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By Root 1809 0

a soul out of physical nuts and bolts is a tall order. But bear in mind that in my view, consciousness is a very unusual sort of intricately organized material pattern, not just any old physical activity. It’s not the swinging of a chain, the plopping of a stone in a pond, the splashing of a waterfall, the swirling of a hurricane, the refilling of a flush toilet, the self-regulation of the temperature in a house, the flow of electrons in a program that plays chess, the wiggling of an ovum-seeking sperm, the neural firings in a hungry mosquito’s brain… but we are getting ever closer as this list progresses. An “inner light” starts to turn on as we rise in this hierarchy. The light is still incredibly dim even at the list’s end, but if we extend the list further and sweep upwards through the brains of bees, goldfish, bunnies, dogs, and toddlers, it grows far brighter. It gets very bright when we arrive at human adolescents and adults, and it stays bright for decades. What we know as our own consciousness is, yes, nothing but the physical activity inside a human brain that has lived in the world for a number of years.

SL #642: No, the essence of consciousness is missing from your picture. You’ve described a complex set of brain activities involving symbols triggering each other, and I’m prepared to believe that something like that does take place inside brains. But that isn’t the whole story, because I am nowhere in this story. There is no room for an I. You’ve proposed myriads of unconscious particles bouncing around, or perhaps big clouds of activity made of particles — but if the universe were only that, then there would be no me, no you, no points of view. It would be the way the earth was before life evolved — millions of sunrises and sunsets, winds blowing hither and thither, clouds forming and scattering, thunderstorms swooping along valleys, boulders tumbling down mountains and gouging out gulleys, water flowing in riverbeds and carving deep canyons, waves breaking on sandy beaches, tides flowing in and out, volcanoes spewing out red-hot seas of lava, mountain chains bursting up out of plains, continents drifting and breaking apart, and so on. All very scenic, but there would be no inner life, no mind, no inner light, no I — no one to enjoy the great scenery.

SL #641: I sympathize with your sense of the barrenness of a universe made of physical phenomena only, but some kinds of physical systems can mirror what’s on their outside and can launch actions that depend upon their perceptions. That’s the thin edge of the wedge. When perception grows sophisticated enough, it can lead to phenomena that have no counterparts in systems that perceive only in a primitive manner. By “primitive” perceiving systems, I mean entities like, for instance, thermostats, knees, sperms, and tadpoles. These are too rudimentary to merit the term “consciousness”, but when perception takes place in a system endowed with a truly rich, fluidly extensible set of symbols, then an “I” will arise just as inevitably as strange loops arise in the barren fortress of Principia Mathematica.

SL #642: Perception?! Who’s doing the perceiving? No one! Your universe is still just a vacuous system of physical objects and their intricate, intertwined, enmeshed movements — galaxies, stars, planets, winds, rocks, water, landslides, ripples, sound waves, fire, radioactivity, and so forth. Even proteins and RNA and DNA. Even your beloved feedback loops — heat-seeking missiles, thermostats, refilling toilets, video feedback, domino chains, pool tables flooded with hordes of microscopic magnetic balls. But something crucial is missing from this bleak scene, and that’s me-ness. I am in a specific place. I’m here! What would pick out a here in a world consisting of water and float-balls in thousands of tanks, or in a world having zillions of different domino chains? There’s no here there.

SL #641: I really do understand that this matter would nag at you; it should nag at any thinking person. My reply is this: In the vast universe of diverse physical events that you