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Topic: What is the cause of self-awareness? (Read 19808 times)
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Death 999
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Or you could read Gödel, Escher, Bach - and Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. That's a fun, if highly difficult, read. After wading through that, you'll look back on this conversation and go 'ah'. Maybe 'aaaaaaaah', even.
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Deus Siddis
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Science and Spirits, an Idiot's Summary:
Science Going Against Spirits:
The Brain with its many nerve cells, chemicals, and complicated structure, is still a very mysterious topic, allowing much of what could be called a "Spirit" or "Soul" to be explained away as the territory of the Brain.
There is no really great documented evidence that a Spirit exists at this point, it is pretty hit and miss. Things like Telepathy probably have a good deal more evidence around them, than does the Spirit issue.
Science Going For Spirits:
Science has many serious theories on things such as dark energy or dark matter, which cannot directly be observed or interacted with, from what little I understand. Only their influence on other things can be measured, supposedly. This is somewhat similar to the concept of a Spirit, in some ways, making it more of a possibility, as these other strange elements of the universe are made more clear or proven to exist (if such a thing is possible.)
If Matter and Energy cannot be destroyed, that also enhances the possibility that there could be somethings else which while changeable, cannot be removed from existance, ever.
So basically, it is an area that science is not even close to answering one way or the other. This will probably be the case for a very long time to come. What you really believe will have to come from what little facts are already out, your personal experience, and your personal intuition or gut on this.
And on a related note, let's say "Spirit" instead of "Soul" because it sounds much cooler and more importantly as a Spirit myself I am used to using the former term. If you don't agree with me on this, you are a self-hating house ghost and the world wants you to die and then live a million lives as an intestinal parasite.
That's a fun, if highly difficult, read. After wading through that, you'll look back on this conversation and go 'ah'. Maybe 'aaaaaaaah', even. Or perhaps even 'Thdok-Bryg-Ahhh'.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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If you're looking for the soul, a new and 'better' kind of matter is not what you're looking for. Dark matter being the soul wouldn't solve anything. It would just push the issue back one more layer. Not an answer. It's in the pattern.
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Deus Siddis
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If something affects something we can measure, the scientific process can be applied to it, experiments, measurements, theory formulation and all. The problem with the self-awareness thing is that we don't know what to measure, and the current hypotheses are a bit sketchy. What you would be looking to measure would probably be somewhere in the brain, or in the whole thing maybe. Either way, I bet that if there was something going on there, it would be at a very small level.
That is unless you want to go ghost hunting or research supposed telekinesis or something crazy, but this is going out onto a limb that you do not need to do and could also prove irrelevant anyhow.
Behaviour seems to rely pretty clearly on purely physical processes, though, but it's not clear whether that's relevant. I am not sure what you mean or if that makes complete sense. It sounds like you are saying that if you have two clone individuals who have been raised in the exact same way, they will always make the same decisions, all the time, absolutely. You still have that weird free will thing where you can just decide to turn around on a whim and do something else.
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Death 999
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We did. You did. Yes we can. No.
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Free will doesn't mean you could turn around and do something else. It is a term for how the choices are made.
Free will and determinism are not at odds. Consider the alternative: instead of your actions being determined by the smooth operation of a computing machine, your mind, they are random. Is a marionette free just because we hooked its strings up to the ultimate RNG? Of course not.
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Pages: 1 [2] 3 4 ... 7
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