If you exclude supernatural explanations (souls and the like) then you see that humans are nothing more than date processing, self duplicating biological machines. — khaled
Do people that think this believe that consciousness is inherent in carbon atoms but not silicon? If so are hunks of coal conscious? Can anyone please explain logically why B, C and D are true or not? — khaled
To assume that these biological machines are conscious whereas mechanical ones are not seems downright unreasonable to me. — khaled
THIS assortment of molecules — khaled
If you exclude supernatural explanations.... — khaled
I would suggest that we generally don’t understand what ‘supernatural’ refers to, other than in the sense determined by social custom and tradition. But that we longer have adequate metaphors for conceptualising such ideas, so the metaphor of ‘mechanism’ prevails. But it’s only a metaphor; beings are not literally devices or machines; you’re actually running up against the inherent limitations of that metaphor, i.e. you can sense that it’s inadequate, but you can’t see an alternative. — Wayfarer
Part of the problem in the OP comes from taking a reductive approach to life - saying that describing the atoms that make up a living organism is exhaustive — andrewk
↪Shamshir that's more what I'm thinking but most people would laugh at conscious rocks. — khaled
We know from a lot of evidence that consciousness is a property of our brains. — Terrapin Station
It doesn't follow that all subjective experiences are dependent on a functioning brain, for example. A rock's experiences are presumably similarly correlated with its own internal processes. We have not discovered what it is about brains that entails that only brains can have experiences, and nothing else can. — bert1
We know from a lot of evidence that consciousness is a property of our brains. It's some combination of the exact materials, the structure they're in (the relations of the materials), and the way our brains function (processes of/in our brains, changing relations in other words). — Terrapin Station
Sure, once you build up a big enough database then you can infer meaning from the data, but what is the nature of 'that which infers meaning'? — Wayfarer
Good article about the 'me,' the 'self,' self awareness, and consciousness. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23931940-100-the-me-illusion-how-your-brain-conjures-up-your-sense-of-self/ — julian kroin
Brains are made of different materials than rocks, and that is one good reason why rocks don't "experience" consciousness relative to brains. Brains are composed of particular materials interacting in particular ways relative to other stuff in the universe. And we only discover consciousness at the locations where brains are present. — numberjohnny5
Other sorts of examples include people ingesting substances that have effects on their consciousness or thinking, brain injuries having effects on the same, etc. — Terrapin Station
What I'm struggling with is what you can conclude from these, other than such and such experience in humans is dependent on such and such brain function in humans. — bert1
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