claim

active

claim:you-your-joys-and-your-sorrows-your-memories-and-ambitions-your-sense-of-personal-identity-and-free-will-are-in-fact-no-more-than-the-behavior-of-a-vast-assembly-of-nerve-cells-and-their-associated-molecules

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Francis Crick's reductionist statement, cited as the epitome of the mechanistic view.

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Thinkers (1)

thinker

Francis Crick
authored

Claims (1)

claim

Matter itself is not a mechanism: It is a potentially soul-like materiality which is essentially what we call self.
contradicts
New cosmological assumption #7: the deepest claim about the nature of matter.

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

There is no privileged material substrate for Selves; cognition can arise in neurons, single cells, plants, tissues, swarms, and engineered systems.claim0.787
Second foundational pillar of TAME; supports basal cognition and rejects brain-centrism.
All intelligences are collective intelligences — individual humans are collections of parts, competencies, drives, and tools both internal and external to the body.claim0.783
Undermines the Steinbeck-style notion of the lone creative individual and challenges the human-AI distinction
Each human is a collective intelligence; the parenthetical 'of neurons' can be dropped as a conceptual commitment.claim0.781
The collective often displays new behaviors or preferences that are not simply the sum of individual cell behaviors.claim0.780
Key property of collective intelligence: emergent behaviors at the group level.
If different organizations of nervous tissue can achieve the same functions, the possibility that cognitive capacities, including sentience, can be achieved by other tissues should be considered.claim0.780
Conditional claim urging consideration of non-neural tissues for cognition.
The Self is malleable and plastic; the subject of memories and preferences is not fixed but subject to radical change in real-time.claim0.777
Central to TAME; challenges monadic self theory through examples of metamorphosis, regeneration, and mind-body substitution.
Consciousness does not imply human-like motives or emotions.claim0.774
Discussion on implications.
The remarkable ability of neurons to unify toward a centralized self is an evolutionary pivot of far earlier cell communication strategies that first solved problems in navigating anatomical morphospace.hypothesis0.772
Proposes an evolutionary trajectory linking morphogenesis to neural cognition.