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ManusJustus on 08 July 2009
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Wind Shlavitor said:

To continue about consciousness; also, unexplainable, is the "sense of self"
Not to confuse with the 'detection' of self, but the 'experience' of self; as in, right now you are experiencing something as yourself, and tomorow, you are still that self and are still experiencing something as yourself, your body is not simply interpreting data, as that is done without 'experience' or the feeling & perception - the experience and sense of self is unexplainable via known science. It's what you 'feel' as perception. That is what seperates the subjective experience from anything deduced by cause&effect science.

And when I say Cause & effect, I mostly mean Action reaction.  If we were to make the same assumptions 'academic' scientists do, then basically everything works via action reaction. There is no 'choice', because you are programmed(through evolution, ie dna, genes, etc) to act, process information, and react, and that's it, no free will. Going from Action-reaction mechanics to free will is impossible the way we understand things now. Conciousness/free will Can be beneficial to the being, but true free will can't spawn via evolution, if you understand the science taught. If you think that we don't really have free will, well, I guess that makes us just robots, only acting and reacting the way we're supposed to, and adapting mechanically; never 'truly' having a choice.

Cause and Effect:

Not everything is a result of cause and effect, quantum physics and Heisenerg's Uncertainity Principle is well-known examle of this.  My 'free will' to choose is nothing more than an ability to think through a complex cost/benefit analysis, which on scale is the same thing a slug does when it decides which way to crawl.  And a snails ability to decide which way to crawl is a continutation of environmental responses of more simple organisms, so there is no disconnect here that you speak of.

Self:

A human has a sense of self just as a cat or bacteria has a sense of self.  A cat has a learned personality and is aware of his feelings.  A bacteria is also aware of itself, and simple chemical reactions cause the bacteria to be aware and to react.  Again, there is no disconnect.  My more complex brain just makes me much more aware of myself than a cat or bacteria are aware of themselves.