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> If weird assemblages of water, carbon, calcium and trace minerals can be self-aware, why not? Because humans (and indeed all life) have "spirits" which can t

> If weird assemblages of water, carbon, calcium and trace minerals can be self-aware, why not? Because humans (and indeed all life) have "spirits" which can think independently of the body, and that's the true reason we are conscious/self-aware. The body is merely a glove for the spirit. Before birth and after death your spirit still exists and is self-aware (don't take my word for it; try it out - when you die, think to yourself "wow, I'm still conscious without a body!"). Spirits are created by God beings from intelligences (which is a spiritual resource that can be neither created nor destroyed). Gods are created by granting humans more knowledge and powers. The progression is this: intelligence -> spirit -> human (body + spirit) -> God. However, not everyone makes it to God status since Gods choose which humans are to be granted further knowledge and power. And people that have been really bad can be stripped of their body and spirit to have their intelligence recycled back into the immutable pool. Hence Strong AI is impossible since we aren't/don't know how to mine/utilize intelligences (the immutable spiritual resource) like God does.

olavk 10y ago
So if strong AI is achieved, this would prove God does not exist?
- retina_sam 10y ago
  Yes, basically.
  - andrepd 10y ago
    But... Strong AI can be achieved, if nothing else by emulating a brain synapse by synapse, at the molecular level. Therefore god doesn't exist?
    - retina_sam 10y ago
      > But... Strong AI can be achieved, if nothing else by emulating a brain synapse by synapse. Therefore god doesn't exist? Isn't this type of thinking a form of cargo cult science, though? According to Facebook's AI director [1]: > The equivalent [of cargo cult science] in AI is to try to copy every detail that we know of about how neurons and synapses work, and then turn on a gigantic simulation of a large neural network inside a supercomputer, and hope that AI will emerge. That’s cargo cult AI. There are very serious people who get a huge amount of money who basically—and of course I’m sort of simplifying here—are pretty close to believing this. [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/facebook-ai-director-yann-lecun-on-deep-learning http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel... At any rate, that's a theory you have there (that simulating neurons results in emergent AI), now you have to prove your theory before I will admit God doesn't exist. I contend that without a spirit, no such AI will emerge.
      - city41 10y ago
        If that's a theory he has there, then you imply god and the spirit are not a theory. If that is the case, please provide proof. Quite literally the entire human race would be interested.
        retina_sam 10y ago
        > If that's a theory he has there, then you imply god and the spirit are not a theory That's just lazy. You can't shift the burden of proof on me when OP was the one making the extraordinary claim (sufficiently sophisticated synapse simulations are guaranteed to result in emergent strong AI). If you want to demand proof of my claims, you'll need to post your demands to the comment in which I made the extraordinary claim.
        city41 10y ago
        If you're going to dodge the question on a technicality, then frankly you're not worth the time.
        andrepd 10y ago
        The existence of god is an extraordinary claim. The claim that replicating a brain at the molecular level will reproduce the behaviour of a brain is not an extraordinary claim. It's not even a claim, it's a fact.
      - jodrellblank 10y ago
        Not really a fair comparison - the islanders of the 'cargo cult' were trying to entice aircraft full of cargo down by recreating what the explorers did - build towers, runways out of palm leaves, and wave coconut 'radios' around. But they didn't know aircraft were built by humans, what radios did, or that there was a huge society far away building aircraft and training people to fly them. And how many aircraft did they ever see, and how long did they spend trying before they were invaded/educated/gave up? If they had 7 billion aircraft, seeing them all from scratch, and a thousand years to investigate, would they have progressed further? We know brains work, we believe they are completely grown and contained within a skull (no remote factories building them), and we keep exploring further and building better tools and gathering more data. The roundworm C. elegans has one of the simplest nervous systems of any organism, with its hermaphrodite type having only 302 neurons. Furthermore, the structural connectome of these neurons is fully worked out. There are fewer than one thousand cells in the whole body of a C. elegans worm, each with a unique identifier and comprehensive supporting literature because C. elegans is a model organism. Being a model organism, the genome is fully known, along with many well characterized mutants readily available, a comprehensive literature of behavioural studies, etc. With so few neurons and new calcium 2 photon microscopy techniques it should soon be possible to record the complete neural activity of a living organism. By manipulating the neurons through optogenetic techniques, combined with the above recording capacities the project is in an unprecedented position to be able to fully characterize the neural dynamics of an entire organism. In trying to build an "in silico" model of a relatively simple organism like C. elegans, new tools are being developed which will make it easier to model more complex organisms. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm Is that 'cargo culting', or is that 'reverse engineering in progress'? And what's the difference - existing knowledge or approach?
    - zeroer 10y ago
      > Strong AI can be achieved That remains to be seen. Let Sam have this. How often do you get a religious person to detail exact circumstances that would falsify their religion?
  - jpt4 10y ago
    Then, retina_sam, I will simply have to show you [0] that God is not so contingent on human achievement. [0] Not immediately, but ultimately.
- duozerk 10y ago
  For a given (and arguably limited) definition of "god".
- mcv 10y ago
  I would say no. Even if awareness is of divine origin, you could still simulate an effect that, from an outside perspective, is indistinguishable from the real thing. The computer doesn't have to be truly aware in the way we are in order to present itself to us as if it is.
russdill 10y ago
Which means that the brain must be able to transmit information to and from the spirit. Please, by all means, point us to a plausible mechanism for such a thing.
- JonnieCache 10y ago
  You can ask this same question about transmissions between ones subjective experience and ones neurons, and the only serious difference between sams answer and modern answers is that sam makes an unwarranted number of assumptions, and as such must be cut away with ockams razor. If you really want to feel that you're qualitatively better than sam, you have to bite the bullet and go for full dennett-style functionalism, effectively coming out as a p-zombie, which I personally find quite unpalatable. In the other direction lies lots of other equally weird stuff, like modal realism and panpsychism. Best to just profess absolute ignorance IMO.
  - retina_sam 10y ago
    > sam makes an unwarranted number of assumptions, and as such must be cut away with occam's razor. I agree with you that the logical thing to do with my answer is to cut it away with Occam's razor, and I don't blame you for it. However, it should be noted that Occam's razor is a general rule of thumb, not some infallible law. If you were handed a piece of paper with a high level description of how the universe truly works, would you recognize it as the truth or dismiss it as the ramblings of a lunatic? If you went back in time even a few hundred years and handed the most brilliant thinkers of the day a piece of paper containing just one paragraph about general relativity, how many of those slips of paper would survive Occam's razor?
    - lmm 10y ago
      > If you went back in time even a few hundred years and handed the most brilliant thinkers of the day a piece of paper containing just one paragraph about general relativity, how many of those slips of paper would survive Occam's razor? I'm pretty confident Newton would get it. He could've verified the speed of light against observations of the moons of Jupiter. He knew about some puzzling aspects of magnets, and was theorising about magnetism while working on optics. Of course, much better than telling people the answer is telling them which threads to pull, which of the many confusing phenomena in the world bears more investigation.
andrepd 10y ago
>don't take my word for it; try it out - when you die, think to yourself "wow, I'm still conscious without a body!" https://goo.gl/4BjcTm https://goo.gl/4BjcTm Come on :^) What the hell kind of argument is this supposed to be?
jodrellblank 10y ago
Because humans (and indeed all life) have "spirits" which can think independently of the body, and that's the true reason we are conscious/self-aware. Apart from the obvious "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You claim this, now prove it" angle, this has so many faults it can only be handwavium and wishful thinking. Why would the spirit need a glove? Why would a glove need a spirit? Do roundworms and algae and cockroaches have spirits? Why couldn't a 'God' create a thinking being without using a spirit? Why is there conveniently a spirit-force that can supply anything from 10k humans to 7 billion humans with spirits? It can't be created or destroyed, then what happens when it runs out? Where is it stored? How does it get from there to here? What does it mean that the spirit can 'think' independently of the body? As far as we know, thinking is a matter of survival in the physical world - interpreting sensory data, outwitting predators and prey, remembering sources of food and water, outsmarting and outfighting competitors for social standing and mating rights. What use would a spirit have for any of this ability? Nothing is perfectly efficient, so there will be waste heat in the process of information transfer from body to spirit, where is that measurable heat? What protocol does it use to transmit information? What forces and particles and transmitters and receivers? What power source? Where in your body are sandwiches turned into ectoplasm? Where in the spirit force are memories stored? What use are physical world memories after body death, why would a spirit want or need them? And if they're no use, what's the point in describing it as still 'you' after death? If the brain can build spirit receiver mechanisms, then they're made out of physical things in the physical world. So where's the chunk of physics (or the gap) which covers them? Where's the Faraday cage that can block them? If brains can grow them, then lab-grown brain tissue can, and human machines can, so we could plausibly build AI / thinking machines and electromechanical/cyborg Gods one day. That's completely the opposite of you saying it's "impossible", since it's still just manipulation of matter, which we are getting ever better at. Take over the communication mechanism and pump adverts and malware into it, right? False enticing memories. If you were going to invent anything which is not proven, and claim it's the truth, isn't it just so convenient that it's a) based on faith, b) fixes (or nullifies) all earthly suffering, c) addresses all fear of death and illness, d) includes an untestable but scary justification for why you should do as you're told (and not be 'bad') and e) has /literally no compromises or downsides/? If that's not too good to be true, I don't know what is. "Spirits are created by God beings from intelligences (which is a spiritual resource that can be neither created nor destroyed)." "Woo-woo is created by WOW from handwavium (which is a woo-woo resource that {science words to try and sound authentic}"
mcv 10y ago
I understand the downvotes for retina_sam's comment for the number of unproven ideas it asserts, but as unlikely as it seems in our materialistic view of the universe, I think it's important to not lose sight of the possibility that maybe there really is something special, something non-physical, about awareness. It is really poorly understood, and I still have not seen an adequate explanation for why I can perceive things and be aware of them. "Awareness is an illusion", as proposed by some thinkers, certainly doesn't do it for me, because there's still something that has to perceive that illusion. It's got to be an emergent property of sufficiently complex logical processing, but how does it emerge? What is it really? I feel like I'm still missing a vital step.
- hanspeter 10y ago
  The lack of an adequate explanation does not demand the need for a non-physical explanation. I think that because consciousness is part of the core understanding of ourselves, we're drawn to a non-physical and spiritual explanation. But as a phenomenon the conscious mind is not different than other observed phenomenons. The rational approach would therefore be to expect an explanation that can be provided by our physical environment just as we do with any other unexplained phenomenon we observe.
  - mcv 10y ago
    > But as a phenomenon the conscious mind is not different than other observed phenomenons. Yes it is, because it's the phenomenon itself that does the observing. If not, then what is it that does the observing?
    - shezi 10y ago
      I have never understood the argument that "observation" is something special and that it must be taken into consideration. In fact, is it really the brain that is observing a phenomenon or is it something else? In the double slit experiment, it really isn't the brain, is it? It's the screen you place some distance away from the slits, or the electron detector if you place it in one slit only. The fact that "an outside observer" only sees the pattern made by these detectors later and may reason about them is entirely unnecessary to the experiment itself and to the collapse of the wave function. If you leave the results of a double slit experiment lying overnight, has the wave function not collapsed for longer? As such, the "observer" in these experiments are devices, just like in most other experiments. Just as the infamous cat is an observer of a quantum system, for whom the wave function has collapsed potentially much earlier than for an outside observer. A wave function collapse is in that case much more of a statement of information state than about the state of reality, which is the exact point of quantum mechanics, in that there must be a distinction now between "observers" (which my be single atoms, mind!) inside of the sphere of influence of an event (whether that event may be bounded by physical barriers or a light cone is irrelevant by the way). [Note that Schrödinger brought up the cat example exactly to point out that the world does not exist in a blurry double-state way even if unobserved.] The same is true for most psychological observations, which get recorded by a computer, by a pen or by an undergrad. The fact that someone else observes these observations doesn't change the phenomenon in any reasonable way. One more analogy: we now have computers that are entirely capable of recording/observing phenomena by themselves, some of them internal to themselves even, where we have no other way of recording such phenomenon. If you run an A/B test on a web site, let it run for long enough, then look at your analytics page and it says to accept one hypothesis with 99.99% probability, then you have exactly the same situation as if you had done the experiment through other people and publishing it as a paper. Except, of course, no human mind has "observed" the phenomenon, neither directly nor indirectly, until you opened the results page. So what it comes down to is this: did the result exist before you read the results page? I would answer yes. All of this is a long way of saying that IMHO the observation of a phenomenon does not change the phenomenon itself.

olavk 10y ago

So if strong AI is achieved, this would prove God does not exist?

retina_sam 10y ago
Yes, basically.
- andrepd 10y ago
  But... Strong AI can be achieved, if nothing else by emulating a brain synapse by synapse, at the molecular level. Therefore god doesn't exist?
  - retina_sam 10y ago
    > But... Strong AI can be achieved, if nothing else by emulating a brain synapse by synapse. Therefore god doesn't exist? Isn't this type of thinking a form of cargo cult science, though? According to Facebook's AI director [1]: > The equivalent [of cargo cult science] in AI is to try to copy every detail that we know of about how neurons and synapses work, and then turn on a gigantic simulation of a large neural network inside a supercomputer, and hope that AI will emerge. That’s cargo cult AI. There are very serious people who get a huge amount of money who basically—and of course I’m sort of simplifying here—are pretty close to believing this. [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/facebook-ai-director-yann-lecun-on-deep-learning http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel... At any rate, that's a theory you have there (that simulating neurons results in emergent AI), now you have to prove your theory before I will admit God doesn't exist. I contend that without a spirit, no such AI will emerge.
    - city41 10y ago
      If that's a theory he has there, then you imply god and the spirit are not a theory. If that is the case, please provide proof. Quite literally the entire human race would be interested.
      - retina_sam 10y ago
        > If that's a theory he has there, then you imply god and the spirit are not a theory That's just lazy. You can't shift the burden of proof on me when OP was the one making the extraordinary claim (sufficiently sophisticated synapse simulations are guaranteed to result in emergent strong AI). If you want to demand proof of my claims, you'll need to post your demands to the comment in which I made the extraordinary claim.
        city41 10y ago
        If you're going to dodge the question on a technicality, then frankly you're not worth the time.
        andrepd 10y ago
        The existence of god is an extraordinary claim. The claim that replicating a brain at the molecular level will reproduce the behaviour of a brain is not an extraordinary claim. It's not even a claim, it's a fact.
    - jodrellblank 10y ago
      Not really a fair comparison - the islanders of the 'cargo cult' were trying to entice aircraft full of cargo down by recreating what the explorers did - build towers, runways out of palm leaves, and wave coconut 'radios' around. But they didn't know aircraft were built by humans, what radios did, or that there was a huge society far away building aircraft and training people to fly them. And how many aircraft did they ever see, and how long did they spend trying before they were invaded/educated/gave up? If they had 7 billion aircraft, seeing them all from scratch, and a thousand years to investigate, would they have progressed further? We know brains work, we believe they are completely grown and contained within a skull (no remote factories building them), and we keep exploring further and building better tools and gathering more data. The roundworm C. elegans has one of the simplest nervous systems of any organism, with its hermaphrodite type having only 302 neurons. Furthermore, the structural connectome of these neurons is fully worked out. There are fewer than one thousand cells in the whole body of a C. elegans worm, each with a unique identifier and comprehensive supporting literature because C. elegans is a model organism. Being a model organism, the genome is fully known, along with many well characterized mutants readily available, a comprehensive literature of behavioural studies, etc. With so few neurons and new calcium 2 photon microscopy techniques it should soon be possible to record the complete neural activity of a living organism. By manipulating the neurons through optogenetic techniques, combined with the above recording capacities the project is in an unprecedented position to be able to fully characterize the neural dynamics of an entire organism. In trying to build an "in silico" model of a relatively simple organism like C. elegans, new tools are being developed which will make it easier to model more complex organisms. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm Is that 'cargo culting', or is that 'reverse engineering in progress'? And what's the difference - existing knowledge or approach?
  - zeroer 10y ago
    > Strong AI can be achieved That remains to be seen. Let Sam have this. How often do you get a religious person to detail exact circumstances that would falsify their religion?
- jpt4 10y ago
  Then, retina_sam, I will simply have to show you [0] that God is not so contingent on human achievement. [0] Not immediately, but ultimately.
duozerk 10y ago
For a given (and arguably limited) definition of "god".
mcv 10y ago
I would say no. Even if awareness is of divine origin, you could still simulate an effect that, from an outside perspective, is indistinguishable from the real thing. The computer doesn't have to be truly aware in the way we are in order to present itself to us as if it is.

russdill 10y ago

Which means that the brain must be able to transmit information to and from the spirit. Please, by all means, point us to a plausible mechanism for such a thing.

JonnieCache 10y ago
You can ask this same question about transmissions between ones subjective experience and ones neurons, and the only serious difference between sams answer and modern answers is that sam makes an unwarranted number of assumptions, and as such must be cut away with ockams razor. If you really want to feel that you're qualitatively better than sam, you have to bite the bullet and go for full dennett-style functionalism, effectively coming out as a p-zombie, which I personally find quite unpalatable. In the other direction lies lots of other equally weird stuff, like modal realism and panpsychism. Best to just profess absolute ignorance IMO.
- retina_sam 10y ago
  > sam makes an unwarranted number of assumptions, and as such must be cut away with occam's razor. I agree with you that the logical thing to do with my answer is to cut it away with Occam's razor, and I don't blame you for it. However, it should be noted that Occam's razor is a general rule of thumb, not some infallible law. If you were handed a piece of paper with a high level description of how the universe truly works, would you recognize it as the truth or dismiss it as the ramblings of a lunatic? If you went back in time even a few hundred years and handed the most brilliant thinkers of the day a piece of paper containing just one paragraph about general relativity, how many of those slips of paper would survive Occam's razor?
  - lmm 10y ago
    > If you went back in time even a few hundred years and handed the most brilliant thinkers of the day a piece of paper containing just one paragraph about general relativity, how many of those slips of paper would survive Occam's razor? I'm pretty confident Newton would get it. He could've verified the speed of light against observations of the moons of Jupiter. He knew about some puzzling aspects of magnets, and was theorising about magnetism while working on optics. Of course, much better than telling people the answer is telling them which threads to pull, which of the many confusing phenomena in the world bears more investigation.

andrepd 10y ago

>don't take my word for it; try it out - when you die, think to yourself "wow, I'm still conscious without a body!" https://goo.gl/4BjcTm https://goo.gl/4BjcTm Come on :^) What the hell kind of argument is this supposed to be?

jodrellblank 10y ago

Because humans (and indeed all life) have "spirits" which can think independently of the body, and that's the true reason we are conscious/self-aware. Apart from the obvious "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You claim this, now prove it" angle, this has so many faults it can only be handwavium and wishful thinking. Why would the spirit need a glove? Why would a glove need a spirit? Do roundworms and algae and cockroaches have spirits? Why couldn't a 'God' create a thinking being without using a spirit? Why is there conveniently a spirit-force that can supply anything from 10k humans to 7 billion humans with spirits? It can't be created or destroyed, then what happens when it runs out? Where is it stored? How does it get from there to here? What does it mean that the spirit can 'think' independently of the body? As far as we know, thinking is a matter of survival in the physical world - interpreting sensory data, outwitting predators and prey, remembering sources of food and water, outsmarting and outfighting competitors for social standing and mating rights. What use would a spirit have for any of this ability? Nothing is perfectly efficient, so there will be waste heat in the process of information transfer from body to spirit, where is that measurable heat? What protocol does it use to transmit information? What forces and particles and transmitters and receivers? What power source? Where in your body are sandwiches turned into ectoplasm? Where in the spirit force are memories stored? What use are physical world memories after body death, why would a spirit want or need them? And if they're no use, what's the point in describing it as still 'you' after death? If the brain can build spirit receiver mechanisms, then they're made out of physical things in the physical world. So where's the chunk of physics (or the gap) which covers them? Where's the Faraday cage that can block them? If brains can grow them, then lab-grown brain tissue can, and human machines can, so we could plausibly build AI / thinking machines and electromechanical/cyborg Gods one day. That's completely the opposite of you saying it's "impossible", since it's still just manipulation of matter, which we are getting ever better at. Take over the communication mechanism and pump adverts and malware into it, right? False enticing memories. If you were going to invent anything which is not proven, and claim it's the truth, isn't it just so convenient that it's a) based on faith, b) fixes (or nullifies) all earthly suffering, c) addresses all fear of death and illness, d) includes an untestable but scary justification for why you should do as you're told (and not be 'bad') and e) has /literally no compromises or downsides/? If that's not too good to be true, I don't know what is. "Spirits are created by God beings from intelligences (which is a spiritual resource that can be neither created nor destroyed)." "Woo-woo is created by WOW from handwavium (which is a woo-woo resource that {science words to try and sound authentic}"

mcv 10y ago

I understand the downvotes for retina_sam's comment for the number of unproven ideas it asserts, but as unlikely as it seems in our materialistic view of the universe, I think it's important to not lose sight of the possibility that maybe there really is something special, something non-physical, about awareness. It is really poorly understood, and I still have not seen an adequate explanation for why I can perceive things and be aware of them. "Awareness is an illusion", as proposed by some thinkers, certainly doesn't do it for me, because there's still something that has to perceive that illusion. It's got to be an emergent property of sufficiently complex logical processing, but how does it emerge? What is it really? I feel like I'm still missing a vital step.

hanspeter 10y ago
The lack of an adequate explanation does not demand the need for a non-physical explanation. I think that because consciousness is part of the core understanding of ourselves, we're drawn to a non-physical and spiritual explanation. But as a phenomenon the conscious mind is not different than other observed phenomenons. The rational approach would therefore be to expect an explanation that can be provided by our physical environment just as we do with any other unexplained phenomenon we observe.
- mcv 10y ago
  > But as a phenomenon the conscious mind is not different than other observed phenomenons. Yes it is, because it's the phenomenon itself that does the observing. If not, then what is it that does the observing?
  - shezi 10y ago
    I have never understood the argument that "observation" is something special and that it must be taken into consideration. In fact, is it really the brain that is observing a phenomenon or is it something else? In the double slit experiment, it really isn't the brain, is it? It's the screen you place some distance away from the slits, or the electron detector if you place it in one slit only. The fact that "an outside observer" only sees the pattern made by these detectors later and may reason about them is entirely unnecessary to the experiment itself and to the collapse of the wave function. If you leave the results of a double slit experiment lying overnight, has the wave function not collapsed for longer? As such, the "observer" in these experiments are devices, just like in most other experiments. Just as the infamous cat is an observer of a quantum system, for whom the wave function has collapsed potentially much earlier than for an outside observer. A wave function collapse is in that case much more of a statement of information state than about the state of reality, which is the exact point of quantum mechanics, in that there must be a distinction now between "observers" (which my be single atoms, mind!) inside of the sphere of influence of an event (whether that event may be bounded by physical barriers or a light cone is irrelevant by the way). [Note that Schrödinger brought up the cat example exactly to point out that the world does not exist in a blurry double-state way even if unobserved.] The same is true for most psychological observations, which get recorded by a computer, by a pen or by an undergrad. The fact that someone else observes these observations doesn't change the phenomenon in any reasonable way. One more analogy: we now have computers that are entirely capable of recording/observing phenomena by themselves, some of them internal to themselves even, where we have no other way of recording such phenomenon. If you run an A/B test on a web site, let it run for long enough, then look at your analytics page and it says to accept one hypothesis with 99.99% probability, then you have exactly the same situation as if you had done the experiment through other people and publishing it as a paper. Except, of course, no human mind has "observed" the phenomenon, neither directly nor indirectly, until you opened the results page. So what it comes down to is this: did the result exist before you read the results page? I would answer yes. All of this is a long way of saying that IMHO the observation of a phenomenon does not change the phenomenon itself.