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You’re an electrified hunk of fat piloting a meat-covered skeleton riding on a damp rock that’s hurling through space and time.
It’s actually a lump of lava with a thin crust. Any time the crust breaks we have a very bad time.
Lava is just liquid rock
The core is metal, the outer shell is hard rock, i would assume what’s inbetween is a mix of pop and smooth jazz maybe?
acid metal
Obligatory “um, akhtually, it’s magma”.
I enjoy Marcus Aurelius paraphrasing Epctetus…
“You are a little soul bearing about a corpse.”
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.
anyways this sandwich tastes great
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.
So you’re saying humanity is a mecha space opera?
Yes.
“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!”
And I want off.
A CPU is just a rock we hit with magic lightning…
And inscribed with runes
Well yes, it’s the lightning that makes the inscription.
Light makes the inscription, lightning runs through it.
Light, gas, CVD and a dozen other processes, depending on the application, make the inscription.
Username checks out
one guy with REALLY steady hands and the tiniest chisel you’ll ever see
🤔
This is covered pretty well in the Discworld series with the druids.
One more series I need to read…
consciousness is stored in the balls
Next to the microplastic.
hm, but how do you explain post-nut clarity then?
Calling it a lump of fat is a bit like calling the Milky Way a very sparse field of hydrogen
That’s true tho
Right, but it doesn’t capture the whole story, namely that it’s arranged in a very particular way
It’s accurate, but not precise.
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.
What about photons, hmmm? They’re used for quantum computing and don’t (technically) need “real electricity”.
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.
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.
Drag was attempting to continue the joke too
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.
A lump of mostly fat then? Seems needlessly specific.
Mostly water, in that case
I’M NOT FAT I’M JUST BIG BRAINED!!
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.
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?
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.
I thought they were up to mice now but I might be mistaken.
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.
The connectome doesn’t really seem to be so realistic, at smaller scales sure.
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.
Gnosticism, one of the oldest known religions that is thought to be the forefather of all religion, taught about that.
maybe but he’s a skinny guy
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.
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.
All I know is that if it all ends at death, then I should never have been born.
That would be preferable to my current existence though I think I still might prefer non-existance in the long term.
Don’t sell yourself so short
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
There’s a lot of water and ions (IONS!) besides that 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
No, you’re the electrochemical interactions happening inside the lump of fat.
Don’t sell yourself short. It’s a salty lump of fat.
Who said I’m salty, jerk?
This gets explored a bit in The Talos Principle and it’s sequal. Working on the 2nd one now, it’s been fun
