Electrons May Well Be Conscious

Re:Electrons May Well Be Conscious by dTal on Monday May 18, 2020 @05:42AM (#23220323)

Is consciousness is not emergent from something - not "fully explainable in some mechanistic way" - what type of explanation for it would satisfy you? If you're not willing to brook the idea of breaking it into smaller components, then you've abdicated understanding it all - it's just an ineffable feature of the universe we'll have to live with, some shadow of the spirit world that has zero effect on any physics calculation. That seems weird to me, and lazy to boot.

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Re:Electrons May Well Be Conscious by pontus on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:25AM (#23222659)

I don't know, that's the problem :)

Btw, I would imagine that our experience of consciousness is emergent from something else, but the question is what that something else is. Is it nothing more than mass, charge etc. or is it something else?

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Re:Electrons May Well Be Conscious by visarga on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:52AM (#23223065)

> Is it nothing more than mass, charge etc. or is it something else?

It's more like chairs, beds, phones, cars and people. Consciousness is emergent from the environment. We learn to interpret visual stimulus by seeing, we learn to interpret sound by hearing, we learn how to relate to the world by being in the world and having consequences to our actions. Our brains grow on the rich sensations they receive from the body, world and the other people. Looking for the mystery of consciousness inside the brain is a mistake, we should look at the whole game instead. The brain is just doing the learning and acting part, but the game is much more.

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