Re:Consciousness as a State of Matter (2015)
by andai on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @04:01PM
(#19039432)
Would you then agree that the interactions that burn stars also produce a form of consciousness?
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Re:Consciousness as a State of Matter (2015)
by sandov on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @04:14PM
(#19039566)
Yes, Consciousness is the result of the fundamental laws of the universe.
It's also an abstraction, a way to understand complex arrangements of matter, in the same way that a table is an abstraction: the matter in a table isn't made of table molecules, it's just that the way in which those molecules are arranged and stuck together makes them a table.
Re:Consciousness as a State of Matter (2015)
by nbulka on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @05:01PM
(#19040048)
Could those stars then potentially have thoughts or actions?
Re:Consciousness as a State of Matter (2015)
by incompatible on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @05:43PM
(#19040392)
It doesn't seem likely to me, since they aren't the kinds of physical processes that generate thoughts, so far as we understand it. The idea that composite objects like tables don't actually exist is called mereological nihilism.