Fear of death.

whoops! TOES

there is nothing, no part of me, that i can imagine persisting after the death of my body.

im sort with Unamuno on this question: life after death is essentially "unthinkable" and our only ways of thinking about it make it seem kinda sucky.

"What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium, and without death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his Consolatio ad Marciam (xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again: ista moliri. And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to see God in the flesh, not in the spirit. And what but that is the meaning of that comic conception of eternal recurrence which issued from the tragic soul of poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?

late great-

You're picking apart my argument and the best you can do is bring me back to a stance of "I have no idea."

If you were successful, how do you then take me in the opposite direction and convince me the shot-in-the-dark afterlife scenario is just as legitimate?

my stance is actually "i have no idea ... wait, do i have ideas?"

i feel like there are many parts of my body i could imagine existing without, least among them my head, though i can certainly imagine losing all my senses and continuing consciousness, maybe. anyway i know that is all workings of brain and not body but sometimes i feel as though there are certain perceptions, like the perception of time, space and ego that seem to be "behind" the screen of consciousness and i have come to conclusion through experiments in electroshock therapy that scramble these sensations

actually there is a missing bit there, that the workings of the brain are consciousness

this shit's been fucking with me lately. sometimes i feel like my heart is just going to stop beating for no reason, cuz why not?

ego is actually in front of consciousness, but i think space and time are behind that consciousness

anyway the egyptians thought we had seven levels of consciousness that scattered in more or less opposite directions when you died, only one was the physical remains

jordan is that a lil b line?

just got shoes! don't got feet.

Im sort with Unamuno on this question: life after death is essentially "unthinkable" and our only ways of thinking about it make it seem kinda sucky.

Well, the Christian doctrine of resurrection involves a resurrection of the body. In some way we can't understand, it will be a perfected spiritual body, but a body nonetheless. I'll admit that it still seems pretty weird if you start to think about it.

The question of what makes up consciousness is really the big Q right now. if consciousness is a physical phenominon that can be measured, it's possible that whatever arrangement of particles that creates "you" will probably occur again in a parallel universe. Or perhaps when this one collapses upon itself and starts over. And when you're dead, your mind traverses infinity years until it exists again. If it's not something that can be measured then there's a question of whether or not it really exists at all. But then, "I think, therefore I am". Maybe someday we'll grow a brain in a lab.

If we can create a super computer that can react in a human way- appear to have emotions, improvise, create ideas, a personality- at what point does that computer have a consciousness of it's own? Can that consciousness leave the computer once it is shut down forever?

wasn't kurzweil trying to upload himself into some kind of anime character?

I kind of wonder about that. For example, what if a computer like Watson could start generating novels. I'm sure there's a certain level for which it could do this sort of thing. For example, kids books are all pretty simple. Animal X is this color, does these things, and then goes to sleep. If it analyzed a million children's books, it could probably write its own. But how deep can it go? Would it be able to understand symbolism? Could it produce something like Heart of Darkness? I dunno, this is over my head.

i think you guys are mostly approaching this thing from the wrong direction. there's no reason to assume consciousness is some positive emergent phenomena when it fact it's more likely a kind of negative capability, what Sartre called "a hole in Being." you could just as well theorize it (paradoxically) as a kind of constitutive blindness that hides as much as it reveals. our nervous system, for instance, is only able to be aware of and interpret its own self-referential loops. the "outside" in this sense is forever hidden--"awareness" is the product of not seeing as much as it is seeing.

not to get all Zen on you.

Well the idea of the computer question coincides with my perspective on the brain and human consciousness, that a brain wouldn't suddenly be awarded supernatural preservation at any point in it's complexity outside of its production of activity. That our mind has become the way it has over an unthinkable amount of time but if a computer could catch up somehow or get close, when we or it is completely shut down that is it. There is no more sensation, just inanimate matter.

ryan can you expand on that a bit? do you mean that consciousness is a fundamental separation and in "knowing" we create a kind of trick reality? seems kind of uhhh gnostic or something. i like it! are there authors/thinkers out there who talk about consciousness more along these lines? xp

like consciousness is a tumor destroying a larger host body/reality...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/17/DoorsofPerception.jpg/200px-DoorsofPerception.jpg

uh oh you brought up the "G" word. i wont touch that but yes you could call it a kind of "virtual" reality. i am basing a lot of this on the notational theories of George Spencer-Brown and Charles S. Peirce (or my interpretations thereof), but the essential idea is that self-organization is always a product of a separation (even a "falseness") from an environment.

"What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" is a classic essay along these lines:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/946105/What-the-Frogs-Eye-Tells-the-Frogs-Brain-Lettvin-Maturana-McCulloch-Pitts

thanking u

if you've ever done some absent minded thing like take soup out of the microwave, then go to fridge to get some milk and leave your soup in the fridge, would you count that as being conscious? what if you spend the whole day doing stuff like that?

there's some interesting topics in psychology that touch on some of this stuff. like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

Interested in late great's response to the super computer scenario

evan we have no way of knowing, just as we have no way of knowing at what point a person starts or stops "feeling" the world

whether that supercomputer is a consciousness like ours, that's a chinese room problem. if you can convince yourself the chinese room is wrong, you can then think of it as a semantic question. if a computer had a human soul would it end the same way as a human soul? and your answer would be yes, and computers could have souls like ours. we still haven't answered whether we've got a soul or if you want to call it some qualia that continues, and no there's no proof of that, but this is the absurd scenario you created doesn't prove machines consciousness can't continue after death either

"you created and it"

iow i think the supercomputer is a canard

no wait, not a canard

a red herring

How is it so absurd? Someday I think a computer will exist that will spark debate about whether it has a consciousness, because it will be able to react to stimuli and form ideas and express them on some level. When that line is crossed, are you saying it comes down now to your belief in a soul?

Or say it is only hypothetical- do you believe this advancement can never be achieved?

you're asking me if we can ever build a human computer. i'm saying sure, even if we did, we'd be back where we were arguing from in the AM about whether there were any conscious qualia that could continue after death, you were saying people who did were selfish or something

jordan is that a lil b line?

― the late great, Thursday, September 27, 2012 5:02 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

haha

It isn't a red herring because 1) It's as possible, if not way more, than the existence of an afterlife 2) It is partly a metaphor for my assertion that the brain is only a very complex mechanical system that produces consciousness

isn't there a more fundamental question to answer what constitutes conscious qualia for living people? i feel like even a not-so-supercomputer could get a lot of traction by pointing out people zoning out all the time doesn't present for a good case that they're conscious either.

the supercomputer is a distraction, sure if the brain is a complex mechanical system that "produces" consciousness, that system breaking down doesn't remove the consciousness, necessarily, nor is there much reason depending on your semantics to consider it continued

you never proved the consciousness was there in the machine in the first place?

from this TRS-80 or Tandy or whatever robot that's on trial's perspective, it's humans who haven't yet proved they are conscious.

Yeah I wasn't trying to prove it had consciousness to you but that at what point would in it's complex human simulation would you think it has a consciousness of its own?

I love Ryan's recent posts here!

Let's say this super computer has found more and more efficient ways of calculating/existing. The Kurzweilian theories point to quantum computing being a real possibility for breaking some technical barriers such as the speed of light. I don't think it's absurd to think that a believably conscious computer would have to be somewhat self-built. For instance i don't really think it's possible to build a computer brain, but conceivably one could build the systems that would self-grow a brain, in ways that really wouldn't be feasible to build from the ground-up. Such a system would likely use DNA or quantum computing; more abstract systems that have fewer limits, are more efficient, but the workings of which are probably going to not be fully comprehensible to us. This highly advanced computer consciousness would be a collection of self-aware energy patterns. Maybe then a form of consciousness would grow from within the matter.

This is all obviously conjecture BS but it seems to make sense.

And what happens, in your opinion, when you shut such a computer off?

what happens when people go to sleep? non-REM i mean.

to sleep perchance to dream

And if the computer is destroyed?

then we're back to the human question

In what sense

what happens to human consciousness when the brain computer stops working

That post-electronic computer consciousness i described pretty much won't be able to be shut off. It'll have evolved to grow itself, possibly computing through energy patterns far above what runs our modern computers, and using more abstract and decentralized processes. Especially if the computer wants to be more and more efficient.

But if you destroy the computer at that point, does it have an afterlife?

it might and it might not, just like a human might or might not