Tharan

I understand from reading your posts in previous threads that you're an atheist, or if not that extreme you at least disavow the teachings of Christianity and believe in evolution. That's fine with me, and I hope my beliefs are ok with you so long as I'm keeping them to myself.

I'm interested in your take on this article, if you're ok with taking the time to read it. https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-cannot-have-evolved-auid-1302

 

Thank you for promoting interesting topics for discussion.

The title itself is problematic. I realize authors of articles don't often write the titles (editors do), but still...claiming something "cannot be" is not generally science.

Moving on to the article, the idea of materialism (traditional version) is also not representative of reality. Traditional materialism is a reductionist philosophy that claims 1 + 1 = 2. On a singe layer logical thought level that is true. But physical reality is not based in a single layer. Reality is multi-layered, which is how emergent phenomenon become real. At the quantum level, there is no gravity. But at the macro-layer, gravity is an emergent property of matter. It is very real and is also not apparent when you break down the constituent parts of matter. There are even more examples of emergent properties at the levels of reality above the quantum realm. Superconductivity is an example that spans both the chemical (electrons specifically) and quantum. In biology, emergent properties are everywhere.

Consciousness is an emergent property. It is an electro-chemical wave function that emerges as a result of the material patterns underlying it. Most consciousness (at least the self-reflective variety) takes place in the outer layer of the brain, which is the newest part, in a evolutionary sense. Levels of consciousness vary not only among humans, but all mammals. It might be argued that reptilian brains (which coincide with the limbic part of our brain) display a low level of consciousness in that it processes variable environmental input (including pain receptors) and makes rudimentary decisions. But the self-reflective (cortex) component that generates imaginations of the past and future may be missing.

But lets say I am wrong about consciousness being an emergent property of the underlying hardware. There is undeniable evidence that various mammals display various levels of consciousness generally. If consciousness is granted by God, then humans are not The Chosen Ones, and animals do not exist solely for our pleasure (or however the Bronze Age writers of the Bible phrased it). Because there is absolutely no doubt that consciousness is a spectrum in the animal kingdom and even a variable among humans.

 

I think there is a base survival instinct at work that consciousness satisfies, but our levels go way the hell beyond that. It also almost feels built-in that there's a level of consciousness that we don't understand which could be higher-powerish. To be honest, I'm still wrapping my head around a lot of it.

 

I wonder how squats and butt plugs will be introduced into this thread.

 

The original version of Darwinism stressed this basic functionality of survivalism, or rather reproductivism. Nature itself doesn't particularly care if a single individual survives long after reproducing. A deeper understanding of complexity and chaos, and the emergent systems that form when complex objects interact with a larger environment, shows us that form development really is a convoluted sand castle built sand grain by sand grain over vast swathes of time.

Many of the biological forms we see in Nature are not particularly efficient or even effective over time. The overwhelming majority of lifeforms that have existed on this planet in the last 4-5 billion years no longer exist. We and everything alive today are but a small tip of a much bigger pyramid. Many of these lifeforms, like the panda bear digestive system, are highly specialized and very fragile. The panda bear digestive system evolved from a more generalized form into the specialized form we see today in the rapidly diminishing panda population. That particular lifeform may not exist in 200 years. Did some alien super-intelligence, a super-intelligence that barely conscious monkeys might call "God", design this form? Probably not. Based on the pattern that we see in Nature again and again, it mostly worked at the time it evolved, until the point that it didn't. Unlike humans, Nature does not make the good the enemy of the perfect. Whatever works.

I want to stress a point to you that seems to be not well understood in religious circles. In nature, form does not require a designer. Daniel Dennett's latest book ("From Bacteria to Bach and Back Again; The Evolution of Minds") covers this topic, and nothing else, giving example after example. When the first multi-cellular organisms captured a specific organism called a mitochondria, and incorporated its ability to process sugars, it was not designed or directed. It is "luck" in the sense that if you try the combination on a lock 100 trillion trillion trillion times, you will eventually get it right. What humans fail to grasp is the shear immensity of attempts nature has over time. It is a failure of imagination. In the gaps of that imagination, God is formed.

 

Evolution requires lots of luck of being at the right place at the right time.

Simply requiring a planet such as earth with the right ingredients is the luck of us being here. There surely has to be more somewhere, sometime in the future or past 'out there'.

Humans on this planet are just smart enough to be lead by retards.

But they do seem to need to be lead.

 

I don’t see how something can be created out of nothing. I hear about the big bang, and yeah that’s great, but what was before then? There’s so much we don’t know. To assume that all this can happen by blind luck takes every bit as much faith to me as leaving in a guy on a golden throne with a long flowing beard who lives in the clouds.

 

Also, it just seems to me, and this may not be true, but it seems to me that every few years we discover something else about how we are built that we didn’t know before. There’s probably just as much that we do not know as there is that we do.

 

This exact question has long perplexed philosophers. What I can tell you now is "Quantum Field Theory".

Lawrence Krauss wrote a book about this topic:
"A Universe From Nothing; Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing"

If you divide "space" into a 3 dimensional cube, call it a "Hamiltonian" space, and then measure the latent energy in that field, you will find that it is popping with multiple layers of bosons (force-relaying fields), fermions, (electrons and others), and various other fields. Often virtual particles will pop in and out of existence. These are basically just random spikes, like ocean waves, that pop out of the substructure, which we might register as a particle. This is in addition to the existing "real matter" that also might exist within that particular Hamiltonian space. In incredibly dense spaces, the spawning of virtual particles is the fundamental reason why black holes "bleed" (Hawking Radiation) and will eventually decay, according to the math.

The complexity of the layers of fields that permeate every part of spacetime is the reason why a juiced field could "freeze" and spawn incredible amounts of matter from pure energy. This would look like a "Big Bang".

Why is the original spacetime field "juiced" such that it might look like an explosion? What caused the "juicing"? Was it a collision of 5-dimensional membranes spawning the explosion of spacetime and its energy into our 3-dimensional reality? The math works at least.

We honestly don't know the origin of the Big Bang or even if that is exactly how is occurred. On the other hand, there is no evidence that it is supernatural. In fact, anything that does occur, is by definition natural.

 

Paraphrasing an old Greek philosopher, the true value of education is not in learning subjects, but in realizing that there are more subjects than you ever imagined surrounding you at all times. The fundamental truth about climbing a mountain, is that you are surrounded by countless other mountaintops. To awaken in the Buddhist sense, is not really to achieve anything other than opening your eyes.

This is the travesty of the non-curious and the uneducated. They think they are smarter than they are, because they have not seen the other mountaintops. They speak only of the single mountaintop they know, which the wise traveler knows as well.