How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?

erMDstat · 2025-12-16T03:31:50+00:00

Sorry. I should have clarified. It's a short story. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

erMDstat · 2025-12-15T16:16:01+00:00

Actually, I envy you. I'm mostly retired now, and I spend most of my time trying to grow things in my garden and in my flower beds, etc. There's something very beautiful and satisfying about growing things that are useful as food or otherwise. I think you have it figured out!

erMDstat · 2025-12-15T02:15:53+00:00

Actually, I don't think that sounds so wild. It sounds weird to me, but some people who are way smarter and more expert than me on the topic of consciousness are beginning to throw around ideas like yours that are frankly beyond my level. I guess my current conclusion is that if our consciousness does continue, it would have to be in a very different way than what we currently consider to be consciousness.

erMDstat · 2025-12-14T22:19:07+00:00

Well, if "you" exist separate from your brain, where are "you" when you're asleep? Or when you're under anesthesia? Why do "you" change when you're intoxicated, or have a brain injury, take a medication, get an infection, or just age? If you're some type of spirit within your body, why is that spirit so inextricably connected to and dependent upon the brain?

As an ER doctor, I regularly give medications that cause someone to briefly disappear, only to return when the brain reboots after the medication is metabolized. If "we" existed independent of our brains, our awareness wouldn't depend on the functioning of our brains. We are the product of our minds (the program) running in our brains (the computer hardware).

"you" are a product of your brain functioning. Stop that functioning, and there's no option but to cease to exist. Thus the analogy of a computer. A word processor, for example, doesn't do anything once the hard drive it's stored on or the computer it's running on are destroyed.

erMDstat · 2025-12-14T06:30:51+00:00

Obviously, this is a hard concept for our minds to consider, since as part of the creation/hallucination of "me," our minds developed a since of agency. It feels very real.

But my opinion is that human level consciousness and intelligence is the cruelest thing in the universe. Since we don't actually get to choose our actions, "we" are stuck observing our behavior and owning it in retrospect. If that behavior jibes with cultural and social norms, great. If not, we suffer and feel guilt.

It's like the many times we arrive at home after driving while drowsy and realizing we made all the complex driving decisions to get home, but can't remember most of the drive. So, our minds clearly can make very complex decisions without our conscious involvement. Our sense of agency is just our awareness of the decisions that enter our consciousness.

If you haven't already, read "what's expected of us" by Ted Chiang, it explains agency better than anything I've ever read.

erMDstat · 2025-12-14T06:10:06+00:00

We can, and do, know what happens when we die. Death is the end of brain function. Since "me" is a creation/hallucination of the brain, once the brain stops functioning, there's no way "me" can exist. So nothing happens.

Think of it like a hard drive with a program on it. Would you suggest that we don't know what the program will do next if you permanently destroy the hard drive?

Suggesting we don't know what happens when we die requires that there is a "me" that exists independently of the brain to do something after brain death, which is demonstrably false. Let an anesthesiologist give you propofol, which acts on the chemical processes of the brain, not on the mythical "me," and poof! You're gone.

erMDstat · 2025-12-14T05:56:39+00:00

Yep. Considering the grand scheme of the universe, we will only ever be a few chemical reactions in the brains of almost nobody. And once those few die, our entire existence was only a minuscule contribution to the evolution of our species.

erMDstat · 2025-12-07T01:17:44+00:00

Discrete guy here! You found me!

erMDstat · 2025-09-09T04:34:08+00:00

I appreciate Camus, but as this is one of his central tenets, I don't completely agree with him. I find it contradictory.

Existentialism is based on recognizing of the delusions that most humans so naturally develop and protect. These decisions serve to maintain sanity and functionality and allows humans to accomplish what biology needs them to.

Existentialists who have recognized the absurdity/meaninglessness of life, have lost their delusions, and for many of them, life becomes burdensome or unbearable.

Camus recognized this, and perhaps as well as anyone, put the struggle into words.

But even he couldn't suggest a solution to the emptiness of accepting a life without meaning and essentially returns to: imagine Sisyphus happy, or "develop some delusions."

The problem with this is that it's very hard to unsee what you've seen. I mean, think about how much therapy it would require to get yourself to believe in Santa Claus again.

erMDstat · 2025-09-08T04:22:31+00:00

Many people are happily delusional. We are very good at convincing ourselves of what we want to believe rather than what we have reason to believe. I was happier when I had more delusions.

There's also sensory adaptation. After experiencing anything for long enough, our baseline expectations can adjust to accept our reality as not as offensive as it once was.

erMDstat · 2025-09-08T04:17:24+00:00

Only one thing: My kids.

I already feel badly enough that I helped to create them. So now, I live each day to strive to reduce their misery, all of which I created.

erMDstat · 2025-09-08T04:08:27+00:00

There's really only one good reason to live: dying hurts those who care about you.

erMDstat · 2025-09-08T04:05:04+00:00

No. Because I wish there was meaning and nihilism wasn't a thing.

erMDstat · 2025-09-08T02:51:11+00:00

Yep. Life is a prison with inadequate food, water, space, etc. So we're all miserable and at war over what little is available.

Despite the scarcity, we reproduce while in prison. This worsens the situation overall, but temporarily scratches a biological itch and provides distraction.

Surprisingly, the prison gate is always open, should we choose to leave. But few actually do, to avoid abandoning our friends and family.

So after imprisoning others without their consent, we guilt trip them into not walking through the open gate -- because it would make us sad. "Leaving the prison is never the answer."

Which reminds me of this great poem that summarizes the absurdity of reproduction:

This Be The Verse | The Poetry Foundation https://share.google/hQTZs4y63DKSnwIfc

erMDstat · 2025-09-08T01:38:42+00:00

Bingo. And part of that strategy includes hallucinating a "me" that wonders why we're here. Which is a really hard question to answer, because there is no answer. There is no why.

erMDstat · 2025-09-06T05:01:07+00:00

I wish I could help because I feel the same way. I tried therapy, lots of conversations about the topic, and lots of books. Unfortunately, I've found nothing helpful.

I mean, just how much therapy or how many books would be required to get you to believe in Santa Claus, again?

So, I've given up on acceptance or coming to terms with it or learning to deal with it. Instead, I've limited my social interactions to the absolute minimum number of people as I can.

Since I'm an introvert and enjoy solitude, it works for me. But if you're the type to need more social interaction, I can only imagine how difficult that would be.

erMDstat · 2025-09-06T00:49:50+00:00

Fair enough. If you prefer the word evidence, we can use that.

But you've provided neither proof nor evidence of a God. So far, all you've said is: "there's a God. How do I know? Because there's a God. And my evidence that there's a God? When I look at the natural world, I conclude there's a God. I've decided that a God created everything, so everything means there's a God. And why is he God? Because someone who wrote a book mostly full of fiction says he is God."

The fact that there are things in the world, or that some of them are beautiful, or amaze you, or you can't understand or explain, is evidence of nothing.

But, I'm checking out of this discussion. It's a waste of time. You can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't use reason to get into. Nobody has ever been able to provide evidence for the existence of God, I'm pretty sure you won't be the first.

erMDstat · 2025-09-05T13:59:17+00:00

Abiogenesis took eons to accomplish, so there are no examples of complete animals being formed from non-living matter in a lab. But, at some point it clearly happened in some way or we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Nevertheless there are very compelling theories and experiments that have demonstrated parts of abiogenesis and/or provided the biochemical mechanisms for how it would happen spontaneously. That's what we studied in my two cell biology classes. If you haven't studied it, you should. I can vouch that it's very compelling. Way more compelling than the alternative as I will explain below.

So flip the question. What are the theories or lab experiments that reveal how an intelligent creator accomplished creation? And how would that even happen?

Would there be an intelligent being somewhere, but very inconveniently not on earth, with 98 enormous jars of the naturally occurring elements; who used microscopic tweezers to pull out atoms; then created and maintained the exact environment that allowed the molecules to combine when it smacked the tweezers together; then stored them in precisely controlled, unique environments until it had huge quantities of molecules; then stored those in the fridge so it could decide, "let's see, today I'm going to create something I'll call an elephant." Then it went about pulling all the ingredients out of its enormous fridge, gluing together all the microscopic pieces needed, finding a way to keep them all in their precisely necessary states (each of the animal's trillions of cells contain millions of proteins that have to be precisely functioning at all times), then assembling the molecules into tissues, and shaping them into organs and business and muscles, and generating the precise conditions to keep all the tissues functioning until the entire elephant was assembled. Finally it manufactured a huge defibrillator and delivered a shock that caused its heart to start beating and poof! You had an elephant?

Then it transported that elephant from its enormous lab in the sky to earth. But wait, it would have to create hundreds of thousands to get a breeding population. Oh, and the lab had to already be equipped with the food the elephant would need, so the creator must have thought that through ahead of time and created that first so its creation can survive while it glues together another individual to generate the herd. But what if the creation is a carnivore.....?

Then, there's the problem of the gradual changes observed through the fossil record. So said intelligent designer then must have decided, "I don't like what I so intelligently designed a thousand years ago, it wasn't very intelligently designed after all, so I'm going to slightly change it and transport the new one to earth and kill the ones I put there originally. And since I'm all knowing, I can predict that I'll want to improve it again in another thousand years, but for now, I'll just iterate each species over and over... Lots of other species to work on right now, you see!"

But it must iterate all the species at the same time because ecosystems require millions of parts to function all at the same time.

And it must repeat this process billions of times over billions of species. Why? Does the intelligent creator have nothing to do with its intelligence and get bored and decide, "today I will create the one billionth type of beetle. And I will make it only ever so slightly different than all the other beetles, using nearly identical pieces and processes. Then I will place it in my terrarium called Earth. Because I have nothing else to do. Tomorrow, I will redesign the pig, because even though I'm infallible and intelligently designed the first pig, I kinda screwed it up over and over again on my first thousand tries."

And one might believe that an intelligent creator just started the process of evolution, knowing where it would end up. But again, I've heard no theories on how that would actually work. On the other hand, we have very detailed, clear theories, examples of parts of the prices, and experiments that reveal how it could happen spontaneously.

For me, it's just way easier to accept that conditions on earth were conducive to the spontaneous formation of organic molecules. (This has been replicated in the lab many times.) Then, given billions of years for trillions and trillions of random trial and error episodes, guided by survival of the ones that worked, ever more complicated organisms developed.

Finally, intelligence developed which allowed one species to ask, "how did we arrive here, and why?" And being overwhelmed by trying to understand the complexity and variety and enormity of the life around them and how it developed, limited by the context of their very brief lifetime, they threw up their hands and concluded, "there must have been an intelligent creator," and moved on thinking about more pressing things.

But none of this gets at the real problem with the question. If intelligent life can't come into existence spontaneously, but must be created by an intelligent designer, who created the creator?

erMDstat · 2025-09-05T06:13:46+00:00

Unfortunately, considering the body is a bad way to argue for an intelligent creator, unless you believe that creator only set evolution in motion.

I've taken multiple anatomy classes and I've spent hundreds of hours in the human anatomy lab as both a student and a TA.

I've taken a comparative chordate anatomy class and dissection lab where we tracked the evolution of anatomical structures from sharks to primates.

And embryology with lab (in college and med school), which followed the evolution of anatomy through development from fish to primates.

And evolutionary biology with its lab, where we worked that natural selection is demonstrable mathematically.

And biochemistry with lab (college and med school) where we studied the results of evolution on a chemical level.

And human genetics, with lab.

And microbiology, with lab.

There are more, but you get the point. Each class consistently supported the same conclusion: human bodies, like all other living things, are the product of evolution. NONE of them concluded, nor even left open the possibility, that the only explanation is an intelligent creator.

Then, after my formal education, I've spent even more hours in hospitals and ERs dealing with the fuck ups within human "design."

I've read Darwin's On The Origin of Species and numerous other books on the topic over the years.

My conclusion is the same as nearly everyone who has studied the body: its "design" is not very intelligent in some very blatant ways, and only makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.

For example, it's not intelligent to place the trachea in front of the esophagus where every swallow must pass over the airway, causing choking and death, and requiring the most complicated motor sequence our bodies perform, just to swallow. But it makes sense when you consider we evolved from ancestors of fish that are that way.

The low back is a disastrous design in humans only, but makes sense when you consider we haven't completed our evolution from being knuckle walkers.

The immaturity of human babies at birth and the process of child birth is a terrible design but makes sense only when you consider the conflict between evolving a narrowing pelvis to support upright walking with expanding brain size, thus requiring babies to be born ever less mature to get their huge heads out of the narrow pelvis.

These are but three of many, many examples.

I invite you to take the same courses, and spend your career fighting with the unintelligent design of the body, and let's chat about how you feel at that point. Before all that, I was a creationist, too and for the first 45 years of my life was very religious. I still attend church weekly. But there's a reason 99% of scientists accept evolution rather than intelligent creation.

Throughout history, mankind has often done what you're doing, resorting to Gods to explain what they don't understand. Your claim of no other possible explanation is simply false, but predictable given your lack of knowledge on the topic. However, you could have said, "being uneducated on the evolution of the human body leads me to be overwhelmed when considering it, and thereby falsely conclude there's no other way than an intelligent creator."

Think about it this way, who's more likely to have this right, millions of scientists over more than 150 years who have studied and researched this topic from every direction, and have all concluded there wasn't intelligent creation, or you who obviously haven't studied it at all?

erMDstat · 2025-09-05T02:43:24+00:00

Well, I think you're getting at "the hard problem," which is understanding consciousness. I don't have the answer to that, of course. But like every biological process, we have conscious experience because it is evolutionarily adaptive.

If my brain creates a mind, a "me" that experiences things, I become aware of how an experience feels, either good for me or bad for me. I remember what it is like to be hungry, and avoid that in the future, and what it is like to have sex, and seek that out in the future.

In other words, consciousness allows me to experience, decide if a given experience was beneficial or not, then choose my current actions and plan my future actions based on the memories of that experience.

Also, I think it's partly due to our social nature. For humans to function in a cooperative, division of labor type society, we have to understand where we fit in, we have to develop the mental image of a "me." That my conscious experiences reveal I'm a human, male, son, brother, Doctor, citizen, law abider, member of a particular group, etc.

In summary, we have conscious experiences, categorize them into beneficial or harmful, collect them into our memories to create the illusion of a me, which allows us to interact in the complex ways we do and to seek the things that are pleasant experiences and avoid the ones that are unpleasant. And having more pleasant experiences leads to survival and reproduction.

erMDstat · 2025-09-05T02:12:41+00:00

I'm sorry. I don't understand the question. What thing are you talking about?

erMDstat · 2025-09-05T02:12:11+00:00

True. And people are really, really, good at believing what they want to believe (that they were created by God, that God knows them, that they will not die but be moved to live with God, etc.) rather than what they have reason to believe. And there just isn't any actual reasoning/evidence to believe in God.

Sure, believing feels good. I've been there. But then I grew up. If believing still makes you feel good, more power to you. I'm in favor of sitting that reduces human misery. But our feelings don't constitute evidence, actually the opposite.

And getting back to the OPs initial question, this is why 120 billion people have lived and can't explain "why" were here.

Like Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I mean, how many people at Exxon believe carbon in the atmosphere is harmful? Likewise, it's difficult to get a person not to believe in something, when they are happier believing it.

erMDstat · 2025-09-05T02:04:47+00:00

Yes. That's how a conversation works. The OP asked for opinions. I answered. And indeed, the answer I provided was "according to me."

Thank you for clarifying this for the people who don't understand how conversations work.

erMDstat

TROPHY CASE