• Question: What is consciousness. How are we aware that we are even alive not dreaming or experiencing something after death

    Asked by anon-240740 to Tom, Rebecca, Emily, Elspeth, Ben, Antoine on 9 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Ben Cropper

      Ben Cropper answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      We don’t! There’s loads of spooky ideas to do with this – we’re living in a simulation, we’re actually a giant cloud of nothing randomly rearranging itself into something that looks a bit like it makes sense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain), etc. etc. etc. The only information you have is what you can feel with your senses, but how much can you trust that? Usually, the simplest explanation is the true one though, and I think it’s likely that we’re exactly as we seem. That’s weird enough! As for the nature of consciousness, I don’t have any good answers to that one!

    • Photo: Tom Dally

      Tom Dally answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      Consciousness is thought to be the sum total of all human experience, or our awareness of our own existence. But I’m genuinely not sure about the second part of your question… this is how films like the matrix happened! As Ben said, we know that we can’ always trust our own senses to tell the truth, because there are lots of circumstances in which both our brains and our memories can lie to us. If your school has teachers who teach psychology you should ask them about the experiments done by Loftus and Palmer in 1974 on eye-witness testimony.

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