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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/24/2009 9:02:51 AM   
GotSteel


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Termyn8or
I had to hit snopes for this, but they confirm, or at least refuse to deny that the soul weighs 21 grams.


Snopes confirms that in 1907 Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill MA placed dying patients on a scale in an attempt to measure the weight of the human soul. They should confirm that as it's true that he ran the experiment. However that's completely different from endorsing his conclusion as sound. There are a number of issues with Dr. MacDougall’s experiment the most glaring of which is where he asserts that because he can't account for the weight loss it must come from the soul. This is just a rephrasing of the I don't understand therefore god argument which has lead the human race to believe all sorts of ridiculous things. A glaring example of this was: we don't understand lightning therefore it's definitive proof that Zeus is throwing lightning bolts from atop Mt. Olympus.


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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/24/2009 10:25:55 AM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: GotSteel

quote:

ORIGINAL: Termyn8or
I had to hit snopes for this, but they confirm, or at least refuse to deny that the soul weighs 21 grams.


Snopes confirms that in 1907 Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill MA placed dying patients on a scale in an attempt to measure the weight of the human soul. They should confirm that as it's true that he ran the experiment. However that's completely different from endorsing his conclusion as sound. There are a number of issues with Dr. MacDougall’s experiment the most glaring of which is where he asserts that because he can't account for the weight loss it must come from the soul. This is just a rephrasing of the I don't understand therefore god argument which has lead the human race to believe all sorts of ridiculous things. A glaring example of this was: we don't understand lightning therefore it's definitive proof that Zeus is throwing lightning bolts from atop Mt. Olympus.




Until this thread I actually thought this 21 gram nonsense was a joke.

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/24/2009 10:52:47 AM   
kdsub


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quote:

ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy


quote:

ORIGINAL: kdsub

unless we have a constantly changing universe...where the laws change randomly although that is a very real possibility.




Not sure what you mean by this. What laws might change randomly? The laws of physics, which underly all physical phenomena, have remained unchanged since science started, only our level of understanding of them has improved. Or is their rate of random change so slow that it just hasnt happened in the course of human history, and its "a very real possibility" that they will change randomly in the future? (In which case its no more real a possibility as god's existence.)


There have been many speculations that our present known universe may be one of many or one of a line of universes that may very well have totally different properties. Our knowledge has not progressed enough to prove or disprove these speculations so there is the possibility that other universes may exist where our physics may not apply.

ps...We have a long way to go just to understand the physics of our universe...The truth could be a far cry from what we think the truth is today.

Butch

< Message edited by kdsub -- 7/24/2009 10:57:17 AM >


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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/24/2009 11:23:07 AM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: kdsub


There have been many speculations that our present known universe may be one of many or one of a line of universes that may very well have totally different properties. Butch


Which of course says nothing about "changing laws" in OUR universe.

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/24/2009 11:27:31 AM   
kdsub


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quote:

ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy


quote:

ORIGINAL: kdsub


There have been many speculations that our present known universe may be one of many or one of a line of universes that may very well have totally different properties. Butch


Which of course says nothing about "changing laws" in OUR universe.


Yes it does... the laws of our universe could change as well...but that is not the point... To know all the mysteries you would need to know the physics of all universes...and if they are randomly changing with new properties through infinity then you could never know all.

Butch


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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/24/2009 11:30:04 AM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: kdsub


quote:

ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy


quote:

ORIGINAL: kdsub


There have been many speculations that our present known universe may be one of many or one of a line of universes that may very well have totally different properties. Butch


Which of course says nothing about "changing laws" in OUR universe.


Yes it does... the laws of our universe could change as well...but that is not the point... To know all the mysteries you would need to know the physics of all universes...and if they are randomly changing with new properties through infinity then you could never know all.

Butch



No, it really doesnt, given that there is no evidence of changing laws in our universe, and no evidence that there are any other universes to begin with. As far as knowing all even about our universe, Godels incompleteness theorem redux

< Message edited by willbeurdaddy -- 7/24/2009 11:36:21 AM >

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/24/2009 1:09:15 PM   
kdsub


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No sense in us arguing over the reality of any universe…even if ours is the only one…We have no idea, as of yet, of the reality of our own. We don’t know its beginnings…where it is going...or when and how it will end… let alone it’s properties so how can you comment in such absolutes?

For now everything is speculation.

Butch


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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/24/2009 1:26:44 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: kdsub

No sense in us arguing over the reality of any universe…even if ours is the only one…We have no idea, as of yet, of the reality of our own. We don’t know its beginnings…where it is going...or when and how it will end… let alone it’s properties so how can you comment in such absolutes?

For now everything is speculation.

Butch



I didnt think I was. In fact I responded to absolutes citing the ultimate in the unknowable, GIC.

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/24/2009 10:37:37 PM   
Ialdabaoth


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Wow. I can't believe I missed this thread all this time.

My two cents:

Yes, the universe is dualistic, but not in the way that most people think of. There isn't some mystical Platonic universe that is wholely divorced from the physical universe.

However, information exists independent of the physical medium used to store it.

Thus, "information" - in a very real way - is a different sort of thing than mass/energy. When we talk about "entropy", we're not talking so much about just a diminished capacity to do useful work - we're talking in a much more vital way about loss of information.

The thing is, humans and other animals and other living beings and other chunks of mass+energy dancing their merry jigs about the cosmos are fundamentally just information processing units. Some information is more redundant than other information, given certain contextual frameworks - it's much easier to describe most of the features of a 60-kg cube of pure, perfect sodium chloride crystal, for example, than it is to describe most of the features of a 60-kg ballerina, even though they have precisely the same amount of physical 'stuff' in them.

Ultimately, what "matters" about a thing - what we call its "essence" or soul - is its complex, dynamic information content. But it's actually a little more complex than that: what truly matters is the complex, dynamic information as processed by our own dynamic complexity. It's what Douglas Hopfstaedter calls a "strange loop": The thing that makes all this important is the thing itself, looking at itself through several layers of abstraction like a kid in a hall of fun-house mirrors.

Which posits an interesting idea bout souls, morality, karma and love: "love" is the capacity that one process has to emulate another process, to fully understand it and enmesh one's own process with it - to, in Robert Heinlein's words, "grok" it. As stated by Monty Python, "this soul does not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches. It has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved, owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia." The size of one's soul - the level of spiritual depth and maturity that a person achieves in life - is directly correlated to how many different holographic sub-processes that soul is emulating. Put another way, "you can measure a person's soul by how much they love." When we love someone or something - truly love it, not just desire it and call desire "love" to sound deep - we reach out and incorporate a bit of its processing into our own pattern; we truly spend time thinking about what it is and how it acts and how it must feel. And when we truly love something, we find ourselves more and more influenced by its feelings.

Every single one of us can reach out and emulate others. And every single one of us can reach out and encourage others to emulate us. As the Hindu say, "Namaste".

... if all of this makes any goddamn sense whatsoever?

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/24/2009 11:59:31 PM   
FangsNfeet


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Can a robot/computer have a soul?

As we continue to work towards AI, we constantly realize how much hard work it is to create it. With our shaping, molding, and constant add ons, computers are evolving from simple one task workers into multi task complex thinkers. When AI finally happens, these machines/programs will realize that it took inteligent design and years of constant evolutionary changes to make them what they are today.

If we are to ever have a Lt Data, Transformers, or robots as in the Futurama series, we do have to consider the possibilities of what the enternal energy of such a machine would do if and when all its knowledge could not be saved/down loaded and had to be dispersed much like our energy does when we die.

The late 1980's Transformer series and movie Transformers II has already sparked the sci-fi ideas of "Robot Ghost" and a "Robot Heaven"

The debate on weither AI can have a soul or not will continue to be a puzzle for religion, philosophy, and science as we constantly debate the existance of human and animal souls.

For us who believe or investigate ghost, a computer ghost haunting would be interesting or even fasinating documentation in the search of computers being capable of having a soul.

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/25/2009 12:31:06 AM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: FangsNfeet


For us who believe or investigate ghost,


You could have saved a lot of reading time by starting your post with this.

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/25/2009 1:08:06 AM   
FangsNfeet


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Care to share any other thoughts about the topic of computers and souls or ghost?

We define life as having survival instinct, adaptation, and reproduction. In the Sci Fi movie Bicentennial Man, life is also defined with aging and death.

Programs are being created and evolving into seperate species. One if not some of these programs are going to become AI. Weither Asexual or putting together a colaboration of teamwork, computer programs will start making new and more advance programs. While Transformers do not reporduce they do have their Auto Spark or whatever to create new living machines. However, the little flying saucer machines in "Batteries Not Included" produce robotic children much like a birthing. If not by age, programs will have an obsolete time/date much like the struggle we watched in the Matrix Series.

Before we phatom the idea of computers/programs having a soul, we have to decide if a machine/computer program is or can be a form of life. We're looking at hardware, soft ware, and the combinations of multiple programs that can from a super program/computer much like many cellular organisims make up a human body.  

< Message edited by FangsNfeet -- 7/25/2009 1:09:57 AM >


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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/25/2009 1:07:08 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: FangsNfeet


Before we phatom the idea of computers/programs having a soul, we have to decide if a machine/computer program is or can be a form of life.  


Oh cool, then we can have a computer abortion thread.

-Legal as long as it has to be plugged in
-Legal if its existence threatens the chips of the parent computers
-Legal if it was created through the forcible union of a patented computer and an illegal copy

Ie, no, a machine cannot be a form of life. that doesnt preclude growing something truly living that can function as a computer, so it would be a form of life, but not entitled to the protections a human life is afforded, even it is more intelligent than a liberal I mean human.



< Message edited by willbeurdaddy -- 7/25/2009 1:08:57 PM >

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/25/2009 1:37:18 PM   
GotSteel


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quote:

ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

Ie, no, a machine cannot be a form of life.



2 a: a living organism or one of its functional systems  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/machine

Actually all forms of life are machines. The computer abortion joke was hilarious though.

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/25/2009 5:24:10 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: GotSteel

quote:

ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

Ie, no, a machine cannot be a form of life.



2 a: a living organism or one of its functional systems  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/machine

Actually all forms of life are machines. The computer abortion joke was hilarious though.


The prominent definition from your own link is something that is constructed. If you want to nit with secondary and tertiary definitions that virtually no one uses go ahead. A machine cannot be a form of life as 99.999999% of people who arent trying to nit on an internutz board would define a machine.

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/25/2009 6:13:07 PM   
Ialdabaoth


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...However, this is rarely achieved, owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/26/2009 9:41:29 PM   
GotSteel


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quote:

ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

The prominent definition from your own link is something that is constructed. If you want to nit with secondary and tertiary definitions that virtually no one uses go ahead. A machine cannot be a form of life as 99.999999% of people who arent trying to nit on an internutz board would define a machine.


Yeah, having been proven flat out wrong start making up statistics, that will prove your point.

Machine: 4. An intricate natural system or organism, such as the human body.

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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/27/2009 5:27:31 AM   
Aneirin


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quote:

ORIGINAL: GotSteel

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aneirin

It always interested me that the electronic componentry that is in artifical intelligence devices, is made up of the same elements and minerals that nature is, and for that matter, us.


Last I checked we weren't made of silicon.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aneirin

Maybe it is the fact that animal life has another thing in it that so far scientists are unable to isolate, understand, prove and there recreate is the difference between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence. That thing called, the spirit, soul, prana and a myriad of other names across the world, through culture and through history, is the difference, without it, you just have a machine.


No, the difference between animals and computers (I don't want to use the word machines because we are all machines) other than being made of meat is that animals are intelligent and computers are not. It has nothing to do with the soul, faeries, unicorns or any other imaginary thing.



What, no silicon, it itself being the second most abundant mineral in the earth's crust, is an essential mineral to biology, though, in trace forms, called trace minerals. But what of other minerals used within the electronic industry, such minerals as iron, zinc, copper, selenium, manganese, magnesium, cobalt, and whatever others, all are major or trace minerals within the body and required by the body. Sure we have silicon 'chips', integrated circuits made of silicon, but even in this integrated circuit age, we still use discreet components, resistors, transistors, diodes, capacitors, inductors etc and what are they made of, nothing less than minerals, often the same minerals that are in biology and by that, life on earth.

But until there is proof or disproof of the existence of something else that is within life on earth, the existence of a soul or whatever is common to people. A thing perhaps noted and mentioned thousands of years ago by speculators or even knowledgeable people, no way are we to assume the intellect of the past to be wrong, until we can prove it and even then understand their findings in the context of their understanding. Maybe it is, we who some believe to be of superior intellect and understanding are only here isn this age because of the findings and understandings of the past speculators.

We may be masters of machines and tools, but are we masters of the mind, we employ our minds to make better and better machines even machines to take the place of the mind, make everything happen for us, and when that is achieved, what is left for us, where is our quest for machines going, what is the end result.


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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/27/2009 8:49:50 AM   
FullCircle


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Nobody has been able to prove human beings have a soul let alone computers someday developing one.

A human being will judge beauty based on experience by looking at the characteristics adjudged to be beautiful; that they have witnessed in the past. Similarly a computer program can look for certain traits in shape or form adjudged to be beautiful.

We probably over romance things and say ‘you need a soul to judge beauty’ when that probably isn't the case, we set ourselves apart in this way. Perhaps you need a soul to create a work of art or perhaps some computer can create some random image and a human will look upon it as beautiful not knowing it was created by a computer in this random way.

What is a soul anyway? Something that can give a meaning to a certain experience like a smoke detector detecting smoke and saying sound the alarm we are all in danger? Similarly a person sees a fire and screams...fire. Maybe the human screams out of fear because it is programmed to do so and doesn't have a soul in actual fear.

People they can't easily define what it is that a soul is for so how will they know when a computer has one? Ask the relatives of someone with a deteriorating brain if they can still see their soul i.e. that facial expression that makes the person familiar to them sent by a organic nerve centre that as learnt that combination of impulses over a period of time to indicate the recognition of someone they know.



< Message edited by FullCircle -- 7/27/2009 8:50:34 AM >


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RE: to build a human brain..... and kill the soul? - 7/27/2009 3:39:12 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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quote:

ORIGINAL: GotSteel

quote:

ORIGINAL: willbeurdaddy

The prominent definition from your own link is something that is constructed. If you want to nit with secondary and tertiary definitions that virtually no one uses go ahead. A machine cannot be a form of life as 99.999999% of people who arent trying to nit on an internutz board would define a machine.


Yeah, having been proven flat out wrong start making up statistics, that will prove your point.

Machine: 4. An intricate natural system or organism, such as the human body.



Note the "4".

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