A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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.
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.
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.
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
I enjoy Marcus Aurelius paraphrasing Epctetus...
"You are a little soul bearing about a corpse."
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.
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.
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...
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
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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
There's a lot of water and ions (IONS!) besides that lump of fat.
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.
It’s OK. Consciousness is but a brief anomaly in the vast sea of time.
br-
rrrrr