✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions — LessWrong

lesswrong.com · 15,077 words · saved by 1 readers

Imagine looking at your hand, and knowing nothing of cells, nothing of biochemistry, nothing of DNA. You’ve learned some anatomy from dissection, so you know your hand contains muscles; but you don’t know why muscles move instead of lying there like clay. Your hand is just . . . stuff . . . and for some reason it moves under your direction. Is this not magic? It seemed to me then, and it still seems to me, most probable that the animal body does not act as a thermodynamic engine . . . The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific inquiry hitherto entered on. Its power of directing the motions of moving particles, in the demonstrated daily miracle of our human free-will, and in the growth of generation after generation of plants from a single seed, are infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concourse of atoms[.]1 [C]onsciousness teaches every individual that they are, to some extent, subject to the direction

x Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions — LessWrong Mysterious Answers Map and Territory Semantic Stopsign Mind projection fallacy Reductionism Rationality Frontpage 274 Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions by Eliezer Yudkowsky 25th Aug 2007 4 min read 161 274 Imagine looking at your hand, and knowing nothing of cells, nothing of biochemistry, nothing of DNA. You’ve learned some anatomy from dissection, so you know your hand contains muscles; but you don’t know why muscles move instead of lying there like clay. Your hand is just . . . stuff . . . and for some reason it moves under y

Explore this link on the map →

related reading