We exist as a contiguous, always active self-modifying chemical cascade. This is a scientific fact.
Our sense of consciousness is what we refer to as our selves. This is pretty concrete philosophical conjecture.
Any teleporter device that rearranges atoms breaks this contiguity. This is scientific fact.
If a teleporter device that rearranges atoms can be invented (and I believe it can but not for a long time) to move a human, then the human that arrives on the other end of the teleport will not be the ‘you’ that looks out from your eyes now as the contiguity is broken. It will THINK it is you, will have your memories, but your current consciousness wouldn’t ‘jump’ to that newly created homunculus. It would simply cease to exist. You think this is philosophy but it is a scientific fact.
I’m not arguing for the existence of a ‘soul’ here, just stating the simple truth that a machine that reassembles atoms into you isn’t making a you that exists now, but rather a just-born being who thinks its been living your life.
And the you that exists now ceases to be.
Please don’t try the ‘falling to sleep’ argument, at no point during that time does the complex bioprocess that makes up our being cease.
Your arrogance is staggering. Is science not also a form of philosophy? And anyway, it’s not a scientific ‘fact’ that your consciousness will do anything at all, the hard problem of consciousness is not yet solved.
No science is not a form of philosophy. One is based on logic from priors or argument over Ordinary Language and the other is based empirical data. They have vastly different approaches and achieve vastly different goals. I am not going to ask a scientist the proper way to live and I am not going to ask a philosophy department head to explain momentum.
They might help each other, on occasion, but healing each other does not mean one is a subset of the other.
The scientific method, whilst very useful, is still the empirical method with certain postulates.
It really isn’t. The presumption argument requires that you are a mind reader and can be 100% certain that you know what unstated priors a person is operating under. If they deny them, you mere reassert it. It is a non-falisifable claim. Thus the attempt to disprove science required a return to faith.
Fish do fine and know nothing about water. Birds fly and don’t understand aerodynamics. The vast majority of life in existence conducts energy production via ATP and only a small fraction of the human race has understood that. Fireflies don’t know that they are doing the most efficient form of light production from chemicals ever found.
The whole presumption apologetics argument is a garbage heap only advocated for by people who value faith over experimental methods. A false attempt to sub in a bad contextualization from the things itself. You don’t need to have a fully worked out from first principles understanding of the universe to conduct a basic experiment. It might be helpful, maybe, but it isn’t required.
Very well. Try it a different way. You claim that scientists have priors that you have discovered. Please provide evidence of your claim. Use the scientific method and try to disprove it and fail.
Your arrogance is staggering. Is science not also a form of philosophy?
Sure, 200 years ago when they called it ‘natural philosoply’, but the advent of the scientific method is what transitioned it away from pretty words and feelings to concrete observable, recordable data.
If you can’t see the difference, you aren’t worth wasting electrons on.
s not a scientific ‘fact’ that your consciousness will do anything at all,
Oh but it is my friend and the wonderful thought experiment that is the game SOMA can make that clear to you, if you are capable of understanding it.
Every examination of cranial and nerve damage in relation to consciousness has made it pretty clear that whatever it is that is our self-awareness is tied to the fat and nerves in our skull, and when disturbed often have drastic results on our cognition, awareness, and sense of self. These are things we have been documenting for centuries. Damage the brain, damage the consciousness. And to a lesser extent the spine but that is still fringe.
Our consciousness isn’t anything special phenomenologically, it consists of complex interactions yes but there is no non-material aspect of it other than what we experience as our cognition, which is not an actual space but rather the results of our self-modifying chemical cascade.
What you think of as arrogance is rather the result of spending decades both in a scholarly frame as well as for personal pleasure studying biology, physics, and psychology. I’m sorry that up until now your main conversation group has consisted of people who think communications in excess of 144 characters is mentally draining.
Yeah I’m with you on this. Even from a pure science fiction perspective there’s just no way the experience of consciousness “transfers” by any currently understood science.
Just like when you move a computer’s file across the Internet the result would be a copy, and that wouldn’t really be noticable or impactful to the copy or the people who know you and the copy would interact with, but it would make a hell of a lot of difference for the person going in. Great if you’re dying and want to do what you can (The Culture book series covers this possibility quite well) but otherwise small comfort.
Best case scenario is “The Prestige”, but with a much quicker and cleaner death.
And if someone slaps “quantum entanglement” on the table like that is a real answer for anything, imma not even bother.
If there is a distinction there should be a difference. Given that a teleported human is indistinguishable from the prior non teleported human there is no difference and thus no distinction.
Incorrect, the consciousness of the original human is gone, and the consciousness of the new human is operating under memories it did not directly experience.
No distinction from the outside, and from the inside a different consciousness, one that didn’t exist the moment before.
Consciousness can be thought as software running on hardware (your brain). You do not destroy software by destroying hardware.
Whether you agree with this or not is not relevant to this discussion, since my point is that whether the above statement is true belongs to philosophy, not to science.
Um that’s a nice metaphor and all but that’s all it is. You pretend like its a profound statement when just 150 years ago they would have used the wax phonograph metaphor.
The map isn’t the territory no matter how hard you pretend it is.
Again, what we engaging is a philosophical discussion. And it is not a metaphor, it is analogy.
And while the map is not the territory, the question is what consciousness is. Is it the territory (brain) or the map (software)? It is very easy to argue that AI gives us a good indication that consciousness might appear somehow in AI systems too at some time, and there, there would be no question that it is a software.
If you don’t understand the dangers of mistaking metaphor for wisdom then you are not worth talking with.
AI is an approximation of how humans think cognition works, a metaphor written in code, but is not equivalent in recapitulating human cognition. I am not saying this is a limitation of hardware or software, but rather a limitation of our currently primitive understanding of our cognition.
It is too easy and a path to misdirection to just say ‘Well the cholesterol and nerve bundles are the hardware, and thinking is the software!’, and is JUST as inaccurate as some 1910 hick looking at a new automobile and saying “Oh I get it, it’s a carriage! But where’s the horse?” because in the hick’s mind they think in metaphors of horses pulling things (which is why we still use ‘horesepower to rate car engines’). They could not imagine a reality in which the cart ‘pulled’ itself.
Actual scientists know the dangers of metaphors and use them cautiously, science communicators use metaphors more heavily because that is a shortcut to get laypeoples to understand in some way complex concepts. If you know Terry Pratchett, these things are called ‘lies to children’.
And don’t get me wrong, ‘lies to children’ serve an important purpose, building the foundations of understanding for later growth.
Like saying ‘the sun burns hydrogen to make light’, which I learned in 3rd grade.
It’s a lie to children of course, the process that the sun uses to convert hydrogen to energy is a FUCKTONNE more complicated than an 8 year old can understand, but the ‘lie to children’ that it does means that when I hit highschool and start learning physics and do the chapter on solar fusion, the framework of understanding is there while I come to grips with random electron walks and density shells.
‘The brain is the hardware and thought is the software’ is ‘lies to children’, and no more useful to the discussion than telling people ‘the sun burns hydrogen to make light’ in a scholarly discussion of stellar development. At best it will make everyone feel a little condescending towards you, at worst you derail the discussion.
Once again, ANALOGY, not metaphor. It is not just a figure of speech, but direct comparison.
Of course, analogy does not prove a thing, however, all we are discussing here with you is not science, but philosophy. Is consciousness a structure which is upon substrate, or is it the substrate itself? Are you information or a physical body? These are not scientific questions, science can only answer how exactly the processes in the brain go, but it cannot explain the subjective feeling of “me”. Nearly by definition, - science deals with objective reality, not subjective perception.
This is exactly why we have stagnated in most of our social development this last half century, people deliberately misunderstanding the point so they can feel justified in arguing it.
This is why it is important to discuss definitions. But in this particular case (whether consciousness includes matter or not) the discussion belongs to philosophy.
However, what you have mention, is quite often happens in philosophy itself. Take for example discussion of whether free will exists. The actual discussion is what free will is. But not everyone admits this.
No, philosophy.
Not really.
We exist as a contiguous, always active self-modifying chemical cascade. This is a scientific fact.
Our sense of consciousness is what we refer to as our selves. This is pretty concrete philosophical conjecture.
Any teleporter device that rearranges atoms breaks this contiguity. This is scientific fact.
If a teleporter device that rearranges atoms can be invented (and I believe it can but not for a long time) to move a human, then the human that arrives on the other end of the teleport will not be the ‘you’ that looks out from your eyes now as the contiguity is broken. It will THINK it is you, will have your memories, but your current consciousness wouldn’t ‘jump’ to that newly created homunculus. It would simply cease to exist. You think this is philosophy but it is a scientific fact.
I’m not arguing for the existence of a ‘soul’ here, just stating the simple truth that a machine that reassembles atoms into you isn’t making a you that exists now, but rather a just-born being who thinks its been living your life.
And the you that exists now ceases to be.
Please don’t try the ‘falling to sleep’ argument, at no point during that time does the complex bioprocess that makes up our being cease.
Your arrogance is staggering. Is science not also a form of philosophy? And anyway, it’s not a scientific ‘fact’ that your consciousness will do anything at all, the hard problem of consciousness is not yet solved.
No science is not a form of philosophy. One is based on logic from priors or argument over Ordinary Language and the other is based empirical data. They have vastly different approaches and achieve vastly different goals. I am not going to ask a scientist the proper way to live and I am not going to ask a philosophy department head to explain momentum.
They might help each other, on occasion, but healing each other does not mean one is a subset of the other.
I hate to break it to you, but philosophy is both the rational (a priori) approach, and the empirical (a posteriori) approach.
The scientific method, whilst very useful, is still the empirical method with certain postulates.
It really isn’t. The presumption argument requires that you are a mind reader and can be 100% certain that you know what unstated priors a person is operating under. If they deny them, you mere reassert it. It is a non-falisifable claim. Thus the attempt to disprove science required a return to faith.
Fish do fine and know nothing about water. Birds fly and don’t understand aerodynamics. The vast majority of life in existence conducts energy production via ATP and only a small fraction of the human race has understood that. Fireflies don’t know that they are doing the most efficient form of light production from chemicals ever found.
The whole presumption apologetics argument is a garbage heap only advocated for by people who value faith over experimental methods. A false attempt to sub in a bad contextualization from the things itself. You don’t need to have a fully worked out from first principles understanding of the universe to conduct a basic experiment. It might be helpful, maybe, but it isn’t required.
I don’t understand how what you’ve said refutes my claim, sorry.
Very well. Try it a different way. You claim that scientists have priors that you have discovered. Please provide evidence of your claim. Use the scientific method and try to disprove it and fail.
Very nice. But now it’s not an empirical debate, it’s a linguistics debate. How do you define the scientific method?
Sure, 200 years ago when they called it ‘natural philosoply’, but the advent of the scientific method is what transitioned it away from pretty words and feelings to concrete observable, recordable data.
If you can’t see the difference, you aren’t worth wasting electrons on.
Oh but it is my friend and the wonderful thought experiment that is the game SOMA can make that clear to you, if you are capable of understanding it.
Every examination of cranial and nerve damage in relation to consciousness has made it pretty clear that whatever it is that is our self-awareness is tied to the fat and nerves in our skull, and when disturbed often have drastic results on our cognition, awareness, and sense of self. These are things we have been documenting for centuries. Damage the brain, damage the consciousness. And to a lesser extent the spine but that is still fringe.
Our consciousness isn’t anything special phenomenologically, it consists of complex interactions yes but there is no non-material aspect of it other than what we experience as our cognition, which is not an actual space but rather the results of our self-modifying chemical cascade.
What you think of as arrogance is rather the result of spending decades both in a scholarly frame as well as for personal pleasure studying biology, physics, and psychology. I’m sorry that up until now your main conversation group has consisted of people who think communications in excess of 144 characters is mentally draining.
Yeah I’m with you on this. Even from a pure science fiction perspective there’s just no way the experience of consciousness “transfers” by any currently understood science.
Just like when you move a computer’s file across the Internet the result would be a copy, and that wouldn’t really be noticable or impactful to the copy or the people who know you and the copy would interact with, but it would make a hell of a lot of difference for the person going in. Great if you’re dying and want to do what you can (The Culture book series covers this possibility quite well) but otherwise small comfort.
Best case scenario is “The Prestige”, but with a much quicker and cleaner death.
And if someone slaps “quantum entanglement” on the table like that is a real answer for anything, imma not even bother.
Fucking finally someone in this thread that makes sense.
Haven’t read the Culture books yet but your post is the third reference I’ve seen this week so maybe I got a new series to read.
That’s okay, you won’t understand it.
If there is a distinction there should be a difference. Given that a teleported human is indistinguishable from the prior non teleported human there is no difference and thus no distinction.
Incorrect, the consciousness of the original human is gone, and the consciousness of the new human is operating under memories it did not directly experience.
No distinction from the outside, and from the inside a different consciousness, one that didn’t exist the moment before.
Yeah you repeatedly have stated that. Could you maybe respond to what people say instead of endlessly reasserting your position?
I have responded to every reply with nuance and detail, and expounded on every facet of my position, but you want to pretend that I haven’t.
Intellectual dishonesty. I came here to get away from that so onto the block list you go!
No.
Consciousness can be thought as software running on hardware (your brain). You do not destroy software by destroying hardware.
Whether you agree with this or not is not relevant to this discussion, since my point is that whether the above statement is true belongs to philosophy, not to science.
Um that’s a nice metaphor and all but that’s all it is. You pretend like its a profound statement when just 150 years ago they would have used the wax phonograph metaphor.
The map isn’t the territory no matter how hard you pretend it is.
Again, what we engaging is a philosophical discussion. And it is not a metaphor, it is analogy.
And while the map is not the territory, the question is what consciousness is. Is it the territory (brain) or the map (software)? It is very easy to argue that AI gives us a good indication that consciousness might appear somehow in AI systems too at some time, and there, there would be no question that it is a software.
If you don’t understand the dangers of mistaking metaphor for wisdom then you are not worth talking with.
AI is an approximation of how humans think cognition works, a metaphor written in code, but is not equivalent in recapitulating human cognition. I am not saying this is a limitation of hardware or software, but rather a limitation of our currently primitive understanding of our cognition.
It is too easy and a path to misdirection to just say ‘Well the cholesterol and nerve bundles are the hardware, and thinking is the software!’, and is JUST as inaccurate as some 1910 hick looking at a new automobile and saying “Oh I get it, it’s a carriage! But where’s the horse?” because in the hick’s mind they think in metaphors of horses pulling things (which is why we still use ‘horesepower to rate car engines’). They could not imagine a reality in which the cart ‘pulled’ itself.
Actual scientists know the dangers of metaphors and use them cautiously, science communicators use metaphors more heavily because that is a shortcut to get laypeoples to understand in some way complex concepts. If you know Terry Pratchett, these things are called ‘lies to children’.
And don’t get me wrong, ‘lies to children’ serve an important purpose, building the foundations of understanding for later growth.
Like saying ‘the sun burns hydrogen to make light’, which I learned in 3rd grade.
It’s a lie to children of course, the process that the sun uses to convert hydrogen to energy is a FUCKTONNE more complicated than an 8 year old can understand, but the ‘lie to children’ that it does means that when I hit highschool and start learning physics and do the chapter on solar fusion, the framework of understanding is there while I come to grips with random electron walks and density shells.
‘The brain is the hardware and thought is the software’ is ‘lies to children’, and no more useful to the discussion than telling people ‘the sun burns hydrogen to make light’ in a scholarly discussion of stellar development. At best it will make everyone feel a little condescending towards you, at worst you derail the discussion.
Once again, ANALOGY, not metaphor. It is not just a figure of speech, but direct comparison.
Of course, analogy does not prove a thing, however, all we are discussing here with you is not science, but philosophy. Is consciousness a structure which is upon substrate, or is it the substrate itself? Are you information or a physical body? These are not scientific questions, science can only answer how exactly the processes in the brain go, but it cannot explain the subjective feeling of “me”. Nearly by definition, - science deals with objective reality, not subjective perception.
This is exactly why we have stagnated in most of our social development this last half century, people deliberately misunderstanding the point so they can feel justified in arguing it.
So fucking done with that kind of thing.
This is why it is important to discuss definitions. But in this particular case (whether consciousness includes matter or not) the discussion belongs to philosophy.
However, what you have mention, is quite often happens in philosophy itself. Take for example discussion of whether free will exists. The actual discussion is what free will is. But not everyone admits this.