Question by Learner: How do atoms and molecules create consciousness?
How does an engineered collection of atoms and molecules cause consciousness to emerge?
By engineered, I just mean arranged in a specific precise manner.
@Zaphod_Beeblebrox: LOL, I know, but still… 🙂 I had to ask. 🙂
Best answer:
Answer by Zaphod_Beeblebrox
1) If any of us knew that we’d be shoe-in for a Nobel prize.
2) Who says that atoms and molecules are “engineered” unless you take the view that evolution itself is a form of engineering, albeit a slow and patient one?
What do you think? Answer below!
All we know so far is that consciousness does exist and that atoms and molecules are involved. The ‘how’ part has not yet been answered and it is up to physicists to find out. Any physicist that comes to the conclusion that consciousness doesn’t exist is wrong.
Atoms and molecules are used to build cells. Cells are used to build neural networks. The combined operation of billions of cells in the neural network create your consciousness, like the way the many pixels on a TV or computer screen create an image.
yes, mr.know-it-all is using YA cos he has nothing better to do. Hold on, let me get him for you.
I’ve never heard of consciousness being engineered by atoms. It’s quite the reverse. Atoms and molecules are effects derived from a prior cause.
“Consciousness drives the Universe”
http://youtu.be/y9bVd3BspIQ
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Consciousness is the Director. It is the Will which makes the mould and the Life Intelligence and Substance fill the mould and Form comes forth.
Consciousness wasn’t engineered or designed in the usual meaning of those words. Neither is consciousness fully understood by the conscious beings possessing it. You might as well ask, how do atoms and molecules create television sets, and the answer would be through evolution via human beings.
Through the process of evolution by natural selection we get from simplicity to complexity where random gene mutations were gradually filtered over immense periods of time to produce favourably selected biological creatures capable of surviving in a changing environment. Consciousness is naturally selected in many different species because of the usefulness of awareness in a world full of competing creatures killing each other for survival. Humans just happen to be the most curious of those creatures trying to understand the nature of consciousness and how it came about. No one yet knows how consciousness works at the molecular level.
Actually a single atom is conscious, and within it is all the information necessary to re-create the entire universe.
The collection of atoms known as a human being, is a multitude of that same conscious energy in action.
The human formed, has more going on within it and all around it than just basic consciousness. (beliefs, attitudes, emotions, free will, volition, etc…)
The atoms that form a single human body, are all part of the one person, and although each atom has it’s own life, the form they belong to for the time being, thinks it is, and so it is. (the atoms realize the old adage (we are all one). Else the human form you hold, surely wouldn’t remain as it does.
All That Is, didn’t create a system that could fail.
(fail safe engineering at it’s finest)
🙂
Cheers!
Because consciousness is already there, before atoms and molecules even exist. They are MADE of consciousness. So that’s why, when they form an engineered collection together, an individual consciousness emerges. Isn’t that beautiful? 🙂