Is Conscious made out of atoms?

Only knowing your own consciousness is solisipism which i mentioned in another thread with you. Consciousness is not necessarily dictated by seeing similarities to oneself in people, people react to the level of awareness of snakes and ants differently than they do to an automobile.

I don't think emergence is dependent on consciousness, I think consciousness is dependent on emergence. For instance emergence can be a part of Role playing video games, you collect enough points, complete enough tasks and level up to a character that is distinctly unique then the one you started as, that would be an example of emergence in a non-conscious system.

Do you think computers are consciouss?

The understanding of the process doesn't necessarily mean anything but the effects within us do. Neurotransmitters means a lot to us. It has a direct influence on Our experience of mood, alertness, sleep, spatial perceptions, hornyness, hunger, memory, so on and so forth. We have ability to influence nerotransmitters as well.

It could be, kind of a new agey concept. Perhaps It's a result of scale and limited brain capacity but again there seems like some things that even an ant does which exhibits consciousness in a way that Pluto doesn't. I don't think it helps that we anthropomorphize all celestial objects either. ('Dying' star, universe was 'born', etc.)

 

Guerillabedlam

i think they are machines that strictly obey certain rules because that's the only possible behavior given the laws that govern the physics involved. but our brains are perhaps the same way, the processes that occur in our brains happen the only way they could happen at any moment, unless you believe that our thoughts can influence the laws of probability .. more likely it is the other way around, the physics influence our thoughts but it seems that we have conscious control over it. much of the processing in a computer is highly redundant and code executes in a linear, if very convoluted fashion .. on the actual chip level though it is a different story, and what actually goes on in the chip is at least one level of abstraction below the actual code.

on perhaps the simplest level, there is a clock signal, an oscillation .. our brains also synchronize to a sort of rhythm much like a clock signal .. the only differnce i can come up with at this time in that regard is the computer processors we use are much more tightly bound to their clock signal than our brain is to it's rhythms, i think there is much more internal feedback that affects the frequency, the clock governs the internal operation of the chip, but the processes of the chip can't influence the clock unlike our brains where they both influence each other .. possibly highly interconnected systems that influence each other spawns awareness, it probably has something to do with feedback loops which certainly occurs in a computer but if they were conscious, i think it would be impossible to know for sure, or prove that they are in fact aware of themselves, unless they were able to tell us about it, and in their own words .. perhaps they are doing this already we just aren't capable of understanding

on a scale that large, changes in one system in the universe can affect other systems and alter the overall organization because everything is linked together by forces such as gravity being the most obvious. and the fact that there are so many different levels of organization, and each level is organized into larger and larger structures, but on the largest scale the universe seems pretty much homogenous on average .. if you go to the atomic level there is structure as well .. whew, im gonna leave it at that cuz its hard to wrap ur head around, much less explain the way i see it without leaving the interpretation open to ambiguity.

maybe change has something to do with consciousness also ..things change, they move, they interact. We seem to be able to know that certain things are conscious, because they behave a certain way (u can tell dogs have consciousness) but they are still very very similar to us, so it is easy for us to recognize similarities. But what about some conscious entity that is VERY different from anything we know .. this isn't a theist argument either, well that depends how you look at it i guess. I suppose there could be a consciousness more aware than we are .. perhaps we(and our consciousness) is part it's existence, as if we were part of the building blocks that make up it's "brain" .. idk, you can call it what you want, you could call it God if you want i suppose. I don't know if anything like that exists, or could exist, it seems like it could maybe. I'm not sure it could be proven to be either possible, or impossible .. not until us humans actually get a better grasp on what "consiousness" actually is, and how it works

 

I don't know computers like you do so perhaps that's why I don't follow your analogies really. There seems to me a dynamic quality to the human mind which I don't really see with computers. I understand how some of our brain functions more or less automatically, what is often homeostatic functioning, yet often humans for better and worse have drastically different responses or elicit variable responses based on the response suggesting a level of autonomy I don't see with computers.

I guess I've seen some robotic synthetic lifeforms that exhibit maybe something closer to consciousness but I haven't really gleaned that from computers ..yet.

We have limited natural capacity in our senses so there absolutely could be something. I'm kind of semi-serious when I suggest that visuals I've had on DMT suggest autonomous entities. The quality of them seems real, the composition of them is beyond my comprehension, which either means the brains perceptions are more layered than I suppose or the frequencies at which those things reside on is slightly offset then the one the brain normally develops into.

 

i do believe when you open your third eye that you are able to get a tiny glimpse of what's going on under the hood, you are able to access awareness that normally you are locked out of ..

there is definitely more going on beneath the fabric of this world, i also believe that the laws of probability can be sneaky sometimes .. synchronicities, things like that.

i have seen before that everything in this world is connected, many distant events can influence local events in ways that are extremely difficult to predict.

dropping a grain of sand can cause a landslide if it tips the balance just slightly so much to set off a chain of events.

this is the butterfly effect .. it is very real, but impossible to pin down all of the variables involved that lead to a chain of events occurring. a butterfly flapping its wings, the tiny air currents can be just enough to alter the conditions just enough to lead to a hurricane hundred of miles away.

 

The innate quality of self preservation in life kind of stunts the butterfly effect imo. Butterfly effect is certainly something we should take note of, particularly when applied to like global warming and stuff, but life has developed resilient structures, allies, qualities, some of which go beyond consciousness to counteract that effect. Perhaps the butterfly effect does have a strong role in emergence though. Perhaps, what I'll call the enviornmental stressors elicited by the butterfly effect, may favor particular action to take place which potentially leads to emergence.

I don't view the universe as deterministic though and the evolutionary success of humans as a species, especially considering the killing, crime, and havoc we've inflicted on each other throughout the millenia, nevermind on the rest of the world, is ample evidence that the delicacies the calculated butterfly effect suggests doesn't necessarily always translate to the varied and dynamic environmental experience in the real world.

 

Throwing that pebble in the pond effect.......
a flower does not know how far its scent reaches......
back at the string theory and vibrations of the universe......