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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Are you made of matter? Are you concious?

If so then the matter you are made of is concious; it is matter that is in a state of conciousness.

That's an odd statement. Is there precedent for attributing emergent phenomenon to the pieces? Because that is what seems to be happening here. To my eyes, if a system is conscious, that does not mean the pieces that make the system are conscious. Consciousness is an emergent property of the system.

Snowflakes are pretty. The water molecules in the snowflake do not inherent this; they are not themselves pretty as a result of being in the pretty snowflake. (Although you could consider them beautiful for other reasons. From a life-sciences and/or chemistry point of view, water is pretty beautiful)

But then again, I'm an engineer with a passing interest in chemistry, not a quantum physicist, so of course I see everything as systems. To me nothing they talk about makes sense anyway.

States of matter are emergent. A single atom cannot be said to be a gas, liquid or solid, only a sufficiently large group of them.

A single unconnected atom would be a gas, right?

No, a single, unconnected atom would be just that. The ideas of solid, liquid, gas, plasma, Bose Einstein Condensate, ect... are defined by the interactions of atoms in varying energy states and degrees of freedom.

Still, a snowflake is not a state of matter. You cannot say "Oh if we increase the pressure it will enter phase X and thus the snowflake state of matter". It is built upon a state of matter (crystaline solid), no?

A snowflake is second-tier emergence (this is a made-up term). Hydrogen and oxygen atoms do not have states of matter. Water molecules, as collections of H and O atoms in specific arrangements, have states of matter. Snowflakes are collections of water molecules in specific arrangements and in specific states of matter. A snowman. A family of snowmen. The general practice of creating snowmen. And so on and so on.

Right, so the ice is not a snowflake, but the snowflake is made of ice. Similarly, organic chemicals are not a consciousness, but a consciousness emerges (we think) in a lump of organic chemicals. Do you disagree?

P.S. A snowman isn't exactly an emergent property. Now, an avalanche system might be...

I agree that describing the actual matter itself as conscious, rather than the object it forms, is a stretch too far. When I die the matter I'm made of will still be exactly the same stuff, but the object it forms will no longer be a human being.

So a cup of coffee on my desk is conscious? I mean, come on! It is the complex neural activity in the brain that brings about consciousness. We just don't understand why that neural activity translates into consciousness.

gottfiend leibniz developed a theory called 'monadology' which suggested that consciousness is the fundamental basis of everything, including matter.

if consciousness is being "aware" of yourself, then at a very, very, very low level, the coffee cup is "aware" of itself because it is a perfect analog computer simulating "a cup of coffee on a desk" - which is what it is.

gottfiend leibniz...

That's an interesting misspelling of "Gottfried". A universal genius, indeed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...

EDIT: Why the downvote? Did I not write enough? My point is, simply, that observing consciousness in correlation to matter does not imply that consciousness is caused by matter. The provided link is to the Wikipedia article that explains this basic statistical principle.

The downvote is probably for the straw man. No one is saying that consciousness is caused by matter.

I guess I didn't see it as a straw man.

"Are you made of matter? Are you concious? If so then the matter you are made of is concious"... implying that if you are both made of matter and conscious then it is the matter that you are made of that makes you conscious. In other words, consciousness is caused by matter.

I don't believe that we have sufficient empirical evidence to determine a causal relationship, only a correlation.

EDIT: I realize I mistakenly jumped to the conclusion that the parent was implying matter caused consciousness when all that was said was that "conscious matter is conscious". I just wanted to further explain what I was thinking. Straw man or not, whether my argument was sound or not, I thought I had a valid point to make to contribute to the conversation and I don't feel that it should have been downvoted.

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