3 ms·

There is nothing religiously fanatical about seeing that everything in science appears to be explained by our laws of physics, and concluding that human conscio

by Thiez 2y ago

There is nothing religiously fanatical about seeing that everything in science appears to be explained by our laws of physics, and concluding that human consciousness probably is, too. In our history we've seen time and time again that humans will believe in magic and higher powers and every single time it's turned out to be just physics, just biology, just chemistry... And here we have something mysterious and poorly understood (and poorly defined...): consciousness. And again as always the quacks line up with their magic to explain it all. Higher dimensions! Quantum effects! We're all in the matrix and only our minds are real! Even though we can clearly see that so many mental processes can be influenced with drugs, with hormones, with magnetic fields, or with a scalpel. Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon.

strogonoff 2y ago
> In our history we've seen time and time again that humans will believe in magic and higher powers Indeed; and these days in tech circles it is the magic of atoms (or strings, or whatever entities you like). The fact that physics by design makes no claims about objective existence of anything does not stop them from thinking that somehow all those entities (which are merely metaphors, ways to create models that are legible to our minds) must exist in some fundamentally objective sense; neither does the fact that we cannot directly access them other than via consciousness, or that the entire idea of empirical observation hinges on the existence of the observer. > Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon. It had been explained [away] already—since you appear to hold physicalism, you may also like illusionist theories of consciousness.

3 ms·

There is nothing religiously fanatical about seeing that everything in science appears to be explained by our laws of physics, and concluding that human conscio

by Thiez 2y ago

strogonoff 2y ago
> In our history we've seen time and time again that humans will believe in magic and higher powers Indeed; and these days in tech circles it is the magic of atoms (or strings, or whatever entities you like). The fact that physics by design makes no claims about objective existence of anything does not stop them from thinking that somehow all those entities (which are merely metaphors, ways to create models that are legible to our minds) must exist in some fundamentally objective sense; neither does the fact that we cannot directly access them other than via consciousness, or that the entire idea of empirical observation hinges on the existence of the observer. > Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon. It had been explained [away] already—since you appear to hold physicalism, you may also like illusionist theories of consciousness.