You ever consider how humans are just complex flesh robots, and consciousness is purely a result of chemical reactions?

the concept of death is correlated to the idea that we're organic robots, but have you also considered the number of people who believe that the spirit of their recently dead family member just flew up into heaven and hes chilling with god and jesus now?
I think you might be overestimating how many people are even considering how external stimuli makes decisions for them, and how their emotions can be boiled down to chemistry

I think the human mind is more than just the brain. In fact, the brain adapts itself to the mind. While sometimes losing brain parts can lead to the loss of certain functions, other times the brain can remap itself to retain them as well. And then there's the case for situations where we have complete choice. What exactly are we reacting towards then? Some may be concerned by primal instincts such as hunger and need for reproduction, but what about for those who are not? Plus, while there are really not concrete evidence for spiritual phenomena, I think they might be true even though for a sizeable portion of them, they could just have been exaggerated or natural occurrences taken as paranormal. In fact, quite a number of psychiatrists here actually acknowledge supernatural explanations for certain cases that they encounter, which leads me to lean towards the possibility that a person can be more than his/her body.

That's what I said.

Next OP is going to find out the sky is blue

considering the state of this board, I think that might be a revelation to at least a few

No, you said that people """choose""" not to take control. I'm arguing that irl, there typically is no control to take. Shit just happens and people have to deal with the consequences.

What is blue?

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I didn't say they "choose" to take control, I'm saying most people can't.

>but most people """just""" """don't""" take control

Fine, I worded it poorly, you win. Is that what you want?

Explain how souls work if it's just chemical reactions

The day a chemist can recreate consciousness is the day I'll say "yeah our brains are just chemical reactions and nothing else." Til then you're really reaching with this claim. There's clearly more to it.

Our human bodies may be just information processing machines, however such machines can't be conscious by themselves. There definitely is such a thing as consciousness, whether it is a physical thing in our brains or something else.

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i mean sometimes, but then i realize i have actual problems i need to think about instead.

Electromagnetic radiation of wavelength ~490-450 nm.

based dilbert with the hard hitting facts

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About pic:
>I'm smart
>I make woman moist with my intellect
>I can get any woman I want
>"writing"

Thats a quantitative representation, not qualia itself.

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But the burden of proof is on you, we already understand the chemical reactions in the brain pretty well, so it's actually less of a jump to make the assumption that we're all running on stimuli, albeit a complex system based on reinforcing stimulus-driven decisions.

Your assumption is that there is something that we don't yet understand that is beyond our capabilities that is ineffable to how everything else works and evidence that we already have on our own brains and the brains of animals

It's a lot harder to prove yours than mine is all I'm sayin

It's been pretty much objectively proven that your brain makes decisions without your conscious input.

youtube.com/watch?v=aAnlBW5INYg

A complex system that takes information and does things based on that information can not be proven to be conscious.
There is no proof of consciousness existing in human brains, yet somehow it does exist.

Okay, sure.
Blue is the name given to how the majority of brains we define as human react to the stimulus of electromagnetic radiation in the wavelength of ~490-450 nm.
Whilst the underlying mechanical interactions in each individuals brain may be very different the effect it has on the brain at a higher level is practically identical for the average person.

I may be misunderstanding what "qualia" is really hinting at though since I haven't extensively studied philosophy so I may be missing the point. However, it seems to be the objection that because you can have two different programs which work differently but produce effectively the same output then that makes the output somehow invalid?

>Blue is the name given to how the majority of brains we define as human react to the stimulus of electromagnetic radiation in the wavelength of ~490-450 nm.
If you were to say that to someone whose never seen blue in their life, would they know what blue looks like?

>yet somehow it does exist
well you gotta prove that if you want it to be true
what I'm saying is that there is no consciousness at all, but instead it's just such a complex system that you think there has to be some sort of consciousness in there

Why would this be some sort of revelation?

I am conscious and so are you, pretending that we're not is a waste of time.

I asked YOU if you ever thought about it
I never said it was some sort of revelation to me, and if you felt that I implied that, then let me reassure you I have never had a revelation in my entire life

the next step is to realize that everything is genetic. serial killers, child beaters, CEOs, successful people. it was always going to turn out that way for everybody. sometimes i think that nobody can be blamed for any wrongdoing or complimented for being extraordinary because it's just their DNA playing out. the people that become sociopaths and terrible people because their parents did horrible shit to them can't be blamed for being terrible to others and their parents cant be blamed for fucking them up because it's all genetics and dna. free will doesn't exist we are just machines that replicate and do whatever we were always going to do because we're programmed that way.

No, because the description of something doesn't trigger the firing of neurons in the same way as the experiencing of it.
With that said though, it would hypothetically be possible to manually fire neurons / create connections inside the brain according to this description such that someone who has never experienced what blue hitting their retina is like now knows what the experience is like.

So I suppose the definition I'm looking for is a definition of how to fire / create links of the neurons in someones brain relative to their brain to invoke the experience of blue. I can't provide you with such a definition because the technology just isn't there yet but I see no reason why it isn't technically possible.

But yeah, I think it's possible to give a definition of blue in a "thought format" and not a verbal one. That format just doesn't exist yet.

I won't deny that the illusion of consciousness is real and very strong in all of us, but you have to admit that empirical evidence would tell us that we aren't that way.
Evidence is most important to me, and I don't think saying that we both feel conscious is actually good enough to be worth discussion
I just think its much more formulaic than we understand

>youtube.com/watch?v=aAnlBW5INYg
That is true, but that doesn't exclude the fact that your mind can still make decisions on its own.

Qualia is the experience of seeing blue and it only exists in the consciousness of one's mind. A machine without consciousness that can detect that something is "blue" doesn't actually understand WHAT IT FEELS LIKE to see the color blue.

what does it say when you understand the exact stimulus that is seeing the color blue and use a very specific electrical and/or chemical input into the brain and elicit as similar as possible response to seeing the color blue
is qualia actually something worth discussing outside of the assumption that consciousness is unique and works in a way that we don't understand
because it feels like all of these things can be broken down into their individual parts, even the reaction to seeing it, and even the immaterial concept of colors can be reduced in a similar way

What I'm trying to get at here is that "experiencing the color blue" can not be defined. It is irrelevant how the experience of seeing the color blue is triggered. The firing of those specific neurons in your brain isn't what qualia is.

And yes, qualia can not be proven to be a real thing, just as consciousness can't be proven to exist.

oh yeah I understand what you're saying
from my point of view its a problem with the disconnect between our language/classification system and our sensory input systems
before we were able to categorize these stimuli, they were just stimuli, so the issue wasn't at the forefront, but now we think about everything, so it has become an issue worth thinking about

I can sort of see what's being said but I'm not sure if I'm convinced by its validity.

If you were to go out and ask the average person to describe the feeling of blue I imagine they would give responses like "the ocean" or "cold" or ... whatever - it doesn't really matter.
I think we're reaching the point where programmed machines could give similar sets of output words given in an input word such as "blue".

>But it's not really feeling, it's just code!
And I can understand where that comes from, but what evidence do we have for this objection? How do we know what the "mind" of the machine is like? Could it be that if the machine could express itself we would believe in its output more?

In fact, let me construct a thought experiment.
Suppose you go up to a machine and type in a word and the machine responds with what it thinks. You might object and say it's not really thinking. However, imagine if the truth was that there was no machine. There was just a man in a room who was forced to respond with another in between to validate that those responses are broadly acceptable.
Perhaps the actual machine is much like that man. After all, you wouldn't say that the man inside the room has no feelings if you knew they were there. Maybe it's not that programmed machines can't feel. It's that they can't communicate in a way that will convince us (the average person) they can.

Now I'm not saying that's reality, but perhaps it could be?

Yes, but the means of my consciousness doesn't change the fact that I am conscious. Nature's amazing that it could randomly produce such a phenomenon.

>What I'm trying to get at here is that "experiencing the color blue" can not be defined.
I mean, even here I have to object. Because we can rigorously define it.

Take the state of the brain the moment before it experiences blue. Invoke the firing of neurons such that it experiences blue. The resulting firing of neurons / chemical releases in the brain I have now defined as the experience of blue. It will result in different firings for different brains but that doesn't really matter. In the same way that two people might dance differently we still have a label we can wrap around the concept of dancing.

I'm struggling to see where this definition is lacking. Hopefully it doesn't seem like I'm trolling though - I am trying to understand.

It's impossible to tell if a machine (or a human) has consciousness just by analyzing its behavior.
Only a mind with a consciousness knows whether it has one or not.
"All humans are conscious" is just an assumption. "I am conscious therefore beings with the same genetic make-up as mine are conscious too"

>fool
>trusting particles
>fight or perish like doggo

Your mainly just thinking about liberals/NPCs

You dualist scum to admit that consciousness is, has been, and always will be explainable by the same physical and chemical interactions as literally everything else. Just because we don't have a linear cause and effect between the physical structure of the brain and observed consciousness in all cases does not leave you a gap to shove the immortal soul in there - why would a soul be affected by brain damage? Why would a non-material soul need a material brain to transmit commands to the body?

Qualia is "what does it feel like", not "what makes it happen" or "what appears to be happening".
I won't be replying to your posts anymore, I have things I need to do. I hope you got something out of this discussion.

I guess our differences are a product of the different assumptions we make.

So lets get some housekeeping done. I'm going to assume that the observations we make of the universe are valid. Of course it is completely unknowable whether this reality is actually just the mad delusions of an insane person and as such any "reason" is merely coincidental but in this case nothing can be reasoned about so it's pointless. You might as well assume you can "know" things because, frankly, it's a lot more boring if you just stick to the fact that you can't know anything.

Within that assumption, I do not see why code cannot describe everything. Code is just instructions about what happens. The only alternative I can see to how events can be decided is randomness. Which is fine, we can include the results of randomness in our code. It doesn't change much. If you have a third way of deciding events then I'd really like to hear it. So the universe can be modeled as code and as such the minds of humans as more code within it.

So if you pick some property of code that you decide is consciousness then you will be able to look at any code and determine if it has that property. (The problem may be undecidable depending on your definition of consciousness but then is your set defined by consciousness even meaningful?) This means you could look at other people, other machines, even those incapable of communicating and decide if they're conscious. Others might disagree on what you choose to define as consciousness but that doesn't matter as much. The fact is that you can and it will work for any definition you choose.

I always think zells are factories and everything and everyone inside are wagecucks

>I won't be replying to your posts anymore, I have things I need to do.
That's fair enough. Thanks for your time, user.

For completeness I'll add this.
>Qualia is "what does it feel like", not "what makes it happen" or "what appears to be happening".
To me, I struggle to separate the distinction between the feeling and the physical process. Because to me, it seems like the physical manifestation is what the feeling physically is.

Put simply:
When you feel a feeling, your neurons will fire in a certain way.
When your neurons are fired in a certain way, you will feel a feeling.
If (a => b) and (b => a) then (a b). (a and b are equivalent.)