Wain wrote:
All thinking is based on chemical-electric processes - so I'd say it's fair to say that consciousness = energy.
This is not fair to say. Hardware and a currently running program are not the same thing.
I know - but you can't run a program without hardware, can you?
Wain wrote:
If I throw a fork at a wall the fork is not conscious. Energy may be a requirement in order to have consciousness, which would only make sense, but energy is != consciousness. The electricity from my wall is not conscious...it has no independant thought.
You are of course perfectly right.
But that was not what I was trying to bring across.
Please don't forget that I'm no native English speaker and so may have some difficulties to find the proper words.
What I said was: "consciousness = energy" - not the other way round.
To make more clear what I mean I possibly should have written:
"consciousness = a certain form of energy"
And please don't mix up "energy" and "electricity" - the latter also is a certain form of energy, but not the same.
The energy I'm talking about can appear in form of heat (or the lack of it), light, or any other radiation, gravitation, electricity, matter, ...
Wain wrote:
The people who say there is no death or there is life after death because energy is never "lost" have completely lost the plot.
Hmmmm - can you please explain
why you think so?
Wain wrote:
Energy is neither life, nor consciousness (whose definition has much more to do with self awareness and the ability for at least a perceived independant thought).
I somehow can't avoid the feeling that you're rather talking about electricity and not about the energy as such.
What makes you so sure that life or consciousness can't be a certain form of energy?
Wain wrote:
When I unplug my computer it does not still work just because the energy has not technically been "lost"
Perfectly right.
What you do is to cut off the fresh supply of energy.
That is what stops the maschine from further working.
The energy already supplied to your computer before you unplugged it is not lost - it is transformed into heat and into already manipulated data (in the sense that the manipulation of the data needs energy and therefor the manipulation is the transformed electricity-energy).
Wain wrote:
...and when I eat a fish the fish does indeed lose its consciousness and die...assuming you believe that animals have consciousness.
I see it this way:
The biological/physical body of the fish dies - no doubt about that.
Although - the energy equivalent of the matter of the fish's biological/physical body isn't lost - it's transferred to your biological/physical body when you eat the fish.
If we now assume that the fish had a consciousness, I would expect this consciousness to be part of an "higher dimension" (see Heim theory) and if the body it's tied to dies, then from the consciousness's point of view it's most likely like taking off a glove or such. His consciousness (summ of all experiences of his life) would then simply continue to exist in that "higher dimension".
I take the fact that you don't share/have the fish's experiences after you eate it as an indicator for you just having eaten the fish's biological/physical body - and not somehow assimilated it's consciousness.
Your biological/physical body gets fresh energy supplied by eating the fish - not your consciousness!
If two things are tied together with a rope and you cut the rope and take one of the two things away - wouldn't you agree that the other thing still is there and did not cease to exist just because you took the other thing away?
Lets look at the computer example again:
If you compare the "biological/physical body" with the hardware and the "consciousness" with the software, you can always take the software (when the hardware died) and
"revive" it on some other suited hardware whenever you like.
I hope I found the proper words to bring my point across...
:roll:
