Quote:
Originally Posted by hydroponichronic
I happen to subscribe to determinism at the moment, finding no sufficient counterargument (although I am open to debate).
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Randomness at the quantum level, unless you think we just don't understand quantum mechanics fully yet. Although that doesn't necessarily preclude determinism on a conscious, human level, but it's a pretty important distinction.
My personal philosophy on life is that life, and everything arising from it, is nothing but a function of matter. KikoSanchez kinda touched on this a little, but I think I might ramble on for a while about it.
If ever, anywhere in the universe, something occurs that allows matter to imperfectly replicate, it will refine itself in all sorts of strange and wonderful ways, all the better to replicate faster. It's completely and utterly logically irrefutable. Evolution without all the self-importance. and a step deeper. And it can account for consciousness.
Anything that is able to respond to its environment to safeguard its own existence has a replicative advantage, and anything that self-replicates will respond to its environment. No consciousness or sentience involved; at its most primitive, it's just selection on the chemical level. Being warm will speed up replication as warmth speeds up chemical and physical processes, so replicating matter will be selected on the basis of its proximity to warmth. If an imperfect replication leads to replicating matter being able to make better use of resources hastening its proliferation (sorry for the mouthful of a sentences), it will again be selected for, by definition. It's a cumulative process; as the selected matter becomes more complex, so do the selective advantages imparted by the changes from replication to replication. If ever the matter is able to respond such that it can move towards warmth (or whatever else), the same applies.
And consciousness, at its most fundamental level, is just responding to the external environment. It's had a few billion years to develop, but the only difference between our consciousness and a bacterium maximising its replicative potential by seeking out higher concentrations of nutrients is that we have billions of times as many responsive processes. And all these processes increase our replicative potential; it's even evident within the last hundred years of human history, such is our effectiveness. Look at the incredible expansion of the human population in that time.
Looking at life this way accounts not just for consciousness, but for all the constructs of consciousness. Education, for example, is merely an emergent mechanism that increases the efficiency of our response to the external environment (i.e. consciousness), and thus gives rise to other mechanisms increasing our replicative potential as matter, such as medicine. Medicine (as a random example) is just chemical processes which increase the replicative success of matter, emergent from the reaction of that matter to the environment. It's no different from unconscious reaction of insensate replicating matter to its environment, just scaled upwards in complexity as a result of the refinement of the process over time (as a self-refining process, this is again by definition). Are you following?
The upshot is, consciousness is just a result of the endless refinement of the replication of matter. It's just a combination of physical processes that have the inevitable result of improving the replicative potential of matter. We attach such importance and meaning to it because it's in the nature of consciousness to do so (and a rather peculiar development to think about), but there's no actual significance there that's any deeper than in hydrogen fusion in stars, or the slow formation of diamond or oil, or anything else. How could there be? Significance is a subjective construct of consciousness. Concepts such as awareness or consciousness are completely meaningless, except of course in the meaning we consciously attach to them. Which means that the only meaning these concepts have are completely circular and self-dependent, and thus the whole house of cards comes crashing down.
And you thought determinism was fatalistic.
It is rather interesting, though, that such complex refinement can give rise to sustained, replicating behaviour that's actually detrimental to the replicative potential of that matter, like evolution in reverse. Drug use, thrill-seeking, things like that, they're all emergent from processes that
do increase replicative potential (I'm getting sick of typing that phrase), but they've done a turnaround. Although really, they're just an example of selection; such behaviours will eventually be selected out as inevitably as day turns to night.
So, yeah, in summary, that's my opinion of how the concept of consciousness fits into the universe.
I can't figure out consciousness...
Re: I can't figure out consciousness...
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