Sorry about that ridiculous watermark.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    I am neither an emergent property nor atoms, I simply am…

    I personally never took much seriousness in the whole “What if your bed is a death machine!?!” idea

    There’s too much continuity for that to make sense, I mean, I remember most of my dreams, so I can basically account for everything… And many of my dreams are effected by outside stimuli…

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Yeah, the comic’s story and message are beautiful, but the “sleep kills you” argument is poorly thought out, and based on a shallow understanding of what continuity actually means. It’s not about consciousness, it’s about continuity. The processes in the brain that make up your mind don’t stop as soon as you fall asleep.

      There’s an argument to be made about how you’re never the same person that you were even just a moment ago, because you’re constantly changing. That’s also shallow and lazy, and ignores the continuity we’re talking about.

      There’s an argument to be made that from your perspective, continuity isn’t broken. That’s also shallow and lazy, because it treats the perception of continuity as if it’s the same thing as real continuity. As far as your clone is concerned, continuity wasn’t broken. But I was never worried about whether my clone will die when I go in the teleporter, you know?

        • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          No, we do know that the brain makes the mind. Physical changes to the brain can make predictable changes to the mind, but your thoughts don’t change the structure of your brain.

          • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            While your first point is true, your second is not. It’s actually been found that if you change the way you think about stuff, your brain actually changes. It’s this little thing called neuroplasticity and it’s fucking wild. - https://www.healthline.com/health/rewiring-your-brain

            We’ve also observed intelligence and seeming awareness from things like fungus, which don’t even have brains.

            • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago

              Yeah, I’m aware of that. Vasanas are a related topic. But these are results of physical interactions between neurons in your brain. There’s nothing nonphysical about your mind that creates or alters matter supernaturally. My point stands, the mind is, as far as a naturalistic philosophy is concerned, an emergent property of complex interactions in the brain.

              • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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                5 months ago

                If my thought moved the neurons as opposed to my neurons making the thought as demonstrated by neuroplasticity, than the brain cannot be the origin.

                • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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                  5 months ago

                  The neurons are what make the thoughts. I acknowledge the existence of neuroplasticity and vasanas, but the mind is an emergent property of the physical neurons. If your thoughts are having an effect on the brain, that is because there are physical processes happening in the brain that are affecting the brain.

                  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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                    5 months ago

                    Except the cause of those physical processes seems to be something that by itself is not a physical process. If I can just decide to rewire my brain and that works, what prompted the rewiring? What told these neurons to say “We should do something different?”

                    Because that’s essentially what’s happening during neuroplasticity, something invisible and intangible (the mind) is changing the brain’s building blocks.

                    It seems to be quite the plothole in the Physicalist Paradigm and the only objection appears to be “Naw uh”

                    See Also: https://ykulbashian.medium.com/emergence-isnt-an-explanation-it-s-a-prayer-ef239d3687bf

                    If you disagree, then we’re just going to have to agree to disagree.

    • wia@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      There are parts of your sleep that you’re basically unconscious and nearly impossible to wake.

      The dreams could be a whole life being uploaded to your brain, hence the weirdness, until it’s initialized and you wake up.