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Author | Topic: Choosing a faith | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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One specific thing that I respected about Bart is that he never encouraged me to drop my faith or throw God away, as our Texas curmudgeon suggested. I'll defend jar here. He (and several others of us) can see that you are making poor decisions. And he wants to see you making better decisions. It is that bad decision making that he particularly wants you to throw away, but he suspects that it is all part of the same package.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
I recently answered a post by Stile where he talked about rolling a dice. This is not the point he was making, but if I roll a dice and it comes up 3, how would I know whether or not God interfered and caused it to come up as a 3. I agree that there is no way to tell. But why do you think that matters? What difference does it make?Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Couldn't you just buy the Kindle version and be reading it now? That would be my attitude. However, some people just do not like e-books. My wife is such a person. She has her own kindle but almost never uses it. Maybe GDR is like that.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Here is an interesting wiki piece on the subject. Quantum Mind I won't say much about it, either, other than that I am skeptical. Quantum mechanics is involved in everything, so it is likely to be involved in consciousness. But that doesn't mean we have to look for anything special. When we look at someone, we can usually tell whether that person is conscious or unconscious. As far as I am concerned, consciousness should just mean the state of being conscious. But somehow, people have managed to throw in a lot of bullshit and woo. As Stile argued in Message 592, being conscious is just part of our evolved nature. There isn't any real "problem of consciousness" .Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Then we can make AI systems with an AC (artificial consciousness) I'm pretty sure that's never going to happen.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Where do see the stop that would keep us from such glory? A conscious AI would seem to require an objective account of the subjective. This looks impossible. Our objective accounts emerge from our own subjective accounts. If subjective can come from objective, and objective comes from subjective, then that would seem to leave the objective disconnected from reality.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
A conscious AI would seem to require an objective account of the subjective. Why? Does your consciousness require such? Presumably an AC would need to be designed and built. We would need objective specifications for that. No, our consciousness does not require that because we are not designed. If you can find a way of evolving AC, then there might be a possibility. But would it then be artificial?
Are you proposing an AC minus emotions? I'm not proposing anything. I'm the skeptic of what you have been proposing.
Our objective accounts emerge from our own subjective accounts. Not by my definition. Our objective experiences and knowledge are those independent of us, verifiable with comparisons of fact, unburdened by the emotional baggage that often accompanies subjective evaluations. I'm not sure what you mean by "subjective" and "objective". Experience is inherently subjective. Experience cannot be independent of the experiencer.
Objective facts do not flow from our subjective meanderings. I have not suggested anything about meanderings. Objective facts depend on experience (visual experience, auditory experience, tactile experience for example). And experience is fundamentally subjective because only the subject has that experience.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Are you seeing ghosts behind consciousness that we will be unable to find and simulate? There are no ghosts. But consciousness is not the kind of thing that can be simulated.
Much too simply but objective: physical ... subjective: mental/emotional Are you seeing ghosts behind emotions? I consider emotions to be very physical.
How do you define them? I don't define them. But I understand "subjective" to refer to that which is based on the experience and judgement of an individual subject, and "objective" to refer to what is the collective assessment of the community. As an example, the appearance of a banana to me is subjective. I have no idea what a banana looks like to you, though I tend to assume it is probably the same as what it looks like to me. But I have no basis for that assumption because I cannot access your visual experience just as you cannot access my visual experience. On the other hand, the way that I talk about and describe a banana is (I hope) objective, because I am able to compare that description and way of talking with other people and there seems to be reasonable agreement about it.
But, I see the experience as objective, even into the physical body. I see nothing inherently subjective about the physics of vision, sound, touch and the memory apparatus that records them. I agree on the physics of vision, sound etc. However, consciousness has to do with the experience of vision, sound etc. The physics of my vision is pretty similar to the physics of your vision. Yet, for all I know, my visual experience of a banana might be like your visual experience of an avacado. That's why the experience is considered subjective.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
So why can’t a consciousness be simulated? If it has simulated consciousness, then is it really conscious? I'll remain skeptical.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Consciousness is a physical process. It is only a physical process. Is it not? Consciousness is so poorly defined, it is hard to say what it is. Some people are saying that consciousness is an illusion. Others are saying that everything (including rocks) are conscious. I don't agree with either of those extremes. However, I do suspect that the so called "problem of consciousness" isn't a real problem at all. If we go along with the panpsychists, then AI systems are already conscious. If we instead go with the illusionists, then humans aren't conscious. We can study and learn more about how we humans interact with the world. But what is thus discovered will probably not be considered an explanation of consciousness. And our AI systems will probably never interact with the world in the same way that we do, if only because we won't want our AI systems to be as irrational as humans can be.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Over and over again, the same question. I'm suspecting that GDR is having a serious crisis of faith. He probably started this thread in an attempt to reassure himself, hoping that his doubts would go away. It does not seem to be working.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
The discipline, as science does, should recognize the physical/neurochemical structure of what consciousness is by consensus. Perhaps it doesn't have a physical/neurochemical structure. Perhaps it has more of a behavioral structure. And we all behave differently. Science is based on systematization. And maybe we are all too different for consciousness to be systematized.
When you say AI are you seeing artificial intelligence as artificial consciousness? My view of AI is that it is a problem half-solved. We have the "artificial" part working. Or, said differently, I'm skeptical of the claims of AI.
When you say AI are you seeing artificial intelligence as artificial consciousness? I see AI systems as neither intelligent nor conscious.
Is there a difference between intelligence and consciousness? What those have in common, is that we are unable to come up with a clear definition of either. So it is hard to day whether they are the same. Some people see them as the same, and some people see them as different. Last month, I did a blog post about intelligence:
What is intelligence? I did not mention consciousness in that blog post.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Excepting the coocoo, what claims from less nutty sources raise your skepticism? Claims that AI systems are intelligent. Really, they are just dumb computers following programmed rules.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
I believe that the Bible was written by humans that were inspired to write down their stories but that is not to be taken to me that is to be taken as 100% factual as if it was dictated by God. I believe that all of the Bible should be questioned and understood in terms of the time and culture in which it was written, and we should be discerning in how we understand it. That part seems reasonable.
What I do believe absolutely as a theist is that there is an external intelligence that is involved in our lives primarily if not exclusively through our consciousness. There, I see you paying too much attention to consciousness. You are making it seem like magic. But it's just part of our evolved nature.
As a Christian I am convinced that God did resurrect Jesus into a renewed bodily form and that the ultimate plan is for the renewal of this world. Back when I became a Christian (at around age 11), I believed that. But later, at around age 17, I looked more carefully at the account of the resurrection in Matthew, and found it impossible to believe. Yes a God could work such miracles. But if those events occurred as described, then reports of that should have spread around the world. But they didn't. So I began to doubt the physical resurrection. And I guess that was my first step toward leaving Christianity.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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nwr Member Posts: 6408 From: Geneva, Illinois Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
AI is just a marketing buzzword. There's no real AI out there. Yes, exactly this.Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity
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