We tend to be brain worshipers. The brain is another organ of the body. The brain is embedded in an organism.
Yes, and historically man has tended to place his own mind or brain on a pedestal above other animals' as if only his has consciousness, but we can see now that this is not the case. If we are going to talk about what makes man conscious then we also have to consider what animals are conscious of. Some animals take care of each other across even large species boundaries. Some have the same feelings of friendship that we do and recognize themselves in mirrors. They can use tools and plan ahead.
So if we follow the order of decreasing complexity back from mammals to birds, snails, single-celled organisms, etc.... where does the consciousness start? Because it looks like a continuous spectrum to me. Naturally a more complex brain can understand more complex symbols than a simpler brain. But all brains seem to have the same predictable reactions to the same input; it's just more obvious with simpler brains because the brain is considering fewer factors and has less individuality in simpler animals.
These facts are the reason it is highly unlikely that scientists will be able to duplicate some aspects of human thinking.
Are you sure you meant to say "unlikely"? Surely the material nature of the mind means that it is more likely to be able to be simulated than if there were something special about it that went beyond the physical.
The mathematical Mandelbrot set is an example of this, in that a very simple mathematical equation produces almost infinite complexity when run on a computer.
Not to nitpick, but (whether computing it by hand or on a computer), fractals do have infinite complexity, not almost, just like there is an infinity of numbers, not an almost-infinity.
It’s a kind of `emergent property`! In this case the property is complexity but from something very simple without anything obvious added to it to explain why this should be. What is missing in the descriptor ` emergent property` is any explanation of how or why something simple can produce complexity
Well, in the case of the fractal, the complexity comes from the fact that the simple formula is being run many times per pixel for thousands of pixels in order to produce an image. There's a lot of work being done, and it's being done with different coordinates as input for each pixel. So there's a fair amount of information going in; no information is being created. Why the information arranges itself in natural-looking shapes, though, is perhaps still a mystery.
