I was sitting on the can, thinking. (that's really all there is to do there) I remember hearing a while ago that some scientists somewhere managed to teleport a few light particles. It isn't a teleportation in a normal sense, since the light particles were [B]technically[/B] destroyed, and then identical copies were re-created on the other side. It [B]was[/B] teleportation, but the thing on the other side can't necessarily be said to be the exact same thing because there was [I]no actual link[/I] between were it teleported and where it came out; even though it [B]was[/B] actually teleported. I obviously don't know the technicals of it because I am not a quantum physicist. At any rate, "In theory" say you could teleport an entire person; keep that in mind for the later portion of this ramble.
Now.. in your own consciousness, you feel (though you may not interpret this way) that you are an entity of consciousness that inhabits a being or body. If you die, your "entity" stops and then there is nothing, no existence of "you" whatsoever. We don't actually know what happens when you die, because nobody has ever come back from true death.
Now, back to the teleportation. If you were to teleport yourself, much the same way those light particles were teleported, you couldn't possibly exist in the same "entity consciousness" in the new "copy" even though the body on the opposite end is itself the [I]exact[/I] same thing that came in. There is no way you yourself as an "entity of consciousness" could go with your body to the other side, as your consciousness cannot be interpreted in matter (unless answer B is true). Even though you were technically teleported, the thing on the other side is essentially new, because there is [I]no physical link[/I] between where you went in, and where you came out. The body on the other side would think, act, and look exactly as you do, but what "entity of consciousness" would be in that body? Since it cannot be the same consciousness that you embody. This is where my brain stops working, would a new "entity of conciousness" identical to you suddenly form in that body?
This poser only offers two possible answers:
A) There is only ONE "force of consciousness" in the universe. And since I thought of it and I'm writing this, that would make it me. If that was true, I would be the only truly conscious being and everything else around me (including you people) is no more real than stage props in a play; that act as I would and acknowledge themselves as conscious beings, because that's what a conscious being would do.. I don't like that solution, because that is a [I]really[/I] scary thought.
B) There is no such thing as consciousness. Your interpretation of "you" is nothing but an elaborate illusion created by your brain. therefore, you have no consciousness, you are simply acting exactly as your brain is programmed to, you are at par with creatures that also have no "consciousness" (as we interpret it), like jellyfish, ants, bees, etc. You simply act as your brain is supposed to act, our brains just do it in a more elegant form. If B is true, that means you actually have no free will, everything is as linear as:
Point A --------------to------------- Point B
Because all your thoughts and actions are just the produce of some electrical signals that your brain evolved to make.
Also:
C) The standard "it was GAWD."
I know A sounds really kooky and impossible, but when you compare it to all the totally bizarre unexplainable phenomenons in the universe, it's really not all that impossible. I choose to believe the "Many-worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics, because it simply makes the most sense out of any explanation out there as to how the universe works. I feel sorta crazy for believing in that, but anything else is grossly oversimplified, or just uninformed or un-thought-out. I've thought this stuff out before, just never written it down. Don't get me wrong, B is also very likely to be true, it just seems sort of bleak.
To think I thought this all up while sitting on the can :v:
You can post now. :3:
I occasionally think about that kind of stuff. I try not to think about it, because I just keep thinking about the same thing otherwise.
[QUOTE=helpiminabox;17722229]I occasionally think about that kind of stuff. I try not to think about it, because I just keep thinking about the same thing otherwise.[/QUOTE]
Really, only time will tell anyways. You pretty much end up in a rut when you think to hard about it.
I always had the thought that what if what I'm seeing, other people see differently. That colors, textures, light that went through my eyes were unique. Of course now it's total ludicrous, but it was a sort of mind fuck.
[QUOTE=Wakka V2;17722244]I always had the thought that what if what I'm seeing, other people see differently. That colors, textures, light that went through my eyes were unique. Of course now it's total ludicrous, but it was a sort of mind fuck.[/QUOTE]
That's probably not the case, but if it was, there'd be no way to tell.
Describe the color "red" to me ;)
Sounds somewhat valid.
Ah, the can. My most trusted throne of thought. And alliteration.
Consider that the human mind is generally accepted to be, quite simply, the interaction of different electrical currents. Consider that conciousness is formed through these currents; hence, when we are asleep, we are no longer concious - our brains are at rest and only running on the bare minimum. Consider that the dreams we experience are not logical in either structure or content.
We can safely assume that they are formed from some sort of background electricity or surplus 'reserve energy' unused by our bodies as they heal and re-energise at night.
I'd have to say that, if you could record the structure of a person or object and rebuild them at point B, the same should be true for the brain and the electrical currents it carries the instant before teleportation. So yes, in a sense, 'you' would be dead, but a new 'you' would be created, exactly identical in every single way (apart from location).
Yay speculation!
What about the bit representations of "you" and other data stored in the brain being read? What is reading the data? (also, if data reads itself, it only creates more data; a computer reading data would therefore be creating data; the user reads the data)
Next time you're on the toilet, just read a magazine.
Your life is already set. The brain reacts as it is supposed to. It takes in information and apply that information to the situation you are in. How you act is always based on what has been said and what you have learned about that, who you talk with and who said it and how you have learned to behave with them, how the surrounding is and what you know about it and learned how to behave in it.
Every choice is already decided, you just got to chose what you want to be decided. You can not blame this for not doing anything as you set your already set future. You chose without having a choice.
So yeah B.
Also if we have some sort of soul or something it is a seperate being sharing your experience and venturing off when you die keeping all your memories, but not actually being you as it did only observe and consume.
[QUOTE=dgg;17722403]Your life is already set. The brain reacts as it is supposed to. It takes in information and apply that information to the situation you are in. How you act is always based on what has been said and what you have learned about that, who you talk with and who said it and how you have learned to behave with them, how the surrounding is and what you know about it and learned how to behave in it.
Every choice is already decided, you just got to chose what you want to be decided. You can not blame this for not doing anything as you set your already set future. You chose without having a choice.[/QUOTE]
what the fuck are you smoking?
looks like you are [i] conscious about consciousness [/i]
[img]http://scottkenemore.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/zombie-austin-powers.jpg[/img]
[highlight](User was banned for this post ("Memeshit" - mm3guy))[/highlight]
[QUOTE=JerryK;17722408]what the fuck are you smoking?[/QUOTE]
Nothing. Your consciousness is your brain. Your brain is you. It is where you access all information and it is where all decisions are made. Decisions are based up on experience.
Experience about where you are and how you have been taught to act there (home versus school).
Experience with persons and how you behave with them (parents versus friends)
Experience in intelligence, both stuff like walking to how to solve an equation and who Caesar was. (What CAN you say? And how have you learned to say it?)
These are all factors deciding what you are going to say, and that is it.
Take the question "What did you do today"
Have mom ask you that at home. You may say "Nothing special really".
Have mom ask you that at a museum "Not much, but we did talk a bit about this guy here, Munch"
Have your friends ask you that at school "A lot of ridicilous shit, I totally scored with Jenny today and we all did a prank on the teacher"
Have your friends ask you that at home "Totally scored with Jenny today, did this hilarous prank on our teacher and do you believe it? I managed to learn how to play "One" properly now, I can show you, hold on"
Have a stranger ask you that in a dark alley "What? Why do you ask me that? What do you want?!"
Have a stranger ask you that in a park on a bench "Heh... Took a peek at the sky and the lovely colours of those roses over there, would have made for a nice photo".
Everything you say and do is based on experience harvested (and instincts that are ancient form of experience that is equal for all animals of that species put into the brain in order to manage to live and harvest experience) throughout your life. And since this applies to every living being you could with some super impossible computer look at the future if you have the information in EVERY living being that has existed on earth and knowledge about everything on earth in general and how it has moved (grass and junk for example) and can feed in all this information into the computer you may calculate how time will proceed.
You will obviously need to take in account the universe too since we can see it and it can affect us, like meteors.
Answer B is a step away from determinism. Determinism is essentially a philosophy that says that each particle of matter, each atom has it's own trajectory and it moves in a set direction and speed. Which means that every event is pre-determined, and if someone built a machine that could keep track of every single particle in the Universe we would know the future beyond any doubt.
That's my best explanation of it, if you want to read any more about it: [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism[/url]
[quote]Causal (or nomological) determinism is the thesis that future events are necessitated by past and present events combined with the laws of nature. Such determinism is sometimes illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's demon. Imagine an entity that knows all facts about the past and the present, and knows all natural laws that govern the universe. Such an entity might be able to use this knowledge to foresee the future, down to the smallest detail.[7] Simon-Pierre Laplace's determinist "dogma" (as described by Stephen Hawking) is generally referred to as "scientific determinism" and predicated on the supposition that all events have a cause and effect and the precise combination of events at a particular time engender a particular outcome.[8] This causal determinism has a direct relationship with predictability. Perfect predictability implies strict determinism, but lack of predictability does not necessarily imply lack of determinism. Limitations on predictability could alternatively be caused by factors such as a lack of information or excessive complexity. An example of this could be found by looking at a bomb dropping from the air. Through mathematics, we can predict the time the bomb will take to reach the ground, and we also know what will happen once the bomb explodes. Any small errors in prediction might arise from our not measuring some factors, such as puffs of wind or variations in air temperature along the bomb's path.[/quote]
Philosophy is some weird(but interesting) shit.
I find determinism depressing. Because it determines that we wonder about determinism. Or anything else.
This post would have already been predetermined.
:smith:
In short, you're explaining how we are no more than a series of complex chemical reactions.
The hard part to understand is actually being the "consciousness."
Why do I feel this? why is there a ME? How can a chemical reaction have thoughts and feelings?
The sheer complexity of the brain is insane. If you look at things from an atomic point of view, we are giant fucking blobs of structures of atoms. Even a simple airsoft BB has a complex chemical structure made of trillions of atoms.
After glancing over the posts, I feel bad about pointing out the spelling mistake in the title.
I guess the OP wasn't conscious of it.
[QUOTE=dgg;17722459]Nothing. Your consciousness is your brain. Your brain is you. It is where you access all information and it is where all decisions are made. Decisions are based up on experience.
Experience about where you are and how you have been taught to act there (home versus school).
Experience with persons and how you behave with them (parents versus friends)
Experience in intelligence, both stuff like walking to how to solve an equation and who Caesar was. (What CAN you say? And how have you learned to say it?)
These are all factors deciding what you are going to say, and that is it.
Take the question "What did you do today"
Have mom ask you that at home. You may say "Nothing special really".
Have mom ask you that at a museum "Not much, but we did talk a bit about this guy here, Munch"
Have your friends ask you that at school "A lot of ridicilous shit, I totally scored with Jenny today and we all did a prank on the teacher"
Have your friends ask you that at home "Totally scored with Jenny today, did this hilarous prank on our teacher and do you believe it? I managed to learn how to play "One" properly now, I can show you, hold on"
Have a stranger ask you that in a dark alley "What? Why do you ask me that? What do you want?!"
Have a stranger ask you that in a park on a bench "Heh... Took a peek at the sky and the lovely colours of those roses over there, would have made for a nice photo".
Everything you say and do is based on experience harvested (and instincts that are ancient form of experience that is equal for all animals of that species put into the brain in order to manage to live and harvest experience) throughout your life. And since this applies to every living being you could with some super impossible computer look at the future if you have the information in EVERY living being that has existed on earth and knowledge about everything on earth in general and how it has moved (grass and junk for example) and can feed in all this information into the computer you may calculate how time will proceed.
You will obviously need to take in account the universe too since we can see it and it can affect us, like meteors.[/QUOTE]
The brain is not you - you are part of the brain (a product of), not the brain itself. There would be no instinctual components or subconscious if it entirely self-aware; the components themselves, would be self-aware, thus constituting the brain as being completely self-aware and thus, you (also, you can be aware of parts of your mind/brain but those parts are not necessarily self-aware - they act autonomous in response to you, internal and external data. Calling these components self-aware is analogous to saying an object within the external environment is self-aware when you're merely self-aware of its existence).
Stop worrying, God is your Savior and your light to Eternal peace.
I made a thread about teleportation and the human consciousness already a while ago.
It takes into consideration that our mind may not simply be our brain but something deeper and that teleportation will destroy that link, ultimately killing what makes us "us" yet no one, not even the copy of yourself would know.
[url]http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=770465[/url]
[QUOTE=trogdor6666;17722586]In short, you're explaining how we are no more than a series of complex chemical reactions.
The hard part to understand is actually being the "consciousness."
Why do I feel this? why is there a ME? How can a chemical reaction have thoughts and feelings?
The sheer complexity of the brain is insane. If you look at things from an atomic point of view, we are giant fucking blobs of structures of atoms. Even a simple airsoft BB has a complex chemical structure made of trillions of atoms.[/QUOTE]
Yes.
How?
Feelings are a product that exists in order to help one survive.
We experience fear in order to avoid possible danger that may hurt us, which in any scale is a threat to us, or we have had an experience that makes us believe it is a threat to us.
We experience love in order to reproduce ourselves, but love is not based around just one person which is why it can be so problematic at times since we have set rules to ourselves to only be with one person at the time which collides with our multiple loves which may exist. But we manage to force ourselves into just being with one person at the time because of teachings that we set as morales for ourselves, which we do in order to feel bad when breaking them so we will not do the same thing again, hopefully.
We also experience love in order to protect others (normal love and motherly and fatherly love) so that we may secure more births in order to survive.
We experience anger because we want people to think like us, because in reality we are really selfish, we just manage to numb it down thanks to morale and it saying we should try to think about others too. So when someone does something that goes against your set of morale, experience or set standards of living you may experience anger because you do not like it when they do something you find wrong. It is also actually quite close to fear since we also experience fear towards unknown things because they might possibly be dangerous. And if someone tries to force this unknown thing upon you you might become angry at that person because it is not something you want to do or feel would be right to do.
We experience laughter for reasons that scientists have not yet understood either. But I think it is a way to help ourselves not reach a depressive state of mind and to share your experience with others and possibly even be a way to attract other persons. By laughing and telling yourself things are ok you might cause a placebo effect that will help your body or state of mind to become better. Lying to yourself a lot can eventually cause you to believe in it. (I have managed to make myself sick just by thinking really hard about being sick, putting a lot of thought into minor pains or feelings and overdramatizing them and bam, I got a fever for a day or two.)
Laughter and happiness goes hand in hand. Doubt and fear go hand in hand. Insecurity and fear go hand in hand. What more emotions are there again?
And one more thing. As I said morales of right and wrong are but only based on experience harvested from the rules of society, these rules are something we have to tell ourselves oh so often in order to not break them because we naturally do not really agree with them deep down, we just force ourselves to do so because we try not to just care abot ourselves.
[editline]04:26PM[/editline]
[QUOTE=livelonger12;17723294]The brain is not you - you are part of the brain (a product of), not the brain itself. There would be no instinctual components or subconscious if it entirely self-aware; the components themselves, would be self-aware, thus constituting the brain as being completely self-aware and thus, you (also, you can be aware of parts of your mind/brain but those parts are not necessarily self-aware - they act autonomous in response to you, internal and external data. Calling these components self-aware is analogous to saying an object within the external environment is self-aware when you're merely self-aware of its existence).[/QUOTE]
True that given that we only manage to use 10% of it. You are 1/10 of you brain.
Your brain is your consciousness
Destroy the brain and your consciousness ends.
If my brain was destroyed and they put a clone of my brain inside my consciousness would end. But the new brains would continue.
Think of it like a clone of you. You aren't controlling two bodies or have two minds.
[QUOTE=hypno-toad;17722207]A) There is only ONE "force of consciousness" in the universe. And since I thought of it and I'm writing this, that would make it me. If that was true, I would be the only truly conscious being and everything else around me (including you people) is no more real than stage props in a play; that act as I would and acknowledge themselves as conscious beings, because that's what a conscious being would do.. I don't like that solution, because that is a [I]really[/I] scary thought.
[/QUOTE]
You're just trying to trick me, because you know I figured out I was the force of conciousness.
THERE I REVEALED YOUR SECRET, HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?
toilets are where people have their greatest thoughts
Consciousness is all an illusion generated by the brain and environment, it doesnt really exist.
Monism and dualism!
There are no answers. Only arguments.
[editline]05:31PM[/editline]
[QUOTE=Hunterbrute;17725640]Consciousness is all an illusion generated by the brain and environment, it doesnt really exist.[/QUOTE]
Does it not?
Why doesn't it?
[QUOTE=Cloak Raider;17725659]
Does it not?
Why doesn't it?[/QUOTE]
Our form of Consciousness is just a higher form of Environmental awareness, which is needed for a species to survive.
Congratulations, you've discovered solipism! Enjoy your existential angst.
[QUOTE=Hunterbrute;17725695]Our form of Consciousness is just a higher form of Environmental awareness, which is needed for a species to survive.[/QUOTE]
So are you saying all of our actions are determined, that we lack free will, and that consciousness is just an illusion?
If so, you fall into problems that John Hick highlights.
[QUOTE=dgg;17724363]-hugewalloftext-[/QUOTE]
I know what feelings are, that wasn't a literal question.
It's easy to understand consciousness from an outside perspective, but when you try to think about it introspectively, it's very weird.
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