I don't pretend to know

[Castiel233]

Does life continue after death, I truly do not know.....

 

But what I do believe, with complete conviction, any God who would create us, make us faulty in His eyes and then punish us forever for being how He made us is a very sick being indeed. 

[Geezer]

Dr. Karen Armstrong in her book "A History of God" confirms that God did not create humans, it was humans that created God. 

[Guest]

We are unconscious when we sleep or take a hit to the head. So when I am dead it will be the same. Think of a computer. A computer is conscious in the fact that when you push a button, say the enter key or the spacebar, the computer is conscious of that action. But if I take a sledgehammer to the computer, bashing it into a thousand little pieces, then pushing the enter key or the spacebar will do nothing because the computer is no longer functioning, it is no longer conscious. It is the same with humans. Like the computer, when the hard drive of my brain is dead, I will not be conscious of anything. -Peace

[MOHO]

1 hour ago, Free said:

We are unconscious when we sleep or take a hit to the head. So when I am dead it will be the same. Think of a computer. A computer is conscious in the fact that when you push a button, say the enter key or the spacebar, the computer is conscious of that action. But if I take a sledgehammer to the computer, bashing it into a thousand little pieces, then pushing the enter key or the spacebar will do nothing because the computer is no longer functioning, it is no longer conscious. It is the same with humans. Like the computer, when the hard drive of my brain is dead, I will not be conscious of anything. -Peace

 

So when computer technology advances to the point were we can build computers that have consciousness will it constitute murder to turn them off? 

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Garry said:

Does life continue after death, I truly do not know.....

 

But what I do believe, with complete conviction, any God who would create us, make us faulty in His eyes and then punish us forever for being how He made us is a very sick being indeed. 

Man created god in order to become immortal, to become part of some larger cosmic narrative, when he was never more to nature than fertilizer. 

 

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

[ToddJ]

2 hours ago, MOHO said:

 

So when computer technology advances to the point were we can build computers that have consciousness will it constitute murder to turn them off? 

Computers can't be conscious.  That's science fiction.  A computer crunches numbers in binary.  It's like saying your calculator will become self-aware.  You might program one to simulate things that conscious beings do, even very well, but it will not be conscious.

[sdelsolray]

2 hours ago, ToddJ said:

Computers can't be conscious.  That's science fiction.  A computer crunches numbers in binary.  It's like saying your calculator will become self-aware.  You might program one to simulate things that conscious beings do, even very well, but it will not be conscious.

 

That would depend on the definition of "consciousness".  You seem to require that the definition include the property of self-awareness.  Other's may define the term without that specific property.  That's fine, but I suggest you propose a definition and seek agreement before you or MOHO argue about a term of which neither of you have reached consensus.

[Guest]

21 hours ago, MOHO said:

 

So when computer technology advances to the point were we can build computers that have consciousness will it constitute murder to turn them off? 

I'm sure the christians will find a way to make that a sin as well. They'll claim it has a soul. 

[Rounin]

On 10/21/2017 at 2:52 AM, ToddJ said:

Computers can't be conscious.  That's science fiction.  A computer crunches numbers in binary.  It's like saying your calculator will become self-aware.  You might program one to simulate things that conscious beings do, even very well, but it will not be conscious.

A brain crunches numbers in analogue. When you say the computer will not be conscious, what do you base that claim on? What is it that you believe our mind does that a computer can't be programmed to do?

[ToddJ]

1 hour ago, Rounin said:

A brain crunches numbers in analogue. When you say the computer will not be conscious, what do you base that claim on? What is it that you believe our mind does that a computer can't be programmed to do?

 

Who said a brain just crunches numbers?  A mind is self-aware with a will and desires and the ability to experience sensations.

[Rounin]

39 minutes ago, ToddJ said:

 

Who said a brain just crunches numbers?  A mind is self-aware with a will and desires and the ability to experience sensations.

And the difference between that and crunching numbers is... what exactly?

[midniterider]

Some people I know aren't very conscious.

 

Where does consciousness come from? My brain? What exactly is it? What is this sense of awareness? What is the sense of self? Who asks this question? Am I just ones and zeros (or the brain equivalent) being processed in my head?

 

When I think about something, what is really occurring? Is a brain chemistry program running? Or something non-material?

 

People may live forever in some non-material form. Because they are non-material maybe they are unable to report back to their material relatives that there is life after death. There may be more to life than can be measured by physical instrumentation. It seems pretty darned amazing that a simple sperm and an egg meet and that somehow grows into a conscious being. 

 

I think consciousness is primary and creates matter. (Dodges atheist tomatos)

[ToddJ]

26 minutes ago, Rounin said:

And the difference between that and crunching numbers is... what exactly?

This discussion is getting a little ridiculous.   If you think you're a calculator, so be it.  If you want to point me to what it is you read that causes you to think that your brain is a calculator go ahead.

[midniterider]

 

2 minutes ago, ToddJ said:

This discussion is getting a little ridiculous.   If you think you're a calculator, so be it.  If you want to point me to what it is you read that causes you to think that your brain is a calculator go ahead.

 

Where does inspiration come from? A new program that starts running by itself? Maybe the brain is just super-complicated and so that is possible. Or maybe not.

[ToddJ]

2 hours ago, Rounin said:

A brain crunches numbers in analogue. When you say the computer will not be conscious, what do you base that claim on? What is it that you believe our mind does that a computer can't be programmed to do?

 

When you say a brain crunches numbers, what do you base that claim on?  You're free to believe that your PC is conscious, but what do you base that claim on?

[sdelsolray]

Note that no one is attempting to reach a consensus on a definition of "conscious" or "consciousness".

[midniterider]

1 hour ago, sdelsolray said:

Note that no one is attempting to reach a consensus on a definition of "conscious" or "consciousness".

 

What is consciousness? What is awareness? Fun stuff to think about.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awareness

 

 

[sdelsolray]

8 minutes ago, midniterider said:

 

What is consciousness? What is awareness? Fun stuff to think about.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awareness

 

 

As Garry, the OP, stated when he started this thread, "I don't pretend to know."

[Guest]

3 hours ago, midniterider said:

Some people I know aren't very conscious.

 

Where does consciousness come from? My brain?

Yes, basically speaking it is the brain interacting with the Central Nervous System, which it operates, is where consciousness comes from.  There is nothing mystical or mythical about consciousness, even drug induced euphoria is deeply chemically determined state, and it connecting you with your midbrain is not transcendence.  

 

Quote

What exactly is it? What is this sense of awareness? What is the sense of self? Who asks this question? Am I just ones and zeros (or the brain equivalent) being processed in my head?

The awareness aspect to your consciousness is the function of the Anterior Cingulate, which regulates a lot of the information between the emotional and cognitive elements of the brain.  It has been demonstrated to become more densely connected after sustained practice of mindfulness meditation, as it gives a person essentially more control over what they are able to put their attention on.  Conversely, this important neurophysiological structure of the brain also decreases in volume in subjects suffering from Major Depressive Disorder, which is why emotional regulation suffers and identity critical cognitions can disable a person into an experience of perpetual guilt and terror. 

 

You'll notice if you meditate, that in every moment there is only a certain number of things that can happen in any given moment.  You can have awareness of the physical sensation of the breath in the body, but paying attention to it also reveals the way that the brain creates these vibrations and sensations in the conscious experience which are but a constructed representation of your body constructed via the Central Nervous System.  Only euphoric states of mind, which can be induced through meditation or through psychoactive drugs does not reveal the interconnectedness of consciousness to everything.  It opens up connections in the brain, in ways that certainly are very helpful, but they don't ever get outside of consciousness to another realm of essential consciousness.  Recent research even demonstrates that brains recognize when the organism is going to die, even before the brain experiences total brain death.  This is why people have near death experiences, and this activity is still happening in the brain while the person has yet totally experienced death.  NO ONE comes back from total brain death, and stories of people recovering always have at least some activity remaining in the brain which can be recovered.  

 

Regarding the binary comparison, this is where a lot of the AI stuff has really confused the conversation, because human information processing is not binary.  For a clue as to what makes human beings special, it helps to explore the difference between a human and a chimpanzee.  The genetic differences regarding our brain are almost completely the same.  Homo sapiens didn't have to invent utterly new structures to the brain, nor did they have to invent some kind of new neuron or neurotransmitter.  Everything was recycled from our evolutionary history, except we have much smaller guts and much larger brains.  You see the genes controlling the size of the brain, done by "fractal" genes in the neurons simply cause human brains to split more times than any other creature.  How could it do this?  Because unlike the Chimpanzees, homonids learned how to cook and no longer needed all that energy and time devoted to digesting like his Chimp cousins.  This freed up the energy which could be utilized by a bigger and bigger brain, until about 70,000 years ago the cognitive revolution took place and humans began creating cultural cognitive artifacts which now essentially change our brains to be different than ever before right from the early stages of human development.  This is humanity.  

 

The processes by which the Central Nervous System are constructed, have been shaped by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, being built upon a reptilian, mammalian, and primate based infrastructure and basic circuits of sexuality and aggression are the same in humans as they are in rats.  It would be cognitions though that would give humans this symoblic nature which believes itself to be above nature.  It thinks of the worlds in abstractions, but it encased in a fleshly prison from which it can only hallucinate that it has been released from.  And like all human beings, this experience of transcendence goes away with the fact that said person's brain is now food for worms.  No one has come back to report any different, unless one considers the fake news of various religious cults since humans invented culture and religion to be authoritative.  

 

Quote

When I think about something, what is really occurring? Is a brain chemistry program running? Or something non-material?

Think about it, the only thing that makes you better than a Chimp, is your bigger brain?  Why is this beneficial?  Because, it gives much more functional real estate to soak up this neurological and biologically based information into the emergent system of the brain.  Your conscious experience of the world, which is an internally constructed hallucination of sorts, which was shaped by the evolutionary systems of the various scales of the brain (reptilian to cognitive levels in the prefrontal cortex).  In a sense, Kant was sort of right about the internal nature of the brain, but it is not a theater of the mind, your sense of self is illusory and created by the functions of the brain interacting with your cognitive identity which is shaped over time by experience and hormonally based development which humans experience based upon sex.  Is this experience reality?  Yes and no, the brain often can be tricked into experiencing all kinds of emotions, but there is nothing more real to the conscious experience than the experience of pain.  Perhaps there is a shallow happiness that a person is experiencing, which once illusions are dissolved quickly fades, but pain is an undeniable aspect of experience that us mammals face.  

 

It is an emergent system, that depends on the activity of the Central Nervous System to communicate and process the information as well as depending on the respiratory and cardiovascular system to pump the precious blood and energy to the brain so that it can perform its function which was defined and designed by evolution.  

 

Quote

People may live forever in some non-material form.

A pipe dream, we are primates who evolved from bacteria, the essential importance that we give to our consciousness is but our existence bias which is a result of the internal functions of our brain.  We see that everyone including ourselves is doomed to oblivion, and we shrink back from this reality of life in order to transform ourselves into something more noble and immortal.  The eternal rational man, a fable produced by apes who had undergone a cognitive revolution which in no way was biased towards producing accurate descriptions of reality, but rather was selected for in order to produce more socially beneficial explanations of which could be used as a justification for larger and more complex social entities.  There is no tribe without the tribal god, and there is no Egypt without the homogeneous culture and religion which was produced after population pressures built on geographical opportunity produced the first major civilization.  

 

Quote

 Because they are non-material maybe they are unable to report back to their material relatives that there is life after death.  There may be more to life than can be measured by physical instrumentation. It seems pretty darned amazing that a simple sperm and an egg meet and that somehow grows into a conscious being. 

Well it required evolution to do all that, didn't it?  The embryo transforms into a fetus, and the forebrain and midbrain sprout out of the hindbrain, and you have the emergence of consciousness in an organism such as we are.  Our experience grows more vivid as we develop, and any damage will assuredly also damage the functionality of the wider system.  More complexly organized matter, produces new and novel functions, which in our case were shaped by evolutionary natural processes.  Just examine the scales, Quantum Fields >> Atomic >> Molecular >> Cellular >> Organs (tissue) >> Neurological >> Psychological >> Sociological.  The neurologically based Central Nervous System is biological in nature, which of course is based upon chemistry, which deals with the essential building blocks of matter, but none of these levels can be wholly reduced by examination of their component parts.  Neither can any aspect, neither the Psychological or the Sociological, can be explained without reference to the component parts, because they are systems of organization and function which are dependent upon those systems for communication and energy.  Which is why we have separate fields of science, from Particle Physics to Astrophysics, to chemistry, to biology, to neurology, to psychology, because there are distinct organization and functional scales which have to be examined at a proper scale.  Looking at a singular neuron in the case of the brain, or a single exchange in a neurotransmitter is insufficient to articulate the totality of the activity which is being directed by the functions of the system, nor are they sufficient scales to explain the outcome of that system for the experience of the organism.  

 

Quote

I think consciousness is primary and creates matter. (Dodges atheist tomatos) 

Instead of tomatoes, I produced a naturalistic rebuttal for your suggestions about a life after death.  Right now, we simply don't have any evidence to suggest your consciousness, or mine depends on anything but the functions of the Central Nervous system and neurophysiological infrastructure of the homo sapien brain, produced by hundreds of millions of years of evolution which had to origin of special creation or divine design.  Consciousness is not primary, it had its genesis at least with regards to earth, at a particular point in time.  As did so many other levels of the universe, such as atomic, and molecular, cellular, organismic, etc.  Ontology is pluralistic, not foundational or hierarchical, there is no essential essence or ontology to anything.  Not even the quantum, for if reductionistic explanations are insufficient to explain higher phenomenons, why should we think that ontological reduction is also appropriate?  

[ToddJ]

3 hours ago, sdelsolray said:

Note that no one is attempting to reach a consensus on a definition of "conscious" or "consciousness".

 

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/conscious

 

I don't know why it is necessary to reach a "consensus" definition when the dictionary is available.  

[midniterider]

49 minutes ago, TrueScotsman said:

Yes, basically speaking it is the brain interacting with the Central Nervous System, which it operates, is where consciousness comes from.  There is nothing mystical or mythical about consciousness, even drug induced euphoria is deeply chemically determined state, and it connecting you with your midbrain is not transcendence.  

 

The awareness aspect to your consciousness is the function of the Anterior Cingulate, which regulates a lot of the information between the emotional and cognitive elements of the brain.  It has been demonstrated to become more densely connected after sustained practice of mindfulness meditation, as it gives a person essentially more control over what they are able to put their attention on.  Conversely, this important neurophysiological structure of the brain also decreases in volume in subjects suffering from Major Depressive Disorder, which is why emotional regulation suffers and identity critical cognitions can disable a person into an experience of perpetual guilt and terror. 

 

You'll notice if you meditate, that in every moment there is only a certain number of things that can happen in any given moment.  You can have awareness of the physical sensation of the breath in the body, but paying attention to it also reveals the way that the brain creates these vibrations and sensations in the conscious experience which are but a constructed representation of your body constructed via the Central Nervous System.  Only euphoric states of mind, which can be induced through meditation or through psychoactive drugs does not reveal the interconnectedness of consciousness to everything.  It opens up connections in the brain, in ways that certainly are very helpful, but they don't ever get outside of consciousness to another realm of essential consciousness.  Recent research even demonstrates that brains recognize when the organism is going to die, even before the brain experiences total brain death.  This is why people have near death experiences, and this activity is still happening in the brain while the person has yet totally experienced death.  NO ONE comes back from total brain death, and stories of people recovering always have at least some activity remaining in the brain which can be recovered.  

 

Regarding the binary comparison, this is where a lot of the AI stuff has really confused the conversation, because human information processing is not binary.  For a clue as to what makes human beings special, it helps to explore the difference between a human and a chimpanzee.  The genetic differences regarding our brain are almost completely the same.  Homo sapiens didn't have to invent utterly new structures to the brain, nor did they have to invent some kind of new neuron or neurotransmitter.  Everything was recycled from our evolutionary history, except we have much smaller guts and much larger brains.  You see the genes controlling the size of the brain, done by "fractal" genes in the neurons simply cause human brains to split more times than any other creature.  How could it do this?  Because unlike the Chimpanzees, homonids learned how to cook and no longer needed all that energy and time devoted to digesting like his Chimp cousins.  This freed up the energy which could be utilized by a bigger and bigger brain, until about 70,000 years ago the cognitive revolution took place and humans began creating cultural cognitive artifacts which now essentially change our brains to be different than ever before right from the early stages of human development.  This is humanity.  

 

The processes by which the Central Nervous System are constructed, have been shaped by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, being built upon a reptilian, mammalian, and primate based infrastructure and basic circuits of sexuality and aggression are the same in humans as they are in rats.  It would be cognitions though that would give humans this symoblic nature which believes itself to be above nature.  It thinks of the worlds in abstractions, but it encased in a fleshly prison from which it can only hallucinate that it has been released from.  And like all human beings, this experience of transcendence goes away with the fact that said person's brain is now food for worms.  No one has come back to report any different, unless one considers the fake news of various religious cults since humans invented culture and religion to be authoritative.  

 

Think about it, the only thing that makes you better than a Chimp, is your bigger brain?  Why is this beneficial?  Because, it gives much more functional real estate to soak up this neurological and biologically based information into the emergent system of the brain.  Your conscious experience of the world, which is an internally constructed hallucination of sorts, which was shaped by the evolutionary systems of the various scales of the brain (reptilian to cognitive levels in the prefrontal cortex).  In a sense, Kant was sort of right about the internal nature of the brain, but it is not a theater of the mind, your sense of self is illusory and created by the functions of the brain interacting with your cognitive identity which is shaped over time by experience and hormonally based development which humans experience based upon sex.  Is this experience reality?  Yes and no, the brain often can be tricked into experiencing all kinds of emotions, but there is nothing more real to the conscious experience than the experience of pain.  Perhaps there is a shallow happiness that a person is experiencing, which once illusions are dissolved quickly fades, but pain is an undeniable aspect of experience that us mammals face.  

 

It is an emergent system, that depends on the activity of the Central Nervous System to communicate and process the information as well as depending on the respiratory and cardiovascular system to pump the precious blood and energy to the brain so that it can perform its function which was defined and designed by evolution.  

 

A pipe dream, we are primates who evolved from bacteria, the essential importance that we give to our consciousness is but our existence bias which is a result of the internal functions of our brain.  We see that everyone including ourselves is doomed to oblivion, and we shrink back from this reality of life in order to transform ourselves into something more noble and immortal.  The eternal rational man, a fable produced by apes who had undergone a cognitive revolution which in no way was biased towards producing accurate descriptions of reality, but rather was selected for in order to produce more socially beneficial explanations of which could be used as a justification for larger and more complex social entities.  There is no tribe without the tribal god, and there is no Egypt without the homogeneous culture and religion which was produced after population pressures built on geographical opportunity produced the first major civilization.  

 

Well it required evolution to do all that, didn't it?  The embryo transforms into a fetus, and the forebrain and midbrain sprout out of the hindbrain, and you have the emergence of consciousness in an organism such as we are.  Our experience grows more vivid as we develop, and any damage will assuredly also damage the functionality of the wider system.  More complexly organized matter, produces new and novel functions, which in our case were shaped by evolutionary natural processes.  Just examine the scales, Quantum Fields >> Atomic >> Molecular >> Cellular >> Organs (tissue) >> Neurological >> Psychological >> Sociological.  The neurologically based Central Nervous System is biological in nature, which of course is based upon chemistry, which deals with the essential building blocks of matter, but none of these levels can be wholly reduced by examination of their component parts.  Neither can any aspect, neither the Psychological or the Sociological, can be explained without reference to the component parts, because they are systems of organization and function which are dependent upon those systems for communication and energy.  Which is why we have separate fields of science, from Particle Physics to Astrophysics, to chemistry, to biology, to neurology, to psychology, because there are distinct organization and functional scales which have to be examined at a proper scale.  Looking at a singular neuron in the case of the brain, or a single exchange in a neurotransmitter is insufficient to articulate the totality of the activity which is being directed by the functions of the system, nor are they sufficient scales to explain the outcome of that system for the experience of the organism.  

 

Instead of tomatoes, I produced a naturalistic rebuttal for your suggestions about a life after death.  Right now, we simply don't have any evidence to suggest your consciousness, or mine depends on anything but the functions of the Central Nervous system and neurophysiological infrastructure of the homo sapien brain, produced by hundreds of millions of years of evolution which had to origin of special creation or divine design.  Consciousness is not primary, it had its genesis at least with regards to earth, at a particular point in time.  As did so many other levels of the universe, such as atomic, and molecular, cellular, organismic, etc.  Ontology is pluralistic, not foundational or hierarchical, there is no essential essence or ontology to anything.  Not even the quantum, for if reductionistic explanations are insufficient to explain higher phenomenons, why should we think that ontological reduction is also appropriate?  

 

Thanks for your reply.

 

 

[ToddJ]

5 hours ago, midniterider said:

Some people I know aren't very conscious.

 

Where does consciousness come from? My brain? What exactly is it? What is this sense of awareness? What is the sense of self? Who asks this question? Am I just ones and zeros (or the brain equivalent) being processed in my head?

 

When I think about something, what is really occurring? Is a brain chemistry program running? Or something non-material?

 

People may live forever in some non-material form. Because they are non-material maybe they are unable to report back to their material relatives that there is life after death. There may be more to life than can be measured by physical instrumentation. It seems pretty darned amazing that a simple sperm and an egg meet and that somehow grows into a conscious being. 

 

I think consciousness is primary and creates matter. (Dodges atheist tomatos)

You're immaterial in some way.  Ones and zeroes don't become alive on paper, nor do they become alive when represented by a transistor in the on or off state.  As far as living on goes, I'm not sure.  After all, when I sleep I experience nothing, unless I dream.  People have reported near-death experiences and strange spiritual experiences through prayer or taking DMT. Ones and zeroes don't laugh or get high, so... you're not a machine;

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, ToddJ said:

You're immaterial in some way.  Ones and zeroes don't become alive on paper, nor do they become alive when represented by a transistor in the on or off state.  As far as living on goes, I'm not sure.  After all, when I sleep I experience nothing, unless I dream.  People have reported near-death experiences and strange spiritual experiences through prayer or taking DMT. Ones and zeroes don't laugh or get high, so... you're not a machine;

This is a problematic statement, saying that you are immaterial in some way seems to be a transcendental error to viewing consciousness.  Indeed, the way these neurotransmitters are received by the synapses, and the very way they are squirted out impacts the experience of your moment to moment conscious state.  The brain is not a binary machine, but it processes information in the ways that organisms have for millions of years before us with the same type of structures and neurons and neurotransmitters.  Consciousness is certainly an experience only able to be accessed by the organism itself, but that consciousness is totally constructed by the brain which was constructed and designed over the course of billions of years of evolution.  

[ToddJ]

1 minute ago, TrueScotsman said:

This is a problematic statement, saying that you are immaterial in some way seems to be a transcendental error to viewing consciousness.  Indeed, the way these neurotransmitters are received by the synapses, and the very way they are squirted out impacts the experience of your moment to moment conscious state.  The brain is not a binary machine, but it processes information in the ways that organisms have for millions of years before us with the same type of structures and neurons and neurotransmitters.  Consciousness is certainly an experience only able to be accessed by the organism itself, but that consciousness is totally constructed by the brain which was constructed and designed over the course of billions of years of evolution.  

 

The brain is incredibly complex and while parts of it may process information, I don't think it should be compared to crude machinery.  The only reason people like that anology is because electronics seem magical to a certain segment of the population (IE computers and life are similar.) , and because of science fiction (SkyNet, Johnny Five, Sonny, Lt. Commander Data)...  We're barely beginning to understand life and the brain.  Computers aren't lifeforms, and I'd say that life is mysterious in a way that science cannot or never will explain.  I believe there's a degree of free will in all creatures.  Why do caged birds sing?

[midniterider]

38 minutes ago, ToddJ said:

You're immaterial in some way.  Ones and zeroes don't become alive on paper, nor do they become alive when represented by a transistor in the on or off state.  As far as living on goes, I'm not sure.  After all, when I sleep I experience nothing, unless I dream.  People have reported near-death experiences and strange spiritual experiences through prayer or taking DMT. Ones and zeroes don't laugh or get high, so... you're not a machine;

 

Yes, I feel consciousness is primary and immaterial. I think there is something 'more' to humans and maybe to everything than just what can be detected by scientific means. I think if material science is the only tool in your tool box (the only way you accept reality) then the only answers you will consider are materialist answers.

 

NDEs, dreams, hallucinations and drug experiences are all explained by materialist thinkers as brain chemistry. We know for *sure* that these experiences are not real. But then we experience 'waking' consciousness and are *sure* that these experiences ARE real! Both experiences occur *supposedly* in our brain. How do I know which one is real? How do I know any of these experiences is real. Whatever I am seems to make up some pretty convincing dreams. How do I know *this* waking world isn't a dream? How do I know that everyone I encounter in waking consciousness is not just being manufactured on the fly in my own mind?

 

My mind can create a whole landscape of sensory experience ... and it's only a dream. Perhaps my mind also creates a sensory experience where I read messages on a web forum ... and it's only a dream too. LoL. 

 

I think I may be the driving force that controls a biological machine but something other than machinery is making the decisions.