Well something goes on between iron and magnetism. They lovy each other.
I’m not sure, at all, what you mean.
Are you being serious, or ‘taking the piss’?
I’m merely pointing out that atoms interact … with some kind of awareness … like iron and a magnet.
And jokingly saying because they are attracted to each other that “they lovy each other.”
I can entertain the idea that that experience/feeling/emotion goes all the way down to subatomic particles. Electrons, protons, neutrons, and other subatomic “particles” could be thought of as drops of spatial-temporal experience. They could experience their physical relationships with the world around them as vectored emotions—feelings that drive them this way and that. Energy could be the transmission of physical feelings. But experience/feeling/emotion isn’t necessarily conscious. We are unaware of most of own feelings. If cells feel, I am unaware of most of the feelings of the cells of my body. Consciousness seems to require a brain and its awareness is focused on a small area of attention or concentration. Usually we are aware of the figure but not the ground of the gestalt of consciousness. But we must experience the ground of the gestalt even though we are unaware of it.
Or you feel them as a collective and that is the background feel of being an embodied creature, a feeling that varies depending on health, tiredness, age, etc. Perhaps that is the buzz of your cells feeling. And then they in turn at their order of magnitude feel their own being in the world
I don’t know how we can know the first part. As far as the second part, I think the whole organism is conscious of things that the little I misses.
You obviously haven’t gone thru Heroin withdrawals. The reason it hurts so bad is because every cell in the body became dependent upon heroin, and when they don’t get it, every cell screams out in pain.
I’m sure that each planet contains some consciousness, but not enough to move its physical self or control itself. That is part of pretty standard occult theory. Physical things have higher intelligences, especially powerful ones are over the stars and moons and stuff.
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Oh, the arguments vary. One argument is that God created everything with a certain amount of governer spirits. Another argument is that each planet, moon and star has a certain amount of angels and demons, and that is a variation of the first idea, but the idea that planets have demons relates to the dualistic moral stuff.
Another idea is that consciousness is an element which is a part of the composition of everything. It’s like the fifth element or which ever number we come to. As such, a part of ever star and planet is consciousness. We lack the facility to sense it properly or interact with it fully, but some think it’s there.
The ideas on this aren’t very much like a modern explanation. Instead it’s just stated strait up like a fact.
That may be an instance when feeling rises to the level of consciousness. It certainly doesn’t demonstrate that we are conscious of the feelings of all our cells at all times or that our cells themselves are conscious.
Atomic interaction is not a representation of conscious self-awareness, or even conscious awareness.
There’s no mystery into why magnetism works, and it doesn’t work because there’s a conscious awareness between objects.
That would be akin to asserting that water moves around a rock because they have a lovely chat over tea and decide that it would be best for both parties if the water would simply move around the rock rather than breaking it open and passing through.
Gravity doesn’t work because of a meeting of minds either; neither does air pressure.
Lightening doesn’t seek out to strike targets in a murderous rampage; waterfalls don’t fall because water molecules are failing at bungee jumping; volcanoes don’t explode because the ground has a pimple that it wanted to pop; and pimples don’t form because there was a party called out for bacteria to attend on your ritzy skin.
The model at the beginning of the thread regarding the similarity between a cell and the planet should not be shocking.
Firstly, not all planets have the same internal arrangement as our planet does; but even the concept of cores and middle layers and exterior layers, and atmospheres…this should not be shocking to compare to a cell.
It shouldn’t because that’s the basic outline of an atomic layering.
Figuratively speaking: the universe doesn’t like things to exist.
Despite all apparent efforts, however, some crap has achieved existence.
Yet, due to the pressure to not exist, things tend to take shape in a form that is trapped on all sides, and piling up layers of resistance in relation to their constituents as best as physically efficient at the time of arrangement (which may or may not be the best that could be attained overall).
Essentially, things that exist huddle and they pile more into their huddle or they fling apart in some manner akin to a loaded mouse trap; most things are some arrangement between these two extremes.
Some things are at one extreme or the other.
If anything about the atom is intelligent, then it is pretty much the most neurologically retarded “intelligence” to date.
This all being said, it does not mean that we should think of particles as unaffected objects that haven’t any real meaning of relationship with human consciousness.
Easily they do simply because we can create a relationship with anything that we want to, and allow that to shape our interaction with that, or those, thing(s).
So seeing the Earth as conscious isn’t errant ontologically; if anything, it is perfectly natural and probably beneficial in some ways.
In the end, I would personally probably just rephrase the statement as, “What if we relate to the Earth as if it were conscious?”, rather than, “What if the Earth is conscious?”
As the direct answer to the latter is that if the Earth is conscious (containing a brain), then we should be able to measure some wave of a reading as independent of any external force.
That doesn’t appear to exist.
Can we demonstrate that consciousness is causal anywhere. Wouldn’t any action by a person be just vastly complex interactions of molecules? And cannot all effects be explained by these supposedly unaware gestalts?
But this cuts the other way just as hard.
I think we all get this, Jayson. We live in the same world as you, using basically the same consciousness you use.
But then comes in the mystics, er, ah, the Quantum Physicists. And suddenly we have a world of “infinite possibilities.”
Truth is we don’t know why atoms do what they do. The subatomic world and below is ineffable to us. We don’t know why they form into what they form into. Why do they form the consciousness/awareness reading these words?
And we don’t even know what the consciousness reading these words is. That’s a bottomless debate.
So conscious atoms? We don’t know for sure. It may appear, on this level, that the water and rock have only an encounter but not an exchange. But what’s happening at the string level between the water and rock? We don’t know. There exists there a world of infinite possibilities. In the long run the rock becomes the water, or tumbles around in it, like small dust particles. Exchanges happen between rock and water. Even on this level.
Could be possible that the reason the awareness reading this exists is because at bottom Atoms are conscious.
In the end it’s a glorious mystery … right up there with god. And just as fantastical. The stuff of myths.
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Well something goes on between iron and magnetism. They lovy each other.
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I’m not sure, at all, what you mean.
Are you being serious, or ‘taking the piss’?
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I’m merely pointing out that atoms interact … with some kind of awareness … like iron and a magnet.
And jokingly saying because they are attracted to each other that “they lovy each other.”
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‘’…with some kind of awareness…‘’
What makes you think there has to be ANY KIND OF AWARENESS???
Shit goes on that we currently cant explain; it may be helpful to think of earth as a huge, single organism, like Felix said (i think it was felix, anyhow); this does not mean that inert matter is aware of anything, in any way.
There is NO EVIDENCE that awareness exists in matter, traditionally thought of as being ‘non-living’… Like, for example, a lump of iron.
I don’t understand this sentence. Can you rephrase the question for my understanding, please?
To say that any action by a person is just a vastly complex interaction of molecules is radically understating the situation.
This is akin to stating that a plane is just a vastly complex interaction of metal and electricity, so therefore asking why we shouldn’t look at a junkyard struck by lightening as possibly being capable of flying.
I could take all of the matter inside of a person, tear them apart atomically and then reassemble them in a different order while still having every last atom as before, and I would not arrive at consciousness.
I would arrive at, most likely, a blob of some atomic mass.
If the atomic world has taught us nothing else, then it has at least taught us that it is not the constituents that are of systemic importance, nor the sum of the constituents, but instead the exact arrangement of the constituents that make the differences.
Take, for example, all of our neurological malformations - such as temporal lobe epilepsy.
Temporal lobe epilepsy occurs because the arrangement of the constituents are different than the normal brain formation; specifically in relation to a hyper-trafficked (my term there) feed of information perceived by the sense through the amygdala causing a vital increase in the emotional value of all information incoming.
Again with a similar, but more crude, example: smash a human head with a hammer and you can immediately see the arrangement altered and consequently causing a fallout of consciousness.
No, as I was not resting on this point.
This was showing that consciousness takes interest in some fashion of taste and preference that is not universally consistent.
For example, if the electron is conscious, then electrons are the most successfully fascist and uniformed self-willing consciousness’ observed.
Or, if the constituents’ sum total is the only point, then we have no reason for having faith in a red traffic light as if the universe is capable of having atomic consciousness in some unknown total, then we cannot trust any inanimate object to function without some apparent arbitrary self will of interest over its own governance and direction in existence.
Meaning, we could hardly trust that the red light is a red light as the universe could have a consciousness that has altered the color spectrum partway to us.
That light may very well be green and we are being lied to by the will of some conscious layer of the universe due to its motive of willful interest.
The reason we, as humans, hold truth (even if we debate the matter) as subjective is exactly because we biologically have subjective taste and willful preference.
If the universe ran in such a manner, we would be incapable of existing as we do - we would have never come into being as there would be no standard basis in which to supply the opportunity for a subjective awareness to evolve upon as there would be no era in which reliability of the environment was concrete enough for a brain to capture and hold one instance of something as normal and another instance of it as not normal, create subjective responses to it for self preservation, and then from this eventually evolve neurological networks capable of supporting dynamic awareness of self-awareness.
This is one of the largest myth creations of QM.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is not a solution for what exists literally.
It’s a solution for calculating probabilities of determining speed or location of objects so small that our observation of them can only see the overall speed in detectors at varying locations, or we can isolate its exact location through a process that has to look at such an incredibly tiny expanse of space that we cannot actually know the speed since our supply of distance is incredibly far too limited to test such an event at the same time.
A man who runs two hundred thousand meters per minute can be tracked as moving this fast with two measures at different intervals of his running path.
However, if we want to know his exact position at one point in time, then we have to take a picture of the man with an incredibly fast camera.
The picture we get will not tell us his speed, as everything in the picture will be in stand-still.
The other QM anomaly is that the probability matrix’s for quantifying position have within them probabilities which state other possible locations; it is from this that we arrive at the proposition of in and out existence “popping”.
The existence isn’t literally doing this; the math is so to solve the problem.
It is not terribly different than rabbit hunting and using a dog to rush out the rabbit.
Because the rabbit may be anywhere in the bushes, does not mean the rabbit is actually popping to all possible bush existences. Instead, the probabilities are such; not the actual.
Once the dog rushes the bushes, we have removed an extent of possibilities as the rabbit runs around and disrupts the bushes in which it resides.
Some of the possibilities, at this point, collapse for the rabbit’s location.
Eventually we have weeded out the rabbit and have isolated the rabbit’s actual location.
At no point did the rabbit exist in multiple universes for the hunt to occur.
This does not mean that we do not know what is required for consciousness to exist.
We may not know the whole of what is required, but we know the least of what is required.
And we know this reasonably well, otherwise we would not be able to debate over the consciousness standing of chimpanzees and orangutans (which are self-aware, but we are debating exactly how it differs from ours).
This hardly provides validity for conscious particles.
We don’t know the bottom because there really isn’t a “consciousness neuron”.
There is no “bottom”. This is something that neurology is now adjusting to, actually, and largely has started looking at consciousness as the arrangement of otherwise benign constituents that can be - in some fashion - found in many forms.
Worms have neurons, for example; but the do not produce conscious awareness because they lack an articulate arrangement of a complex enough system of neurons to produce such.
Don’t talk to me about string theory.
I only have one statement for string theory’s ridiculousness (which the Higgs boson really removes the need for anyway):
If string theory is correct and if the gravitation that we have is the tail end of the gravitational force coming from other dimensions, and if it is a field, and if that field moves in waves, and if there is nearly empty space between masses (these are all string theory assertions), then why isn’t a larger mass’s strength of pull lessening just for a moment and then taking hold strong again of the lesser object?
In short, why isn’t a satellite mass visibly bouncing in its orbit?
It could be possible that the ‘bottom atoms’ of a plane are flight atoms and that’s actually why planes fly, not because of any design of a wing.
If we are going to attribute consciousness to atomic levels, or particle levels, then we are forced to examine the possibility of all qualities of networked arrangements as being provided individually from the smallest part (‘bottom atom’, as you called it).
Consciousness is not a mystery in what consciousness at least requires.
We’re not confused on that.
If we were, we wouldn’t be performing surgical operations.
What we don’t know is how exactly our highly complicated consciousness arrives from the neurological network that we have.
We know much of that story, but have much left still to learn…however, we do actually have much of that question outlined.
We can, for instance, state how we recognize faces, how we “know” who someone is (determine that they are who they assert to be), or how we create “blind spots” in our vision.
None of these about conscious awareness are possible without knowing some of how our specific ‘aware of self-awareness’ consciousness works to some level.
We (as a species) are not absent any comprehension of the matter involved.
Neurology is not “string theory”.
We do not diagnose brain retardation on a theory of atomic consciousness absenteeism due to vibrational out-phasing of dimensional existences of quarks.
That is not what perplexes neurology about our form of consciousness.
It seemed implicit in what you were saying that we see humans, who have consciousness, as making choices. But for all we know it is an epiphenomenon. How do we demonstrate that consciousness is causal?
No this isn’t fair at all. I am not saying that some set of similar randomly mixed materials can do what a human can do. I am responding to your skepticism about particles making choices by pointing out that our ‘choices’ are simply a hell of a lot of those particles. Where does choice arise?
In relation to a wide variety of functions, sure, but in terms of choice and consciousness, we do not know.
This is assuming that consciousness allows for choices. I don’t see any reason so far to assume this. Further electrons are not so fascist, they are a set of probabilities, or are sort of mostly here, but also somewhat over there. They aren’t not even, most of the time, committed to location.
We may seem less fascist because we have so many particles in us. Even the minimally complex set of pachinko balls move around in a variety of patterns.
Again this is coupling consciousness with choice. They could have consciousness without choice. They could have choices in a very narrow range that take place over huge periods of time, from our perspective. I don’t know.
See above, but also ‘preference’ need have nothing to do with choice, we are simply impelled, with a concomittant quale of ‘I wanted that and so I went for it’.
And again, this is coupling something like free will to consciousness and also viewing a pantheist universe of choice as having some degree of speed and flexibility it need not have. Perhaps given the complexity of our make we can veer in a wider variety of vectors, and so on down via other animals and then plants, less and less directions are possible and or choices take longer to manifest.
There is no reason to assume that consciousness entails choice, freedom.
And there is no reason to assume that freedom is always as fast and as various for all things.
Moreno, your entire post is essentially, “Where does choice occur?”
We do have a bead on where choice occurs neurologically, but aside from this (as it is an incomplete assessment as we are still digging), we do know a minimum of what is required.
That has been my main point.
We may not know exact locations of event horizons, but we also do not need to just to understand if there is consciousness in a quark.
We do not need to because we do know what is required for a choice to be possible: it requires a neuronal network with a complexity which contains, not only certain types of neurons, but also certain formational networks of neuronal interactions.
We are not looking at neurology as functioning by process of quark arrangement.
That is not the minimum requirements.
Simply because we do not know everything about our consciousness does not supply validity for the possibility that consciousness may occur from any abstraction of our consideration.
It does not because we do know some things about our consciousness.
Back before, I mentioned that we do have a bead on choice; to elaborate, we can track the precognitive neurological pathways in which indicate which binary choice will be made in simple dichotic selections.
This does not nail down a single object as, “choice thing”.
There is likely no such object, as I said before.
What neurology is finding, and replicating in fact, is that the arrangement of the neuronal networks is what produces these events.
The key factor in all of this has been neuronal networks, not atomic networks.
Yes, everything is made of atoms, but this is hardly the network layer of interest here.
Atoms are to neurons as the plastic compound of legos is to a constructed lego castle.
The arrangement of the legos is what provides the outcome of the castle, not the arrangement of plastic compounds within the legos.
Yes, without the plastic compound of legos, the legos themselves would not be possible, but it is not the plastic compound with which we replicate to accomplish the castle as one could do this and arrive at the wrong output - easily.
We can (and have) build neuronal networks in petri dishes and use them as quantifying brains of robotic systems (thank you MIT).
We do know enough about the neuronal network to understand what at least must exist, even if we don’t understand exactly where in that network the exact constituent participants of every event of choice takes place.
Now, if we are redefining consciousness to be void of choice and instead simply defining it as a state of being capable of being reactively affected by exterior stimuli, then I have nothing to offer the conversation as the terms would have been so cardinally redefined into vagueness that an entire scope of what consciousness is in observation would be cardinally ignored and unaccounted for.
In regards to the electron, as a side note.
The statement was made because even at their volatility (of which there is a range), they are by absolutely no comparison to the subjective nature of human consciousness (or even animal consciousness).
We cannot chart predicatively, even with the most advanced mathematics, how an animal or human will behave in predictive capacity of their consciousness anywhere near the layer of certainty with which we can do with electrons.
And if we want to argue whether we can do so with electrons or not, simply take note that everything used currently to type on this forum relies on a predictive and controllable state of electron behavior in massive volume simply not possible in animals and humans.
I’m going with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on this one, that the earth is evolving ever greater consciousness. He called the Nooshpere long before the world wide web.
“Teilhard makes sense of the universe by its evolutionary process. He interprets complexity as the axis of evolution of matter into a geosphere, a biosphere, into consciousness (in man,) and then to supreme consciousness (the Omega Point.)”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin#Teachings
That doesn’t help anything. It’s a nice ontological view with positive benefits, but it doesn’t supply validity to the claim that particles have consciousness.
What I am really referring to, the Conscious Earth, is not a creator that designed natural rules, law of physics, but a presence which was being created as our world exists. It is a presence that long here from the very beginning of human history till now.
Human are too arrogant that we can surely see through everything and reach the final conclusion that we can find a group or one creator who designed and produced our world. There is something before that and it is stopping us from further learning about our world. The Conscious Earth is such a presence.
Conscious Earth is a hidden manipulator that linked to everyone of us. She manipulated our world from the past up to now and created various religions.
Religions are the result of both the Conscious Earth and human being. Religions are exactly the evidences for her presence. The interactions between the Conscious Earth and our ancestor have created religions.
I look upon Conscious Earth as the truth behind our world. A hidden manipulator that was being created from the very beginning with the single-cell organisms. It is difficult for us to move forward to the discussion of many philosophical questions if we have missed her presence. It is a missing puzzle in academia.
Things you put forward here, like the laws of physics, magnetism and gravity, have no offenses with the Conscious Earth since it is a supreme being without violating any natural rules. For all these beautiful mathematics, we cannot deny the presence of one or a group of creators who produced our world. However, their presence may not enable themselves to get into our universe. We have missed one important thing before getting into the final question of the origin of the universe. That is the Conscious Earth. A manipulator created religions in our history. We miss one puzzle which make all philosophical debates useless. For example, someone asked “we have god, why there are still evil?” The God they referring to is the creator, but the one who really have influence over our world is the Conscious Earth. She have constraints too. Our desires and Free Will are the basic factors account for the evil. I am not saying the Conscious Earth is “all good”, but she remains neutral in many conflicts and does not have many of our desires.
The Conscious Earth is the truth behind our world which worth discussing. The use of comparisons between the cell and the Earth is revealing the similarities of their designs. It does not necessarily mean that the cell is conscious too. Their designs show the probability that the Earth is conscious.
Teru Wong