pocketjpaul

pocketjpaul t1_iya2g91 wrote

Reply to ELI5: How do a bunch of lightly-electrified cells turn into consciousness? What causes the system to go from a “meat computer” to the subjective and immeasurable experience we call consciousness? by uniqueUsername_1024

Absolutely nobody have any idea about this and we are pretty sure we will never know because there is no valid scientific experiment to answer this question.

We are not even capable of telling if something is alive or not.

I’ll go further for fun.

You are alive and conscious. That’s the only thing you can be sure.

But you are made of millions of billions of alive things like cells, and bacterias.

Ok. But they are part of you, they can’t live without « you ».

Yes like ants. Ants are alive. They have pretty simple and predictable behaviors, like your cells. However, ant colonies have complex behaviors that the individual ants can’t understand. Like you and your cells. Are ant colonies alive ?

If you accept that definition and say that ant colonies are alive. What about human societies ?

And don’t start me on viruses. Viruses are just inert chemical assemblies. Well. They can be pretty complex. But they have no energy. They don’t move. They have no will. They are dead materials that just happens to have complex chemical interactions with living things. And by doing that, they also evolve through natural selection. Are viruses alive ? They are just simple things we probably could create in a laboratory with our current technology or in the near future. So they are dead assemblies. But they reproduce. And they evolve. Why ?

Good luck finding the answers. But if you want to go further, you just discovered what philosophy is about.

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