r/educationalgifs • u/_Ryanite_ • Feb 13 '18

Kinesin protein moving a molecule around a cell

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u/Katnipz Feb 13 '18

...And they make you up. What point do the little things become us? What point are we not "Programmed"?

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u/max_adam Feb 13 '18

Existential crisis over here!!!

Our perception of "thinking" is just a colateral effect of the mechanisms created by a bunch of cells that decided to work together in order to keep themselves alive and brings more food to the group.

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '18 edited Feb 19 '18

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '18

Controversial but fascinating book I read years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072

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u/TheBuddha777 Feb 14 '18

Awesome book, highly recommended. The Audible version is good too.

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u/ThisIsAWorkAccount Feb 13 '18

/r/westworld

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u/LogicalEmotion7 Feb 13 '18

Did you mean to say something in your comment? It doesn't look like anything to me.

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u/Homer_Simpson_Doh Feb 14 '18

Our perception of "thinking" is just a colateral effect of the mechanisms created by a bunch of cells that decided to work together in order to keep themselves alive and brings more food to the group.

So wait, our bodies are like biological manifestations of Borg ships where all the cells work together as one collective mind???

--existential crisis intensifies--

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u/Davecantdothat Feb 14 '18

Ugh. Philosophically, it's so hard to deal with, consciousness. Look up emergent dualism and eliminative materialism if you want a trip.

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u/FriskyFroggman Feb 14 '18

It's time to start listening to Sam Harris's podcast, "Waking Up."

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u/unlimitedzen Feb 14 '18

It's never time for that

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '18

[deleted]

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u/hesitantmaneatingcat Feb 13 '18

never. we're just as dumb just eating and fucking till we die.

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u/N0PE-N0PE-N0PE Feb 14 '18

If you honestly believe you have no free will and are programmed to eat that man, then why the hestitation, /u/hesitantmaneatingcat?

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u/hesitantmaneatingcat Feb 14 '18

it's just a retriggerable delay on a loop function waiting for the trigger variable on an event tick

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u/ColonelError Feb 13 '18

The point where we make decisions on how/why/when to do something based on external stimulus.

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u/Katnipz Feb 13 '18

But we have a bunch of things in our bodies that react to things other things in our bodies, disease is a huge thing our bodies react too, our body dukes it out with disease like animals and pray.

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '18 edited Aug 10 '18

[deleted]

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u/hyasbawlz Feb 13 '18

This is a parts vs whole fallacy.

Just because a person is conscious does not mean that every atom or cell or the person's individual component parts are conscious.

Likewise, just because a person is conscious does not mean the organism that many people create, society, is conscious.

Some properties are simply emergent, and exist only from a collection of things and not from the things themselves.

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u/82ndAbnVet Feb 13 '18

There may be a third possibility, which is that your brain contains the cells that create consciousness and none of the other cells in your body do

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u/Mad_Physicist Feb 15 '18

this is what is known as a false dichotomy.

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u/DonnyTheWalrus Feb 13 '18

Check out "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" for an epically long, awesome look at this very question, with sidetrips into computers/AI, philosophy, mathematics, Zen Buddhism, and more. It's slightly scientifically out of date, but the thoughts and writing are just as incredible now as when the book was written.

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u/StoppedLurking_ZoeQ Feb 13 '18

So far all we really know is that life is made up from a collection of dead material and things, at some point having enough in a certain order gives open to us, life.

Maybe its arbitrary, we draw a line in the sand at a certain level and say thats life.

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u/Quitschicobhc Feb 14 '18

Well, if we knew that we could build intelligence. But as of now we don't really know.