Philosophy Wire: The Octopus-zombie, life and salt…

The dead squid dances. Is electrochemistry all there is, or maybe something else is the…sauce of life?

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2011-08-03]: A dead octopus (the title of the video is obviously false) starts moving like a live one when a sauce containing salt is poured onto it. Our lives are based on elektrochemical reactions and the octopus seems to actually be alive! (some claim that it is actually alive in this video, but anyway this does not affect the main point - the same phenomenon happens with frog legs – see here) But it is not... Or is it? Can "life" be just electrochemistry? Can what each of us is feeling every day as "I" be a series of ion exchanges? To slightly paraphrase Leibniz's mind experiment, if we "get into" a brain we will not find anywhere its "owner" and the only thing we will see will be cells... And perhaps some ions from the squid we just ate...

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Philosophy Wire: The zombie ant and the notion of Consciousness

Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2011-03-03]: Fungi attack ants, contaminate their brains, turn them into zombies, "force" them to climb up a tree, kill them, then they grow a pod of spores from the head of the ant and then spread new seeds over long distances by taking advantage of the height at which the "zombi"-ant has ascended! Unbelievable, but these things are common in forests in Brazil [source: web news]. Can creatures as "zombies" exist, even at a hypothesis level? What is Consciousness? Is an engine which works a "Being" or a "zombie?" I am "who I am" or I am just a machine, a zombie? Which "fungi" now controls my brain to make me write these lines? Or does the only fungi that exists is the mushroom I am about to eat later?

Articles for further reading
One can read in the ""Human Consciousness and the end of Materialism" article more for the "Zombie argument for Dualism".

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