According to Mark Titus at Nautilus:
The Greek philosopher Democritus might have said something like that 2,500 years ago. Although his books are lost, we know from the fragments that remain and what others said about him, that he believed everything in the universe was made of atoms in perpetual motion, whirling in space. Large, small, smooth, and slippery, or jagged and hooked, they combine to form the universe—its stars and planets, and the earth and all it contains, including our bodies and our minds. All that is required to understand this is “just a little imagination and thinking”—what physics, chemistry, and biology have provided since the 17th century.
In spite of this success, science (as we now call the metaphysics of Democritus) has not been able to show how mind or human consciousness can be incorporated into it. Democritus had a theory for this, namely, that mind consists of “fire atoms,” extremely small and mobile atoms that create copies or images of the larger ones, becoming our perceptions and thoughts. Though it’s since discarded the fire atom, neurobiology has made some progress as to how perception and thought actually take form. Consciousness may well be made of atoms, and it all begins with sensations. More.
Our Niwrad asked News to post this response:
This article “Consciousness is made of atoms, too” is typical of the nullity of scientism addressing consciousness.
To say that “Consciousness is made of atoms” is like to say that a painter is made of paints, an architect is made of bricks, a writer is made of books…
Consciousness is the subject and the world is the object. To conflate the two is to claim that a ceramic jar and the observer of it are the same. This article denies the ontological hierarchy and is metaphysically heretic.
We are told: “Sensations are the building block of consciousness”. This approach denies all the higher properties of consciousness, which are fully detached from sensations. Reason is well beyond sensation, to say nothing of intellectual intuition, which is higher still than reason. Anyone familiar with meditation, pure intellectual work, or deep learning/reasoning knows what I mean.
The article sounds like a piece of low level dialectic with no relation whatever to sensation. In that way, it is self-refuting.
See also: A defense of physicalism: Plankton could evolve minds Physicalism has come to this but it still holds the academy. Note: Schulman seems to confuse the natural tendency of life forms to make efforts to stay alive with minds or consciousness as such. The fact that plankton, like other life forms, struggle to stay in existence says nothing about whether they could evolve into creatures with minds.
At BBC: Consciousness no different than our ability to digest
Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness?
and
What can we hope to learn about animal minds?
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