RE: Free will & the Conservation Laws
February 28, 2016 at 9:55 pm
(This post was last modified: February 28, 2016 at 10:00 pm by Jehanne.)
(February 28, 2016 at 8:47 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(February 28, 2016 at 4:56 pm)Jehanne Wrote: The brain is irreducibly complex in that it is much more than 0s & 1s; after all, has anyone simulated a human or mammalian brain? The answer, of course, is, "Yes," but such have all been very poor to poor simulations. So far, consciousness exists only in brains and not in computers, and in my opinion, computers will never have consciousness. For one, most of the human brain is fat, or myelin, which acts as an insulator but also as a messenger, but, I am not expert. So, whatever makes up consciousness is likely to be found in wetware and not inorganic materials, which make-up computers.
But that's nothing to do with irreducible complexity. The term means that, if you have a system with multiple parts, removing any of those parts renders the whole system inoperable. In other words, you cannot reduce the complexity of the system without destroying it. Lots of people have lost bits of their brain (including your Humble Narrator) and are able to function as if nothing were missing. In some cases, brains have been observed to reroute functions to other parts of the brain to compensate for the missing bits.
Boru
And, it's a poor choice of words on my part:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity
Consciousness is "irreducible" in the sense that there is no TOE ("theory of everything") that is going to explain it, and it is also something that is very "complex". I should not, however, use the two terms together!
P.S. "Irreducible and complex" would be more true to what I was trying to convey.