7 ms·

>With sufficiently good tweezers and a lot of patience you could reassemble a human being into a bicycle of comparable mass; and vice versa. Considering that t

>With sufficiently good tweezers and a lot of patience you could reassemble a human being into a bicycle of comparable mass; and vice versa. Considering that there is no material distinction between a living person and a dead body, I would say that this view is perhaps overly reductive. The matter of the body is essential, but not sufficient; life is fundamentally a process driven by autopoietic processes, which you would need to initiate in order to have anything meaningful. Being is uninteresting without becoming, state without change is just dead.

goldenkey 5y ago
> Considering that there is no material distinction between a living person and a dead body When someone dies, information is lost. With cell death comes loss of structure. Unless we can use their existing DNA to repair the damage, the person will remain dead. And even if revived, their brain's memories might still have been severely compromised. Especially if, like what you hint at, the process of electricity flowing in the brain is the actual memory itself, an ongoing process. It's certainly possible that if the process is halted, the memory is lost. Just like DRAM. At the moment it's pretty much a mystery. But I agree, OP assumes a lot about structure over process. Zen says everything is a function, not an object. And by nesting functions, we get everything... Memory and consciousness really have no reason to be entirely structural. A lot of things actually don't. Our old computer memory technology was actually just delay line memory. Perhaps our brain works in a similar way to some extent. The universe itself, in most respects, is made out of stable processes that we abstract as objects. An atom is really just a process of energy flowing in a specific way through space over time, repetitively. Upset the process and you get a nuclear explosion which most of us would consider an event or process...not an object. So was the energy of the atom ever really an object in the first place? No, it was like a candle flame. Constantly kindling itself, of different oxygen and fuel from moment to moment. Yet we gave it a name and an identity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Yes I totally agree. My perspective comes from a mix of zen and systems/cybernetics; matter and other temporarily stable configurations like life are stable attractors in the state of energy flow. So the fundamental essence of reality is energy, rather than matter. The difference been transient energy like "events" and static-appearing things like matter is that the latter is constantly maintaining itself in a feedback loop. Believing it to be matter is a mistake, and one that leads you to misleading metaphysical beliefs like the idea in the article above, or that all qualities can be reduced to quantities, or all things can be understood by looking at the pieces that it is made of. It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    > It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics. Indeed. Even the stationary solutions to Schrodinger's equation, which correspond to unchanging states, involve constantly revolving real and complex parts that balance eachother out to keep the amplitude squared at a constant. The idea of an object and a lego universe is really the west's biggest folly. I recommend this movie to anyone looking to shake up their perspective: http://www.digitalphysicsmovie.com/ http://www.digitalphysicsmovie.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary_state
  - namero999 5y ago
    > It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics. Well put. This boggles my mind too. It also seems to me that it should be evident that ultimately, either we rely on infinite regression (essentially explaining nothing) or at a certain point we pick an ontological primitive that we don't explain. And that our choice should be informed by how much of the known world can be explained in terms of such a primitive. I can't fathom what would lead anyone to choose matter for that purpose, and at the same time it seems like the mainstream, unquestioned choice.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
52-6F-62 5y ago
I enjoyed reading your other comments maybe out of implicit bias, and this is tangential maybe, but just the same I'm curious about what you make of Nima Arkani-Hamed's recent work—namely amplituhedrons—in this larger context.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  it's way beyond me; my grasp of quantum mechanics is at a slightly-beyond-pop level. My road into the systems memeplex was from trying to understand my own intuitions about software engineering and wicked problems in the social space. From there it's been mostly philosophy with a little bit of maths.

goldenkey 5y ago

> Considering that there is no material distinction between a living person and a dead body When someone dies, information is lost. With cell death comes loss of structure. Unless we can use their existing DNA to repair the damage, the person will remain dead. And even if revived, their brain's memories might still have been severely compromised. Especially if, like what you hint at, the process of electricity flowing in the brain is the actual memory itself, an ongoing process. It's certainly possible that if the process is halted, the memory is lost. Just like DRAM. At the moment it's pretty much a mystery. But I agree, OP assumes a lot about structure over process. Zen says everything is a function, not an object. And by nesting functions, we get everything... Memory and consciousness really have no reason to be entirely structural. A lot of things actually don't. Our old computer memory technology was actually just delay line memory. Perhaps our brain works in a similar way to some extent. The universe itself, in most respects, is made out of stable processes that we abstract as objects. An atom is really just a process of energy flowing in a specific way through space over time, repetitively. Upset the process and you get a nuclear explosion which most of us would consider an event or process...not an object. So was the energy of the atom ever really an object in the first place? No, it was like a candle flame. Constantly kindling itself, of different oxygen and fuel from moment to moment. Yet we gave it a name and an identity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory

beaconstudios 5y ago
Yes I totally agree. My perspective comes from a mix of zen and systems/cybernetics; matter and other temporarily stable configurations like life are stable attractors in the state of energy flow. So the fundamental essence of reality is energy, rather than matter. The difference been transient energy like "events" and static-appearing things like matter is that the latter is constantly maintaining itself in a feedback loop. Believing it to be matter is a mistake, and one that leads you to misleading metaphysical beliefs like the idea in the article above, or that all qualities can be reduced to quantities, or all things can be understood by looking at the pieces that it is made of. It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  > It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics. Indeed. Even the stationary solutions to Schrodinger's equation, which correspond to unchanging states, involve constantly revolving real and complex parts that balance eachother out to keep the amplitude squared at a constant. The idea of an object and a lego universe is really the west's biggest folly. I recommend this movie to anyone looking to shake up their perspective: http://www.digitalphysicsmovie.com/ http://www.digitalphysicsmovie.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary_state
- namero999 5y ago
  > It's strange to me that materialism is still such a popular belief amongst people who consider themselves rational, because even the origin point of that belief (the atomistic view of physics) fell apart at the hands of quantum mechanics. Well put. This boggles my mind too. It also seems to me that it should be evident that ultimately, either we rely on infinite regression (essentially explaining nothing) or at a certain point we pick an ontological primitive that we don't explain. And that our choice should be informed by how much of the known world can be explained in terms of such a primitive. I can't fathom what would lead anyone to choose matter for that purpose, and at the same time it seems like the mainstream, unquestioned choice.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

52-6F-62 5y ago

I enjoyed reading your other comments maybe out of implicit bias, and this is tangential maybe, but just the same I'm curious about what you make of Nima Arkani-Hamed's recent work—namely amplituhedrons—in this larger context.

beaconstudios 5y ago
it's way beyond me; my grasp of quantum mechanics is at a slightly-beyond-pop level. My road into the systems memeplex was from trying to understand my own intuitions about software engineering and wicked problems in the social space. From there it's been mostly philosophy with a little bit of maths.