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“ This was the very question that consumed Arnold, filled him with guilt, eventually drove him mad. The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshol
by willis936 7y ago
“ This was the very question that consumed Arnold, filled him with guilt, eventually drove him mad. The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do.”
- Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins)
- mooseburger 7y agoIt's conflating conscious awareness with the existence or non-existence of free will. It's conscious awareness that is the ineffable mystery, unless you believe the chair you're sitting on actually feels you sitting on it. I mean, it has to if you believe the mind is nothing but atoms, because the chair is also nothing but atoms. There isn't such a thing as emergent properties, or neurons, those are just models we use to understand bunches of atoms.
- c22 7y agoIn the same way I accept that I can eat some leaves, but not rocks, that mercury is a liquid at room temperature while steel is a solid, and that the latter can be configured into a car I can drive around in, I accept that some collections of atoms may posess the property of awareness without necessitating that all do.
- mooseburger 7y agoThe brain, like the objects you described, poses no mystery to physics. There isn't anything about the atoms in the brain that suggests there would be consciousness, or indeed, anything in physics that predicts consciousness arising, the way that the properties of any other macro object can be understood in terms of physics.