The nature of our soul/spirit/consciousness

[skyking]

It seems our interlocutor doesn't understand that most atheists practice reason with more rigor than does he himself. It's all good, if he wants to entertain the idea of eternal souls or reincarnation, bully for him.

I'll invoke another Razor at this time, that of Hitchens.

He is I suspect very young and nieve, he certainly lacks critical thinking skills and is not well versed in science. Not criticisms just observations after all I'm dumb as fuck so I can't talk.

Well, I can't say anything about him as a person, but I do agree that he should buff up his science.

We've done a fair bit of science buffing here and I appreciate it, I learn things here. I know some of our visitors do too.

[Thumpalumpacus]

We've done a fair bit of science buffing here and I appreciate it, I learn things here. I know some of our visitors do too.

Yeah, I definitely learn more than I bring to the table in terms of science here. Y'all are some smart sonsabitches.

[adey67]

We've done a fair bit of science buffing here and I appreciate it, I learn things here. I know some of our visitors do too.

Yeah, I definitely learn more than I bring to the table in terms of science here. Y'all are some smart sonsabitches.

I'm hampered by my dyscalculia, maths physics and chemistry are extremely difficult for me which has held me back all my life, I guarantee if I'd applied for nursing college today and not 35 years ago I would not have got in.  So many really smart folks here I agree.

[GenesisNemesis]

I imagine humans will reach a point where we can download our consciousness and memories and "ourselves" into either a machine or a body (cloned maybe?) for something close to eternal life.  I don't see any theoretical reason why not.  All it takes is the assumption that what is going on currently in our bodies and brains is purely physical, made up of the bouncing around of atoms and molecules (i.e., nothing supernatural or "soul" or spirit or whatever).  One thing there won't be is an absence of willing volunteers to try, I think a lot of elderly or dying people will sign up to advance the research in a century or so.

It would need to be represented as data in some way by another system, wouldn't it? But once it gets represented as data, is that really "your" consciousness anymore? Data is also subject to corruption eventually too.

Time to make coffee.

[Astreja]

{Consciousness} would need to be represented as data in some way by another system, wouldn't it? But once it gets represented as data, is that really "your" consciousness anymore?

And how would a machine consciousness interact with the world?  Would each person have to have unique algorithms so that their computerized mini-me reacted in character?

More importantly:  Why bother, if it isn't really you?

[Paleophyte]

Ever notice they all seem to be the reincarnation of Cleopatra or Napoleon, never 33rd battery chicken from the left?

Or they're always Native Americans when the overwhelming majority of the planet's population throughout history has been starving serfs, slaves, or their equivalent in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Nobody is ever a reincarnation of some poor bugger plodding around a rice paddy in ancient China or some kid dying of cholera in Botswana. Judging by population density we should all reincarnate with a pretty sound knowledge of several Chinese and Hindi dialects.

[SYZ]

Co-founder of Siri and Samsung's Vice President of Innovation Luc Julia has said
"There is no such thing as artificial intelligence".    And I agree.        AI is hugely
misunderstood and hugely overrated.

—A few of the snippets from his opinions on AI:

AI is constructed and controlled by humans. It is based on rules (expert systems)
or on data (machine and deep learning). The rules are set by us, and of course the
data the models are built from exist. Human intelligence invents and creates new
data that has never been seen before and break the rules to do so.

AI is learning upon whatever is known at time T.   Humans, in addition to learning
are inventing whatever will exist at time T+1. The current techniques of AI do not
invent. They do not think. Descartes said “Cogito ergo sum... I think therefore I am.”
AI doesn’t think, AI doesn’t exist.

Concerning the autonomous car, it will never exist with the AI we know today, which
is made of mathematics and statistics, expert systems or neural networks. It is indeed
impossible to cover all the cases that an autonomous car may encounter because it
will only cover cases that have already been seen.

As for Elon Musk, he is certainly a marketing genius, but he doesn't understand
anything about AI. He is not the one to rely on to understand AI. He knows how to
sell and oversell, has visions that are not necessarily bad, but he must return to reality.

[Kim]

There's a beautifully written novel by Kazuo Ishiguro called Never Let Me Go. I'm a relentless champion of this book, for many reasons.

Not to give away the story, I think it aptly addresses themes of consciousness and belief. Quite often, human beings judge, manipulate, & deflect responsibility in response to certain concepts of reality. For a time, self deception becomes accepted truth... and eventually, truth. Reality is a process, through which humans function. Whatever reality is acceptable, may depend on what is believed to be true or, what the conscience has processed to be true.


Hopefully, I've talked around the story enough to raise some curiosity for reading it. Never know what you'll find when you open a book. Sometimes, you never know anything til the last page.

[trdsf]

If the property ever becomes understood, what happens next.  To you think people will be able to download their conscienceness into a pay for your own online afterlife. (I'm trying to remember the tv show that has this as the basis of it's plot).  Or will we be able to create AI intelligent creatures like the character Data in star trek.

Can't really say since we don't know in detail what the nature of consciousness is.  That's kind of like asking Bardeen and Brattain, before they had even made the first successful point-contact transistor, if you could run Linux on it.

If on the other hand it isn't a process to understand, but a form of energy or other substance, dies it go anywhere after a person dies?  Gets recycled into some else, disperses and no longer is sustained, or travels to another theory of an after life (there are several theories out there).

That's a speculation too far, I think.  The only way in which consciousness is 'energy' is that it comes out of the bioelectric currents of the brain, but it's not anything like heat or electromagnetic or kinetic energy.  If it were, it would have to be quantifiable and measurable.  If it's neither quantifiable nor measurable, and there's not even a potential test to identify it, then it's not really worth considering as a potential solution to the question.

Consciousness is probably better understood as software running in RAM.  The human brain has essentially evolved into an expert system with a bare minimum of BIOS, but that part is supremely well evolved to take in and process data as it comes along.  When it shuts down, the program crashes because it's not stored in a physical way like an .EXE file.

We know from studies on victims of traumatic brain injuries that they can and do suffer radical losses of information, learned abilities, motor skills, and/or personality changes -- if consciousness were separate from the physical layer of the brain, that would not be the case.  The evidence as it stands supports the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of the bioelectric computer that is the brain, and when a person dies, that which made them that person ends.

To go back to your first question: does this mean AI is theoretically possible?  Yes, I think so, but I also think we're only just at the beginning of that process.  Understanding human consciousness will help understand what's needed for a digital consciousness, and we don't understand human consciousness yet.

[trdsf]

For instance one phenomon that deals with reincarnation is the people who say they remember something from a past life and that is somehow confirmed.  For me this is is enough read on to consider the phenomon, however it's not enough to adopt the conclusion of reincarnation.  The two counter reasons are that 1) There is a new studies about memory being passed on in wildlife, (birds I think are what these studies were from) ; and 2) population increases indicates that whatever it is that makes up our spiritual/mental selves it doesn't seem like the next generation can only be a reused energy or spirit matter of generations that have already passed on.  

These counter arguments aren't enough to dismiss the phenomon of lingering past life evidence, but they are enough to question both sides thinking some piece of information is missing to see how the puzzle fits together.

Funny thing about past lives.  I did a couple past life regression things back when I was a practicing Wiccan.  I could name you seven lives that I "saw" -- and no, I was never Cleopatra or Napoleon or Charlemagne.  And none of the ones that I "saw" could be fact-checked, of course.

But I have a better explanation than reincarnation for that experience: I'm a writer.  It's my job (well, my avocation, I'm not yet published so it's not a job) to come up with believable characters.  Having already been in a suggestible state of mind, my brain did what I try to do consciously as a writer: come up with something on the fly.  And I did.

Speaking from my own experience, I have never, not once, met anyone who claimed to know about their past lives who wasn't a creative sort in one way or another.  And that, I think, is the more plausible explanation of where their past life "experiences" come from: their own creativity.  Nothing paranormal or metaphysical involved.

[Astreja]

Can't really say since we don't know in detail what the nature of consciousness is.  That's kind of like asking Bardeen and Brattain, before they had even made the first successful point-contact transistor, if you could run Linux on it.

That's one thing that I consistently see from the believer side:  An insistence that questions have to be answered immediately, even if we haven't studied them long enough to have meaningful data.

If you can't sit with unknowing and with ambiguity, and just grasp for the first answer that satisfies your craving, don't expect that answer to be true.

[trdsf]

Can't really say since we don't know in detail what the nature of consciousness is.  That's kind of like asking Bardeen and Brattain, before they had even made the first successful point-contact transistor, if you could run Linux on it.

That's one thing that I consistently see from the believer side:  An insistence that questions have to be answered immediately, even if we haven't studied them long enough to have meaningful data.

If you can't sit with unknowing and with ambiguity, and just grasp for the first answer that satisfies your craving, don't expect that answer to be true.

And I'll tell you, I probably dislike "I don't know" even more than they do.  I hate the idea that there are some current unknowns that won't be known until long after I'm dead.

The difference is that my next four words are "well, let's find out", not "yeah, that sounds good".  Because you're absolutely right, sometimes the only answer we have is "We don't know yet" and the only solace you can get from that is to hope that 'yet' is some time during your lifetime.

[jerry mcmasters]

I imagine humans will reach a point where we can download our consciousness and memories and "ourselves" into either a machine or a body (cloned maybe?) for something close to eternal life.  I don't see any theoretical reason why not.  All it takes is the assumption that what is going on currently in our bodies and brains is purely physical, made up of the bouncing around of atoms and molecules (i.e., nothing supernatural or "soul" or spirit or whatever).  One thing there won't be is an absence of willing volunteers to try, I think a lot of elderly or dying people will sign up to advance the research in a century or so.

It would need to be represented as data in some way by another system, wouldn't it? But once it gets represented as data, is that really "your" consciousness anymore? Data is also subject to corruption eventually too.

Time to make coffee.

Whatever the form is that makes it what it is, the housing could exist to make it continue to be what it is. (Maybe?  Idk.)

Reminds me of the old "teleporter" thought experiment, if your atoms are "star treked" into some form and then reassembled elsewhere, is the resultant person (thing?) "you"?  Or did you just die and this is some other person?  I tend to think it would still be you.  If by accident it creates two of you, which is you?

[SYZ]

...Reminds me of the old "teleporter" thought experiment, if your atoms are "star trekked" into some form and then reassembled elsewhere, is the resultant person (thing?) "you"?  Or did you just die and this is some other person?  I tend to think it would still be you.  If by accident it creates two of you, which is you?

Well, apparently there IS evidence in the transmogrification of Jesus Christ
into 2 billion tons of biscuits and 13 million gallons of red wine. Just ask the micks.

[mordant]

A friend gave her though about reincarnation as a nonreligious belief.  Bacically saying that since energy and matter can be neither created nor destroyed, then it goes to reason that our spirit, soul, or consciousness continues on eventually reincarnated again after we die.

It's an interesting thought, but the point of bringing it up is to ask any of your thoughts on our consciousness.  As far as I'm aware there isn't a good explanation for how we get one, what it is, and why even life support can't bring some one back who's just not there any more.

It most certainly does NOT "stand to reason" that the conservation of energy and matter means consciousness must continue in some way.

This ignores the fact that consciousness is a particular configuration of matter and energy. If you printout the US Declaration of Independence and then burn it, it is not under the slightest obligation to reassemble itself into what it was before it was destroyed. All that the conservation of mater and energy says is that its atoms still exist, not that their former organization as a sheet of paper with particular patterns of ink on it are preserved in any way whatsoever.

This is an expression of the law of entropy, which states that everything tends on an overall basis to proceed from more to less organized states over time. Entropy can be reduced locally -- I can go out into my garage if I had the skills and tools and craft a beautiful piece of furniture out of scrap lumber -- but at great cost and deliberate effort.

What actually "stands to reason" is that a highly complex system of biological and electrochemical processes that gives rise to sentience would be among the LEAST likely things to somehow spontaneously reconstitute itself.

[SYZ]

A friend gave her though about reincarnation as a nonreligious belief.  Basically saying that since energy and matter can be neither created nor destroyed, then it goes to reason that our spirit, soul, or consciousness continues on eventually reincarnated again after we die...

It most certainly does NOT "stand to reason" that the conservation of energy and matter means consciousness must continue in some way...

Agreed.  It's of interest that despite my asking Critic to confirm his "friend's" qualifications
or accreditation, he never responded.  It seems from the majority of his past comments on
this type of scenario that he's inclined to believe whomever and whatever they say to him
with uncritical acceptance.

"Stand to reason" means that something is obvious because it's what most sensible people
would expect.  And most people do not  believe in reincarnation.  The phrase itself is
mostly used by people when they can't explain a concrete link between their claim and any
empirical evidence.   It's just a cop-out.

[Scoop]

A friend gave her though about reincarnation as a nonreligious belief.  Bacically saying that since energy and matter can be neither created nor destroyed, then it goes to reason that our spirit, soul, or consciousness continues on eventually reincarnated again after we die.

It's an interesting thought, but the point of bringing it up is to ask any of your thoughts on our consciousness.  As far as I'm aware there isn't a good explanation for how we get one, what it is, and why even life support can't bring some one back who's just not there any more.

Its not that you have "this energy" that has to go anywhere per say.  I am no expert, but ...

Our aliveness is raising the electrons/molecules in you to a higher energy state.  I am simplifying to just electrons. As the electrons fall in energy states we "alive".  A tad over simplified of course, like ignoring eating and what not.

When you reach static equilibrium you are dead.  Its not that the energy was there and has to go somewhere.  Its more about the processes in your body didn't have the energy/or functioning to allow your body parts (electrons/molecules) to get back to a higher state so that they can "fall" to a lower state again.  I guess some molecules get locked into a higher level, but that is chemical potential.  Or whatever they call shape potential energy.  I don't know the details.  For us "electron configuration" is good enough here.  

Think of rolling a ball down the stairs then you toss it back up to roll down again.  If you do not throw it up, it doesn't have the energy to "change" into something else. Or, the ball stops in the landing above the steps and remains there.  Its now potential energy.  It didn't go anywhere, it stays "stored" in the state of the system.  

I deny this "next life" based on the above.  So my "lack belief" in an after life or anything like it is a positive claim based on what I just said. It aint much, that's true enough. I think people should learn more before denying or proclaiming any knowledge of some beliefs.  Or at least be aware of what they do not know.

[Dom]

Just in case there is "something" that we haven't been able to measure - everything on earth gets recycled. It all decomposes into tiny particles. If there is "something", it would be fragmented and not exist as a whole.

[skyking]

For instance one phenomon that deals with reincarnation is the people who say they remember something from a past life and that is somehow confirmed.  For me this is is enough read on to consider the phenomon, however it's not enough to adopt the conclusion of reincarnation.  The two counter reasons are that 1) There is a new studies about memory being passed on in wildlife, (birds I think are what these studies were from) ; and 2) population increases indicates that whatever it is that makes up our spiritual/mental selves it doesn't seem like the next generation can only be a reused energy or spirit matter of generations that have already passed on.  

These counter arguments aren't enough to dismiss the phenomon of lingering past life evidence, but they are enough to question both sides thinking some piece of information is missing to see how the puzzle fits together.

Funny thing about past lives.  I did a couple past life regression things back when I was a practicing Wiccan.  I could name you seven lives that I "saw" -- and no, I was never Cleopatra or Napoleon or Charlemagne.  And none of the ones that I "saw" could be fact-checked, of course.

But I have a better explanation than reincarnation for that experience: I'm a writer.  It's my job (well, my avocation, I'm not yet published so it's not a job) to come up with believable characters.  Having already been in a suggestible state of mind, my brain did what I try to do consciously as a writer: come up with something on the fly.  And I did.

Speaking from my own experience, I have never, not once, met anyone who claimed to know about their past lives who wasn't a creative sort in one way or another.  And that, I think, is the more plausible explanation of where their past life "experiences" come from: their own creativity.  Nothing paranormal or metaphysical involved.

I'm not much of a dreamer, that is to say I don't get to recall many.
I had a funny dream that was built in part on the mind, coming up with something on the fly.
I was being chased by the proverbial bad guys in the winter, at the local school grounds. I rounded a corner and slipped on ice, and landed hard on my hip, thus ending the dream.
Of course I had fallen out of bed right on the point of my hip. Because time is fluid during dream states, I may have concocted the whole dream up as I fell from bed

[brunumb]

Its not that you have "this energy" that has to go anywhere per say.  I am no expert, but ...

Our aliveness is raising the electrons/molecules in you to a higher energy state.  I am simplifying to just electrons. As the electrons fall in energy states we "alive".  A tad over simplified of course, like ignoring eating and what not.

When you reach static equilibrium you are dead.  Its not that the energy was there and has to go somewhere.  Its more about the processes in your body didn't have the energy/or functioning to allow your body parts (electrons/molecules) to get back to a higher state so that they can "fall" to a lower state again.  I guess some molecules get locked into a higher level, but that is chemical potential.  Or whatever they call shape potential energy.  I don't know the details.  For us "electron configuration" is good enough here. 

Nope.  Electron configuration and energy states of electrons has absolutely nothing to do with it.  Sorry  

[no one]

Counterpoint to all the doubters and skeptics......

but.......magic.

[Astreja]

Our aliveness is raising the electrons/molecules in you to a higher energy state.

No, that's not something specific to "aliveness."  A dead body could be on fire and have higher energy than a live body.

When you reach static equilibrium you are dead.

The body doesn't reach static equilibrium when it dies.  Various chemical processes continue, including decay.

[Antonio]

My soul is no longer my problem

[Inkubus]

My soul is no longer my problem

What did you get for it?

But now that no one's mentioned it, this business with selling your soul to Satan, afaics it's a win-win situation.

I can forget Mr Omni, he's been clocking my antics from day one so that's me fucked I'm destined to burn.
But hay, if I sign up with the queer fella I'll have ten beautiful years in exchange for nothing. What can old nick possibly to do to me if I don't fulfil my part of the deal when the coldest part of hell will melt lead?

[Cavebear]

My soul is no longer my problem

Since no one actually has one, that is a very minor concern. If you can prove there is one, I would be interested.

But the fact that you think you have one; who else's responsibility could it be other than there your own. I grant that there are theists who believe in pre-destiny and so (thusly) feel relieved of all personal responsibility for their actions, but do you feel none yourself? At least, as an atheist, I have to take complete responsibility for mine.