The consciouness paradox

You are treating atoms too simply, as just static, independent entities, when in fact (almost) all atoms are interacting with other atoms in some way. An isolated carbon atom is different from an ionized carbon atom which is different from a carbon atom combined with four hydrogen atoms in a methane molecule, etc, etc,: these carbon atoms are in distinctly different states, or at least their outer electron shells (which is what really matters in what you are discussing) are in different configurations and different energy levels. Even more important, you are ignoring that all these atoms (or, more precisely, their outer shell electrons) interact with light - specifically with photons, the 'atoms' of light, and these interactions form the basis of how the atoms give substance to substance, i. e., what larger scale forms and interactions various combinations of atoms give rise to.Your opening post is constituted from 26 letters (the 'atoms' of our language). This post is constituted from 26 letters. How can a simple, ignorant set of letters be cognizant of another simple set of letters? Yet, my post is a direct response to yours and is shaped by - even quotes - yours. This is possible, and very understandable, when one recognizes the rules by which letters interact to form words, sentences, and statements of concepts.So, photons of light from some glowing source strike the outer shell of electrons of the outer layer of atoms in your hand; some are absorbed but some bounce off (as a function of the energy states of those electrons, which is governed by their interactions with neighboring atoms) and some of those strike your eye and are focused onto your retina (again as a result of the optical properties of the atoms in your eyes components which are governed by their states). These photons trigger the release of weakly bound electrons in certain molecules - photoreceptor pigments - in your retinal cells which then travel to nerve endings and start a cascade of well understood and documented electro-chemical interactions in your nerve cells that result in the impression of 'seeing' your hand. The fine details of how we then recognize the hand, remember the hand, and think about the hand are far from being currently understood, but this is a field of very intense and productive research that is producing significant insights into the various processes of our minds.But I suspect that you will have no more interest in this post than you have shown in CS's reference in message 7 that could start you on a better founded understanding of the issues associated with concepts of thought and consciousness. You appear to be a neo-mysterian: you have found something that strikes you as weird and you are infatuated with its weirdness. That has brought you to a full stop as far as really exploring what has been discovered about the brain and consciousness, how knowledgeable researchers are investigating various aspects of this field and the conceptual frameworks the have found, and anything else that might detract from your beloved position that the mind is unfathomable. In case I am wrong, I would also suggest that you go to Amazon.com and search under the subject 'mind' or 'consciousness'. You will find a great many titles that you can get from your library - I particularly recommend those of Steven Pinker and Richard Rostack(Sp?).One thing that you will discover is that researchers in this field try to avoid the terms 'conscious' and 'consciousness' as coming with too much baggage and prior misconceptions. Consciousness has become a word like the words flogiston, contagion, and god in designating more our level of ignorance than any definitive concept.Another thought: I just put my digital camera in from of a mirror and set the self timer. Does the picture it took of itself make the camera self-aware? Is the resultant pattern of electric charges now imprinted on its memory card any less abstract, cognitive, or "conscious" than my thoughts about my hand?Hopefully, what I have written has helped you to see the light. And yes, we are pretty much puppets on the ends of strings.

Grizz, these examples are very loose indeed in that they happen to exemplify the power of the reductionist approach. That we perceive two admixed colors as a single, different color is (reductively) understood from the trichromatic theory of color perception, the spectral characteristics of our photoreceptors, and the combining characteristics of the retinas neural net to give the "qualia" of pink or whatever. That the two gases, H2 and O2 combine to give the liquid (at room temperature) H2O is also perfectly and reductively deduced from the quantum mechanical description of those molecules. (Ok, maybe that's quantum reductionism, rather than 'Classical".)I don't mean to chide you here, you are one of my favorite posters on this forum. It's just that I am an Absolute Reductionist. This is not a result of any deep insights or great deductive logic. It's really that my mind is simply to shallow (and narrow and short) to wrap around all this complexity and emergence stuff. Is the 'temperature' of a glass of water an emergent property, or is it just a convenience for minds incapable of contemplating the distribution of positions and velocities of a trillion, trillion atoms of H2O?

But beauty is NOT an emergent property, or any kind of property of that complex plumbing or of any physical (and brainless) entity. It is a sensation pushed to the conscious part of our brains by a sequence of chemical and electrochemical activities in the subconscious parts of our brains. That is why people differ in what they describe as 'beautiful'. While very little is currently known about the fine details of this process (which explains the clumsiness of my wording), enough is known that we can have confidence that someday, probably not in the too distant future, this process can and will be describe in the most fundamental and simple terms, i. e., this will be an example of absolute reductionism.An added note: your example, even if valid, is not what most complexityationists (e. g., Stewart Kaufman) mean by an emergent property. They mean a property of a sufficiently complex system that cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the (simpler) components of that system. And that this inability is due to the inherent nature of nature, not to any limitations on our knowledge of the system or our analytic or computational capabilities.