Comment by donkeybeer

We don't know how, and do not have to know how.

I could throw out some ignorant basically random and meaningless guesses like "emergent property arising from sufficient threshold complexity" or "quantum effects" but these are just bullshit examples that are nothing more than filler noises to say in place of "a thing we don't know". It's more honest to just say we don't know. There are infinite things we don't know and there is nothing wrong with that. The unknown does not have to be filled in with fiction, it can and should remain simply unknown until some actual observation or reasoning can supply something real.

Obviously biology includes simple processes. Your elbow is a simple hinge and any number of chemical reactions are simple chemical reactions that will happen exactly the same way all by themselves without being part of a biological construct. This is not interesting and doesn't prove or disprove anything about any other kind of process or phenomenon. The mechanics of biology are irrelevant.

And yet the tumbler of pingpong balls and the piece of paper are contemplating their own exitence? They communicated because they have a thought and then a desire to communicate the thought? Are you saying that?

You aim to suggest that I am failing to stick to the hard facts of reality by imagining something we can't put our fingers on in a consciousness, but I say that imagining that a bin of pinpong balls thinks is a rather more egregious example of unsubstantiated faith.

If you mean the opposite (more likely I assume), that you yourself are not doing anything different than a bag of pingpong balls when you engage in this discussion with me, well I have nothing to say to that. But then I don't have to say anything to that because I don't owe a bag of pingpong balls any consideration at all. It can emit text all day and it means nothing to me and warrants no response. Even if it emits text that says "What biggoted chauvanistic discrimination! Just because I am made of pinpong balls that means the veracity of my arguments don't matter and I'm not a person?"