Is Conscious made out of atoms?

Don't know about brains but membranes provide communication and integrity.
Communication happens at the edges, at receptor sites. Atoms fit together to become molecules and on up the chain. A brain is a collection of cells, conscious units. The brain isn't much without it's relations with neurons throughout the body. The difference between the emergent behavior of protozoans and the complex behavior of mammals is a matter of numbers of connections.

While there may be no ghost in the machine the abstract forces of vibration, (emotion,) and luminosity, (vision,) tend to become substantial.

 

Nevertheless from such a empiricist justification for awareness I think there is no judgment of a chemical balance or imbalance within the concrete universal Matter of freely willed eventhood.:smilielol5:

 

There is no need leaving you free to want. Imbalance in your terms is indecision about what you want.

 

Either I determine that the "balancing" is in spirit "what I want" at being applied to knowing Desire for Being with the nature objectively then and there for failure or success; or the Balance is truly to discover in Nature existing or not-existing. But the second way has nothing to do with what I want, as the future of it's natural being is towed by the ideal natural world. There it is them who project the possibility for equilibrium to be the self in doing I am, or freely conclude I still discover.:biker:

 

Yes, but even Enstein went nuts at the end, as the particles even smaller than atoms did not fit his equations. His laws apply but not to the smallest of particles. The god particle, for instance, as it has been labelled now.

 

I find that on other web sites discovering of nature in the third world and for instance China has brought about feelings of activist insecurity over adverse effects on the nature's world and projects of their countries', such as China. Activists cannot from now on count on having the will to stop whomever is needed to for the problems like climate change. The poor become like black mail in the third world against environmental success. Isolationism is now a good idea for the environmental activists.

 

Consciousness is made up of onion croutons.

 

Funny, Fairlight. Thanks for the levity......

 

Einstein did not go nuts, you believe lies. He was simply not satisfied with the quantum particle standard model, understandably so, it was neither complete or elegant.

 

conscioiusness is not made up of anything. nor is it in any way physical.
it is one of those things, that are not tied to what we think we know about it.

 

No, I know he did not literally go nuts, but figuritively he did. I go figuritively nuts all of the time.....

It is only a manner of speaking....

 

I'm not following this at all and given the fact we are conscious I don't really understand your assertion...

You are saying 'we' don't know what consciousness is tied to yet you know what it is not made up of?

That seems like some backwards ass, spun around Socratic paradox flipped on it's head.

 

such are the parels of assuming everything is limited by what we think we know. you are confusing the mind, with the soul. the mind is software that runs on the wet hardware of the brain. like all software, mind is emergent phenomina. certainly the physical body, the brain included, is like all physical matter.

what i am asserting is a completely nonphysical end user / self.

these are entirely seperate things. linked in life. making possible interaction with a physical world.

all of these programs that you are using right now to read this and respond to it. they to have no physical substance, but exist as the interaction of stored states in physical machines. the machines, computers, internet, these things are physical, but the information itself is not a physical thing.

mind is that same kind of non-physical thing.

it is commonly contended that awareness is simply a special aspect of mind. that is one way of looking at it.

what i am contending is that our awareness, each of us individually, is yet another thing entirely, not created by this mind phenomina, but seperate and independent of it, as an end user of the brain/mind system. just as you, in your physical form, are setting there at your keyboard, interacting with the software running on your computer, or other physical device, which is connecting you to this internet.

so i'm sorry, but i fail to make sense of the nature of your objection.

 

I would like to state here that as per Hinduism/Vedanta, all energy and matter emerged out of consciousness.

Consciousness is all-pervading, and is actually the most subtle element in this universe. Everything else emanates from it.


Sachchidānanda brahma= "Brahman is existence, consciousness, and bliss".


'Sarvam Khalu Idam Brahma' (All things here are Brahman)

 

i think it is less about the atoms, or whatever units that make up the structure, but the structure itself

like individual letters together make words of which meaning does not necessarily depend on the "meaning" of individual letters, and words can form sentences, and sentences to form paragraphs.. the syntax

 

I didn't even make any arguments in that post. The thing I was confused about was whether you were arguing with yourself or prevailing notions of consciousness, as "what we think we know about it" is rather cryptic.

It's clear that brain damage and some diseases do effect the mind and awareness. Alzheimer's for instance can radically change awareness and that is pretty evident, so it's difficult for me to comprehend what you mean by awareness being independent of mind.

It's interesting to me that you want to point to awareness as non-physical though and make it distinct from mind, Why not just assert the mind is non-physical and build off a dualist model of consciousness?

 

"The problem, however, is that no evidence for consciousness exists in the physical world. Physical events are simply mute as to whether it is “like something” to be what they are. The only thing in this universe that attests to the existence of consciousness is consciousness itself; the only clue to subjectivity, as such, is subjectivity. Absolutely nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a locus of experience. Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence of it in the physical universe—nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to. The painfulness of pain, for instance, puts in an appearance only in consciousness. And no description of C-fibers or pain-avoiding behavior will bring the subjective reality into view."
Sam Harris, atheist guru and neuroscientist.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-mystery-of-consciousness

 

Well, It is a combination of an extremely complex arrangement of different atoms along with the electrical impulses generated by some of those said atoms that results in consiousness, awareness, feelings and such. And of course many other animals have said feelings and such. And energy also. So you need a very complex arrangement of atoms capable of generating electrical impulses and energy to create awareness and thoughts and feelings.

 

Yah both examples of emergence which I lean towards as well, specifically it being an emergent property of the brain.

I think some of the obstacles which face science in this regard is the neuroplasticity of the brain, meaning that it is not a static structure which all regions have necessarily specific functioning, some structures can take on multiple functions and some can compensate function in cases if injury, disease, or defect.

Also, the concept of consiousness undoubtely resides on a spectrum and so pinpointing a particular structure of what consciousness may be difficult and varied.

 

i have thought long and hard about such things, the only consciousness we know is our own. we assume other people to have a similar experience of consciousness to our own because they are similar to ourselves.

but what about other things that take on a complex, and dynamic level of order? the brain has many different levels of processing that are assembled into a higher and higher order.. we only perceive the consciousness of the collective organization in its entirety, but take away some part of it and there will still persist a consciousness.

it seems that consciousness requires a sufficiently complex system in which the input of many levels of organization depends on the output of other systems of which output also depends on the output from first said system(s)

i think about this when looking at code on my computer, the variables that functions are passed are operated upon and then returned which may be passed to other functions which use those variables and the first said function will eventually be passed a variable whose value depends on all the functions it was passed through. actual computer chips are an extrememly complex arrangement of Boolean logic gates (ex. output is true if both inputs are true .. the input can come from the output of another gate that actually gets fed input that depends upon the output of the gate it's output is fed into as input) that form all sorts of feedback loops for the purpose of taking instructions to act upon data, and update that data with new values, which will surely be used again as input

i have thought about computer consciousness, or awareness, and it seems to me that if the computer was conscious, it would probably not be conscious of the actual code i was running on it, but a new, completely independant awareness that has nothing much to do with the meaning of the code to a human. Think about what the meaning of the processes in your brain are .. molecules are assembled into neurotransmitters that are packed into vessicles in neurons, and these chemicals through various mechanisms affect the production of other/or same chemicals, which affects the electrical activity in the brain, which affects the chemistry of the brain .. but this doesn't mean anything to us, we are not reallly aware of it .. the consciousness itself is it's own .. object, or concept that emerges, with its own properties, dependant on the mechanisms it emerges from, but with attributes that are new and independant of the attributes of the underlying framework.

i think it has something to do with abstraction, and after a sufficiennt number of levels of abstraction (abstract a system, assemble many of those systems into another abstraction, then assemble many of these or similar systems and abstract that, and so on) and the blurring of lines between levels of abstraction.

kindof like arrays in computer programming, "something" is a string, but its really an array of character to the computer stored as individual bytes in memory, but to us, we abstract the characters into words and such. You can have an array of strings, or an array of arrays of arrays of arrays...see after so many abstractions it kinds confusing and hard to actually grasp it, this whole structure is made of the smallest unit, but the whole thing is treated as one object for the most part.

could the entire Milky Way galaxy be conscious, or the whole universe?