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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
So you’re saying humanity is a mecha space opera?
Yes.
And I want off.
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.
Username checks out
one guy with REALLY steady hands and the tiniest chisel you’ll ever see
🤔
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
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?
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.
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.
Mostly water, in that case
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.
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.
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.
All I know is that if it all ends at death, then I should never have been born.
Depends upon what you mean by “consciousness.” A lot of the literature seems to use “consciousness” just to refer to physical reality as it exists from a particular perspective, for some reason. For example, one popular definition is “what it is like to be in a particular perspective.” The term “to be” refers to, well, being, which refers to, well, reality. So we are just talking about reality as it actually exists from a particular perspective, as opposed to mere description of reality from that perspective. (The description of a thing is always categorically different from the ontology of the thing.)
I find it bizarre to call this “consciousness,” but words are words. You can define them however you wish. If we define “consciousness” in this sense, as many philosophers do, then it does not make logical sense to speak of your “consciousness” doing anything at all after you die, as your “consciousness” would just be defined as reality as it actually exists from your perspective. Perspectives always implicitly entail a physical object that is at the basis of that perspective, akin to the zero-point of a coordinate system, which in this case that object is you.
If you cease to exist, then your perspective ceases to even be defined. The concept of “your perspective” would no longer even be meaningful. It would be kind of like if a navigator kept telling you to go “more north” until eventually you reach the north pole, and then they tell you to go “more north” yet again. You’d be confused, because “more north” does not even make sense anymore at the north pole. The term ceases to be meaningfully applicable. If consciousness is defined as being from a particular perspective (as many philosophers in the literature define it), then by logical necessity the term ceases to be meaningful after the object that is the basis of that perspective ceases to exist. It neither exists nor ceases to exist, but no longer is even well-defined.
But, like I said, I’m not a fan of defining “consciousness” in this way, albeit it is popular to do so in the literature. My criticism of the “what it is like to be” definition is mainly that most people tend to associate “consciousness” with mammalian brains, yet the definition is so broad that there is no logical reason as to why it should not be applicable to even a single fundamental particle.
I am too stupid to understand what you just said.
Gnosticism, one of the oldest known religions that is thought to be the forefather of all religion, taught about that.
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?
We are ALL thinking lumps of fat on this blessed day :)
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.
No, you’re the electrochemical interactions happening inside the lump of fat.
code “object-request-error”
msg ‘Invalid status 503 Service Unavailable for Some(“01/93/da/2e/55/b3/75/2a/84/1c/2ee79309c6b9.jpeg”) - {“message”:“failure to get a peer from the ring-balancer”}’
lmao so true
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.
It’s OK. Consciousness is but a brief anomaly in the vast sea of time.
