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Posted by Mario Dovalina on June 24, 2001 01:51:54 UTC

"Instead of tackling the hard problem of describing the conscious experience, we can duck it and investigate the easy...question of the process of delivering information from the physical world to this mysterious consciousness."

I don't really think any outside....... AGENT is needed. If I were a tree, I would probably be unable to describe the experience, but that is a lack of ability, not neccesarily indicative of outside intervention.

That brings up another point. Would you say all living things have agents working through them? Dogs? Fish? Sponges? Grass? Fungus? Viruses? Where do you draw the line between living and non-living, in between conscious and non-conscious?

I may be scientifically minded, but I will never deny the possibility of outside agents causing our consciousness. Anything is possible. However, the available evidence suggests against it. As far as has been told, the brain is entirely self-contained. If evidence in the future suggests otherwise, I will change my opinion. But I try not to jump to conclusions.

I compare the philosophical situation to this: we are all in a pitch black maze, trying to get out into the light in whatever way possible. I am on all fours groping my way along to the exit, others are sprinting as fast as they can in a direction they think feels right. Who is more likely to get a broken nose?

"The physical world is entirely describably with numbers. The soul (defined as above) and god (defined as the original consciousness) are not describable with numbers."

Why not? Take a virus as an example. It is a simple strand of RNA, incapable of reproducing itself without using a host cell for that purpose. As a virus goes about that process, it might think to itself (humor me): "Why am I doing this? There must be some greater purpose to my existence. I seem to exist in a world without consciousness, and yet I am aware of myself. So I must be special."

What is the purpose of a virus? To make more viruses. Its entire existence, its entire entity, can be summed up in a few hundred genes inside its membrane. It, itself, may not be able to attach any meaning to its existence, and may think of itself as subjective, and yet its simple number-based genetic coding influences its every action, again and again...

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