This series is really interesting…thank you! If materialism is true, then we could download our minds to a computer. We could build devices to read the minds of other people, communicate telepathically, etc. But if it’s not true, and the inner self is categorically separate from the physical world, that’s even more strange. It would mean that a process (consciousness) which emerged from a physical system bound by the laws of nature (the brain) is not itself governed by those laws…like it transcended them somehow?? Ideologically, that’s a tough pill to swallow. Seems like it’s opening the door to all kinds of other stuff that “breaks physics.” My gut feeling is that there’s some suuuuuper complicated theory that can describe consciousness from the level of the neuron all the way up, purely in terms of biochemical reactions and information processing. If such a description is impossible even in principle, then surely consciousness is the very reason for the universe’s existence.
This series is really interesting…thank you!
If materialism is true, then we could download our minds to a computer. We could build devices to read the minds of other people, communicate telepathically, etc.
But if it’s not true, and the inner self is categorically separate from the physical world, that’s even more strange. It would mean that a process (consciousness) which emerged from a physical system bound by the laws of nature (the brain) is not itself governed by those laws…like it transcended them somehow??
Ideologically, that’s a tough pill to swallow. Seems like it’s opening the door to all kinds of other stuff that “breaks physics.”
My gut feeling is that there’s some suuuuuper complicated theory that can describe consciousness from the level of the neuron all the way up, purely in terms of biochemical reactions and information processing.
If such a description is impossible even in principle, then surely consciousness is the very reason for the universe’s existence.