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Originally Posted by onetwo_threefour
^ Yep, my undergrad was psychology, but heavy on the neuroscience/neurobiology aspect. By the time i graduated, I really questioned whether we even have free will in a true sense. Everything about consciousness seems like it's just a matter of emergent properties of a highly complex system, but that would seem to make all of our activities deterministic even if we don't understand the mechanism. If that is the case then how can we exercise free will at all? We are just slaves of the electrochemical processes of our bodies after all and free will may just be an ad hoc ex post facto justification that our brains give us to explain our behaviour to us.
I don't really believe that, but stuff I learned in my studies about things like optical illusions, cognitive dissonance, how emotional reactions can actually precede thought and other strange findings of neuropsychololgy all makes me wonder how close we even are to actually studying consciousness. Somehow our consciousness really does seem separate from the biochemical/electrochemical processes of our bodies and if there's any spirituality I may still subscribe to it would just be the mystery of how we can have a consciousness that seems more than the sum of its parts. I certainly do think that there is a natural explanation for this, but it's the one thing that i have a somewhat open mind about, that our animating spirit is something more than just an emergent property of our physical makeup. We don't yet have even the tools to explore that proposition but it's something I wonder about.
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I don't see anything wrong with being cognizant of and accepting that our thoughts and actions are nothing but emergent properties of our physical make up and electro-chemical processes.
The mechanics of it does not take away from the beauty that is life and the imagination and reverence to be in awe of it and to seek out new knowledge and understanding; all despite the majority of days that we do feel enslaved to our physiology and merely being the product of millions of years of evolution driving the base instincts behind our thoughts and perceptions and the nature our very existence.
Despite the nebulous mechanics, if the emergent property is an irrational mind, then it is exactly that irrational mind that yearns to free ourselves from the bonds of our physical and corporeal existence because it has the imagination to behold the possibility of much, much more to life. That to me, is what defines self-awareness and sentience.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Thor
The more we learn, the less we are actually determining our own beliefs, and that our brains as they become less mysterious are starting to resemble a probability machine.
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That too. All of existence is pretty much quantum mechanics when you boil it down isn't it? I think that's beautiful that we can even dare to attempt to comprehend such a thing.