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To: PDerna
[to VadeRetro:] In your own words, the building blocks of our universe consisted of “certifiably mindless” material, a non-uniform gas. There was neither an actuality nor a potential for self-awareness in any of those particles. Nothing even close, I am confident in saying. And yet, the very definition of consciousness is self-awareness, the ability not just to have a mind, but to “step out” of it. The problem is that you can’t get here from there. Those dots do not connect. Materially speaking, as long as the building blocks of the cosmos are mindless, unconscious atoms, then piling on block after block only gives you more mindless, unconscious atoms, but it categorically cannot give you consciousness.

PMFJI, but me & Heartlander went back & forth on this over a couple threads, including this one. Do a search for "hydrogen" early in this thread. Basically your argument commits the fallacy of composition: assuming that no entity can exhibit a quality other than a simple sum of the qualities of its components.

Consider this analogy:

Oxygen is a flammable gas. Hydrogen is an explosive gas. Put them together and you get water: a substance whose mass is equal to the mass of two hydrogen atoms plus one oxygen atom - just like you'd expect. However, water is neither a flammable gas like oxygen, nor an explosive gas like hydrogen. Nor is it 2/3 explosive & 1/3 flammable, owing to there being twice as many hydrogen atoms as oxygens. It's positively flame-retardant, and it's a liquid to boot! Now how can that be?

Water is a higher-order entity than mere atoms. A molecule of water is made up of three atoms. There's no extra, magical entity added to the atoms to produce this higher-order organization called a "molecule of water". There's no mystical or Ideal "wetness" quality that's injected into it to make it wetter than the three atoms taken alone are. But because of the relationship of the atoms to each other, this higher-order entity behaves radically differently than the three atoms taken alone.

You seem to think this can't be possible without some supernatural person removing the Ideal Forms called "flammability" and "explosiveness" from the individual atoms and, in their place, injecting some kind of Ideal Form called "wetness" into the resulting molecule. That is what you're saying when you assert that conscious beings cannot arise naturally out of mindless parts.

312 posted on 01/11/2004 11:03:56 PM PST by jennyp (http://crevo.bestmessageboard.com)
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To: jennyp; PDerna; general_re
Speaking of Fallacies of Composition...
318 posted on 01/12/2004 8:08:43 AM PST by VadeRetro
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To: jennyp
It is not the fallacy of composition. I see your problem with it, but what is 'consciousness' and on which entities is it located? Scientifically speaking, it does not exist, because it is not observable - it cannot be located anywhere or as the result of the combinations of anything! And yet it does exist, so how does science approach the problem? See below.
360 posted on 01/13/2004 12:40:29 PM PST by PDerna
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