Its philosophical CyberLN.

The thing is, there is nothing special about life. All of our wants and needs and emotions and thoughts can b explained by simple deterministic physics. Stick a needle in my brain, change a few molecules and suddenly I go from being a republican to a democrat. You can change my memories, my wants, my needs, etc. Im just a physical process. A robot. A bunch of chemical dominoes falling down. An endless series of stimuli and response.

But I'm sentient.

So even though I am made of particles bouncing around, the end result is that I am sentient. I experience subjective experiences like pleasure, pain, red, loud, soft, sharp, etc.

But what if you had a machine that could manipulate matter on a quantum scale? And you could build a replica of a person. With all of my memories embedded in it. Would that replica be sentient? How would you know? Would it truly experience thing, or would it just be like a robot? Or... is it the other way around? Is there some central point in a robot... or every organized system, that is sentient?

This is called the problem of the philosophical zombie. the hard problem of consciousness.

There's nothing special about the material we are made of. We constantly consume dead material, in the form of vitamins, minerals, water, protein, carbs, etc. and we rearrange these materials into our body... and the end result is that we are sentient.

A person moving around, thinking, and talking has nothing to do with the sentience at the core of it all. You can be lying there on a table, zonked out of your mind, not able to process information, eyes glazed over, perfectly still. No moving. no talking. No thinking. No self awareness. But still sentient... and if someone cuts your face with a knife... you still feel it. You are still sentient. You don't move, you don't respond, you don't communicate that you are in pain, and perhaps you don't remember this event. But you still experienced it.

So... how do we know what is sentient and what isn't? We don't. Every atom, every molecule, every object, every planet, etc. might have some form of raw sentience. Qualia. Doesn't mean it is self aware, or thinks, or can respond, or is going to respond to stimulus in a way that we call a lifeform.

Since we don't know what is sentient and what isn't or if you are the only thing that is sentient, or if every organized system is sentient... there are three options.

1. You are the center of the universe. No one else is really sentient. If you cease to exist, then everything ceases to exist because you were the only observer. This is called sollipsism.

2. Everything is sentient. Circles within circles. Fractal sentient structures. Panpsychism.

3. There is something special about brains. They are sentient some of the time, in certain states, we call being conscious. This is the stance most atheists take.

But since we don't understand consciousness, we can't really say. If 1 or 2 are true, then consciousness continues after the physiological change of state we call 'death'

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Public information announcement:
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(by The Pragmatic)

"blasphemy" is actually the infamous troll of the Atheist Republic forum.

Generally referred to as "Kenny", has been banned many times under different names.
Previously known aliases include: "Kenny Schweiger", "Kenny", "myself", "alleycat", "richardd", "Christopher", "marken", "punkin", "amber", "Simon", "fred,k".

Claims to be an atheist. But he has a fondness for using "sarcasm", even though no one ever gets his sarcasm and he has been told this many times, he keeps posting such deceiving comments.

He seems obsessed with religions, creationists and the stupidity of Fox News, Bill O'Reilly, Joel Osteen, Ted Cruz, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump, Vanna White, Sarah Palin, etc.

This announcement will be posted whenever he spams, agitates, confuses or flies of the handle.

Also, he finds these announcements 'boring'.