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> Despite my desire to accept religious teachings, I am constantly prevented by a simple fact: no one has found any physical evidence of something like a soul,
by hasenj 15y ago
> Despite my desire to accept religious teachings, I am constantly prevented by a simple fact: no one has found any physical evidence of something like a soul, or any mechanism which might enable a persistent consciousness beyond our current brain.
For a minute, forget about "persisting beyond death".
Consider consciousness, is there any conceptual model at all of how it arises purely out of the known physical laws?
I can imagine building a computer with strong-AI and I see no reason - what so ever - to assume that it may possess any form of consciousness. Given all that we know about how the physical world works, and how computers work, there's no reason to assume that some particular software configuration will give rise to subjective consciousness within a computer.
- icebraining 15y agoDefine consciousness.
- hasenj 15y agoThat's part of the problem :)
- icebraining 15y agoThen the question of whether software can have consciousness is meaningless. As Dijkstra said, "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
- hasenj 15y agoI think you misunderstood what I meant. The closest thing to a definition would be something that experiences Qualia, but then you'd ask me to define Qualia, and at this point I can't give an objective non-circular definition. David Chalmers does a good job of explaining it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo
- ryusage 15y agoIt's clear to me that my own consciousness is dramatically influenced by my physical environment. After all, anything that physically interacts with my brain will affect my consciousness in some way. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that would imply it is a physical phenomenon, no?