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[E-Cat]

Consciousness isn't actually lost there. When we faint and say we lost consciousness it's just a figure of speech to explain the moment where you don't think, or at least don't remember you thought, and where you don't sense the world around you or what's in your mind, or at least you don't remember you did. Consciousness is not gone when you a sleeping but not dreaming. It still exists just as much as it existed when you were awake. It just doesn't work with your body at that specific moment, or at least you can't remember it worked with your body. Consciousness allows your body to rest.

I think what you are trying to say, but not saying it very well, is that the same arrangement of molecules that give rise to consciousness is still there, but not active.

What I was trying to do was make the point that, metaphysically, it's not really such a different situation from the one described by the OP - yet, he is probably not troubled by it.

 

[Airola]

More importantly, how can anyone tell the difference between a machine that pretends to be self conscious and one that actually is, without that how can we even begin to assume that there is something more to it then the illusion of consciousness ? or to be more precise even, let's talk self awareness. How can you prove that something that it's not self aware but pretends to be, isn't?

It's there any observable ( not even asking for demonstrable) trait that we can call soul or us or ghost? if not, how can you even start defining it to search for it and assume it exists.

The soul concept it's nothing more than a comfort concept just like gods, we needed those to cope, to make sense of things that we didn't know how they worked.

Edit: BTW, the path for gifting robots of self awareness might have come from philosophy, which i think it's fucking sick! ( as in awesome)
People are treating self awareness as the ability to simulate yourself, and this seems like a very tangible goal that represents what it is to be self aware.

A good enough AI could fool most people, if not all.

The thing we should remember is where and how did the machine come to be. We can compare it to humans.
First of all, the machine was created by humans. Even in its somewhat convincing states in history (like maybe what it is now), there never was even a hint of actual self awareness in the machine. People knew all those computers did was calculations programmed by a human, and there weren't even any efforts to make it actually aware of itself instead of making an illusion that it is aware. Every single programmer knew that (except maybe the great late Terry Davis who made Temple OS). Right now we don't actually really know if we could actually even make an AI that has the complexity that human mind has.
These computers were never born the same way humans came into existence. They are a byproduct of a conscious thing that came from nothing. They are an imitation. They are first and foremost a tool to help people with complex calculations. They were made to save time. They calculate faster than any human, but any human is more aware of his calculations than a computer is.

Belief in souls didn't happen merely just by imagination. People have always had experiences that point to things beyond their bodies. Out of body experiences, sleep paralysis, near death experiences, visions, whatever else. Of course anyone can say they are hallucinations but that doesn't take away them still being actual experiences. Computers don't have those. If you'd want to have a computer to tell it had an out of body experience, you would have to specifically program that into it. Whether or not soul is a real thing, at the very least humans have always had experiences that at the very least point to that direction, but computers never had it.

A highly complex AI that people start to believe in is an elaborate lying machine created by humans to fool themselves.
An AI that's made to represent what it is to be self aware is very useless if you think of it any further. I could only see it being useful as that in a situation where people are left all alone and they would go crazy if they couldn't have even a faked interaction with someone or something. In normal world there are billions of self aware creatures all around you and they will give you an exact representation of what it is to be self aware. There should be no reason to create a computer to simulate that, other than what I said before and maybe for our amusement, to make us go "look what I did" and "did you do that, wow" when showing and looking at that. It wouldn't ever be as good representation of self-awareness as another human is.

That said, it is an incredible thing though. From both angles, whether we have a soul or we don't, it's quite a remarkable thing that people have started to play with the idea. If we don't have a soul and are purely a naturalistic biological things, it's quite amazing that some apes ended up having these consciousness simulations around. And if we do have a soul, it's still really interesting why and how we have come to this point that we feel we should make up a consciousness of our own in the form of a computer.

 

[Airola]

Only if you assume that the feeling of "you" (as @DrAspirino has given us a name for, "proprioception")...

I will never ever stop using every excuse and chance I got to spam Tourniquet songs:

....is something that's special and NOT just a property of you having a functioning brain. If it isn't (and there's no reason to believe it is), then a 100% physically identical copy of you will simply feel like "YOU" the exact same way you do.....just through a different perspective.

This is the problem. If I'm not sensing myself and my copy at the same time, the copy isn't a 100% copy of me. One could say it's biologically a 100% copy, but it wouldn't still be a real full copy of me. Part of my existence is the experience of myself in this body. If the copy would lack my actual sense of self, it wouldn't be a full copy. And again, I don't think I could experience myself in two separate places at the same time.

What i'm suggesting is that this sensation of being rooted to a single body (having a "Soul" or the "Ego") is the true illusion. One that you can actually dispel for yourself with drugs, and experience the sensation of infinity.

You can just search around the internet on forums or Reddit for accounts of "Ego Death" achieved through meditation or psychedelics.

I've never done it myself, but what's interesting is that people who achieve are sometimes absolutely convinced that the loss of ego is/feels no different from death....and in alot of ways, it isn't any different.

They are still experiencing their part of that infinity. They are experiencing that they become infinity. It's the scale of their ego that changes, not the ego in itself.

Now I have to admit that I have never used drugs so I don't know how that and whatever sensations might come from it feels like so my above comment should be taken with a big grain of salt.
I have experienced an out of body experience (in short, in sleep paralysis I have started to rise up from my body but the 100% feeling of upcoming death has always been so dreadful I've fought back and never allowed to go any further with the experience - some say the sensation is incredible if you just let it happen but for me the feeling of actual death has been too strong every single time) so I know the human mind can have weird ass experiences like that. Be it a hallucination or not, the experiences are real.

My personal take on souls and infinity is that it could very well be that in our state of existence here the soul is an individual soul but after death it will become more of a part of a bigger thing. And it could be part of the bigger thing right now too, but it also at the same time is its own individual thing. Maybe think of it as a leaf on a tree. It's a thing of its own and part of a bigger thing at the same time.

I think what you are trying to say, but not saying it very well, is that the same arrangement of molecules that give rise to consciousness is still there, but not active.

What I was trying to do was make the point that, metaphysically, it's not really such a different situation from the one described by the OP - yet, he is probably not troubled by it.

Our difference is that you believe it's the arrangement of molecules that makes consciousness, and I don't believe that makes consciousness. To me this teleportation example examines that pretty nicely. If you could make a copy of yourself but couldn't experience both copies as your self at the same time, then consciousness couldn't be a byproduct of certain way arranged molecules.

The consciousness could even be active then but not active in a way that interacts with the body.

 

[jackets with pockets]

I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg.

- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

 

[Keihart]

A good enough AI could fool most people, if not all.

The thing we should remember is where and how did the machine come to be. We can compare it to humans.
First of all, the machine was created by humans. Even in its somewhat convincing states in history (like maybe what it is now), there never was even a hint of actual self awareness in the machine. People knew all those computers did was calculations programmed by a human, and there weren't even any efforts to make it actually aware of itself instead of making an illusion that it is aware. Every single programmer knew that (except maybe the great late Terry Davis who made Temple OS). Right now we don't actually really know if we could actually even make an AI that has the complexity that human mind has.
These computers were never born the same way humans came into existence. They are a byproduct of a conscious thing that came from nothing. They are an imitation. They are first and foremost a tool to help people with complex calculations. They were made to save time. They calculate faster than any human, but any human is more aware of his calculations than a computer is.

Belief in souls didn't happen merely just by imagination. People have always had experiences that point to things beyond their bodies. Out of body experiences, sleep paralysis, near death experiences, visions, whatever else. Of course anyone can say they are hallucinations but that doesn't take away them still being actual experiences. Computers don't have those. If you'd want to have a computer to tell it had an out of body experience, you would have to specifically program that into it. Whether or not soul is a real thing, at the very least humans have always had experiences that at the very least point to that direction, but computers never had it.

A highly complex AI that people start to believe in is an elaborate lying machine created by humans to fool themselves.
An AI that's made to represent what it is to be self aware is very useless if you think of it any further. I could only see it being useful as that in a situation where people are left all alone and they would go crazy if they couldn't have even a faked interaction with someone or something. In normal world there are billions of self aware creatures all around you and they will give you an exact representation of what it is to be self aware. There should be no reason to create a computer to simulate that, other than what I said before and maybe for our amusement, to make us go "look what I did" and "did you do that, wow" when showing and looking at that. It wouldn't ever be as good representation of self-awareness as another human is.

That said, it is an incredible thing though. From both angles, whether we have a soul or we don't, it's quite a remarkable thing that people have started to play with the idea. If we don't have a soul and are purely a naturalistic biological things, it's quite amazing that some apes ended up having these consciousness simulations around. And if we do have a soul, it's still really interesting why and how we have come to this point that we feel we should make up a consciousness of our own in the form of a computer.

It reads to me as if you have a belief in souls and are not really question it. That's fair, but not really a fun start for this conversation.
You still keep referring to the feeling of self, and not to the observable effects of it.
Self Awarenes it's not useless in machines, it would allow machines to act more independently without having to teach them everything. But it would also be an imitation of us, so you should really be asking what would be the difference? is it only the birth or the biological aspect of it?

In Blade Runner replicants are basically robots made of flesh.

 

[Airola]

It reads to me as if you have a belief in souls and are not really question it. That's fair, but not really a fun start for this conversation.
You still keep referring to the feeling of self, and not to the observable effects of it.

I don't think I should start from nothing every time I discuss about this subject.
I surely have doubted everything in my life, many many times.
And I have come to the conclusion that souls exist many many times.
I doubt you or others who might not believe in souls are coming from a clean slate either.

Why shouldn't I refer to the feeling of self? Should I take your view on self as a fact and base my views on how you view self?

To me these discussions are about giving different points of view in dealing with a subject. Most probably you will not start believe the way I do and I don't start believing the way you do, but we examine each others' views and write responses, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing and the people who read it make up their own minds about it. Some of these writings might change our minds only years after, sometimes it never happens. But neither one of us comes from completely clean and open mind to the discussion but we both have a sense of what reality is. There's no need to get completely rid of that every time a new discussion about it happens. I'm really interested to hear things that are far from what I believe though.

Self Awarenes it's not useless in machines, it would allow machines to act more independently without having to teach them everything. But it would also be an imitation of us, so you should really be asking what would be the difference? is it only the birth or the biological aspect of it?

I meant this from the context of AI existing to represent self awareness.

In Blade Runner replicants are basically robots made of flesh.

While I believe that in theory it could be possible to make a robot out of flesh, in a sense that maybe we could create these biological things in a lab one day. But I'm not sure if they can ever be 100% convincing replicas. Maybe, maybe not, who knows. But I don't think it matters if it's flesh. We can basically simulate a computer with a huge ass physical book too. Have enough pages (like trillions upon trillions) and it could have the information a computer can have. For every process there would be a page number reference you'd need to change the page to. If you want to count 3+3 the book would tell which page to open to see the answer. With infinite amount of pages and with the book being enormously big there could be a lot of if-then-else choices. No amount of those choices would make that book self aware. Just like that book, a computer is also made by humans to react to what key they press and then look for the reaction from the program the humans have programmed. A robot made out of flesh wouldn't be that much different from that. It's just the differences in the manners the information is given, received and processed.

It's kind of hard to grasp the thought process of the symbiosis of the lack of belief to human self experience and the belief of possible robot self awareness.
Like, on one hand humans don't really have self awareness, but on the other hand we can create robots with self awareness. Now that could be a product of strawman thinking from my part, but I find that quite troubling. It's troubling that there might be people who either deny or at least severely downplay people's experience of self, even going as far as to say it's an illusion, and then at the same time are ready and willing to believe a robot would have self awareness (even if that's admitted to be an illusion too). They would let you believe your experience of yourself is not what you think it is and that what you sense is just an illusion, and at the same time they would give an elaborate imitation the position of humanlike self aware creature.

I've said this before but in my imagination the saddest thing would be to slowly turn all life from this planet into organic robots. Humans, animals, plants, everything. They would do everything exactly as the originals did, the human robots would've been programmed to act 1:1 the way humans do. The entire planet would be a perfect robotisized version of it and all would be perfect, there would be no sickness, no worries, no troubles, all would be perfect. But the reality would be that every single human and animal in that planet would actually experience nothing from that. It would be like what it was, it would look perfect, but there would be no-one to actually ever witnessing and experiencing it. That would be the saddest possible thing. The universe can have value only if there is someone to experience at least some part of it. Animal, anything. If the only one processing what's around would be a robot, it would be a sad sad thing.

If we ever create an organic robot, how can we actually ever even be sure that it's a 100% copy of us? Maybe we just make it seem as if it's a copy but maybe some parts of what we are needed to be evolved from a single celled organism in an ocean. Who knows what processes unnoticed to us have happened while slowly making us happen. It's like plywood. Yeah it looks like wood board but it's not real wood board. It's just an imitation but lacks the required exact things to make it an actual wood board.

 

[Shadowplay1979]

As an identical twin let me chime in here.

Erm... no we don't...

Same originating DNA but probably material divergence in methylation.

What's interesting between us is that there have always been marginal differences between us whilst growing up; I'm a cm taller, have facial contour differences, I'm left-handed and he's right-handed etc.
From birth there were also strange and distinctive differences such as our fingerprints being identical but opposite (i.e. prints on my left hand are the same as those on his right etc).

We've never experienced the fabled cognitive twin neural link that people talk about, however I know a few female identical twins who claim to share some kind of connection (empathic in nature as far as it's been described -> think Sense8 without the telepathic communication) so I do wonder whether there's a gender bias to that, assuming it is a real thing.

We have had a lot of coincidental thought when we were much younger but I think much of that was a product of nurture being the shared life & environment we grew up in. After we split living together when we left home for Uni we've become so different as people (different career paths, relationships, environments & life experiences) that that hasn't really happened since.

Do I think there is some quantum link between us? Nah...

Do I believe we're two separate consciousnesses? Of course.

Do I believe that consciousness is defined by and rooted in some as-yet-to-be-understood quantum mechanics/phenomena? Absolutely!

Ya'll should check out Sir Roger Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mind (1989) which theorizes that consciousness is not algorithmic and thus, much of what we understand about the physical mechanisms of the human brain, whilst still governing a complex mesh of biological and physical functions, do not yet demonstrate the ability to drive or orchestrate what we understand as consciousness in the philosophical sense, and that there is something else going on, perhaps at the quantum level but through phenomena we have yet to either observe, intuit or hypothesize mathematically.

So what does that mean for teleportation? Well it's unclear, but depending on the nature of consciousness, without that base understanding, it's not even 100% clear that even if you can perfectly reconstruct the atomic structure you're actually going to be replicating the consciousness too as a by-product.

In some ways I would personally go so far as to contemplate that it would be impossible to do that, considering the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, surely it would be impossible to even perfectly replicate every attribute (position, velocity, spin) of every particle of every atom, of every molecule, of every protein of every cell in the human body. Imperfect replication maybe possible but then whilst it may guarantee parity across molecular structures, it certainly won't guarantee anything else beyond that so you never have any chance of seeing a "perfect" copy come out the other end.

Penrose was who i was thinking of when i wrote about quantum mechanics in regards to consciousness and elements of panpsychism.

 

[Keihart]

I don't think I should start from nothing every time I discuss about this subject.
I surely have doubted everything in my life, many many times.
And I have come to the conclusion that souls exist many many times.
I doubt you or others who might not believe in souls are coming from a clean slate either.

Why shouldn't I refer to the feeling of self? Should I take your view on self as a fact and base my views on how you view self?

To me these discussions are about giving different points of view in dealing with a subject. Most probably you will not start believe the way I do and I don't start believing the way you do, but we examine each others' views and write responses, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing and the people who read it make up their own minds about it. Some of these writings might change our minds only years after, sometimes it never happens. But neither one of us comes from completely clean and open mind to the discussion but we both have a sense of what reality is. There's no need to get completely rid of that every time a new discussion about it happens. I'm really interested to hear things that are far from what I believe though.



I meant this from the context of AI existing to represent self awareness.



While I believe that in theory it could be possible to make a robot out of flesh, in a sense that maybe we could create these biological things in a lab one day. But I'm not sure if they can ever be 100% convincing replicas. Maybe, maybe not, who knows. But I don't think it matters if it's flesh. We can basically simulate a computer with a huge ass physical book too. Have enough pages (like trillions upon trillions) and it could have the information a computer can have. For every process there would be a page number reference you'd need to change the page to. If you want to count 3+3 the book would tell which page to open to see the answer. With infinite amount of pages and with the book being enormously big there could be a lot of if-then-else choices. No amount of those choices would make that book self aware. Just like that book, a computer is also made by humans to react to what key they press and then look for the reaction from the program the humans have programmed. A robot made out of flesh wouldn't be that much different from that. It's just the differences in the manners the information is given, received and processed.

It's kind of hard to grasp the thought process of the symbiosis of the lack of belief to human self experience and the belief of possible robot self awareness.
Like, on one hand humans don't really have self awareness, but on the other hand we can create robots with self awareness. Now that could be a product of strawman thinking from my part, but I find that quite troubling. It's troubling that there might be people who either deny or at least severely downplay people's experience of self, even going as far as to say it's an illusion, and then at the same time are ready and willing to believe a robot would have self awareness (even if that's admitted to be an illusion too). They would let you believe your experience of yourself is not what you think it is and that what you sense is just an illusion, and at the same time they would give an elaborate imitation the position of humanlike self aware creature.

I've said this before but in my imagination the saddest thing would be to slowly turn all life from this planet into organic robots. Humans, animals, plants, everything. They would do everything exactly as the originals did, the human robots would've been programmed to act 1:1 the way humans do. The entire planet would be a perfect robotisized version of it and all would be perfect, there would be no sickness, no worries, no troubles, all would be perfect. But the reality would be that every single human and animal in that planet would actually experience nothing from that. It would be like what it was, it would look perfect, but there would be no-one to actually ever witnessing and experiencing it. That would be the saddest possible thing. The universe can have value only if there is someone to experience at least some part of it. Animal, anything. If the only one processing what's around would be a robot, it would be a sad sad thing.

If we ever create an organic robot, how can we actually ever even be sure that it's a 100% copy of us? Maybe we just make it seem as if it's a copy but maybe some parts of what we are needed to be evolved from a single celled organism in an ocean. Who knows what processes unnoticed to us have happened while slowly making us happen. It's like plywood. Yeah it looks like wood board but it's not real wood board. It's just an imitation but lacks the required exact things to make it an actual wood board.

I think you kinda reinforce my point of giving too much credit to us and believing in the soul as comfort.

The fact that we have self awareness doesn't imply that it has to be something special, something only humans have or something other worldly.
The more science advance, the more we learn that every living organism it's more similar and connected than what we used to think.

Just as context, animals in the west used to be thought as automatons and therefore it was ok to harm them. But we now know that a lot more animals are capable of even abstract thinking. Plants, now we know have something akin to a nervous system but it's simply so different that it took humas a lot of time to understand it, plants can communicate and even have memory.

My point is that, humans being ordinary it's not a bad thing, it doesn't make us less. And if there really is nothing more to self awareness than the process that we can observe, we should really consider machines as living beings if they ever achieve self consciousness, because you don't really have any evidence of there being some magical trait that makes us humans special.

Also, some context in case you are curious about what have people thought about this, since it's a really beaten horse:

 

[Airola]

I think you kinda reinforce my point of giving too much credit to us and believing in the soul as comfort.

It's not a comfort issue. It's a logic issue. It's like with my belief in the existence of god. I go through the thing over and over again. Trying to figure out what's the truth. Sometimes believing, sometimes not. Sometimes having longer seasons in thinking god doesn't exist, but each and every time I come up to the conclusion that naturalism can't logically be the truth of reality. And from there I again come to god.

The fact that you bring up comfort means that you think of life as something that for many might require comfort. That life in itself for us is a source for emotional and existential discomfort (which, by the way, I think is pretty special for life to experience). So if that's the case, is there anything wrong with it even it would be because of comfort? Isn't it actually pretty beautiful thing if a dying person can have his final thoughts in thinking his soul will now move on? Why would anyone want to take that possibility away from any dying human? Besides, even in the case that naturalism is all there really is, isn't it phenomenal that out of nothing a self aware sentient being happened, and had to realize he will die but came to think of a soul moving on when he's dying? I'm not saying this in trying to prove the existence of soul but I'm just trying to understand your point in bringing up "believing in the soul as comfort" angle. As if that's either a bad thing or something that discredits the idea of a soul.

I can't understand how you can in the same sentence bring up giving too much credit to us and believing in soul as comfort and use it against the idea of soul and us being special. The fact that we actually have been able to come up with an abstract idea such as a soul and to use it as comfort during existential crisis and moments of dying is remarkably special for life. The whole possibility of using an abstraction like that to bring comfort in major existentially critical moments is proof of us deserving much more credit than you imply we should be given.

The fact that we have self awareness doesn't imply that it has to be something special, something only humans have or something other worldly.

It's not about being special either. We are special in many more ways than just having a soul.
It's about what's logically the most plausible thing, and it's not about reading about souls from religious texts but it's about personal experiences, what other people tell about their experiences and what does science tell about the existence of the universe.

The more science advance, the more we learn that every living organism it's more similar and connected than what we used to think.

Just as context, animals in the west used to be thought as automatons and therefore it was ok to harm them. But we now know that a lot more animals are capable of even abstract thinking. Plants, now we know have something akin to a nervous system but it's simply so different that it took humas a lot of time to understand it, plants can communicate and even have memory.

I'm not saying animals don't have souls. I'm not even saying plants don't have souls either.

My point is that, humans being ordinary it's not a bad thing, it doesn't make us less. And if there really is nothing more to self awareness than the process that we can observe, we should really consider machines as living beings if they ever achieve self consciousness, because you don't really have any evidence of there being some magical trait that makes us humans special.

It's you who brings up the idea of a soul being an unordinary or a magical thing.
As I believe soul is the deepest core of what humans are I think soul is right about the most ordinary thing there is what comes to sentient life, and it certainly not magical but instead as natural as nature gets.

What comes to humans being special, I don't think we need a soul to be considered special. We are special regardless. There are no other creatures on this planet who write symphonies as means to communicate things we struggle to communicate by words. From all life we know to exist we are by far the most special creatures. Sure ants and bees have their own super special skills but none of them have as many practical and more abstract skills than we have. So I think using "we are not special" to counter the idea of soul is pointless. The capability to wonder our own existence and look back at the moment where this universe began makes us amazingly special. Instead of there being nothing, there is something. And instead of that something being just dark cold space with rocks and stars here and there, there is this small little rock with sentient life that wonders their own existence and writes books and composes music and builds factories and travels to space and comes up with words for love and hate and communicates abstract things through music, stories and pictures. Out of all observable life we know there has not been one other species that does that and if there ever will be another it will be so far in the future that I'm not sure if the sun exists anymore.

I don't understand where this will to underestimate the specialness of humans comes from.

Also, some context in case you are curious about what have people thought about this, since it's a really beaten horse:

I've listened and watched hundreds if not thousands of hours of videos and debates about consciousness, philosophy, religion etc so I'm very familiar with all of this.

 

[Keihart]

It's not a comfort issue. It's a logic issue. It's like with my belief in the existence of god. I go through the thing over and over again. Trying to figure out what's the truth. Sometimes believing, sometimes not. Sometimes having longer seasons in thinking god doesn't exist, but each and every time I come up to the conclusion that naturalism can't logically be the truth of reality. And from there I again come to god.

The fact that you bring up comfort means that you think of life as something that for many might require comfort. That life in itself for us is a source for emotional and existential discomfort (which, by the way, I think is pretty special for life to experience). So if that's the case, is there anything wrong with it even it would be because of comfort? Isn't it actually pretty beautiful thing if a dying person can have his final thoughts in thinking his soul will now move on? Why would anyone want to take that possibility away from any dying human? Besides, even in the case that naturalism is all there really is, isn't it phenomenal that out of nothing a self aware sentient being happened, and had to realize he will die but came to think of a soul moving on when he's dying? I'm not saying this in trying to prove the existence of soul but I'm just trying to understand your point in bringing up "believing in the soul as comfort" angle. As if that's either a bad thing or something that discredits the idea of a soul.

I can't understand how you can in the same sentence bring up giving too much credit to us and believing in soul as comfort and use it against the idea of soul and us being special. The fact that we actually have been able to come up with an abstract idea such as a soul and to use it as comfort during existential crisis and moments of dying is remarkably special for life. The whole possibility of using an abstraction like that to bring comfort in major existentially critical moments is proof of us deserving much more credit than you imply we should be given.



It's not about being special either. We are special in many more ways than just having a soul.
It's about what's logically the most plausible thing, and it's not about reading about souls from religious texts but it's about personal experiences, what other people tell about their experiences and what does science tell about the existence of the universe.

Edit: maybe you think it as qualia, and that's enough for you. I just keep asking because maybe you have some logic behind it more than just believing in it because we are a remarkable species. But if it's just about believing then that's fair, i get it. I think here is practicality in believing as well, no shame in it.



I'm not saying animals don't have souls. I'm not even saying plants don't have souls either.



It's you who brings up the idea of a soul being an unordinary or a magical thing.
As I believe soul is the deepest core of what humans are I think soul is right about the most ordinary thing there is what comes to sentient life, and it certainly not magical but instead as natural as nature gets.

What comes to humans being special, I don't think we need a soul to be considered special. We are special regardless. There are no other creatures on this planet who write symphonies as means to communicate things we struggle to communicate by words. From all life we know to exist we are by far the most special creatures. Sure ants and bees have their own super special skills but none of them have as many practical and more abstract skills than we have. So I think using "we are not special" to counter the idea of soul is pointless. The capability to wonder our own existence and look back at the moment where this universe began makes us amazingly special. Instead of there being nothing, there is something. And instead of that something being just dark cold space with rocks and stars here and there, there is this small little rock with sentient life that wonders their own existence and writes books and composes music and builds factories and travels to space and comes up with words for love and hate and communicates abstract things through music, stories and pictures. Out of all observable life we know there has not been one other species that does that and if there ever will be another it will be so far in the future that I'm not sure if the sun exists anymore.

I don't understand where this will to underestimate the specialness of humans comes from.



I've listened and watched hundreds if not thousands of hours of videos and debates about consciousness, philosophy, religion etc so I'm very familiar with all of this.

i enjoyed this reply the best, since you actually engaged in what i was questioning. But i think the question remains, if not magical, then what it's this observable trait that only humans have, that also animals have, but that makes us humans and not animals, that makes you think of the concept of soul ?

If animals have it and we too, then it must be something observable in both, isn't it?
You say soul, you say self, but you don't give it any atributes. As you describe it, it just sounds as an excuse to think that something remains after death. If not, what then? what it's this observable trait that you call soul?

 

[Airola]

i enjoyed this reply the best, since you actually engaged in what i was questioning. But i think the question remains, if not magical, then what it's this observable trait that only humans have, that also animals have, but that makes us humans and not animals, that makes you think of the concept of soul ?

If animals have it and we too, then it must be something observable in both, isn't it?
You say soul, you say self, but you don't give it any atributes. As you describe it, it just sounds as an excuse to think that something remains after death. If not, what then? what it's this observable trait that you call soul?

The sense of self is observable by everyone, but no other person can observe your own sense of self but you. Everyone can only sense themselves so that makes it really hard thing to study. The feeling of one's own self is pretty much beyond what can be scientifically study. And of all observable things it's the most observable but only for every person for themselves. Every other thing you observe, you observe through your observing self. Every thing you observe you go through interpretation. You have to measure an external thing. You have to interpret what each thing is. But with the sense of yourself, even if you take out your sense of smell, vision, touch etc, you would still have the sense of your own being.

You are.
And you know you are.

It's a wonder in itself.

People have given all kinds of theories what this you is for at least thousands of years. One common thing that has happened thousands of years ago and that still happens and most probably will happen in future, is the capability of having experiences that feel extraordinary, if not even supernatural. While one could argue those experiences are hallucinations, the experiences as themselves are still real. That is a fact. I know you want to have that measurable but how do you do that with our current technology when we still can't figure out what self even is?

Who knows if it will be observable in future. Most of the things we can observe now weren't observable even 200 years ago. We are actually pretty lucky someone came up with sending and receiving information through radio waves. Imagine a world where people just didn't find out about radio waves. That could've been a possibility. This planet has been here for billions of years and only recently, compared to that time, radio waves were predicted by calculation and then found and used.

First I would say that for the sense of self we can all observe right now. It's not an illusion. It's the realest thing you can ever observe. Every other observation you make about anything depends on your sense of self.

What comes to soul, we currently mostly have anecdotes and personal experiences. And we can have philosophical questions about it, like with this teleportation and copying thing that to me points that what makes the sense of self is separate to our physical biological body. We can have philosophical questions about the origin of universe and life.

If naturalism is the whole and full truth, then we could theoretically trace everything back to the beginning of the universe, and I mean every single tiniest thing, and whatever the beginning has could be observed and we could calculate how the next 14 billion years from the beginning will happen. It would also mean we have no free will - which again goes against our sense of self that every single one of us can observe. But if it truly IS the full truth, even then that initial state of existence would have everything that is needed for human consciousness to happen. So human consciousness would not be an accident even in that case but it's a thing bound to happen, no matter what. So the initial state of coming from non-existence to existence would have all that's needed to have self-experiencing sentient life.

Maybe it's the beginning of the pattern towards neurons that spark in our eventual brains, or maybe there is some other component that brings forth consciousness in sentient life that we haven't found yet. The fact still remains that 1) we are self aware, and 2) we experience things that feel as if we are not in our bodies, and 3) we can freely choose a lot of things we can do. It's not hoping for magic to be real to have hypotheses of the existence of a soul.

Now you might want to bring up how these out of body and near death experiences have been able to make by messing with the brain, but I think the only thing that tells is that we can confirm those experiences really do happen. It doesn't tell anything about the realness of the experience. All it does is it tells that this part of the brain is connected to the experience. It doesn't tell if when you mess with that part of the brain the person's sense of being actually goes beyond this world or not. Who knows, maybe that part of the brain could be (ab)used to make people visit the great beyond for real in future.

Self-awareness, experiences of soul like behavior and free will, connected to the beginning of the universe points out to a soul. That's not a magical thing but solid grounds for a hypothesis of souls. And I think that should be studied more, especially now that they are starting to learn more about quantum mechanics. Calling the experience of self an illusion to avoid going forwards with the idea of souls existing is not something we should do.

 

[Keihart]

The sense of self is observable by everyone, but no other person can observe your own sense of self but you. Everyone can only sense themselves so that makes it really hard thing to study. The feeling of one's own self is pretty much beyond what can be scientifically study. And of all observable things it's the most observable but only for every person for themselves. Every other thing you observe, you observe through your observing self. Every thing you observe you go through interpretation. You have to measure an external thing. You have to interpret what each thing is. But with the sense of yourself, even if you take out your sense of smell, vision, touch etc, you would still have the sense of your own being.

You are.
And you know you are.

It's a wonder in itself.

People have given all kinds of theories what this you is for at least thousands of years. One common thing that has happened thousands of years ago and that still happens and most probably will happen in future, is the capability of having experiences that feel extraordinary, if not even supernatural. While one could argue those experiences are hallucinations, the experiences as themselves are still real. That is a fact. I know you want to have that measurable but how do you do that with our current technology when we still can't figure out what self even is?

Who knows if it will be observable in future. Most of the things we can observe now weren't observable even 200 years ago. We are actually pretty lucky someone came up with sending and receiving information through radio waves. Imagine a world where people just didn't find out about radio waves. That could've been a possibility. This planet has been here for billions of years and only recently, compared to that time, radio waves were predicted by calculation and then found and used.

First I would say that for the sense of self we can all observe right now. It's not an illusion. It's the realest thing you can ever observe. Every other observation you make about anything depends on your sense of self.

What comes to soul, we currently mostly have anecdotes and personal experiences. And we can have philosophical questions about it, like with this teleportation and copying thing that to me points that what makes the sense of self is separate to our physical biological body. We can have philosophical questions about the origin of universe and life.

If naturalism is the whole and full truth, then we could theoretically trace everything back to the beginning of the universe, and I mean every single tiniest thing, and whatever the beginning has could be observed and we could calculate how the next 14 billion years from the beginning will happen. It would also mean we have no free will - which again goes against our sense of self that every single one of us can observe. But if it truly IS the full truth, even then that initial state of existence would have everything that is needed for human consciousness to happen. So human consciousness would not be an accident even in that case but it's a thing bound to happen, no matter what. So the initial state of coming from non-existence to existence would have all that's needed to have self-experiencing sentient life.

Maybe it's the beginning of the pattern towards neurons that spark in our eventual brains, or maybe there is some other component that brings forth consciousness in sentient life that we haven't found yet. The fact still remains that 1) we are self aware, and 2) we experience things that feel as if we are not in our bodies, and 3) we can freely choose a lot of things we can do. It's not hoping for magic to be real to have hypotheses of the existence of a soul.

Now you might want to bring up how these out of body and near death experiences have been able to make by messing with the brain, but I think the only thing that tells is that we can confirm those experiences really do happen. It doesn't tell anything about the realness of the experience. All it does is it tells that this part of the brain is connected to the experience. It doesn't tell if when you mess with that part of the brain the person's sense of being actually goes beyond this world or not. Who knows, maybe that part of the brain could be (ab)used to make people visit the great beyond for real in future.

Self-awareness, experiences of soul like behavior and free will, connected to the beginning of the universe points out to a soul. That's not a magical thing but solid grounds for a hypothesis of souls. And I think that should be studied more, especially now that they are starting to learn more about quantum mechanics. Calling the experience of self an illusion to avoid going forwards with the idea of souls existing is not something we should do.

You are really stretching it here, it really reads like either you haven't truly read on the subject or are afraid to question it.

Anyway, i love this topic but i don't want to try to convince you and you don't really seem into questioning what makes us, us.
You are very settled in the idea that there has to be something.

 

[Airola]

You are really stretching it here, it really reads like either you haven't truly read on the subject or are afraid to question it.

Anyway, i love this topic but i don't want to try to convince you and you don't really seem into questioning what makes us, us.
You are very settled in the idea that there has to be something.

You know the same could be said about your approach too, right? (obviously changing the last line into "...that there can't be something.")
I haven't seen you question your view a single time either. Maybe you are afraid of the thought of a soul existing? Or maybe you just don't like the idea, perhaps? I mean I can question your motives too here.

 

[Keihart]

You know the same could be said about your approach too, right? (obviously changing the last line into "...that there can't be something.")
I haven't seen you question your view a single time either. Maybe you are afraid of the thought of a soul existing? Or maybe you just don't like the idea, perhaps? I mean I can question your motives too here.

I like to entertain both possibilities so i don't think there has to be a soul, i think there could be a soul.
Because you have to always start from a view that can be demonstrated false, you can prove there is a soul if in fact there is one(you eventually find evidence). But you cannot prove there isn't one if there isn't(you never find evidence, because it doesn't exist nor is defined properly).

I think that taking comfort in the existent of a soul just because it can explain our romantics views about our importance in the universe it's kinda lame and coward, it's an idea pretty easy to accept because you don't even need evidence of it. Taking the alternative seriously is what really means looking into the abyss, and what can keep you up at night.

Either way, didn't meant to trigger you.

 

[E-Cat]

Our difference is that you believe it's the arrangement of molecules that makes consciousness, and I don't believe that makes consciousness. To me this teleportation example examines that pretty nicely. If you could make a copy of yourself but couldn't experience both copies as your self at the same time, then consciousness couldn't be a byproduct of certain way arranged molecules.

Why not?

Actually, I know why. I used to think this way when I was younger, too. You seem to view your consciousness as some quasi-mystical, unmalleable Platonic essence that is independent from the rest of your body.

In reality, what would happen in a teleportation scenario is the following: Upon completion of the process, you don't feel as much as a tickle. Your clone proceeds to walk out of the copying machine, having the distinct experience of being conscious. It appears no essence of you is being broadcast over the air waves into your clone. You are both having a pretty similar - but separate - subjective experience in that exact point in the space-time continuum by virtue of consisting of biological cells that are arranged in a pattern that is suitable to yield consciousness. And your experiences will further diverge from there due to different stimuli.

"But why am I not that guy, too??" Because "you" are the flow of particles that make up your structure at that very point in time! No one can be that guy, because every single instance of conscious experience is unique, limited only by all the possible configurations of matter in the universe that allow for it. Your current identity did not "come to be experienced by you", it is you. It is an illusion to think that you are some ghost gliding through time, looking at your life from afar, and just so happened to latch onto this particular person - that you could have been someone else. If we were to augment your brain, the resulting person would be it, not you. Every instance of conscious experience is the exact sum of its parts. Consequently, every moment is a small death. You, as of this moment, can never be someone else; nor can you ever know what it is like to not be you.

tl;dr: There would be two conscious people, both thinking it is "them". But there would be no magical link between their minds.

 

[Sakura]

Star Trek explains that though.
There is an episode that confirms that most humanoid species are created based on the genetic material from the same precursor species.
There are many odd aliens who are completely different to humans though.

Come on now. We can't even breed with other apes. Same precursor species or not we wouldn't be able to breed with them. We've been separated for untold amounts of time. Enough time to evolve significant biological differences. Look at Klingons, they got 8-chambered hearts, multiple stomachs, etc but yeah we can breed with them because same precursor species lol. It's a cop out because they don't actually have a good reason why we should be able to.

 

[LostDonkey]

Tattoo them before they teleport. The clone wouldn't have the Tattoo if it was a clone. Or would it?

 

[LordKasual]

I will never ever stop using every excuse and chance I got to spam Tourniquet songs:


This is the problem. If I'm not sensing myself and my copy at the same time, the copy isn't a 100% copy of me. One could say it's biologically a 100% copy, but it wouldn't still be a real full copy of me. Part of my existence is the experience of myself in this body. If the copy would lack my actual sense of self, it wouldn't be a full copy. And again, I don't think I could experience myself in two separate places at the same time.

This is where i've come to my own solution to this problem. There IS something that I think humans can describe as a "Soul" -- your perspective. It doesn't matter if you could perfectly copy a human. What's unique to you is your conscious perspective.

Your consciousness though is not really unique to you. Your body continuously replaces itself with new matter...and even though your brain is mostly the same from start to finish, it's nothing but a unique configuration of cells and pathways. It's information.

The problem here is the way you're trying to rigidly hold on to definitions of the self that this thought experiment seems to expose as irrelevant.

Our difference is that you believe it's the arrangement of molecules that makes consciousness, and I don't believe that makes consciousness. To me this teleportation example examines that pretty nicely. If you could make a copy of yourself but couldn't experience both copies as your self at the same time, then consciousness couldn't be a byproduct of certain way arranged molecules.

The consciousness could even be active then but not active in a way that interacts with the body.

I mean....in a sense, if you copy a person's consciousness.....you ARE experiencing two existences at once....just from 2 different perspectives.

Do "YOU" have access to those perspectives?......Does that question even make sense?

They're both "You", so technically you have them both. You ARE them both.

Ask two identical versions of yourself to solve a problem, and those two copies are going to behave as though it's one mind tackling the same problem from two different perspectives....because it's two versions of the same mind, with the same memories. They're going to make the same deductions and strategies. Keep in mind, these people are you, and they aren't you....the same way that the "YOU" of right now is technically a different person from the "YOU" that existed in the time before you clicked, read, and replied to this thread. And likely a very different "YOU" than the one that existed 10 years ago.

It FEELS like you're one, unchanging entity, but you have already split from your old self many times, in very similar (if not functionally identical) ways to this teleportation thought experiment.

The "YOU" that woke up in your bed before school in the 10th grade is not quite the same person as the "YOU" that woke up in your dorm in college. If you were to vaporize your atoms and rearrage them perfectly every night when you went to sleep, you'd have absolutely no way of even knowing.

These perfect clones will start off behaving as parts of a whole, but will inevitably become two different people because they are anchored to two distinct perspectives, and thus subjected to different events.

And as a last point.......just think about it..........if you believe that consciousness does NOT arise from a simple configuration of atoms, and we can surmise that the Ego is ultimately just a convenient illusion for the sake of survival.....then why should you believe that consciousness (or the "soul", or whatever we are) is a singular, static entity that follows the same constraints as these other same illusions? Why can't it be plastic, or shared?

Did we inherit our consciousness from some cosmic queue that waits for a vacant brain? I dunno....seems too convenient of an explanation. Which is why i feel like this whole idea of "The self" (and of course, the human concept of "life" and "death") is ultimately just an illusion that we are biologically unable to break from. Questions like these just seem to make it more obvious.

If you accept the idea that your subjective, singular view of reality is ultimately an illusion to a greater underlying reality, then the solution to this Teleportation Problem is way easier to mentally resolve, imo.

 

[Tesseract]

i'm gonna telefrag myself

 

[Airola]

I like to entertain both possibilities so i don't think there has to be a soul, i think there could be a soul.
Because you have to always start from a view that can be demonstrated false, you can prove there is a soul if in fact there is one(you eventually find evidence). But you cannot prove there isn't one if there isn't(you never find evidence, because it doesn't exist nor is defined properly).

I think that taking comfort in the existent of a soul just because it can explain our romantics views about our importance in the universe it's kinda lame and coward, it's an idea pretty easy to accept because you don't even need evidence of it. Taking the alternative seriously is what really means looking into the abyss, and what can keep you up at night.

Either way, didn't meant to trigger you.

But it's possible that even if souls exist it will never be proven. A lot of scientific truths start from an idea, then a hypothesis and eventually they might become observable truths. But before it became observable truth it never was an untruth but it always was the truth even when there wasn't even an idea of it. So whether or not souls exist it's not about having an observable thing to look at it at the moment. It might never even become observable as it all depends whether we find the correct things to look at or not. And that's a mixture of luck and looking at the right place and doing the relevant calculations and research.

And again, evidence for it already exists in manner of human experience. You don't have to accept the evidence and you can try to prove the evidence wrong if you want to but I think it's not true to say there's no evidence for it. Sometimes truth doesn't get proven, and that's not even because there isn't any evidence to prove it but there isn't enough evidence to prove it. Obviously it's possible that all that evidence is false too, but it's not as if there's nothing to point towards the existence of a soul.

Also something feeling lame or cowardly has nothing to do with whether or not it is the truth. I put that to the same category as when talking about aliens someone makes the claim that it's selfish to believe we here on earth are the only living beings in the universe. I mean, so what? It being selfish has nothing to do with what is the truth and it's mainly said to make the opposing side feel bad about their opinion. Like, I shouldn't believe the way I believe because I wouldn't want to be selfish, and in this case I shouldn't believe the way I do because I wouldn't want to be lame or a coward.

 

[GeorgPrime]

Ok so lets say in 500 years from now teleporting is mainstream. But how do we know its the version that doesn't kill the person who steps in?

Lets say its the only version thats possible and it completely destroys your atoms and makes a perfect copy of you on the other side. That copy thinks nothing bad happened and believes teleportation was succesful. But he is just a clone. The original person is destroyed. How can you prove that other than spying on the inventors to see if they want to use it?

Never forget



I assume if teleportation gets real we will have a lot half human / half cockroach hybrids

 

[Airola]

Why not?

Actually, I know why. I used to think this way when I was younger, too. You seem to view your consciousness as some quasi-mystical, unmalleable Platonic essence that is independent from the rest of your body.

In reality, what would happen in a teleportation scenario is the following: Upon completion of the process, you don't feel as much as a tickle. Your clone proceeds to walk out of the copying machine, having the distinct experience of being conscious. It appears no essence of you is being broadcast over the air waves into your clone. You are both having a pretty similar - but separate - subjective experience in that exact point in the space-time continuum by virtue of consisting of biological cells that are arranged in a pattern that is suitable to yield consciousness. And your experiences will further diverge from there due to different stimuli.

"But why am I not that guy, too??" Because "you" are the flow of particles that make up your structure at that very point in time! No one can be that guy, because every single instance of conscious experience is unique, limited only by all the possible configurations of matter in the universe that allow for it. Your current identity did not "come to be experienced by you", it is you. It is an illusion to think that you are some ghost gliding through time, looking at your life from afar, and just so happened to latch onto this particular person - that you could have been someone else. If we were to augment your brain, the resulting person would be it, not you. Every instance of conscious experience is the exact sum of its parts. Consequently, every moment is a small death. You, as of this moment, can never be someone else; nor can you ever know what it is like to not be you.

tl;dr: There would be two conscious people, both thinking it is "them". But there would be no magical link between their minds.

This doesn't explain the sense of self at all though.

The point is that why have this sense of self at all? There are 7 billion people in the world, and god knows how many other animals. They all, minus one, experience their lives from a different perspective, with a different sense of self.

And before my perspective with this sense of self happened, unless reincarnation is a real thing, all lives have been from a different sense of perspective than this one. There have been countless of perspectives that haven't had this my sense of self. Why this certain perspective right now has this certain sense of self? Just as the billions upon billions upon billions of perspectives have gone through their lives without them having this sense of self, this life could've been so too. I see no reason why this perspective should be right now experienced in this manner, but it is. This life could be going on just the same way as all the lives before the existence of this body have gone. In fact I see no reason why any of the perspectives in this world are felt with a sense of self, yet they all are and have been and will be, I assume (I base that assumption on the way I feel myself and I assume that's how it is with every other human, and possibly other animal, out there). As pure naturalistic lumps of meat they could just have automated reactions, yet they haven't.

What comes to the teleportation thing, yes, both people would think it is them, but even if they have the same memories, they would be different. Would copying a memory and character traits from one person to another make them same persons? No. They both still have their own subjective sense of self and that alone makes them different even if they act the same way and have exact same memories. So yes, we agree on that. But what it really is that makes self feel a certain self instead of some other self like every other self has ever felt? There's still no answer for that.

 

[Keihart]

This doesn't explain the sense of self at all though.

The point is that why have this sense of self at all? There are 7 billion people in the world, and god knows how many other animals. They all, minus one, experience their lives from a different perspective, with a different sense of self.

And before my perspective with this sense of self happened, unless reincarnation is a real thing, all lives have been from a different sense of perspective than this one. There have been countless of perspectives that haven't had this my sense of self. Why this certain perspective right now has this certain sense of self? Just as the billions upon billions upon billions of perspectives have gone through their lives without them having this sense of self, this life could've been so too. I see no reason why this perspective should be right now experienced in this manner, but it is. This life could be going on just the same way as all the lives before the existence of this body have gone. In fact I see no reason why any of the perspectives in this world are felt with a sense of self, yet they all are and have been and will be, I assume (I base that assumption on the way I feel myself and I assume that's how it is with every other human, and possibly other animal, out there). As pure naturalistic lumps of meat they could just have automated reactions, yet they haven't.

What comes to the teleportation thing, yes, both people would think it is them, but even if they have the same memories, they would be different. Would copying a memory and character traits from one person to another make them same persons? No. They both still have their own subjective sense of self and that alone makes them different even if they act the same way and have exact same memories. So yes, we agree on that. But what it really is that makes self feel a certain self instead of some other self like every other self has ever felt? There's still no answer for that.

You keep avoiding the real problem by not defining what you consider self.
He said perspective, but you refute it saying there is something more, yet you don't explain what and it's just something that can't be explained. That it's not logic, not even dualism would agree with you there.

A perfect copy would effectively be the same as the original in the moment it was copied. Thus, the copy is just different from the original as much as the original it's already different than the one copied, because of time and space.

The strongest argument in dualism it's the self awareness problem, but we are getting there too. Check out the Chinese Room problem, which tries to make a point for dualism, although it is flawed too when put into test.

 

[Airola]

This is where i've come to my own solution to this problem. There IS something that I think humans can describe as a "Soul" -- your perspective. It doesn't matter if you could perfectly copy a human. What's unique to you is your conscious perspective.

Your consciousness though is not really unique to you. Your body continuously replaces itself with new matter...and even though your brain is mostly the same from start to finish, it's nothing but a unique configuration of cells and pathways. It's information.

The problem here is the way you're trying to rigidly hold on to definitions of the self that this thought experiment seems to expose as irrelevant.




I mean....in a sense, if you copy a person's consciousness.....you ARE experiencing two existences at once....just from 2 different perspectives.

Do "YOU" have access to those perspectives?......Does that question even make sense?

They're both "You", so technically you have them both. You ARE them both.

Ask two identical versions of yourself to solve a problem, and those two copies are going to behave as though it's one mind tackling the same problem from two different perspectives....because it's two versions of the same mind, with the same memories. They're going to make the same deductions and strategies. Keep in mind, these people are you, and they aren't you....the same way that the "YOU" of right now is technically a different person from the "YOU" that existed in the time before you clicked, read, and replied to this thread. And likely a very different "YOU" than the one that existed 10 years ago.

It FEELS like you're one, unchanging entity, but you have already split from your old self many times, in very similar (if not functionally identical) ways to this teleportation thought experiment.

The "YOU" that woke up in your bed before school in the 10th grade is not quite the same person as the "YOU" that woke up in your dorm in college. If you were to vaporize your atoms and rearrage them perfectly every night when you went to sleep, you'd have absolutely no way of even knowing.

These perfect clones will start off behaving as parts of a whole, but will inevitably become two different people because they are anchored to two distinct perspectives, and thus subjected to different events.

And as a last point.......just think about it..........if you believe that consciousness does NOT arise from a simple configuration of atoms, and we can surmise that the Ego is ultimately just a convenient illusion for the sake of survival.....then why should you believe that consciousness (or the "soul", or whatever we are) is a singular, static entity that follows the same constraints as these other same illusions? Why can't it be plastic, or shared?

Did we inherit our consciousness from some cosmic queue that waits for a vacant brain? I dunno....seems too convenient of an explanation. Which is why i feel like this whole idea of "The self" (and of course, the human concept of "life" and "death") is ultimately just an illusion that we are biologically unable to break from. Questions like these just seem to make it more obvious.

If you accept the idea that your subjective, singular view of reality is ultimately an illusion to a greater underlying reality, then the solution to this Teleportation Problem is way easier to mentally resolve, imo.

I completely disagree that the 7-year-old me wasn't the same as this 37-year-old me is. I do not believe that changes in memory and persona makes the self different. I do not believe that going to sleep means the self technically dies and becomes another. The self is the same regardless of the changes in memory and persona and atoms in the body. I think everyone knows that but are confused by technicalities that have come through the massive amount of data we've gain through science combined with a rather desperate need to fit all that to everything.

I don't believe that memories and character habits are what makes me. I think that what makes me is completely all about the subjective sense of being. It doesn't matter if the sense of being is sometimes blank or what can be remembered when the sense of being isn't blank, or what is physically done by this sense of being. A person who builds a house is not based on the house he built, nor is it based on the memories of building the house, nor is it based on the character trait of having a will to build a house. The only thing that matters is that this human being senses its own being. It is the exact same being now as it was when it was born and what it will be when it is about to die. The experiencer does not ever change no matter what that experiencer learns or forgets.

So I would argue that the copy of myself is 100% not me. If I see a person who looks quite like me and acts quite like me and speaks quite like me and likes the same things I like, I wouldn't say it's 10% me, or even 1% me. It's 100% different person than I am. Even if my memories would somehow be given to him, it would still be 100% different person than I am. Having the same personality is completely different of being the same person.

 

[Keihart]

 

[Airola]

You keep avoiding the real problem by not defining what you consider self.
He said perspective, but you refute it saying there is something more, yet you don't explain what and it's just something that can't be explained. That it's not logic, not even dualism would agree with you there.

A perfect copy would effectively be the same as the original in the moment it was copied. Thus, the copy is just different from the original as much as the original it's already different than the one copied, because of time and space.

The strongest argument in dualism it's the self awareness problem, but we are getting there too. Check out the Chinese Room problem, which tries to make a point for dualism, although it is flawed too when put into test.

Defining what 'self' is is probably the hardest thing to try to explain. That's why my replies here are huge walls of text. It's extremely difficult to try to explain what it means to be 'self'.
It's not about avoiding to define it, I'm doing my best in trying to do it in each post.

A big problem is that what I've understood you to define self being does not match with my experience of self and how I feel my self being and what I see problems of understanding 'being' to be. From that point of view answering it with "it's an illusion" is as dissatisfactory answer as it gets.

Self is not only perspective. It's a sense of being. There are countless of perspectives out there. Them being perspectives tells nothing about the experience of self within those perspectives.

 

[Keihart]

Defining what 'self' is is probably the hardest thing to try to explain. That's why my replies here are huge walls of text. It's extremely difficult to try to explain what it means to be 'self'.
It's not about avoiding to define it, I'm doing my best in trying to do it in each post.

A big problem is that what I've understood you to define self being does not match with my experience of self and how I feel my self being and what I see problems of understanding 'being' to be. From that point of view answering it with "it's an illusion" is as dissatisfactory answer as it gets.

Self is not only perspective. It's a sense of being. There are countless of perspectives out there. Them being perspectives tells nothing about the experience of self within those perspectives.

Then you are just not using logic, because literally , not even you know what you are talking about when saying self. So how is it even possible to argue for or against it? it's futile, it's not even worth discussing it if you can not define it.

In fact, if you don't know what this self is, how can you be so sure that a copy would not have it?

Edit: i asked you if you were thinking of it as qualia before, but you glossed over it, i think you actually are. Here is the way you explain it:
"The knowledge argument asks us to imagine a future scientist who has lacked a certain sensory modality from birth, but who has acquired a perfect scientific understanding of how this modality operates in others. This scientist—call him Harpo—may have been born stone deaf, but become the world's greatest expert on the machinery of hearing: he knows everything that there is to know within the range of the physical and behavioural sciences about hearing. Suppose that Harpo, thanks to developments in neurosurgery, has an operation which finally enables him to hear. It is suggested that he will then learn something he did not know before, which can be expressed as what it is like to hear, or the qualitative or phenomenal nature of sound. These qualitative features of experience are generally referred to as qualia. If Harpo learns something new, he did not know everything before. He knew all the physical facts before. So what he learns on coming to hear—the facts about the nature of experience or the nature of qualia—are non-physical. This establishes at least a state or property dualism. (See Jackson 1982; Robinson 1982.) "

 

[Airola]

Then you are just not using logic, because literally , not even you know what you are talking about when saying self. So how is it even possible to argue for or against it? it's futile, it's not even worth discussing it if you can not define it.

Surely you know there are things we more or less understand but can't put into words?
Art is about that exact thing. Art is there to tell ideas that are really hard to put into words. Literature art tells about those ideas with more words - often using metaphors and symbolism to help, just like other types of art do too.
By your logic there should be no need for art because why discuss things we can't define by words.

In fact, if you don't know what this self is, how can you be so sure that a copy would not have it?

By logic. We can't be internal witnesses in two different places at the same time.

Edit: i asked you if you were thinking of it as qualia before, but you glossed over it, i think you actually are. Here is the way you explain it:
"The knowledge argument asks us to imagine a future scientist who has lacked a certain sensory modality from birth, but who has acquired a perfect scientific understanding of how this modality operates in others. This scientist—call him Harpo—may have been born stone deaf, but become the world's greatest expert on the machinery of hearing: he knows everything that there is to know within the range of the physical and behavioural sciences about hearing. Suppose that Harpo, thanks to developments in neurosurgery, has an operation which finally enables him to hear. It is suggested that he will then learn something he did not know before, which can be expressed as what it is like to hear, or the qualitative or phenomenal nature of sound. These qualitative features of experience are generally referred to as qualia. If Harpo learns something new, he did not know everything before. He knew all the physical facts before. So what he learns on coming to hear—the facts about the nature of experience or the nature of qualia—are non-physical. This establishes at least a state or property dualism. (See Jackson 1982; Robinson 1982.) "

I think the logical thing to assume from that quote is to say Harpo didn't actually know everything and the writer who wrote he did either lied or didn't know he didn't know all.
It doesn't follow that the experience of what it is it like to hear is necessarily non-physical and it doesn't follow that it isn't either.

I don't quite understand what your point is.

 

[Keihart]

I think the logical thing to assume from that quote is to say Harpo didn't actually know everything and the writer who wrote he did either lied or didn't know he didn't know all.
It doesn't follow that the experience of what it is it like to hear is necessarily non-physical and it doesn't follow that it isn't either.

I don't quite understand what your point is.

That thought experiment is an argument that aligns with your point of view, it's actually the main argument for dualism. Maybe i needed to explain you that dualism it's the posture that mind and body are separate entities.

The experiment tries to illustrates that there are things that can not be learned because they are experienced and as such, only you know them, and self awareness it's one of those. Like the Chinese room later tries to illustrate.

But as you say, if you really know everything about sound, than you would not experience anything new by gaining the sense. So in that sense it falls apart.

By logic. We can't be internal witnesses in two different places at the same time.

Yes we can by logic, we can't by common sense, but common sense it's not really something you should resort to for explanations.
By logic, if there are 2 yous then you are experiencing both things, regardless of either you being aware of it. Because both are you.

If sound it's your brain interpretation of the sensory information that your ear captures from the air vibrations why self can't be your brain interpretation of conscience, self awareness and all those brain processes through time ?

 

[LordKasual]

I completely disagree that the 7-year-old me wasn't the same as this 37-year-old me is.

But it's true, without question. Nobody stays "the same" from age 7 to age 37 unless they have some kind of severe development issue.

You say you aren't the same "You" from 30 years ago, but if you were to pluck the two of you from time and present them with questions/choices then i'm willing to bet my savings that the answers to these questions and the choices you would make would be fundamentally different.

You can attribute that to whatever you want, but the end result is that your experiences have altered your consciousness to the point where in alot of ways you'd likely be unrecognizable to yourself if you weren't told (or could tell from physical appearance/comparing memories) you were speaking to your younger/older self. But even comparing memories, your reactions/answers/choices would STILL vastly differ.

So I would argue that the copy of myself is 100% not me. If I see a person who looks quite like me and acts quite like me and speaks quite like me and likes the same things I like, I wouldn't say it's 10% me, or even 1% me. It's 100% different person than I am. Even if my memories would somehow be given to him, it would still be 100% different person than I am. Having the same personality is completely different of being the same person.

What i'm arguing here, is that the answer to this question might not a binary thing.

The copy would absolutely be their own person...but they would absolutely still be "You". There's no way for them not to be, you've been cloned. As for which one of them "YOU" (the currently conscious person reading this) would "BE" (experience), what i'm suggesting is that the question seems somewhat irrelevant?


You're either one of them, or you are none of them....either you're conscious, or you aren't.....but perhaps that isn't actually true. Seeing as each and every one of us has "experienced" billions of years (or possibly infinite time) of non-existence, and our lives are a culmination of lapses in lucid consciousness.......the question itself almost seems to be irrelevant. Like asking whether you're "wet" while submerged, or what direction "North" is while standing on the north pole. The teleportation question is a forceful break down on what the concept of "You" even is.

Any attempt to pin down the singular thing that defines "you" in this situation is like trying to hold water in the palm of your hand.

This is why i say IMO it makes much more sense to just abandon the idea entirely, and instead of approaching it from a selfish position ("Where am I"), instead approach it from a universal one ("What are WE").

Don't worry about "which one" you are. Assume you're both. Hell, maybe you're neither. Perhaps a divergence and collapse happens, perhaps nothing happens. Perhaps the "You" that you think you are "dies" every time your consciousness lapses, and you only awaken with the memories of the one before you. Could you even tell the difference?


But regardless, that didn't stop you from being a singular, "conscious" being at the moment of your birth, and not only is that unexplainable in philosophical terms, but in physical ones as well, as not even a completed model of reality will ever explain to us in any meaningful way where the universe came from.

Yet, here we are, posting in a thread on the internet trying to find out what the fuck we are.



TL;DR

i don't see how non-existence before your birth or after your death are any different, and yet, you still managed to emerge from the void with a conscious sense of self. So why should this teleporation cloning issue somehow be anything special?

 

[Keihart]

I got reminded of this, it's pretty cool. The Ai advances seem to be also going hand in hand with the brain understanding:
kinda off topic, but i think it's a good way to understand that much of our perception and feelings are actually tied to or physical bodies, despite our dualism roots.

 

[Airola]

That thought experiment is an argument that aligns with your point of view, it's actually the main argument for dualism. Maybe i needed to explain you that dualism it's the posture that mind and body are separate entities.

The experiment tries to illustrates that there are things that can not be learned because they are experienced and as such, only you know them, and self awareness it's one of those. Like the Chinese room later tries to illustrate.

But as you say, if you really know everything about sound, than you would not experience anything new by gaining the sense. So in that sense it falls apart.

I'm kinda in the same boat with the dualist thought, but I don't think it's as simple as to just think of them as two separate things. I think the combination of mind and body might be a third distinct thing on its own.

I don't believe anyone can ever tell if they know absolutely everything about any certain thing. We can toy with the idea though, and while I think the "deaf man" idea has another explanations such as "unreliable narrator", its point probably is to tell things through a paradox. As in showing how this is a paradox so the basic idea can't be true - which in this case would be to show that a person knowing everything about something is impossible, either by people just not being able to learn every single thing they potentially could know or there being things that fall out of being observable in the manner they'd expect to observe it, and by that it aims to tell that we intuitively know that things like 'what it feels to hear' - qualia - are not things that fall into the same category of observable things by certain tools.

But as I mentioned, in that example it's also possible that the person just didn't really know everything there is to know even though it was written he did so it's an example with some holes in it. It's a good example as a discussion starter though.

Yes we can by logic, we can't by common sense, but common sense it's not really something you should resort to for explanations.
By logic, if there are 2 yous then you are experiencing both things, regardless of either you being aware of it. Because both are you.

Again we come to the question of "what is you?"
As I wrote to the other guy, I don't believe "me" is my memories and my habits. "Me" is the internal witness and it does not change even if thought patterns or memories change. The question perhaps is that is the idea of two yous actually a paradox.

If sound it's your brain interpretation of the sensory information that your ear captures from the air vibrations why self can't be your brain interpretation of conscience, self awareness and all those brain processes through time ?

With each person the basic way the brain works is the same.
Imagine your current life not existing. Imagine three persons sitting on a sofa, next to each other. Imagine they just appeared there from nothing. One possible scenario is that you are not seeing the world through any of their perspective. Other possible scenario is that you actually are seeing the world through the perspective of one of them. Other two possibilities are that you see from the perspective of the two of the rest. In any scenario all of them are looking through their perspectives, but imagine if you were one of them. We can look at those three persons and know they are all experiencing their being right there right now. But what would it require for you actually be one of them instead of none of them?

 

[Keihart]

I'm kinda in the same boat with the dualist thought, but I don't think it's as simple as to just think of them as two separate things. I think the combination of mind and body might be a third distinct thing on its own.

I don't believe anyone can ever tell if they know absolutely everything about any certain thing. We can toy with the idea though, and while I think the "deaf man" idea has another explanations such as "unreliable narrator", its point probably is to tell things through a paradox. As in showing how this is a paradox so the basic idea can't be true - which in this case would be to show that a person knowing everything about something is impossible, either by people just not being able to learn every single thing they potentially could know or there being things that fall out of being observable in the manner they'd expect to observe it, and by that it aims to tell that we intuitively know that things like 'what it feels to hear' - qualia - are not things that fall into the same category of observable things by certain tools.

But as I mentioned, in that example it's also possible that the person just didn't really know everything there is to know even though it was written he did so it's an example with some holes in it. It's a good example as a discussion starter though.




Again we come to the question of "what is you?"
As I wrote to the other guy, I don't believe "me" is my memories and my habits. "Me" is the internal witness and it does not change even if thought patterns or memories change. The question perhaps is that is the idea of two yous actually a paradox.



With each person the basic way the brain works is the same.
Imagine your current life not existing. Imagine three persons sitting on a sofa, next to each other. Imagine they just appeared there from nothing. One possible scenario is that you are not seeing the world through any of their perspective. Other possible scenario is that you actually are seeing the world through the perspective of one of them. Other two possibilities are that you see from the perspective of the two of the rest. In any scenario all of them are looking through their perspectives, but imagine if you were one of them. We can look at those three persons and know they are all experiencing their being right there right now. But what would it require for you actually be one of them instead of none of them?

If you examine all your replies you can notice a unwillingness to give up on the idea of there being something more to "you" than the physical process, you are not questioning if there is something more, you are certain of it.

There is no need for this something else to allow consciousness to exist, there could be something else, but i ask you, why there couldn't be? What's the problem or difference if there was nothing more to it, what makes you think that it would not work without this undefined concept?

Why search for a magical explanation to something ordinary, that every living being has in some way or another. Magical explanations should be your last resort when following logic, shouldn't they?

 

[Airola]

But it's true, without question. Nobody stays "the same" from age 7 to age 37 unless they have some kind of severe development issue.

You say you aren't the same "You" from 30 years ago, but if you were to pluck the two of you from time and present them with questions/choices then i'm willing to bet my savings that the answers to these questions and the choices you would make would be fundamentally different.

You can attribute that to whatever you want, but the end result is that your experiences have altered your consciousness to the point where in alot of ways you'd likely be unrecognizable to yourself if you weren't told (or could tell from physical appearance/comparing memories) you were speaking to your younger/older self. But even comparing memories, your reactions/answers/choices would STILL vastly differ.

Me 1 kilogram lighter or 1 kilogram fatter is the same me.
Me forgetting what I did yesterday is the same me that yesterday remembered what I had just done.

The experiencer is the key here. Me growing up is nothing more than having physical changes in my body. The experiencer of that is exactly the same. If I burn a house know and maybe lose all memory of that by repressing the memories enough, the experiencer with those repressed unavailable memories is still the same experiencer that burned the house. If I do something absolutely horrible and LOVE doing it, but 50 years from then DEEPLY regret what I had done and wonder how I ever even could've loved doing what I did, it is still the same exact experiencer that loved what he did and now hates and regrets what he did.

The experiencer is not defined by whatever it starts to like or stops liking. It's not defined by what it remembers or what it has forgotten. The absolute reality is that it was your sense of being looking at the world through the perspective of that same being when you were 4 and it's the same being looking at the world from that same perspective when you are 70. Memories or habits or physical attributes don't change the experiencer into another experiencer at any point in the experiencer's existence.

What i'm arguing here, is that the answer to this question might not a binary thing.

The copy would absolutely be their own person...but they would absolutely still be "You". There's no way for them not to be, you've been cloned. As for which one of them "YOU" (the currently conscious person reading this) would "BE" (experience), what i'm suggesting is that the question seems somewhat irrelevant?

You're either one of them, or you are none of them....either you're conscious, or you aren't.....but perhaps that isn't actually true. Seeing as each and every one of us has "experienced" billions of years (or possibly infinite time) of non-existence, and our lives are a culmination of lapses in lucid consciousness.......the question itself almost seems to be irrelevant. Like asking whether you're "wet" while submerged, or what direction "North" is while standing on the north pole. The teleportation question is a forceful break down on what the concept of "You" even is.

Any attempt to pin down the singular thing that defines "you" in this situation is like trying to hold water in the palm of your hand.

This is why i say IMO it makes much more sense to just abandon the idea entirely, and instead of approaching it from a selfish position ("Where am I"), instead approach it from a universal one ("What are WE").

Again the key is the experiencer. If that's not the same, then it is not you no matter how much the copy looks, sounds and acts like you. The question is what happens to the experiencer when you are teleported or copied. Memories, habits and all those are irrelevant. What happens to the experiencer? Hell, what if you never existed and suddenly you find yourself coming from some human copy machine with lifetime of memories and already established habits and you look at

Don't worry about "which one" you are. Assume you're both. Hell, maybe you're neither. Perhaps a divergence and collapse happens, perhaps nothing happens. Perhaps the "You" that you think you are "dies" every time your consciousness lapses, and you only awaken with the memories of the one before you. Could you even tell the difference?

In that situation wouldn't it be more likely to assume that consciousness actually never really died but more like was just not active in your active body? To me it implies that consciousness is there all the time regardless of you being conscious about it.

But regardless, that didn't stop you from being a singular, "conscious" being at the moment of your birth, and not only is that unexplainable in philosophical terms, but in physical ones as well, as not even a completed model of reality will ever explain to us in any meaningful way where the universe came from.

Yet, here we are, posting in a thread on the internet trying to find out what the fuck we are.

And isn't that amazing!

Anyone who is trying to tell we are not special should really think twice. From nonexistence of nothingness material things become into existence, bringing forth sentient life who are communicating with each other from all over the world, all separate from each other, and wondering what the hell we are and why the hell we are. And people have been wondering about this thousands and thousands of years ago when most people couldn't even read or write. If that shit ain't special I don't know what is.

TL;DR

i don't see how non-existence before your birth or after your death are any different, and yet, you still managed to emerge from the void with a conscious sense of self. So why should this teleporation cloning issue somehow be anything special?

It's about people in the middle of their lives. Them not remembering what non-existence was like before they were born has nothing to do with the problem they are facing right now. A problem that might end their lives or make their current life more troublesome with there now being a completely another person with all of your knowledge. Imagine that person using all your knowledge to do something that helps him but hurts you. Or imagine being the copy. You might remember having a wife but the original 'you' claims the wife completely to himself. There was this Paul Rudd tv show, Living with Yourself or something like that that explored this idea quite a bit.

The problem is that we still haven't cracked even the surface of what 'you' the experiencer is. A separate another experiencer with my memories is not the experiencer that I am. Will the original experiencer be gone during teleportation and will the teleported person be another experiencer? Will it be 'you - the experiencer' that will continue to remember your past life or will it be 'he - the experiencer' who will now own your memories? It's a big question to both to the person who steps in the teleporter and to the person who comes out of the teleporter. And when it's about copying the person, at least we know 'you' do not become nonexistent during the process, but then you would also know that it's 'him' who is the copy instead of 'you' - yet we can't really be certain if there's an experiencer at all within the copy or the teleported person.

 

[Airola]

If you examine all your replies you can notice a unwillingness to give up on the idea of there being something more to "you" than the physical process, you are not questioning if there is something more, you are certain of it.

There is no need for this something else to allow consciousness to exist, there could be something else, but i ask you, why there couldn't be? What's the problem or difference if there was nothing more to it, what makes you think that it would not work without this undefined concept?

Why search for a magical explanation to something ordinary, that every living being has in some way or another. Magical explanations should be your last resort when following logic, shouldn't they?

If you examine all your replies you can notice you resorting to the kind of things that are in your first sentence after I have written more or less lengthy responses to you, trying to answer to questions and problems and giving examples of my own. I'm not the one questioning motives here. I'm not the one making claims that you are just not willing to give up your ideas. Instead I try to answer to the questions as well as I can - and this is not an easy subject to talk about especially when I, and I assume you too, am not a native English speaker.

I can assure that you are just as stubborn with what you think is the truth as I am. So please would you write less of that and more of actual substance.

Of course the reality can be that it's all in the brain and that's it. The reality also can be that this is all a simulation. What good it will do for me to say that? You know I will end up looking at this issue from the perspective I've come to find is the more likely option anyway. I mean, yeah I could entertain the thought of this being a simulation but as I don't really believe that at all what good it will be for the discussion to start to tackle the issue by forgetting what I already believe, know or believe to know to be true, and not questioning the simulation theory or try to look at it from a different angle? You seem to allow the same to you, so why not for me?

And again, it's not me calling it magic. I don't think it's magical. I think it's natural, but I also think it might not be something you can calculate and observe with the tools we currently have.

The biggest thing for me is that your pure naturalism concept doesn't explain the experiencer, the inner observer. It doesn't give answers to that. It doesn't explain the experiencer, it doesn't explain the out of body type of experiences and other situations like that, and steps towards "it's an illusion" just takes me further away from believing in the pure naturalism concept. It's in a sense quite like what 'god of the gaps' is for atheists. And one huge thing is my belief in free will. I think a completely purely naturalistic world would mean free will not existing. But my personal experience in this world makes not having free will very unlikely, and I would even say impossible (even though we can't really know that for sure - I think it's sometimes better to just say something is possible or impossible without having to always make the sidenote of it actually meaning likely or unlikely). Free will points to there being something in us that is external from the bounds of biological reactions in our bodies. Calling it an illusion does not work as an explanation.

1) Sense of self, sense of being, the experiencer, inner subjective witness, the inner observer
2) Free will
3) The apparent inevitability of the existence of unique senses of self in the universe. The initial state of universe having all there is that is needed for this experience to be had and it eventually inevitably coming into existence.
4) Out of body experiences of my own
5) Others claiming to have out of body experiences and near death experiences (be it a "tunnel" or a feeling of warm embrace or whatever else), visions and whatnot.

All of them to me points out to the possibility of there being something in us that isn't purely the result of chemical reactions in our bodies. Purely naturalistic world wouldn't explain all of them, I think. And it even would make at least free will impossible. I hope you understand that if I can't get logical reasons for those I can't completely give up the idea of a soul - or if the word 'soul' is too religiously loaded, let's call it 'part of existence not fully dependable and not fully a result of the brain and the chemical reactions within the brain'.

 

[nkarafo]

Tattoo them before they teleport. The clone wouldn't have the Tattoo if it was a clone. Or would it?

Why wouldn't it?

You either go through a wormhole or every atom is copied. Tattoos are just ink inside your skin. It would be copied just like your clothes or anything else that gets into the teleportation chamber.

 

[nkarafo]

I assume if teleportation gets real we will have a lot half human / half cockroach hybrids

That doesn't make sense though.

The movie is great but if you think about it, it kinda breaks it's own rules. Let's say for some reason the computer gets confused if more than one organism enters the chamber. You wouldn't really need a fly (or any other animal) with you to become a hideous, fused monster. Your body already has tons of organisms and parasites (good or bad) both inside or on your skin, hair, etc. So if teleport works like in the movie, you would be fucked anyway.

 

[Spaceman292]

Maybe you should watch a few of the 600 star trek episodes about this exact worry.