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AntiDyatlovtoday at 2:28 PM3 repliesview on HN

Well, actually, probably not. If you say we're made out of meat, you end up with the hard problem of consciousness.

I'm imagining a purple cube in this moment. Is the purple cube made out of meat?


Replies

otikiktoday at 5:16 PM

Of course not.

If you put two stones in the ground, they define a line. It goes through the center of mass of both stones and extends towards both sides through the universe.

Now remove the stones.

Does the line stop existing? You can still "see it" in your brain. It could be argued that the line has always been there. That the stones were just a marker. A means for an idea to manifest in the physical word. You could put any two other markers at any point on that line and they would represent the same line.

The idea that "the cube is made out of meat" is akin to saying that "the line is made out of stone". Ideas always exist, their representation in the physical world don't.

Your sense of consciousness is just one of those representations. It is "immortal", just like the line is. In principle it could exist without the physical substrate that is your brain, or in a different substrate. Probably there's a way to encode all of that into a big number.

I think this is where the idea of an "immortal soul" comes from. It is however kind of easy to misinterpret it, especially if one is a mesopotamian sheperd who explains the world with gods and religion.

pixl97today at 5:28 PM

Where does the simulation happen inside a computer.

The hard problem of consciousness isn't.

rokkamokkatoday at 2:57 PM

It's electrical signals... Inside your meat

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