Strongly emergent televisions
The Antenna Argument (Could the brain be an antenna for a yet-to-be-discovered spectrum?)
Question: Doesn't a television with an antenna, a microphone, or an infrared telescope show strongly emergent properties?
None of the parts have access to the spectrums they can now observe and yet when put together they gain access to information coming from a completely different plane of reality previously not accessible to their parts.
A television without an antenna is just going to show noise, but with the antenna, it has access to previously inaccessible information, just like a computer with a Wifi antenna.
How do we know that the brain is not accessing a different spectrum than no other machine in the universe can? We don't have to stray away from the existing laws of physics to postulate that the brain is doing something undiscovered when it becomes conscious.
We have difficulty even understanding the most basic life forms, there is still a lot to be understood about the brain which lies perfectly in the laws of physics.
If you hand a smartphone to a person during the stone age, it would make zero sense that it somehow has access to an electromagnetic signal which nobody can see, taste, hear, touch or smell.
It would be equally confusing if someone from the future gives Galileo a device that communicates through gravitational waves or some other spectrum for which he has no concept yet.
Comments
Post a Comment