Recent comments in /f/Showerthoughts

FoFoAndFo t1_j5a30e1 wrote

Reply to There’s always a person sleeping. by Reddit_Faker123

I wonder if it’s an overstatement to say there’s always a billion people sleeping. Maybe right now is the exception: it’s 6:15 AM on most of the the West Coast of the new World and 11:15 PM on most of the East Coast of Asia. It’s the middle of the night in the middle of the Pacific so other than the fact it’s a weekend now might be the time when the most people are awake.

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Fabulous-Passion3715 t1_j4vbwim wrote

Reply to We are living beings, yet every single atom that constitutes our bodies isn’t alive. by The-Elder-King

I asked artificial intelligence it's thoughts on your statement. Here is the reply:

As a machine learning model, I do not have the ability to have thoughts or feelings. However, from a scientific perspective, it is true that individual atoms and molecules that make up living organisms are not considered to be alive. Life is a characteristic of complex systems made up of these atoms and molecules, and it is the organization and interactions of these components that give rise to the properties we associate with life, such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to the environment.

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YALBO t1_j4u9ipv wrote

Reply to We are living beings, yet every single atom that constitutes our bodies isn’t alive. by The-Elder-King

Animated clay golem Dorfl debates his nature with the city's leading priesthood.

>'We're not listening to you! You're not even really alive!' said a priest.

> Dorfl nodded. 'This Is Fundamentally True,' he said.

>'See? He admits it!'

>'I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom of Life - '

>'True! Let's do it!'

>'However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.'

-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

(Much later in the series the elemental personification of the winter thought to make himself a human body by collecting and including a shopping list of chemical ingredients into a snowman. What Dorfl clearly understood, he missed completely. If only he'd got the idea, things might have gone differently with the witch he pined for. Too bad... frost to fire.)

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BreakfastBeerz t1_j4t6ie0 wrote

Reply to comment by The-Elder-King in We are living beings, yet every single atom that constitutes our bodies isn’t alive. by The-Elder-King

We are not reacting and adjusting. We are simply a complex collection of chemical, physical, and electrical reactions transferring energy. Our consciousness is simply one of those reactions.

When water flows down a hill and runs into a rock, the water doesn't just stop, it flows around it. It didn't decide to go around the rock, it just did because of the chemical, physical, and electrical properties of the rock and water. We are unimaginably more complicated than a rock and water, but we are no different.

When the electrons from your phone screen reach your eyes and causes a chain reaction through your optic never into your brain, your brain will set off another chain reaction of chemical and electrical responses which in turn will cause other chain reactions and other reactions. Eventually your muscles will move and they will do so because of all those reactions and they will type out words, or scroll past or whatever they are supposed to do in response to all those actions....not at all unlike the water flowing past the rock.

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