Recent content by alexsok

If the universe is infinite (and BB theory can work with infinite and finite space equally well), then does that mean that there is an infinite number of galaxies with an infinite number of stars? I know we can only observe our slice of the universe that the light had time to reach us and that...

It's the same as asking "what made the big bang explode"? the simple answer is we don't know and might never know.

Cosciousness is not QM. Penrose and his friend Hameroff did too much damage with these claims. Consciousness is most likely a biological phenomenon that is irreducible though. The universe existed long before we came into it and we are as disposable to it as our genetic vehicles are for life.

Curiosity of what? Think back to the time before you were born and there you have your curiosity satisfied - that is not a place I would want to visit again, particularly since being dead is tantamount to the entire universe never existing (for you anyway, but that's the same thing). RIchard...

So you're embracing a form of panpsychism then.

I wonder... if we could live forever and weren't afflicted with any permanently debilitating maladies such as terminal diseases, loss of loved ones, etc but were simply unhappy say for 80 years. Some people here suggested the waiting it out in these "milder" cases is the way to go and others...

I think you're simplifying the problem ala the "biological naturalism" of John Searle which is elegant enough, but overly simplistic... I am more than positive that machines would be conscious even if we don't find out all the nitty-gritty of the brains inner workings (functionalism) though...

I wonder. The universe indeed seemed to have appeared out of nothing, but what about consciousness coming to life in every human embryo (and in other forms of life where it's a different type of it)? Doesn't it come out of nothing also? Can we correlate them?

Well, I'm happy too that it worked out that way ;) But, although it's tempting to proclaim because it seems to us that we existed forever and will never die (a particular property of consciousness) that the birth of the universe is similar to our birth, we know that we weren't really present...

JoeDawg Thanks for your reply. Firstly, I don't believe in any God or the afterlife. I'm a transhumanist. I believe that consciounsess is ultimately irreducible but can definitely be simulated on non-biological substrates (so in this regard I'm a functionalist). But without muddling things up...

JoeDawg I understand your concern, but what other alternative explanation can you give for the emerge of consciousness literally out of nothing in every human being? You're also saying that it is unimportant in the grand scale of things, but how then is it capable of, as you said, emerging out...

I was wondering, seeing as the genome contains all the code that is necessary to building a three-dimensional structure (our brain) and consciousness emerges when a certain critical limit is reached (the complexity of matter), doesn't that mean that the the property of consciousness is intrinsic...

Alright, that makes sense. But how do the future conscious entities actually come to be and where are they at the moment or they are merely a possibility encoded inside the fourth dimension?

You want ot say that the entire past, present and future history of the human race is already written in advance in some form of an "omega point"?

So everyone is hung up on semantics then? But conscious entities such as us do need origin in the past...