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What says our consciousness is not just a long form electro-chemical reaction of deeply nested feedback loops programmed into millions of base pairs?
by Razengan 5y ago
What says our consciousness is not just a long form electro-chemical reaction of deeply nested feedback loops programmed into millions of base pairs?
- nefitty 5y agoIt is, and it's a very immersive and persistent illusion.
- jcims 5y agoAFAIK that’s the only explanation we have any evidence for at this point. It’s easy for me to think there’s magic buried in the hundred billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses in the human brain. But in the case of tardigrades or wasps, it becomes much less obvious where the consciousness would ‘live’ with such limited real estate.
- kaba0 5y agoA wasp is at least an order of magnitude more complex than a tardigrade though (maybe even two orders?), and flying require quite complex intelligence so I would not put some for of consciousness for wasps. Though I would believe that their “brains” are entirely different from mammal brains, because to be honest, some mammals are really really dumb (and for a long time they were believed to be only “biological robots”?).
- Emma_Goldman 5y agoThe basis for believing this is the inference that because the physical world insofar as we have knowledge of it obeys physicalist principles, so must the human mind. But we can't really claim to know based on our investigation of the mind itself. If we entertain theories of consciousness like dualism, monism or emergentism, it seems unlikely that we have the categories of understanding and analysis to decisively confirm or deny them.