this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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philosophy
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Other philosophy communities have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [ x ]
"I thunk it so I dunk it." - Descartes
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What do you mean "can't tell us"? Who is us? I assure you your organs do indeed feed your thoughts. They are your thoughts in fact.
We have real world examples of people gaining senses after they've developed consciousness. Again who is "you" and how do you "perceive" anything as external? I've never experienced anything externally at all. I can't comprehend that thought process at all. If you plug a webcam into my USB port it would absolutely be within my subjective experience, I think.
They might also contain within them the divine spark... That would be fucking insane and world changing but I don't have any reason to suspect it's true....
That last one seems unlikely just off the weight of similarity to all other life. What's the cutoff for a thing to have a soul? Only humans? Which protohuman met that threshold? Species are a social construct after all, biology is very happy to let humans and neanderthals breed viable offspring. Do all mammals have souls? Elephants perform funerary rites, but so do some birds. Is there a neuron count or brain structure that a soul lives in? Why wouldn't a whale have a soul with those mega huge brains?
What I often think about are the human brainlet experiments, where they have 100s or 1000s of human brain cells in a dish and they use them to like compute math. They say that it's ethical because brainless of that size don't think or experience.
My thought on that is that nobody knows what thinking or experiencing is or means or emerges from. How can they know this?
Anyway, it's not entirely relevant, but I think it's related in a way to this discussion through the researchers' certainty of what thinking is, when we don't really have any clue.
Brain cells without the ability to predict future harm or remember past harm or even the ability to interpret harm are probably not suffering. At least it's hard for us to imagine a state of suffering without those aspects.
My question is how do you know any of that? Nobody actually even knows what constitutes a thought, nor what a memory is or how they are stored, nor the capability of a small number of cells. How would you without assumptions?
The problem with that logic is it collapses in to solipsism. How do you know any other being in the universe is capable of any thought at all? If we assume that because of our biological nature we are wholly incapable from deriving the truth, we may as well have given up from the jump.
You're making scientific assumptions about a topic where there is no science to back it up, and establishing the framework for the thought experiment. I feel like you've already made the assertion that only biological structures can think, so why bother even posing the question if not to just reinforce you're already held belief?
The problem I'm pointing out is that nobody even understands how the actions of the biological systems you're talking about even do the things you're attributing to them (memories, thoughts, reasoning) - we don't have a structure property relationship to show that there is a known relationship between the biology and the actions -- except that we can ask humans. We can't ask other things, or brainlets.
What does it mean to "think"? Is the bundle of brainlets not biological in this scenario?
I may be misunderstanding you, but would a scan of the brain not demonstrate how the brain maps? I am pretty sure, that we are pretty sure, that the amygdala is responsible for your flight or fight response, the right half of your brain is responsible for creativity, the left objectivity (or vice versa, you get the point) and only showing data to one side of your brain has incredibly profound impacts on how you interpret said data. Is this not science to back up my beliefs? I guess I haven't cited them, but nobody has cited their "consciousness is foundational" beliefs either.
I think its a grave undersell to state we have no idea how the biological systems at play interact... we have very very vague ideas. Much more than 0.
Showing that brain "activity" seems to correspond with vague concepts around capability (auditory, creativity (the left brain right brain thing I'm pretty sure has been debunked, but that's irrelevant) fight or flight, etc.) is one thing, but nobody knows what makes an experience, a thought, or a memory. Nobody can point to a biological structure or function and say "hey there's a memory," or "hey, there's a thought in the scan!"
Anyway, maybe I'm not explaining what I mean well, but unless you do have research that shows what the biological basis of a thought is, then we're both working on same level of unknowns.
My whole point is that we actually have exactly 0 understanding of what makes a feeling or a thought or a memory. Anything you think you know about is probably incorrectly popularized ideas of how the brain works from the 50s and 60s that have permeated into mainstream culture.
Looking at how specific fMRI excitement of a brain region "turns on/off" certain body functions does not provide us insight into what makes a thought or memory. Measuring re-learning after TBI doesn't really give us knowledge into what it means to subjectively experience the world and how that relates to feelings, thoughts, or ideas. Does that make sense?
I don't know if anyone has ever done this exact test, but I imagine if we plucked someones eyeballs out mid MRI scan they would quite literally have less brain activity than prior... or at least increased brain activity in different places due to the pain of plucking ones eyes out.
As far as I know, left and right brain activity has only increased in evidence. The idea that people are "left brained" or "right brained" is complete pseudo science, but the idea that certain tasks are assigned to certain halves of the brain is well founded. Both halves can perform the same tasks, but the left half is better at linguistic function (which can be tested by only presenting information to your left field of view (NOT just left eyeball, but left side of both eyeballs)) and the right is better at creative function. Heres a wikipedia article thatll probs lead you where you need to go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divided_visual_field_paradigm
Yes, it is pseudo science, which I said. We are getting away from the actual basis of the question which is that we don't know what thinking or memory or the actual capability of even the only biological system we are vaguely familiar with (mammalian brain).
My whole point is that we don't even know enough to say that consciousness exists in the brain (we can see capabilities, and activation of muscles, and "processing" over general regions whatever that means), or what thinking is or what is needed to think ---- in biological systems. How can we possibly know that it's impossible in other, less familiar structures?
Okay I think I understand what you are saying now... how do we know that tiny brainlet doesn't comprise a small brain instead of a small section of a brain... it likely contains the same physical matter (neurons)... thats a good point. I think that simply adds to the beauty of a brains neuro plasticity. A lot of the brain seems completely redundant, which doesn't go against the idea of it being a biological strength.
I don't think consciousness originates from a single part of the brain, I think consciousness is simply the experience of all parts of the brain at once. The brainlet would still not possess the ability to register dread or fear or anything (at least as we understand) so I would still be willing to state its not bad to being experimenting on it. I just dont know if enough diagnostic data is being processed to actually have introspection or just moment to moment realization.
Yeah and a part of what I'm saying is that we don't know that threshold is. Like would a million cells be enough to form thoughts? A thousand? A billion? Two?
The question is simply what we consider a thought. A brain with 1000 cells is very likely capable of less foresight than a brain with a billion. We can't explain the mechanisms as to how, but that doesn't mean they're non existent.
Thanks for discussing this with me. I guess what I mean by a thought is what the organism is experiencing. Electrical or chemical movements between cells is something that we can measure, but does the cells or objects doing that movement then experience the thought? What is the minimum threshold for electrical or chemical movements through any object or cells or group of cells to get a thought happening and experienced by the organism? Is all thought just emergent from the movement of electricity?
Is our electrical grid experiencing what is happening to it??
The electrical grid may be "experiencing" something but I feel like a lot of personifocation occurs when we attempt to imagine that feeling. The electrical grid has no means to introspect, so it's moment to moment feeling would be completely raw and impossible to pin down as it is changing rapidly through time. No memory, no foresight, no sensory data, nothing... Very hard to imagine.
It wouldn't ever feel alive because it would never possess the ability to self reflect.
It wouldn't be agential nor would it be aiming to achieve homeostasis.
It's like a single thread on your sweater. By itself it's incredibly basic, it gets more complex as it interacts with other matter. You don't "feel" thousands of individual threads though, when you wear a shirt. You reify it into a single experience.
Maybe this doesn't make much sense I am hungover af
This is exactly what I'm thinking though, how do you know it has no means of inteospection, no memory, or no foresight?
Yes it has no tools for interacting with the world, but does that mean it has no emergent thinking? Personification is exactly what I am questioning -- when is it appropriate? Brainlets, bees, humans, electrical grids, ecosystems, mycelium? Where does experience emerge from?
Where could it possibly obtain the mechanisms to do that? Those all originate from physical parts of our brain. I can literally cut out your memories with a scalpel...
It's all diagnostic data for an agent, humming at once. It's the internal reification of all of your diagnostic data into a single sweater that you wear. Thousands and thousands of tiny threads that eventually make up one big "thought process" that we reify, but is really just a bunch of tiny processes happening simultaneously
I think that might be SciFi - as far as I am aware nobody knows what a memory is, or where or how they're stored. This is the thing, we all have ideas that the brain is this magical necessary thing for thinking, and yet noone knows what a thought even looks like or what is necessary for it
It would be a lot of cutting, as memories are actually encoding in various places across the brain. We do know a lot about how memories function, but that is actually besides my point... We definitely know memory is somewhere in the brain... not elsewhere. Its a physical thing.
It really isn't. One can very easily be presently in a great deal of pain.
Yeah but present pain only seems to really matter if it entails future pain as well. Thats a great Zen Buddhist trick I learned many years ago: you aren't afraid of pain: you're afraid of future pain. Current pain is already happening and you're already bearing it.
If I am constantly feeling present pain, but completely incapable of acknowledging the past, I cannot ground my present pain in any relative sense.