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Mystery of the consciousness
March 28, 2014 at 1:19 pm
Civilization is building space ships. Airplanes. Computers. Researching quantum physics. Soon we will have quantum computers etc.
Yet nobody knows shit about consciousness.
Ed Witten says consciousness will remain a mystery.
I watched the "Moving Naturalism Forward" event and apparently naturalists are having extremely hard time with it.
When will consciousness be figured out? Kind of funny that figuring out our own minds is the most difficult thing in the world.
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RE: Mystery of the consciousness
March 28, 2014 at 1:28 pm
It goes to question, "Does the mind move the body, or is it the body moving the mind?"
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RE: Mystery of the consciousness
March 28, 2014 at 1:40 pm
My hunch consciousness was both a biological and quantum event. Possibly when the right set of neurons, combined with the electrical impulses, chemical soup caused something on the atomic scale that changed the whole make up of the brain allowing it to expand into the strange intangible reaches. But that is just a crazy guess....lol I am no neurologist so take that with a grain of salt if that.
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I would be a televangelist....but I have too much of a soul.
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RE: Mystery of the consciousness
March 28, 2014 at 3:50 pm
(March 28, 2014 at 1:19 pm)tor Wrote: Civilization is building space ships. Airplanes. Computers. Researching quantum physics. Soon we will have quantum computers etc.
Yet nobody knows shit about consciousness.
Ed Witten says consciousness will remain a mystery.
I watched the "Moving Naturalism Forward" event and apparently naturalists are having extremely hard time with it.
When will consciousness be figured out? Kind of funny that figuring out our own minds is the most difficult thing in the world.
A good read on what consciousness might be is
The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett.
It is a basic primer on emergence, among other things.
One of the next books on my list is
Consciousness Explained by Dennett.
Skepticism is not a position; it is an approach to claims.
Science is not a subject, but a method.
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RE: Mystery of the consciousness
March 28, 2014 at 6:20 pm
Well, there are two issues here. The first is how does the CONTENT of the mind form, i.e. what brain chemistry or structures result in various experience. I really don't think it can be possible to fully enumerate a brain state-- instead, we'll have to resort to statistical models and conceptual shortcuts. But in doing this, are we rounding out the butterfly from the butterfly effect?
The second issue is one of the existence of mind. It seems unlikely that any understanding of HOW mind works will be able to explain to physical monists WHY mind exists in any physical system. Why does the processing of light and sound and the outputting of behaviors require sentience? That's always going to be a philosophical question, IMO.
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RE: Mystery of the consciousness
March 28, 2014 at 6:39 pm
Consciousness has always perplexed me. I'm composed of a bunch of particles, with no life of their own, but formed in this particular way, I am self-aware. Why am I, whatever that is, looking out of these eyes and feeling what happens to this body but not yours?
Everything I needed to know about life I learned on Dagobah.
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