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Originally Posted by Copernicium
You need a human brain for consciousness. Or debatably a chimp or dolphin brain, although I'm not sure how their consciousness compares to ours.
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But do you? Clearly you need a brain for reasoning, thinking and forming a sense of self. But when it comes to consciousness I am not so sure. Thoughts, memories and the ego aren’t synonymous with consciousness. I don’t even know how you would define it. Susan Blackmore wrote a book on this in which she said that in spite of all she had read consciousness itself remained a mystery to her. How did a universe of rocks and gas and water (solid things/stuff) give rise to something like consciousness (not solid stuff at all)? I believe this is known as ‘the hard problem’ among philosophers - how you reconcile these two fundamentally different things, matter and consciousness. But then I guess matter itself is an illusion. Isn’t that the big discovery of modern physics?