Concoder this: If everything is made of atoms, and chemical reactions, then how do any living organisms think?
Because your limited list doesn't include all things. There's a ghost in the machine! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
sorry I'm concodering it, but nothing is happening Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!. My atoms are not feeling very active at the moment!
Thinking is simply a process of the chemical reactions you speak of. Certain chemicals affect various neurones which are attached to millions of other brain cells. We think in a similar way to computers it's almost binary. 1 Or 0 on or off, left or right. One of the most profound things ever said to me was that Life is simply a series of choices. Everything is a choice and one thing triggers another which triggers another de blah de blah de blah. An infinite universe full of infinite possiblilties (Old vulcan saying)
But there is no need to "explain" thought by a ghost in the machine. There is no ghost in the machine. Ghosts in machines suck ass! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Isn't it possible that once the brain has started its show, it will continue until the organism dies. Is the act of thinking a result of previous experience, or is it an act of "free will"? Why do we <i>experience</i> thought? Why does it not happen as "silent calculations"? What do we need this freakin' consciousness for?!? Life would be a lot easier without it! Or would it...? Just a little outburst... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
A reply I think that the answer to that question would be more forthcoming if one pondered the ways we don't or can't think. But,of course, that would require not thinking about what appears impossible.
All atoms and chemical reactions that you are aware of are your thoughts of them. You are therefore not qualified to speak of what atoms themselves are, only to talk of what it's like for you to experience your observation of a chemical reaction or your experience of working out a bunch of math in quantum physics which will be predictively confirmed by obeservation experiments, or your experience of observing a little drawing representing a Bohr atom. "What we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our type of question. Space exists only in relation to our particularizing consciousness. The portions of the external universe of which we have additional knowledge by direct awareness amount to a very small fraction of the whole; of the rest we know only the structure and not what it is a structure of. Science is concerned with the rational correlation of experience rather than a discovery of fragments of absolute truth about an external world." - Arthur Eddington With this in mind, it's clear that thought and matter don't contradict each other in any way... for the only type of matter which we know in itself is our thoughts themselves. For everything else in the unvierse, we know only representations of it within our thoughts.
We dont... we only respond to stimuli based on prior experience and programming. The "kernel" of human thought is instinct. The only question for me, the most powerful, is instinct itself. this is the variable factor.... how the hell did THAT come about....
I think thinking is just a reaction to exterior stimulus. For example: It is hot outside. Therefore: Body sweats, human starts to complain and turns on the air conditioning. P.S. Hey Ender, what's 'concoder' mean? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! (see, that's another example of thinking. My brain didn't recognize something, so it set out to find out what it is. I could've just used the dictionary, but my body's saying it's too comfy and doesn't want to move Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! )
Ender: You're premise begs the question. How is it that atoms and chemical reactions cannot lead to thinking??? Seems to me that you're looking for some non-physical sense of the word 'thinking'. %BlueSoulRobot%: What about thinking that occurs without an exterior stimulus??? eg., dreaming. or, depending on your definition of 'stimulus', a purely creative thought like: unicorn. ?? BTW: Cerebro. hehe
Ender, What you are asking is a really complex question and in the center of todays research in artificial intelligens. There are no theories that can really explain what thoughts are. It is too complex for a mathematical analysis. What we know is how individual neurons are built and how they send and recieve signals from other neurons. But that is pretty much it. We can also see intelligent behaviour in artificial neural networks. In neural networks a behaviour is learnt by repeated exposure to different examples. After a while the neural network has learnt how to respond to stimuli. The interesting thing and the strength of neural networks is that it responds reasonable to examples it has not previously seen. The brain is a huge collection of neural networks communicating with each other and having different functions. Together this creates what we perceive as consciousness. Here we border on philosophy and it is really difficult to explain what consciousness really is. Anyway..
Maybe the human brain is an extremely advanced bio-computer but we need a password to get into 90% of it's functions, like shareware. Unfortunatly, no-one has this password and it's up to us, Humans, to break that password.
--Glaucon-- But dreaming does arise from external stimulus. Every action has a reaction. If you dream, then it's a reaction from something that's happened to you before. And unicorns aren't purely creative, they came from legends of horses or rhinos that sailors saw and then came back to tell their landbound countrymen of a mystical horse with a horn. Another example are mermaids: sailors saw walruses/seals in the fog and thought they were maidens with fish tails, because they were deprived (wink wink) from being out at sea too long, heh heh Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And welcome to SciForums! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! (a little late, but that's ok) Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
