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That's very well explained. I can accept the sort of dualism that identifies the heart and blood circulation as different things, just as banana pith and banana skin are different things, but dualism seems either misleading or unhelpful here - it is all banana, just as heart, veins, arteries and so -one are different but all the same stuff engaged in doing one particular job as part of one general job - keeping the body going. In that case Dualism is either rather irrelevant semantics
Yep, I have to agree here. The whole point of bringing up dualism is because of some inherent failure in naturalism's ability to ever possibly explain how the mind works. Redefining it to being just a way to label different levels of abstraction of a physical system feels like a bait and switch, at best.
I am confused here. "naturalism" says that the mind and brain work do the natural laws of the universe. How is that wrong? We don't know enough to say we will " ... ever possibly explain ...".
are there any "unnatural" laws?
...and frankly, Gaylen, if the discussion is not about that argument bearing the label 'Dualism' (and the title 'The hard question proves dualism and disproves monism') then it is a matter (I think Dennet's idiosyncratic dualism) better suited to the philosophy forum. because the point here is (reading between the lines of the ostensible topic) whether atheists admit that humans provably have a soul, because they accept that we cannot duplicate human consciousness in a machine.
I think that you, KC, and I are probably all on the same page here, even tho our terminology keeps making it seem like we are miles apart. I see the type of dual-aspect theory I'm offering as a type of naturalism that is perfectly consistent with atheism and not easily compatible with traditional theism. (Property dualism does leave some doors open for non-traditional theists to get a foot in, but to get to theism from property dualism you need to introduce some other premises that are more specifically related to the nature of consciousness and intelligence, and most of these other premises can be easily dismissed by atheists, since they would be speculative). Anyway, the "dualism" line of discussion is, indeed, off track and should be in a philosophy forum rather than here.
What I've really been trying to suggest is the "enactive and embodied" theories of consciousness, but even this could be considered off-topic in this forum since it focuses more on the minimum criteria needed to build conscious machines and is, once again, not really relevant to the distinction between atheism and theism - except I suppose it could be seen as reinforcing the idea that we really don't need theism of any sort in order to build conscious machines; we don't need God to breathe life into the machine, or anything of that sort. The tricky problem left is that we still don't have a theory of consciousness (as some scientists and philosophers have pointed out, we are still in "natural history" mode - collecting tons of data, making categories, etc., but without a guiding theory to make sense of it all - very much like biology prior to Darwin, or physics prior to Newton).
Most of my efforts are ultimately focused on trying to figure out - at least in rough sketch - what a plausible "theory of consciousness" might look like. A good theory of consciousness would not completely rule out the possibility of theism, but - like the theory of evolution, or the understanding of order from chaos in nonlinear dynamics - a theory of consciousness would yank away one more of the "gaps" wherein the faithful can hide God.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 09-08-2014 at 06:54 AM..
are you attempting to "remove" god only? Is your only objective is to block out 'theist? It really can't be done. I feel this is because we make nothing that universe does not allow. We do not "create awareness" we use the rules of the universe to make different expressions of it. We are not creating anything from scratch.
The best we really can do is think of how you create a blood cell in your body. Can you control it? The universe "made" us. I don't have a better word than "made". I do not mean it as "knowingly held a corpse in its hands and exhaled into it. That belief dismantles itself on many levels.
What your are really trying to do in my opinion is address a personality trait in some humans. And that is a valid consideration. But without a "wink" I don't know how to do it.
When you say the illusion of "I-ness" you essentially discount your own existence despite its "unavoidableness." Nothing vanishes as soon as you examine it. There is no time you do NOT experience the "composite I-ness" . . . even when you for some reason are amnesiac and don't have a clue who you are or have been previously. In fact, the "I-ness" is the ONLY thing you absolutely know to be real . . . as the solipsists have often tried and failed to prove. As you said reality is real and there are other "I-nesses" in existence. What I cannot understand is how this utterly central, crucial, unavoidable and constant "I-ness" that IS you . . . whatever it does or does not remember about you and your experiences . . . can be so cavalierly dismissed. Since it is so independent of memories and experiences . . . it cannot be the result of them.
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Originally Posted by AREQUIPA
No I don't. I have already explained that reality is real, despite it being in many ways an illusion. I am aware of the I-ness and its convincing persistence, and yet its elusiveness when you try to grasp it shows that it is illusion and not anything 'solid' but is real as part of our consciousness - which should nicely suit your view, old mate.
I wrote a couple of things that I cancelled about the feeling of identity and how it is linked with memories and experiences and yet is still there if we completely lose our memory. The brain actually has those memories but we just can't access them. You know that memory comes back. That should be some indication that it is dependent on the workings of the mind.It suggests to me also that this feeling of 'I'- ness' is an evolved survival mechanism, just like family feelings, fear, love, patriotism and religion.
I won't labour the argument but you will find this model answers all the problems you are aware of about identity, mind and solipsism.
Sorry for my absence . . had some more pressing issues to deal with than the forum. What you have said simply corroborates my contention that WE are NOT the physical brain content . . . since WE still exist when access to it is either made inaccessible or totally destroyed by trauma. Only death severs US from the body and brain at this level of being.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AREQUIPA
I think you make good points. I may be misunderstanding, but I feel there is a danger of applying philosophical prncliples, labels and constructs in a sort of tunnel -vision focus and fail to see there is something wrong with it.
I am reminded of Mystic's remark that I use 'Common sense' instead of philosophic logic There is some truth in that, but it is more applying what we obviously know - that the heart and circulation are all part of the same thing, let alone same 'stuff' and pointing out that various components are not the same as each other is true...but obviously not helpful in terms of deciding (by analogy) whether the nuts and bolts mind and 'experience' have necessarily to be not the same thing at all, by using a semantic analogy of something (circulatory system) which quite obviously is all the same thing at all.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KCfromNC
Yep, I have to agree here. The whole point of bringing up dualism is because of some inherent failure in naturalism's ability to ever possibly explain how the mind works. Redefining it to being just a way to label different levels of abstraction of a physical system feels like a bait and switch, at best.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Arach Angle
I am confused here. "naturalism" says that the mind and brain work do the natural laws of the universe. How is that wrong? We don't know enough to say we will " ... ever possibly explain ...".
are there any "unnatural" laws?
You are correct, Arq . . . you are focused on common sense and not a true philosophical rendering. At the level Gaylen is considering it . . . it IS all one thing and I agree. There is no such thing as supernatural (or NOT natural or "unnatural"). Where we disagree is on WHAT that one thing IS . . . consciousness.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Arach Angle
are you attempting to "remove" god only? Is your only objective is to block out 'theist? It really can't be done. I feel this is because we make nothing that universe does not allow. We do not "create awareness" we use the rules of the universe to make different expressions of it. We are not creating anything from scratch.
The best we really can do is think of how you create a blood cell in your body. Can you control it? The universe "made" us. I don't have a better word than "made". I do not mean it as "knowingly held a corpse in its hands and exhaled into it. That belief dismantles itself on many levels.
What your are really trying to do in my opinion is address a personality trait in some humans. And that is a valid consideration. But without a "wink" I don't know how to do it.
Yes they are trying to remove God from everything . . . instead of recognizing that everything IS God's consciousness . . . which we are but a part of.
are you attempting to "remove" god only? Is your only objective is to block out 'theist?
I, personally, have no special interest in either defeating theism or promoting it. I simply want to know what's true, and if some form of theism happens to be true, then I certainly want to understand it. I would not be the least bit shocked if some loose version of theism (something roughly along the lines of MysticPhD's "consciousness field") turns out to be true, but my intuitions at this point are that our current concept of "consciousness" is way too muddled to be very meaningful in any useful theory. My notion of a "primordial qualitative chaos" is, admittedly, not much clearer, but it does have the virtue of modeling the way in which intelligence can emerge via naturalistic principles, rather than assuming that intelligence is fundamental. I really can't make much sense of the idea that the world was intelligently designed. Indeed, I would be downright shocked if it turns out that the world was designed by an Intelligence (and I would have some pointed questions for the SOB who did the design work ). My real views on "consciousness" are deeper than I've tried to explain here. My posts are already so long and so off-track to the theme of "robots and atheism" that I've shied away from adding any more complexity to the mix beyond what I already have.
I think, however, that I will open up an new thread in the philosophy forum where the notion of "consciousness" can be explored in great depth. In particular I will suggest a particular theory that clarifies the notion of "qualitative" and allows "qualia" to be public phenomena (I think I have a way to do that now). I don't think I will be coming back to this atheism/robot thread, so if anyone drops in here and has any questions/comment for me, I suggest looking me up in the philosophy forum in a thread called "A naturalistic alternative to materialism? (a theory of consciousness)"
I think that you, KC, and I are probably all on the same page here, even tho our terminology keeps making it seem like we are miles apart. I see the type of dual-aspect theory I'm offering as a type of naturalism that is perfectly consistent with atheism and not easily compatible with traditional theism. (Property dualism does leave some doors open for non-traditional theists to get a foot in, but to get to theism from property dualism you need to introduce some other premises that are more specifically related to the nature of consciousness and intelligence, and most of these other premises can be easily dismissed by atheists, since they would be speculative). Anyway, the "dualism" line of discussion is, indeed, off track and should be in a philosophy forum rather than here.
What I've really been trying to suggest is the "enactive and embodied" theories of consciousness, but even this could be considered off-topic in this forum since it focuses more on the minimum criteria needed to build conscious machines and is, once again, not really relevant to the distinction between atheism and theism - except I suppose it could be seen as reinforcing the idea that we really don't need theism of any sort in order to build conscious machines; we don't need God to breathe life into the machine, or anything of that sort. The tricky problem left is that we still don't have a theory of consciousness (as some scientists and philosophers have pointed out, we are still in "natural history" mode - collecting tons of data, making categories, etc., but without a guiding theory to make sense of it all - very much like biology prior to Darwin, or physics prior to Newton).
Most of my efforts are ultimately focused on trying to figure out - at least in rough sketch - what a plausible "theory of consciousness" might look like. A good theory of consciousness would not completely rule out the possibility of theism, but - like the theory of evolution, or the understanding of order from chaos in nonlinear dynamics - a theory of consciousness would yank away one more of the "gaps" wherein the faithful can hide God.
I understand. My approach has been (apart from looking at the impact on atheism - and Mystic has by far the most cogent challenge to the rational basis of atheism) to say that we need to do a lot more research on what consciousness is and how it works before we can even think of explaining the admittedly mysterious processing, storing and use of input. I continue to think that much of this will be found to be explainable in terms of how (the particles of sweetness) and the why (the evolutionary advantages it gives) and that philosophy will be unable to come to any conclusions about what it what, let alone which system - materialistic monism or dualist something more-ism (which is, I reiterate, a fundamental argument in Mystic's case against the materialist default and thus, the rationale of atheism) and the best it can helpfully do is to point up the questions that science has to answer - if it can.
I must assert that you give the promissory note deserves a bit more leeway and we should not say that the materialist consciousness company is out of business because it can't settle up just yet.
I, personally, have no special interest in either defeating theism or promoting it. I simply want to know what's true, and if some form of theism happens to be true, then I certainly want to understand it. I would not be the least bit shocked if some loose version of theism (something roughly along the lines of MysticPhD's "consciousness field") turns out to be true, but my intuitions at this point are that our current concept of "consciousness" is way too muddled to be very meaningful in any useful theory. My notion of a "primordial qualitative chaos" is, admittedly, not much clearer, but it does have the virtue of modeling the way in which intelligence can emerge via naturalistic principles, rather than assuming that intelligence is fundamental. I really can't make much sense of the idea that the world was intelligently designed. Indeed, I would be downright shocked if it turns out that the world was designed by an Intelligence (and I would have some pointed questions for the SOB who did the design work ). My real views on "consciousness" are deeper than I've tried to explain here. My posts are already so long and so off-track to the theme of "robots and atheism" that I've shied away from adding any more complexity to the mix beyond what I already have.
I think, however, that I will open up an new thread in the philosophy forum where the notion of "consciousness" can be explored in great depth. In particular I will suggest a particular theory that clarifies the notion of "qualitative" and allows "qualia" to be public phenomena (I think I have a way to do that now). I don't think I will be coming back to this atheism/robot thread, so if anyone drops in here and has any questions/comment for me, I suggest looking me up in the philosophy forum in a thread called "A naturalistic alternative to materialism? (a theory of consciousness)"
I agree here. While, as an atheist, I am of course not inclined to God -theories, and it would be dishonest to claim that evidence of some kind of cosmic mind would not make me groan (because of course the various religions would all claim it for their own tribal deity) I am not opposed to the idea of an Einsteinian sorta -god.
A cosmic mind gives no real basis for all the different divine messages being handed down, let alone any particular religion or holy book. Nor does the possibility of a cosmic -mind creator -god make any difference to deep time geology and the evidence of evolution.
I still have to complete my reading up on this but it still seems to me that the preferred position is that all this stuff is the same and dualism is no more than a handy identifying label for different components in a unified whole, like heart and arteries in circulation or protons and electrons (massive and massless, different - but in not some fundamental way of a different reality system, let alone some evidence of an unseen spiritual world.
Thus, while I have to watch myself on trying to make an atheist -friendly case stick, I really see the dualism argument an academic system of labelling things for the purposes of identification or trying to do a scientific analysis of consciousness without having the tools to do it.
I understand. My approach has been (apart from looking at the impact on atheism - and Mystic has by far the most cogent challenge to the rational basis of atheism) to say that we need to do a lot more research on what consciousness is and how it works before we can even think of explaining the admittedly mysterious processing, storing and use of input. I continue to think that much of this will be found to be explainable in terms of how (the particles of sweetness) and the why (the evolutionary advantages it gives) and that philosophy will be unable to come to any conclusions about what it what, let alone which system - materialistic monism or dualist something more-ism (which is, I reiterate, a fundamental argument in Mystic's case against the materialist default and thus, the rationale of atheism) and the best it can helpfully do is to point up the questions that science has to answer - if it can.
I must assert that you give the promissory note deserves a bit more leeway and we should not say that the materialist consciousness company is out of business because it can't settle up just yet.
I don't think materialist consciousness out of business. Not even close. I guess all comes down to how we use the word "matter", really, I would use the word "energy" or "fields" in its definition. I mean does a philosopher consider a "photon" matter? Do they consider the fabric of space "nothing"?
How is this in any way related to atheism? We know that people, not deities, create robots and computers.
The real question is whether or not people can create consciousness... and I would say that they probably could.
It depends on how you define consciousness, but I would say that it really isn't too difficult to simulate. Computers are already capable of learning and reacting... I don't think AI is so far away.
And really, if we perceive it to be consciousness, doesn't that mean it is? Think about how we react to characters in films that are pure CGI, or even animatronic puppets like Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back. Yoda is more real to more people than you or I.
I'm not even sure that consciousness as most people understand it even exists... it's more like one of those illusions where we see certain patterns and have certain assumptions about ourselves and each other and never actually think to question them.
Robots can be taught to sacrifice, to perform rituals, to question, to learn, etc. To be honest, I think they could probably be programmed to feel more alive and even to be more spiritual than most people.
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There is some truth in that, but it is more applying what we obviously know - that the heart and circulation are all part of the same thing, let alone same 'stuff' and pointing out that various components are not the same as each other is true...but obviously not helpful in terms of deciding (by analogy) whether the nuts and bolts mind and 'experience' have necessarily to be not the same thing at all, by using a semantic analogy of something (circulatory system) which quite obviously is all the same thing at all.
