Everything in the universe is supposed to be made of entities called “atoms”. Therefore, the brain is made of atoms. The brain is presumably the mechanism through which we perceive (and attain our understanding of) the universe. But, how can we gain any real understanding of the universe (which, since the universe is made of atoms, is equivalent to gaining an understanding of atoms) by using the very entities (atoms, which make up the brain) that we’re trying to understand? Isn’t there something circular going on here?
Nah. Wouldn’t worry about it too much. And not everything is made of atoms.
Oh, I’m not worried, it’s just something I threw out there. If everything in this physical universe is not made of atoms, what other components are there?
You’re asking how we can gain understanding of the universe when we’re part of that universe? You’re looking for something separate from the universe? It’s only circular if you consider the universe to be an entity and that we are that entity - which makes no sense. To put it differently, atoms are just the tools we need to investigate atoms. That isn’t circular. You seem to subtly be saying that atoms are dead so how do we account for life? But science often has a tendency to see the material world as dead, IMO. There is no good reason I can see to divorce life from materiality.
monads
-Imp
Anon, I’ll be perfectly honest, I found this subject on another site. After reading it, I wanted to see how others would react to it. It is surprising that our composite materials could allow us to have what we perceive to be sentience. I was told once of a particle in the makeup of an atom (neutron, proton, whatever) turns itself when it senses being observed. I’m not sure which vein of science purveys this notion.
I think an atom is just a construct used to explain the dynamics of matter. It’s not like if you look close enough at things, that you’ll eventually be able to see all the atoms in it.
Well I’m not saying that matter precedes sentience. I’m saying it’s impossible to imagine matter which ‘contains’ sentience and sentience itself separately.
Sure you will. www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhib … V1003.html
Those are atoms. They used a scanning tunneling electron microscope to move them and photograph them. This was the first time they did this years ago, so I’m sure there’s much cooler atom manipulated images now.
Aside from that, we were able to infer that there were atoms through experimentation.
Radiation for one. Subatomic particles. Energy, though there’s some difficulty with this one. Whatever it is that empty space is ‘made’ of.
Those are representations of an unknown substructure by a computer. They’re pixels, not atoms. Inferring something through an experiment doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily empirical.
I would’ve expected more from you, Smears. Go look up the history of how we know that there are atoms and what they are. Go do some chemistry homework with the periodic table. Atoms are real, and that is a picture of atoms. What is sight except a representation by the ‘pixels’ of your eye and mind? That IBM is an enhanced image of something, just like looking through a regular microscope, except the image his to be put on a computer screen.
If you think about it though, it took cofigurations of materials to create a vessel with certain neural pathways to give humans the ability for ‘sentience’ in order for us to question how we came about. Was this a complete crapshoot of evolutionary trail and error or a specific intent?
I’m the resident contrarian. What can I say?
You can be contrary…just be right 
It’s a lot to consider. I’ve never been able to draw any conclusions.
ONe thing to clarify from the beginning: We have never tried to define the universe from atoms alone, but you are getting toward the subject that we have been looking for a fundamental particle. The “atom” in its original, and obsolete, definition was the smallest particle that couldn’t further be separated. Now we wonder if such a thing exists.
A fundamental particle can still exist as a phenomena in itself if we cannot at least theorize its origins. In other words: Even if we fine the real “atom” it might not thoroughly explain the universe. Either way, searching for such particles has lead to incredible technological innovations, and there’s nothing circular about that.
Gaia, considering the possibility of there being other planets which could have formed millions of years earlier than the earth and could have the same properties of earth, what are the chances of them having beings like us? Doesn’t it boggle the mind that the right configuration of of subatomic materials could create a being who can reason and question their surroundings? Or is this body too complex for it be an evolutionary happenstance?
Artificial intelligence research highlights the issues envolved in making somthing perform a specific task. Theres a thing called combinatorial explosion that with each new ability or nonrestriction added to a system (ability to vary in some way) the problem gets infinitely worse. So that if you are limited to doing one action per minute(obviously not true of humans, we can do way more), within six minutes alone the thing has to choose from a trillion choices, greatly in creased from just 1 million at the third minute.
That b eing said why is it surprising for the mind to be made up of some kind of functioning physical system (the arrangement of atoms)? That is, consciousness doesn’t exist outside of some kind of evolved state because the computational problems envolved within just a few minutes are impossible without the system assuming regularities in the known world, which are probably various combinations of atoms.
If somthing is going to ‘compute’ it needs some kind of physical structure to do so, but once more, it needs to have a specific direction and I’m not sure where we find that outside of atoms.
Everything in the universe is made of energy. Atoms are just one representation of it. We break atoms up and the part that breaks off we experience as time. The remaining part we experience as sub-atomic particles.