GENS4010 Week 11

On my first year of university, I took a psychology course that introduced the main ideas of the discipline, and one of them included the idea of mind and matter, and which part comes first. One of the lectures included quite a humurous cartoon of a group of aliens trying to decide where human thoughts come from after finding it difficult that a piece of meat called brain does all the information processing.

I did an extensive search on the Internet to find this same cartoon but after hours of searching, I came up with none. So I attempted a rather crude imitation drawing of the same cartoon:
The point here is to illustrate that brain and consciouness have always been a mystery. Many theories have been developed on it, and attempts was made to find out exactly how something biological like the brain can actually create thoughts. I find the subject very mind-boggling if I actually spend some time to think on it. Descartes originally thought that, for whatever reason, human consciousness comes from the pineal gland in the brain, but nowadays I don't think anyone can say for certain exactly when and where biology changes into thought. Although the origins of feelings such as love and anxiety can be mapped to certain parts of the brain, the same cannot be said for thoughts and consciouness, and when matter turns into mind.

Something else that has been suggested in a philosophy class I've attended last year is to describe what is alive and what is dead. For example, are tables alive? This might be a very stupid question, given that tables cannot think, feel, or sense. But when broken down into enough detail, both tables and humans are made from the very same microparticles. Our brain which originates our feelings are made of same microparticles that the chairs are made out of. Given this argument, I think it becomes very difficult to judge what is alive and what is not.