• Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    You’re an electrified hunk of fat piloting a meat-covered skeleton riding on a damp rock that’s hurling through space and time.

    • saltesc@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I enjoy Marcus Aurelius paraphrasing Epctetus…

      “You are a little soul bearing about a corpse.”

    • kozy138@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      It’s weird that we, as people, think that our being or self ends at our skin. And we’re just a consciousness controlling a meat cube.

      What about all the bacteria living on and inside of us? People would die without their microflora.

      What about our subconscious/unconscious doings/thoughts? Are we in control of them? Or are they in control of us? Could consciousness be an illusion? One created by our senses’ interpretation of external stimuli.

    • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Be fair. You are an abstraction layer; a subsystem running on that electrified hunk of fat. There’s plenty of stuff that evolution has delegated as non-conscious functions of the fatlump.

    • SkidFace@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      “At thе end of the day, your brain is just a meat computеr in a bone cockpit piloting a skin robot You think the world makes sense? Nothing makes sense! So you might as well make nonsense!”

  • theneverfox@pawb.social
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    5 days ago

    I never understood this weird hangup, it’s like people struggling to reconcile free will with deterministic actions to a being outside normal time. Of course you’ll make the same choices if you rewound time and changed nothing… You’re the same, the universe is the same down to the last particle - how does that conflict with the idea of agency?

    Consciousness is an emergent property. One neuron is complex, but 1000 can do things one could never do alone. Why is it so surprising that billions, arranged in complex self organizing structures, would give rise to something more than the sum of its parts?

    Maybe there’s a quantum aspect to it, maybe there’s not… It seems like it’s all based in this idea humans are so extra special that surely there must be special laws of the universe just for us

    • thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      To be honest the thing that confuses me is that I am conscious. That’s weird, how am I aware, there is no explanation of this. Assuming we pretty much understand all physics and science and there isn’t anything surprising around the corner. Consciousness has to be a physical thing, a computation. But that’s weird as hell too? What rule of the universe governs whether or not something is aware. A brain could do everything it does now without being really aware just pretending. And if that’s true does that mean it’s just the flow of information that can become conscious? Could anything become conscious? If I made a marble Rube Goldberg machine complicated it enough and doing the right calculations could it be conscious?? It feels wrong it feels like we are missing something

      • zeca@lemmy.eco.br
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        4 days ago

        This is exactly what puzzles me. Or at least you seem to be talking about what puzzles me. The problem is that when I mention this to others, most missunderstand what I mean by “being aware” or “conscious”, and im not sure its possible to refer to this phenomena in a much better way. But that is exactly the argument i usually make, that an automata could behave exactly like me, following the supposed physical laws, but without being aware, or having any sensation, without seeing the images, hearing the sounds, only processing sensorial data. Processing sensorial data isnt the same as feeling/hearing/seeing it.

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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          19 hours ago

          i disagree with your assumption that an automata could somehow behave exactly like you

          like, that doesn’t make any sense, you can’t know what your actions are without you performing them, we can’t magically step outside of space and time and look at our reality like the pages of a comic book, your actions are per definition unique to your specific configuration of particles. It’s like how two books can be identical but obviously they’re not literally the same book, because they’re in different places in space.

          your line of reasoning feels a lot like all of the paradoxes, it’s a neat thing to think about but ultimately there’s the extremely trivial solution of “well that’s not possible so it’s a nonissue”

        • tomalley8342@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          I believe the academic label for your concern is the mind-body problem, or the hard problem of consciousness which specifically questions the gap in explanation between the physical process and the subjective experience. Going against the grain of the OP picture, this is definitely still firmly within the realms of philosophy, not at all a settled science.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        We absolutely are missing something. Clearly it requires more than just a lot of intelligence, otherwise we’d have seen a computer become sentient by now instead of ChatGPT proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that they absolutely will not be anytime soon.

      • u_u@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 days ago

        Also, I am very interested in the question of, why me? Why am I in charge of this body’s consciousness. How was it decided that of all conscious being that ever and will exists, I am conscious of this world from my point of view, at this point of time.

        This is the only existential question I can’t seem to let go, especially since I am a non-theist. It will be easier to answer if I am a believer, or at least spiritualist.

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        4 days ago

        Consciousness is the AI assistant in meat mecha suit.

        It seems like we make decisions, but we don’t. Think of a decision you’ve made - you think over it, you sleep on it, you imagine outcomes and might decide intellectually - but you don’t lock it in. That just happens - sometimes it even flips at the last second, and you don’t know why you did it - for better or worse

        Our brain does a lot of preprocessing - vision, hearing, balance, walking, language…

        Our conscious minds preprocess time. It turns our senses and our experiences into stories, abstract predictions, laterally pattern matching, and ultimately - analysis and recommendations

    • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      Maybe there’s a quantum aspect to it, maybe there’s not…

      I see what you did there, intentionally or not.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      It seems like it’s all based in this idea humans are so extra special that surely there must be special laws of the universe just for us

      I never got that argument against the soul as it were. What makes you think that these special laws would only exist for humans? Aren’t there plenty of people who believe all things have some kind of soul or spirit? Isn’t that most Eastern Religions and quite a few Western Pagan ones?

  • dankm@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    A CPU is just a rock we hit with magic lightning…

  • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    Calling it a lump of fat is a bit like calling the Milky Way a very sparse field of hydrogen

  • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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    5 days ago

    Sorry Natural Intelligence bros, but meat can’t think. You’ve been duped into thinking human beings are conscious by Big Omega 3. Intelligence can only exist in computers using real electricity. Not that piddly ion pump stuff.

    • Ziglin@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      What about photons, hmmm? They’re used for quantum computing and don’t (technically) need “real electricity”.

      • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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        4 days ago

        Hmm, still a boson particle, the same as electrons. Organic neurons don’t transmit boson particles, they create a fake electromagnetic field by equalising ions in solution. It’s lame and not real intelligence.

        • Ziglin@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Electrons aren’t bosons, they’re fermions. And ions generally do contain electrons unless we’re talking positive hydrogen or negative anti-hydrogen ions. And the EM field isn’t fake (was that part of the joke?).

          Also I was attempting to reference optical quantum computing but light also seems to be useful for classical computing. Thereby adding to your joke not contradicting it.

  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    code “object-request-error”

    msg ‘Invalid status 503 Service Unavailable for Some(“01/93/da/2e/55/b3/75/2a/84/1c/2ee79309c6b9.jpeg”) - {“message”:“failure to get a peer from the ring-balancer”}’

    lmao so true

  • Matriks404@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Depends on what you mean by ‘consciousness’. If you mean the actual biological process that is happening in our brains - yes. If you mean something different, it is probably not a scientific meaning but more a philosophical or religious one, which is ultimately not a bad thing but you should separate this from actual science.

  • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 days ago

    The brain is not a “lump of fat”. If you desiccate the brain, most of what’s left are lipids, yes, but at that point you are not conscious anymore. The brain is a mix of proteins, carbohydrates, water and fat.

    • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      Also fairly sure that electrical impulses alone cannot account for consciousness. If that were “all” there was to it we’d have simulated a human brain by now. There’s a few theories about quantum processes being involved but this isn’t exactly easily proven.

      • anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 days ago

        If that were “all” there was to it we’d have simulated a human brain by now.

        Didn’t it take them a long ass time to do this for a fruit fly brain?

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          5 days ago

          Depends on when you start the timer. The fruit fly brain was only completely mapped recently. There’s a simulation of it that runs on a laptop. If that simulation can run on a modern laptop and the map was otherwise available, then it likely could have been done on supercomputers in the decades prior.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        5 days ago

        To simulate a human brain, we would need a complete map of it. We don’t have that yet. If the quantum theories around neurons are correct, then the map would be incomplete without it.

        I doubt we could simulate it directly without a very specialized ASIC.

        • Wintex@lemm.ee
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          5 days ago

          The connectome doesn’t really seem to be so realistic, at smaller scales sure.

  • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 days ago

    To my knowledge there are interesting quantum-mechanical effects at play as well though. There’s a lot of esoterical nonsense around that of course, however first discoveries pointing into this direction are quite promising.

    I always remember a quote from Alan Watts talking about this topic: “You are the universe experiencing itself”. The idea of consciousness being an emerging property of the universe itself makes most sense to me, and the non-deterministic properties of quantum mechanics open this possibility.

    Definitely more inspiring to think about it this way than just as a lump of fat.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      I can only hope that when this flesh dies, that my consciousness returns to the cosmos and persists free from the limitations of the body.

      • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 days ago

        If it is an emerging property then the sense of “self” is most likely bound to this “lump of fat”; more precisely its inability to have connections to someone else except through physical barriers. the most interesting aspect of this is probably what siamese twins once described who were connected at their head. They said that they could “hear the other one’s thoughts”.

        if we could share our minds with one another it would most likely completely change our understanding of consciousness. Likewise, if something can survive the death of the body (the “emerging property” part) then most likely not as an individual given that part is more of a property of our brains.

        It’s self-evident why esoterical stuff got hooked on these things. The idea of closure on one of the most central religious questions is really appealing.

      • Ziglin@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        That would be preferable to my current existence though I think I still might prefer non-existance in the long term.

  • solsangraal@lemmy.zip
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    5 days ago

    people don’t like this idea because if that’s all we are, then who is anyone to say that the inevitable equivalent man-made lump of fat with electrical activity isn’t entitled to all the same rights and status that we are

    also jeebus doesn’t want you to think you can’t go on getting punished even after you’re dead