The Key to Immortality: Consiousness
  • Frink
    2
    I've always thought that if we truly want to live forever we have to go directly to the source: consciousness aka determine how "the soul" is linked to the body, presumably through the brain. If you understand that, you can plug directly into a supercomputer, or create a robot that contains your mind and can travel the universe going into "sleep mode" for long stretches of the journey. You don't need to worry illnesses and can even fix mental illness, addiction, etc. You could where long states of ultimate bliss. Live in a Virtual Reality where literally anything is possible. Could revolutionize humanity.

    I also happen to have a potentially good idea for how to go about hacking the brain the way you would hack a program to figure out how consciousness works:
    Look at the specific parts of the brain that experience consiousness and make consious decisions and see if you can spot a difference from the parts of the brain that don't.

    Find the differences, and I suspect the next clue toward understanding the core of life itself will be revealed.

    Do you know if any such differences?
    Frink Options
  • khaled
    3.5k
    Look at the specific parts of the brain that experience consiousness and make consious decisions and see if you can spot a difference from the parts of the brain that don't. — Frink

    We’ve been trying for a while. So far it all just seems like meat. Our brains don’t have any special “chemical X”. This is called the hard problem of consciousness btw. It’s basically asking “what are the necessary conditions for consciousness?” We can’t really answer that very well because we have no way to detect consciousness. There is no consciosness-o-meter. I can’t even tell whether my couch is conscious or not, and neither can you. Heck, I can’t tell if you’re conscious or not
    khaled Options
  • Relativist
    2.6k
    also happen to have a potentially good idea for how to go about hacking the brain the way you would hack a program to figure out how consciousness works:
    Look at the specific parts of the brain that experience consiousness and make consious decisions and see if you can spot a difference from the parts of the brain that don't.     — Frink

    There's been quite a lot of neurological research like this. Puzzles remain.

    One thing is clear: memories are in the brain. They disappear from injury and disease. So if you're right that consciousness survives death of the body, it has no memories. Since it has no sensory organs, it can't see or hear either. Sounds scary.
    Relativist Options
  • Pantagruel
    3.4k
    One thing is clear: memories are in the brain. They disappear from injury and disease. So if you're right that consciousness survives death of the body, it has no memories. Since it has no sensory organs, it can't see or hear either. Sounds scary. — Relativist
    Maybe not so clear. Consciousness is a feature of a complex system, not just the human brain, or body, but the entire environment within which consciousness operates. This is a theory known as distributed cognition, or embedded cognition. Studies have been done to quantify this. Additionally, physical systems themselves are 'mnemonic' in that they are current presentations of historical events. Michael Leyton's book 'Symmetry, Causality, and Mind' explores this concept in detail.
    Pantagruel Options
  • Frink
    2
    I agree that memory is likely stored in brain and doesn't stick around after the brain shuts off. Sleep is similarly scary. Though memories can likely be downloaded and saved somewhere.

    Yeah, it is indeed very hard to know if anything else is concious with certainty. I would say that it seems like a safe assumption though to assume other humans are concious, animals too, particularly mammals. It is entirely possible atoms in general are consious but seems less of a safe assumption.

    Regarding the integrated theory.. if you cut out someone's eyes or sever their spinal cord or directly cut out that chunk of the brain, maybe they lose a part of their concious experience but it's not like they stop being consious. There still seems to be some core somewhere there that integrates the rest together.
    Frink Options
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    ↪Frink
    The first thing to know is what one means by "x is immortal". What's this x?
    TheMadFool Options
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