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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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.