Is the Universe alive and intelligent?

[Domen]

Actually plants, including potatoes, may have a certain level of intelligence (a very low one, but still).

 

[Borachio]

Yet they totally lack a central nervous system. Which would seem to be the standard basic requirement for any form of intelligence, rudimentary or not.

Still, I don't know. The Secret Life of Plants idea has been around for a very long time.

 

[warpus]

Yeah, I don't know if it makes sense to say that potatoes are intelligent.

 

[Borachio]

I think I'm going to go and ask a potato about this. Some of my best friends are potatoes. It's possible, I suppose, that they just play dumb.

 

[Kyriakos]

At any rate potatoes can't be really intelligent next to the average human, cause whenever someone posts a video with a clearly sub-par resolution or other issues, it is always noted that it looks like it was made with a potato. So they have very low skills, no?

 

[Thorgalaeg]

A potato in the sense most people use it is only a tuber, it is not a plant itself but a part of a plant where nutrients are kept. So it is like saying that our belly fat is intelligent, which is another intriguing possibility btw.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

I read belly fat is manipulating you into not killing it.

 

[Narz]

The universe is watching you masturbate (and so are your french fries)!

 

[gay_Aleks]

The universe is watching you masturbate (and so are your french fries)!

It also watches you pee.

 

[Mouthwash]

Assuming Dust Theory is correct, you are being watched by an infinite number of incorporeal perverts (representing every possible universe in which your experience takes place) who are furiously pleasuring themselves to your bathroom visits.

Think about that while wiping.

 

[timtofly]

Certainly potatoes are alive! That's an absurd question. (If you don't mind me saying so.)

They tend not to be alive once you've cooked them, though.

It's a fairly good bet that potatoes aren't intelligent, cooked or uncooked. Scary idea!

If the potato is dead after cooking it, why does it grow hair after sitting in the refrigerator too long?

 

[gay_Aleks]

Maybe because just like bacterias and other one-cellular organisms, potatoes are damn hard to kill.

 

[Kyriakos]

^Besides, those aren't 'hair' at all the potato is growing. They are by-products (waste mostly) from the potato's attempts to build a portal to return to its regular dimension. You have to think outside the box

 

[gay_Aleks]

Less "outside the box", and more "outta this reality".

 

[Borachio]

If the potato is dead after cooking it, why does it grow hair after sitting in the refrigerator too long?

Er... yeah?

The hair on a corpse's head continues to grow for quite some time. (Until such time as the corpse is cremated, or otherwise rendered incapable of growing hair.) Finger nails also continue growing.

Does this mean that corpses are just people pretending to have died?

 

[gay_Aleks]

Fire up a lightning up their asses and eventually they all come alive.

 

[Tahuti]

The universe is watching you masturbate (and so are your french fries)!

Basement cat sez: Go over teh darksidez! Go masturbate!

 

[Borachio]

Is that what cats are really doing with all that licking, and such? Eww! And to think I've stroked a cat.

 

[brennan]

Well, that's nice.

And everything hinges on "a certain form" of complicated information processing.

I'm none the wiser.

P1: Systems can have attributes that are not possessed by its individual component parts owing to the nature of their mutual arrangement.
P2: Consciousness is such an attribute.
P3: Our brains possess the attribute of being conscious.
P4: Brains are an information processing neural network.
C: Having a functioning brain or similar information processing apparatus makes you conscious.

There's no proof that the above is true, but the only reason people find it hard to believe is that they want to see a 'mechanism' for consciousness - a consciousness particle or energy that is not necessary if you accept P1.

 

[Kyriakos]

P1: Systems can have attributes that are not possessed by its individual component parts owing to the nature of their mutual arrangement.
P2: Consciousness is such an attribute.
P3: Our brains possess the attribute of being conscious.
P4: Brains are an information processing neural network.
C: Having a functioning brain or similar information processing apparatus makes you conscious.

There's no proof that the above is true, but the only reason people find it hard to believe is that they want to see a 'mechanism' for consciousness - a consciousness particle or energy that is not necessary if you accept P1.

It also should be noted that examinations of patients with damaged (in part or parts) brain, show that while a patient can at first lose entirely or seemingly entirely some mental abilities due to the damage, later on he can appear to gain them back, despite the damage physically remaining the same or visibly the same. It is theorised that this is the effect of the very flexible nature of neurons which can reform and reconnect even in different ways and locations, so as to produce a new variation of the old connections that synergistically enabled the mental function which was momentarily not available to that person

It follows from that, in my view (but it seems pretty evident) that different people already have potentially vastly different neural connections for the "same" mental abilities, and so common human thought is common only in some core paremeters, and not in the particulars of how it is manifested mentally and biologically in those neural connections and related formations in the mind.