nature of conciousness

JoeB-

hmmm.. this is a toughie..

Is there any physical law that can explain conciousness? or even begin to explain it?

I believe that it should be possible to create a concious machine... after all, humans are concious and yet we are only an assembly of atoms etc...

I am completely non religious and don't accept any spiritual explanation of conciousness... having said that I do think it could be possible for a Godlike figure to exist outside the universe and to have 'created' the universe and the laws of physics, this could never be proven or disproven in my opinion.

I also reckon that some day humans may be able to create concious machines... if so the formulaes and theory involved will likely make quantum mechanics look like childs play...

It does raise some interesting questions... i.e could humans create a concious, thinking machine that could explain the universe to us? (after all if we created enough concious machines they would eventually come up with original unique ideas that we haven't thought of yet)

And I posted this question in another thread... if my body was entirely replicated would it have my memories? It should have as obviously my memories are contained somewhere within my body. I reckon making an exact copy of me is impossible because of uncertainty so this question is hypothetical only...

I'm looking forward to peoples opinions...

nesf

Philosophy might have been a better place to post this since it's more in that field for instance.

Your biggest problem here is first, you'll have to define what you mean as conciousness. Then you have to define how it is exactly we think when we are concious.

These are very big and complicated questions.


The Computational Theory of the Mind might interest you: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/

It's not a bad place to start looking at this if you want to take the computer analogy and see how far it takes you. It does start running into problems after a while though. Searle's "Chinese Room" thought experiment (on the site above in the critisisms section) highlights a particularily important one in can it explain understanding.

It's only a starting point for you, and will probably leave you with a lot of questions but the site above is very good (imho) for getting a good appreciation of philosophical issues and the references at the bottom of the pages are good places to start if you want to get into more depth in a particular area.


Hope that helps.

DublinWriter

Aristotle: "To do is to be"

Nitzche "To be is to do"

Frank Sinatra "Do be do be do..."


....or....

Descartes "I think, therefore I am"

Dublinwriter "I think, therefore I think I am"

Pighead "Is there a chipper still open now?"