Category: Emergentism
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Epiphenomenalism cannot be true
In brief, epiphenomenalism cannot be true. Qualia, it turns out, must have a causally relevant role in forward-propelled organisms, for otherwise natural selection would have had no way of recruiting it. I propose that the reason why consciousness was recruited by natural selection is found in the tremendous computational power that it afforded to the real-time world…
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Is sentience evolutionarily useful or physically inevitable?
It is very intuitive to believe that sentience motivates us to make (better) decisions (“better”, from an evolutionary point of view). But we can also consider that it is possible that we are sentient robots, but without will, that we simply do what we have been programmed for, even though we have the feeling that…
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What is the problem of consciousness?
The problem of consciousness can be formulated as follows: how is it that, from a purely material basis (a brain or a centralized nervous system), consciousness emerges? This is what the problem of consciousness really boils down to. Answering this requires answering the question, what structures must be present in an organism and how would they…
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Collective intelligence, ants and the binding problem
A single neuron in the human brain can respond only to what the neurons connected to it are doing, but all of them together can be Immanuel Kant. Read more The idea of a collective consciousness (Or Anthill) is pretty simple: instead of cells you have small sentient animal that make up a larger creature.…
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A biomaterial that arrange itself
“Using DASH, the Cornell engineers created a biomaterial that can autonomously emerge from its nanoscale building blocks and arrange itself – first into polymers and eventually mesoscale shapes. Starting from a 55-nucleotide base seed sequence, the DNA molecules were multiplied hundreds of thousands times, creating chains of repeating DNA a few millimeters in size. The…
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Consciousness and the binding-problem
While panpsychism sounds crazy, it is actually a highly viable theory of consciousness, as long as it is distinguished from animism: the view that everything is alive and therefore possesses agency, intentionality, thoughts, emotions, etc. Elementary particles almost certainly are not endowed any of these attributes, but according to (my take on) panpsychism, they have…
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The Legend of Simurgh
The Simurgh features strongly in Persian mythology and a number of the great epic poems of Persian literature. It is said to be a mixture of peacock, griffon and lion symbolises the union of heaven and earth. In his epic poem The Conference of the Birds, Fariduddin Attar describes how millions of birds went in…