Atheist Debates - Consciousness as Energy

Is consciousness energy? If so, can it be destroyed?

Or will this argument demosntrate that we can live forever?!?!

[AmberAmber]

Love you Matt! TY for saving me from terrible fallacious beliefs - you've made my life much better for 14yrs now & Im BEYOND grateful. Also? TY for caring about civil rights & for taking humanist positions on all things regularly 'demonised' by greedy charlatans. You matter so much.❤🫂🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️✊🏾✊🏽✊🏿🖤

[ahgflyguy]

Nice vid, Matt. Smuggling in a soul is something I think I’ve heard Michael Shermer talk about as well. Here, the double-smuggle, consciousness for a soul, then actually smuggling in (fake) properties of consciousness through energy equivocation is a new one to me.

[greenjelly]

Think of consciousness as a running engine. It uses energy. It responds to certain stimuli. But when the fuel runs out, the engine dies.

[FoursWithin]

Thank you Patrons ! ❤
For doing what I presently cannot. Thank you for supporting my favorite dufferless Duffer. 😊

[FredHarvey]

Consciousness is not a thing, it is a function of a thing.

[skepticsinister]

I’m conscious that your work Matt, is indispensable to the progress of humanity, and thus, I’m maximally appreciative! ❤️👏🙌

[yami-]

It's been a while since I've seen you and I'm loving the beard. I've got nothing much to add to the argument though, you've laid it out perfectly. There's is something I'd like to add though and that is about the last part of the video. I think there's great value in training your BS alarm to go off and heeding it when it does... I've encountered this precise argument before I think... and even if you don't have enough knowledge to refute it instantly, it's one of those that exactly makes you go "Hmm". Once you do though, really worth dissecting the various parts and understanding what part of it doesn't make sense. That will help you get a better grasp of how to approach the next argument which doesn't quite make sense. Overtime you can develop a good sense of the places where people misconstrue or even unintentionally misunderstand a concept and insert it into their argument, thus giving you the ability to find the problems with an argument more quickly.

As a tip I've found that more often than not, the error either lies in the second premise or the conclusion is a non-sequitur, so those might be good places to start looking.

[ConsciousExpression]

I had an argument about consciousness where the guy was insisting we don't understand but refused to define what he meant by consciousness. I claimed we do understand consciousness quite well, but he wouldn't even agree that consciousness is present when you're awake and not present when you're under general anesthesia

[Craxin]

I can sum this up quicker. Energy cannot be destroyed, but it can be dispersed. Once energy is dispersed, it ceases to have the same form. Once you die, all electricity in the brain and body disperses.

[michaelrodger]

Energy, in physics, is the capacity for doing work. It may exist in potential, kinetic, thermal, electrical, chemical, and nuclear. All of these things are of the physical world. So when people use the first law of thermodynamics (energy can't be created or destroyed) to support a metaphysical idea of energy its a false equivalence we aren't talking about the same thing when we say or mean energy.

[quamtatado]

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be destroyed. Fire is energy. This is why we can never put a fire out. 😞

[LouisGedo]

Looking forward to watching this.

In the meanime, about a dozen years ago a read a science based paper on consciousness. The author, a neuroscientist, sleep study assessor, and other relevant credentials put forward the most compelling argument that consciousness is the outcome of a particular brain state where 2 main parts of the brain are communicating with each other in a particular manner.

I don't recall the author's name or specific details about which exact parts of the brain the author is referring to.

[donepearce]

The OP got it wrong. Conciousness is not energy, consciousness uses energy. That energy will ultimately dissipate as heat. There is a calculation (which I have forgotten) for the amount of energy required to store one bit of data. This is intrinsic, and unrelated to any particular technology.

[BertrandLeRoy]

The opposite is true: there are aspects of consciousness such as memorization that are only possible with an augmentation of entropy, so consciousness cannot be maintained forever, it has to die eventually.

[ScottM]

I like using fire as an example. It's not a thing as in you can't scoop up a jar of it. It's an ongoing result of chemical processes and when the fuel driving it runs out it stops. It doesn't continue on as fire somehow and neither does conciousness.

[Darth]

The brain, being made of matter, is energy, because matter is a particular state of energy. However consciousness is a type of brain activity. Saying that consciousness is energy is akin to saying playing chess is magnetism. IE it's a category error.

[vegasflyboy]

Consciousness is not energy. it's a brain state that can be destroyed, altered, and even suspended with anesthesia.

[kappasphere]

P1: Energy can't be created or destroyed
P2: Music has been demonstrated to be a form of energy
C1: Therefore, music cannot be destroyed

[ŠONŠOV-ew]

We can pierce the corpse with a needle to determine that there are no reactions, when we look at the corpse it seems that something is missing and the corpse's brain is still in some state.

[danford]

Consciousness as energy is crazy if that were true people have would have expended that energy to try and make contact with the living.