3 ms·

The idea of humans having no soul is terrifying, essentially we would all just be p-zombies, functioning entirely as an organic machine does, but with no real t

The idea of humans having no soul is terrifying, essentially we would all just be p-zombies, functioning entirely as an organic machine does, but with no real truly conscious experience.

kjkjadksj 1y ago
Do you believe anything different? You touch the stove and yell in pain. Your boss stresses you out and you have a panic attack. You get a raise and feel happy. You get taxed and feel angry. These are all very much responses people have modeled in flies in lab setting.
- unyttigfjelltol 1y ago
  "While animals and plants certainly have a form of soul, it remains distinct from the human experience."[1] [1] https://blog.entomologist.net/do-insects-and-animals-possess-souls.html https://blog.entomologist.net/do-insects-and-animals-possess...
tracerbulletx 1y ago
Why? The idea of a soul is basically just a conceptual attractor that punts off the problem to another realm so you don't have to think about it and you can artificially terminate causality. If what we are is a gyre in a multi dimensional fractal then the interactions and problem solving going on inside of our brains is still happening and making choices even if those choices are being made inside of and purely as a consequence of the whole.
- galangalalgol 1y ago
  Agreed, and packed in there was the notion that the experience of consciousness is somehow related to the soul. I'm leaning towards Metzingers notion that that experience is a result of our model of self, being updated without our awareness, so that we think of that model as ourself instead of just a model of ourself. That doesn't diminish the utility of consciousness, or make it less amazing. But I don't think that gap is empty for God to fill so we don't need to tie consciousness in with the soul. Some of the Christian bible's teachings about dying to self sound an aweful lot like Buddhist meditation seeking Nirvana or ego death. So it might even be part of the plan to shed consciousness. Incidentally if you think about blinking or breathing, it becomes voluntary instead of involuntary. Mindful meditation and Vipassana both have you think about sensation and your responses to stimulus in a very voluntary way, so it makes sense the update process for the self model might become voluntary and disable consciousness.
bloaf 1y ago
This doesn't follow, at least not in my understanding. Consider the following: Qualia are "what it 'feels like' to experience some sensory input." Up until recently, most LLMs were "once through" meaning that the only "sensory inputs" they "experienced" would be the raw text. So we might argue that "experiencing sensory input" means "tokenizing raw text," and that therefore the tokens that the LLM processes internally are the qualia. But that's un-satisfying. We don't say that the impulses sent from the eye to the brain are the qualia, and the tokenization process sounds more like "eye turning light into electrical signals" than what we actually mean by qualia. So now we focus on the "feeling" word in our definition of qualia. A feeling isn't a token or an electrical impulse, its our internal reaction to that token or electical impulse. So because once-through LLMs have no input that corresponds to "their internal reaction to a token", they can never be said to "experience" a "feeling" using our previous definition of experience as "processing some input". But this directly suggests the solution to the qualia problem: if we were to build an LLM that did accept an input that represented "its internal reaction to the tokens it previously experienced" then we'd have invented qualia from scratch. The qualia would be precisely the log file that the LLM generated and "sent back around" as input for the next round.
- 90s_dev 1y ago
  https://xkcd.com/55/ https://xkcd.com/55/
CuriouslyC 1y ago
I have the opposite take away from humans having no soul - that the entire universe is aware/alive. We experience consciousness and agency, if there's no magic fairy dust that gets sprinkled on us to make that happen, we shouldn't expect to be fundamentally different from the universe in that respect.
- bumby 1y ago
  Panpsychism?
  - anon84873628 1y ago
    Some say that pure physicalism necessitates panpsychism.
anon84873628 1y ago
The conscious experience is certainly "real" - you can subjectively confirm that. It's just that the free will is an illusion :-)
jdietrich 1y ago
Buddhist theology broadly rejects the existence of the soul, and has a much fuzzier concept of "self" than most religious or secular viewpoints - the Buddhist "self" is not transcendental, but emergent and ephemeral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Buddhism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Buddhism)
aoeusnth1 1y ago
or, hear me out, organic machines have conscious experience because existence itself is divine. Humans don't have a special soul separate from the universe, they have a soul because they are the universe: materialism.
xrhobo 1y ago
The good news is that we have evolved an amazing ability to believe ridiculous narratives as coping strategies so that we aren't frozen by this reality and can still get on with and enjoy life. When ridiculous narratives like Christianity feel worn and outdated, we make up new ridiculous narratives like panpsychism. I would say "organic machine p-zombies with no real truly conscious experience with an operative system built on random, ridiculous, changing narratives. A machine that randomly stops working then other organic machines burn or bury it." The fact I can believe this and still enjoy life so much really is a miracle in the Christian sense.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

The idea of humans having no soul is terrifying, essentially we would all just be p-zombies, functioning entirely as an organic machine does, but with no real truly conscious experience.

kjkjadksj 1y ago

Do you believe anything different? You touch the stove and yell in pain. Your boss stresses you out and you have a panic attack. You get a raise and feel happy. You get taxed and feel angry. These are all very much responses people have modeled in flies in lab setting.

unyttigfjelltol 1y ago
"While animals and plants certainly have a form of soul, it remains distinct from the human experience."[1] [1] https://blog.entomologist.net/do-insects-and-animals-possess-souls.html https://blog.entomologist.net/do-insects-and-animals-possess...

tracerbulletx 1y ago

Why? The idea of a soul is basically just a conceptual attractor that punts off the problem to another realm so you don't have to think about it and you can artificially terminate causality. If what we are is a gyre in a multi dimensional fractal then the interactions and problem solving going on inside of our brains is still happening and making choices even if those choices are being made inside of and purely as a consequence of the whole.

galangalalgol 1y ago
Agreed, and packed in there was the notion that the experience of consciousness is somehow related to the soul. I'm leaning towards Metzingers notion that that experience is a result of our model of self, being updated without our awareness, so that we think of that model as ourself instead of just a model of ourself. That doesn't diminish the utility of consciousness, or make it less amazing. But I don't think that gap is empty for God to fill so we don't need to tie consciousness in with the soul. Some of the Christian bible's teachings about dying to self sound an aweful lot like Buddhist meditation seeking Nirvana or ego death. So it might even be part of the plan to shed consciousness. Incidentally if you think about blinking or breathing, it becomes voluntary instead of involuntary. Mindful meditation and Vipassana both have you think about sensation and your responses to stimulus in a very voluntary way, so it makes sense the update process for the self model might become voluntary and disable consciousness.

bloaf 1y ago

This doesn't follow, at least not in my understanding. Consider the following: Qualia are "what it 'feels like' to experience some sensory input." Up until recently, most LLMs were "once through" meaning that the only "sensory inputs" they "experienced" would be the raw text. So we might argue that "experiencing sensory input" means "tokenizing raw text," and that therefore the tokens that the LLM processes internally are the qualia. But that's un-satisfying. We don't say that the impulses sent from the eye to the brain are the qualia, and the tokenization process sounds more like "eye turning light into electrical signals" than what we actually mean by qualia. So now we focus on the "feeling" word in our definition of qualia. A feeling isn't a token or an electrical impulse, its our internal reaction to that token or electical impulse. So because once-through LLMs have no input that corresponds to "their internal reaction to a token", they can never be said to "experience" a "feeling" using our previous definition of experience as "processing some input". But this directly suggests the solution to the qualia problem: if we were to build an LLM that did accept an input that represented "its internal reaction to the tokens it previously experienced" then we'd have invented qualia from scratch. The qualia would be precisely the log file that the LLM generated and "sent back around" as input for the next round.

90s_dev 1y ago
https://xkcd.com/55/ https://xkcd.com/55/

CuriouslyC 1y ago

I have the opposite take away from humans having no soul - that the entire universe is aware/alive. We experience consciousness and agency, if there's no magic fairy dust that gets sprinkled on us to make that happen, we shouldn't expect to be fundamentally different from the universe in that respect.

bumby 1y ago
Panpsychism?
- anon84873628 1y ago
  Some say that pure physicalism necessitates panpsychism.

anon84873628 1y ago

The conscious experience is certainly "real" - you can subjectively confirm that. It's just that the free will is an illusion :-)

jdietrich 1y ago

Buddhist theology broadly rejects the existence of the soul, and has a much fuzzier concept of "self" than most religious or secular viewpoints - the Buddhist "self" is not transcendental, but emergent and ephemeral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Buddhism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Buddhism)

aoeusnth1 1y ago

or, hear me out, organic machines have conscious experience because existence itself is divine. Humans don't have a special soul separate from the universe, they have a soul because they are the universe: materialism.

xrhobo 1y ago

The good news is that we have evolved an amazing ability to believe ridiculous narratives as coping strategies so that we aren't frozen by this reality and can still get on with and enjoy life. When ridiculous narratives like Christianity feel worn and outdated, we make up new ridiculous narratives like panpsychism. I would say "organic machine p-zombies with no real truly conscious experience with an operative system built on random, ridiculous, changing narratives. A machine that randomly stops working then other organic machines burn or bury it." The fact I can believe this and still enjoy life so much really is a miracle in the Christian sense.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]