it we'd have simulated a human brain by now. There's a few theories about quantum processes being involved but this isn't exactly easily proven.
We are ALL thinking lumps of fat on this blessed day :)
To my knowledge there are interesting quantum-mechanical effects at play as well though. There's a lot of esoterical nonsense around that of course, however first discoveries pointing into this direction are quite promising.
I always remember a quote from Alan Watts talking about this topic: "You are the universe experiencing itself". The idea of consciousness being an emerging property of the universe itself makes most sense to me, and the non-deterministic properties of quantum mechanics open this possibility.
Definitely more inspiring to think about it this way than just as a lump of fat.
maybe but he's a skinny guy
I can only hope that when this flesh dies, that my consciousness returns to the cosmos and persists free from the limitations of the body.
If it is an emerging property then the sense of "self" is most likely bound to this "lump of fat"; more precisely its inability to have connections to someone else except through physical barriers. the most interesting aspect of this is probably what siamese twins once described who were connected at their head. They said that they could "hear the other one's thoughts".
if we could share our minds with one another it would most likely completely change our understanding of consciousness. Likewise, if something can survive the death of the body (the "emerging property" part) then most likely not as an individual given that part is more of a property of our brains.
It's self-evident why esoterical stuff got hooked on these things. The idea of closure on one of the most central religious questions is really appealing.
people don't like this idea because if that's all we are, then who is anyone to say that the inevitable equivalent man-made lump of fat with electrical activity isn't entitled to all the same rights and status that we are
also jeebus doesn't want you to think you can't go on getting punished even after you're dead
Don't sell yourself short. It's a salty lump of fat.
Who said I'm salty, jerk?
There's a lot of water and ions (IONS!) besides that lump of fat.
No, you're the electrochemical interactions happening inside the lump of fat.
This gets explored a bit in The Talos Principle and it's sequal. Working on the 2nd one now, it's been fun
I've never understood why people think the most sophisticated and complex technology humans have ever been aware of is too mundane just because we have scratched the surface of understanding it.
What if life's evolutionary end point is always sentience?
Then life is even more pointless and cruel than it appears.
That would be poetically fitting for an universe determined to die a heat death.
I'm still rooting for Idealism or the immortal soul to somehow be a thing.
Go Banana!
Speak for yourself. I try not to think.
Action potential doesn't do thinking. Thinking happens at neuron junctions and that shits chemical and analogue. The electrical part just moves the data to the next synapse. There are some gap junctions but those aren't really associated with thinking.
br-
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If by consciousness, you just mean thinking, then sure.
But if you mean awareness — “phenomena”, if you prefer — then I don’t see why an experiential state would (or could) be entirely secondary to a physical state.
It is, after all, possible for me to write words and perform other physical actions based on my experiential state. In many ways, my mental world is more “real” than the physical world.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think rejecting physicalism necessarily requires embracing the idea of a soul. I’m an atheist, and a neutral monist, for example. But if I had to choose between only physicalism and idealism, idealism makes more sense. Before anything else, I’m conscious.
