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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
honestly I never got this. Same with the simulation thing. What’s it matter if we’re in a simulation or all I ever do is the result of some salty fat firing off neurons? I mean what am I going to do about that?
people used to get burnt at the stake for this shit. and dont’ forget how butthurt people got over the suggestion that –gasp– the earth isn’t the center of the universe
I’m aware it’s controversial, I just genuinely do not get why you would care.
because when you have deeply entrenched religious indoctrination, ideas about the world, life, and reality that don’t mesh with your “god” are literally personal attacks on your very identity.
some people care about this shit more than they care about anything else. you should get rid of the assumption that things need to make sense to these people
you should get rid of the assumption that things need to make sense to these people
trust me I don’t but especially if I pick up the simulation thing that also seems to concern a lot of people who aren’t religious. I mean I get the religious people, it’s in direct affront to the axioms you structure your entire shit around. That makes sense to me, even if I don’t share the axioms.
the simulation thing implies we don’t have “free will” or that we don’t have control over our life (which we don’t anyway), and that scares people half to death. so, classic denial
This gets explored a bit in The Talos Principle and it’s sequal. Working on the 2nd one now, it’s been fun
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.
That would be preferable to my current existence though I think I still might prefer non-existance in the long term.
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.
You’re an electrified hunk of fat piloting a meat-covered skeleton riding on a damp rock that’s hurling through space and time.
“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!”
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.
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
It’s actually a lump of lava with a thin crust. Any time the crust breaks we have a very bad time.
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
Obligatory “um, akhtually, it’s magma”.
I enjoy Marcus Aurelius paraphrasing Epctetus…
“You are a little soul bearing about a corpse.”
And I want off.
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
I’M NOT FAT I’M JUST BIG BRAINED!!
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.
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.
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
Depends on what you mean by ‘consciousness’. If you mean the actual biological process that is happening in our brains - yes. If you mean something different, it is probably not a scientific meaning but more a philosophical or religious one, which is ultimately not a bad thing but you should separate this from actual science.
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.
We are ALL thinking lumps of fat on this blessed day :)
Calling it a lump of fat is a bit like calling the Milky Way a very sparse field of hydrogen
That’s true tho
It’s accurate, but not precise.
Right, but it doesn’t capture the whole story, namely that it’s arranged in a very particular way
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”.
Hmm, still a boson particle, the same as electrons. Organic neurons don’t transmit boson particles, they create a fake electromagnetic field by equalising ions in solution. It’s lame and not real intelligence.
Electrons aren’t bosons, they’re fermions. And ions generally do contain electrons unless we’re talking positive hydrogen or negative anti-hydrogen ions. And the EM field isn’t fake (was that part of the joke?).
Also I was attempting to reference optical quantum computing but light also seems to be useful for classical computing. Thereby adding to your joke not contradicting it.
Drag was attempting to continue the joke too
Don’t sell yourself short. It’s a salty lump of fat.
Who said I’m salty, jerk?
A CPU is just a rock we hit with magic lightning…
This is covered pretty well in the Discworld series with the druids.
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
🤔
There’s a lot of water and ions (IONS!) besides that limp of fat.
No, you’re the electrochemical interactions happening inside the lump of fat.
