I'm literally a thinking lump of fat

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

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

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

consciousness is stored in the balls

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

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.

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.

We are ALL thinking lumps of fat on this blessed day :)

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.

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

There's a lot of water and ions (IONS!) besides that lump of fat.

Don't sell yourself short. It's a salty lump of fat.

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.

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

This gets explored a bit in The Talos Principle and it's sequal. Working on the 2nd one now, it's been fun

No, you're the electrochemical interactions happening inside the lump of fat.

I've never understood why people think the most sophisticated and complex technology humans have ever been aware of is too mundane just because we have scratched the surface of understanding it.

What if life's evolutionary end point is always sentience?

It’s OK. Consciousness is but a brief anomaly in the vast sea of time.

I'm still rooting for Idealism or the immortal soul to somehow be a thing.

Go Banana!

"The material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong is the only reality.... Our consciousness and thinking, however supra-sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is merely the highest product of matter." — Karl Marx

Speak for yourself. I try not to think.

br-

rrrrr

Action potential doesn't do thinking. Thinking happens at neuron junctions and that shits chemical and analogue. The electrical part just moves the data to the next synapse. There are some gap junctions but those aren't really associated with thinking.

If by consciousness, you just mean thinking, then sure.

But if you mean awareness — “phenomena”, if you prefer — then I don’t see why an experiential state would (or could) be entirely secondary to a physical state.

It is, after all, possible for me to write words and perform other physical actions based on my experiential state. In many ways, my mental world is more “real” than the physical world.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think rejecting physicalism necessarily requires embracing the idea of a soul. I’m an atheist, and a neutral monist, for example. But if I had to choose between only physicalism and idealism, idealism makes more sense. Before anything else, I’m conscious.