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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
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
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
consciousness is stored in the balls
Next to the microplastic.
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 actually a lump of lava with a thin crust. Any time the crust breaks we have a very bad time.
Obligatory “um, akhtually, it’s magma”.
Lava is just liquid rock
The core is metal, the outer shell is hard rock, i would assume what’s inbetween is a mix of pop and smooth jazz maybe?
acid metal
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.
I enjoy Marcus Aurelius paraphrasing Epctetus…
“You are a little soul bearing about a corpse.”
So you’re saying humanity is a mecha space opera?
Yes.
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.
This gets explored a bit in The Talos Principle and it’s sequal. Working on the 2nd one now, it’s been fun
A CPU is just a rock we hit with magic lightning…
And inscribed with runes
Well yes, it’s the lightning that makes the inscription.
Light makes the inscription, lightning runs through it.
Light, gas, CVD and a dozen other processes, depending on the application, make the inscription.
🤔
This is covered pretty well in the Discworld series with the druids.
One more series I need to read…
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.
If that were “all” there was to it we’d have simulated a human brain by now.
Didn’t it take them a long ass time to do this for a fruit fly brain?
Depends on when you start the timer. The fruit fly brain was only completely mapped recently. There’s a simulation of it that runs on a laptop. If that simulation can run on a modern laptop and the map was otherwise available, then it likely could have been done on supercomputers in the decades prior.
I thought they were up to mice now but I might be mistaken.
To simulate a human brain, we would need a complete map of it. We don’t have that yet. If the quantum theories around neurons are correct, then the map would be incomplete without it.
I doubt we could simulate it directly without a very specialized ASIC.
The connectome doesn’t really seem to be so realistic, at smaller scales sure.
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.
Gnosticism, one of the oldest known religions that is thought to be the forefather of all religion, taught about that.
maybe but he’s a skinny guy
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.
Don’t sell yourself short. It’s a salty lump of fat.
There’s a lot of water and ions (IONS!) besides that lump of fat.
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
It’s OK. Consciousness is but a brief anomaly in the vast sea of time.
br-
rrrrr
