Things Other Than Humans Feeling?

[ZacharyNardolillo]

Sorry, this seems like it would have been posted somewhere but I couldn't fnid it. Well as humans we aren't just objects going around in the universe, we actually feel and "live" in our universe as "beings" perhaps? Best word I can think of. Anyway, can science determine exactly WHY we actually experiance everything that happens to us, and if animals do too? A big thing that kind of freaks me out is... Do bacteria and other germs feel the same way we do or are they living yet not actually experiancing their lives? And also, is it realy possible to make machines experiance reality as well? Tell me your thoughts on this, it seems like it's probably a huge mystery to me...

[Turtle]

Sorry, this seems like it would have been posted somewhere but I couldn't fnid it. Well as humans we aren't just objects going around in the universe, we actually feel and "live" in our universe as "beings" perhaps? Best word I can think of. Anyway, can science determine exactly WHY we actually experiance everything that happens to us, and if animals do too? A big thing that kind of freaks me out is... Do bacteria and other germs feel the same way we do or are they living yet not actually experiancing their lives? And also, is it realy possible to make machines experiance reality as well? Tell me your thoughts on this, it seems like it's probably a huge mystery to me...

 

i recommend reading doug hofstader's book, I Am a Strange Loop as it is all over your questions like bacteria on poop. not an easy read, but then they aren't easy questions. :confused: here's a smidge to get you started.

 

A New Journey into Hofstadter's Mind

"You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions, and so forth, round and round," Hofstadter writes. What blossoms from the Gödelian vortex--this symbol system with the power to represent itself--is the "anatomically invisible, terribly murky thing called I." A self, or, to use the name he favors, a soul.

 

It need know nothing of neurons. Sealed off from the biological substrate, the actors in the internal drama are not things like "serotonin" or "synapse" or even "cerebrum," "hippocampus" or "cerebellum" but abstractions with names like "love," "jealousy," "hope" and "regret."

 

And that is what leads to the grand illusion. "In the soft, ethereal, neurology-free world of these players," the author writes, "the typical human brain perceives its very own 'I' as a pusher and a mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad infinitesimal entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among them." ...