Imagine this: In the far, far future, long after you’ve died, you’ll eventually come back to life. So will everyone else who ever had a hand in the history of human civilization. But in this scenario, returning from the dead is the relatively normal part
something something science as the new religion
This article is a summary of a paper by two Russian dudes that starts with explaining the ideas of Russian cosmism. Fedorov came up with the idea that to fullfull the Christian prophesy scientists would figure out the way to ressurect everyone who's ever lived, but because that's a lot of people we also need to colonise other planets for them to live there. Fedorov was a mentor to Tsiolkovsky, got him interested in space travel and rockets.
I hate this. It basically comes down to "oh you didn't share everything about yourself on social media so you'll come back an emotional cronenberg and have to live a fake life"
but in a really cool way though, i love big wobbly space rings
They already figured it out in the TNG episode relics. They encounter a Dyson sphere and Scotty came back from being presumed dead.
One of the great "discover something that fundamentally alters enormous parts of the show and then never talk about it again" episodes.
There's a commentary track on the blu-ray where they talked about how the Dyson Sphere really should have gotten its own episode with better focus and not a B plot for this one. They definitely regret pissing that one away.
cause if you make a copy of something that first thing and second thing are still independent of each other.
a copy of your consciousness will exist, but it wont be YOUR consciousness.
your consciousness is a result of drugs produced by your brain.
Neal Stephenson wrote a sequel to Reamde 2 years ago titled "Fall.. or Dodge in Hell" that goes in on the topic of your conversation. Extremely trippy thought experiment that assumes that having mapped out your neural map in full, and actively simulating your brain could register consciousness in a virtual sandbox. It explores the power struggle experienced when managing the power consumption of this simulation, and how this impacts the resources and politics of organic life on earth as it is shaped by a cloud computing monolith in which all people have the opportunity to join the digital hive.
Not sure if Neal is considered reactionary because his insights often do stray towards lolbertarian ego, but he usually remains restrained materially.
I guess I don’t really see how the same logic doesn’t apply to an actual human brain, which itself is basically an organic computer
Is it though? It's a common assumption but it's far from confirmed, our current models of consciousness are very rudimentary despite what techbros would like you to believe.
Check out this article: https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-cannot-have-evolved-auid-1302
I’ve kind of already had this conversation in this thread including reading some articles by that author, I’m not really convinced by him, and I think that his ideas rely just as much on assumption, if only different ones.
Can you explain why? I've yet to see a convincing rebuttal to the argument I linked, I'd like to hear it.
Tbh I’m a bit surprised you find that argument convincing to begin with, there are a number of issues with it that jump out at me
our ability to subjectively experience the world and ourselves—is no exception: it, too, must give us some survival advantage, otherwise natural selection wouldn’t have fixed it in our genome.
First this, the premise of the entire argument, is not true. This is not how evolution works, and the entire argument is based on this incorrect idea about evolution.
A lot of the rest of it is semantic sleight of hand. Like
There is something it feels like to see the colour red, which is not captured by merely noting the frequency of red light. If we were to tell Helen Keller that red is an oscillation of approximately 4.3*1014 cycles per second, she would still not know what it feels like to see red.
The “something it feels like to see the colour red” not being the same thing as the wavelength of the color red doesn’t mean that both things aren’t the result of material reality. He’s making one argument “the feeling of seeing the color red is different from knowing the physical quantities that make the color red” (which is obvious) and passing it off as another argument “the feeling of seeing the color red is immaterial”, which he doesn’t actually offer any support or evidence of.
Ultimately buying into his argument requires rejecting materialism, but he’s more or less just asserting that consciousness is this thing that can’t be the result of material reality, I don’t see any convincing argument in support of this assertion.
Uh you didn't really do a good job responding to the argument, it seems like you didn't even read it properly and instead want to nitpick semantics.
The point of the argument is, if phenomenal consciousness doesn't have a causal effect on the material world, why did we evolve it? If something is to evolve, that something has to have some causal feedback loop with nature, and in a physicalist viewpoint this is not so.
You could argue phenomenal consciousness is an accident (a spandrel is the official term I think) but it's a hell of an accident if you ask me. I don't think you can really convince me that something that doesn't have a causal effect in nature evolved to align so well with what's happening in nature.
I don’t see any convincing argument in support of this assertion.
It's literally in the rest of the article, you should probably just read it in its entirety.
If something is to evolve, that something has to have some causal feedback loop with nature,
I literally JUST told you that this is not how evolution works, all you’re doing is restating the false premise.
The article is shit, the argument is shit, in fact it’s not even really an argument, it’s only an assertion so there’s not much more to respond to.
Then how does it work then?
The article is shit, the argument is shit, in fact it’s not even really an argument, it’s only an assertion so there’s not much more to respond to.
Uh okay, I literally just wanted to have a discussion, why be a dipshit about it?
Also you do realize "matter is the only substance and everything comes from it" is also "just an assertion"? The point is to argue your assertions.
Harmful traits are selected against, positive traits aren’t selected for, evolution is not some teleological process where every trait has a “why”, it’s a process of random mutations. Forgive me if I can’t take seriously an argument that revolves entirely around a fictitious version of evolution, the author couldn’t take it seriously himself by actually reading something about how evolution works first before making it the cornerstone of his argument.
You started being a “dipshit” claiming I didn’t read the whole article when I did, starting your comment with the purposely pretentious reddit “uh”, shut up. Nothing more obnoxious than somebody who does this crap and plays victim when their shit gets flung back at them.
Harmful traits are selected against, positive traits aren’t selected for, evolution is not some teleological process where every trait has a “why”, it’s a process of random mutations.
Sure, but for natural selection to work you need some causal feedback loop, right? The evolved traits in the end need to interact with matter so they can be judged by nature (in the abstract sense of course, I don't want you accusing me of believing in Gaia or whatever) as positive or negative. They "why" is the mechanism of natural selection, and I just don't see how consciousness fits there.
Also you didn't respond to my "spandrel" argument at all, which is what you're seemingly implying consciousness is, correct me if I'm wrong on this.
You started being a “dipshit” claiming I didn’t read the whole article when I did, starting your comment with the purposely pretentious reddit “uh”, shut up. Nothing more obnoxious than somebody who does this crap and plays victim when their shit gets flung back at them.
Fair point I guess, but you still escalated for no good reason, but fine we can do the debatebro shit, I can take it.
What is the negative effect of consciousness on the ability to pass down one’s genes that would cause it to definitely be selected against to the point that anybody could say it “couldn’t have evolved”?
It's not about consciousness being either positive or negative, by definition it has to be neutral from a physicalist perspective since all is matter and consciousness is wholly a product of matter and by itself has no chance of showing itself as either positive or negative. So a physicalist view kinda forces you to think of consciousness as an accident in evolution.
Now if it's an accident why has consciousness even evolved in the exact way it did given these physicalist assumptions? It seems to have no reason to, unless you bring into the picture an intelligent designer or that it's this one in a trillion accident, both of which seem unlikely to me.
To me (and the author of the article) it would make much more sense to assume consciousness itself is a basic substance of existence.
It’s not about consciousness being either positive or negative
It is about that. You can’t make a convincing case that something “could not have evolved” unless it has a negative affect on the ability to survive or reproduce, or is not heritable.
It could have evolved, but if it has no causal effect then you can only regard it as a "evolutionary spandrel", or an accident basically. Neutral traits exist.
The whole point of the argument is examining whether declaring it a spandrel makes sense. I don't think it does.
Literally all evolution is “accidental”, there is no such thing as purposeful evolution.
I don't know how to explain it better honestly, but I'll try again.
You believe everything is matter and consciousness is somehow reducible to matter, right? That means consciousness in of itself does not have any causal effect on the material world, correct?
If so that means that consciousness cannot be part of any natural selection process, and if it wasn't why did it evolve in the exact way it did? Why even is there consciousness? And if there is why isn't it just a random collection of experiences that don't at all correspond to the material world at all? The only real answer from a physicalist perspective is that it's just this big coincidence, which just seems very unlikely to me. If your theory depends on assuming this huge coincidence then your theory is kind of in trouble IMO.
You believe everything is matter and consciousness is somehow reducible to matter, right? That means consciousness in of itself does not have any causal effect on the material world, correct?
No, what? It doesn’t mean that at all.
Alright, can you elaborate? What is consciousness from your point of view and how does it causally interact with matter?
I honestly do not even understand the question “how does it causally interact with matter”? Consciousness is awareness of existence, and it is the result of some processes of the body and brain.
Alright, what is the "awareness of existence"? I'm talking about the qualitative, subjective aspect of consciousness, the "feels" if you will, the redness of red, the pain and pleasure etc. Where does that fit in your view? Is all of it caused by interactions of matter?
If that is so then you agree with the premises of my previous comment: https://hexbear.net/post/91483/comment/1013036
Or am I missing some nuance here?
Why would consciousness being the result of interactions of matter mean that it doesn’t itself have any effect on other matter? That simply doesn’t follow logically
How does it have an effect then if the subjective contents of the consciousness are wholly dependent on configurations of matter?
Having a causal effect would mean the subjective feels themselves exert some kind of influence over matter.
Literally everything is the result of material things, what you’re saying makes no sense at all, it would be equally (not) applicable to literally any quality of any living thing. It’s mumbo jumbo
Not sure I understand honestly. You admit the subjective qualities of consciousness are purely the result of matter interacting. That necessarily implies only a one way causal direction, meaning that subjective feels in of themselves don't actually do anything in the material world.
That necessarily implies only a one way causal direction,
NO, IT DOESNT
How does it? You can’t jump from “X is the result of material reality” to “X can have no affect on material reality”. What is the logical process you’re using to claim that the first thing “necessarily implies” the second? It’s a complete non sequitor
I guess it isn't necessarily implied in of itself but it sure is heavily implied in a physicalist framework. Otherwise you have to admit there's some kind of "consciousness particle" that interacts with matter, which is something no physicalist admits to.
Not sure why we're arguing this is not even that controversial, most scientists and physicalist philosophers admit that subjective feels have no causal effect on reality and are wholly a product of the material brain doing stuff (except Daniel Dennet and other illusionists I guess but honestly their viewpoint is just a bunch of rhetorical slights of hand and are completely missing the point)
No, I don’t agree that would need to be “consciousness particle”, I’m not sure where you’re getting all this stuff to be honest, it just keeps coming out of nowhere. Consciousness is a quality that we ascribe to things, whether something has that quality or not affects the way that thing interacts with other things.
What you’re saying doesn’t make any more sense for consciousness than it would for any other quality. “If pregnancy is the result of material processes, then pregnancy can’t have any affect on the material world unless there’s a pregnancy particle”. This is literal gibberish, it’s not an argument from logic. I feel that you assign some sort of mystical otherworldliness to the quality of consciousness and assuming that I share this idea about it. I don’t.
Edit: good talking with you, I’m going to bed as it’s quite late here. If I log on tomorrow I’ll try to continue discussing
What you’re saying doesn’t make any more sense for consciousness than it would for any other quality
Alright, you're getting there. Now you just have to realize that all qualities are in essence mental constructs, nowhere in the material world does "pregnancy" exist, atoms and EM fields don't know nothing about babies. "pregnancy" is an abstract quality of organisms that exists only in our minds that we use to make sense of the material world, and our minds are made up of subjective experiences, which is what the discussion is about. When you're doing logic and math and science you're doing it within the confines of your awareness, which again is "just" a bunch of subjective feels. You can't really hope to separate qualities as you understand them from your own mind, because you are your mind and you understand everything through your mind. The material world can function just fine without knowing about pregnancy and other quality or abstract concept, but your mind cannot. The question is where does the mind fit in the whole picture.
I feel that you assign some sort of mystical otherworldliness to the quality of consciousness and assuming that I share this idea about it.
I'm not assigning any mysticism, you're ignoring the relevance of mind existing in a seemingly exclusively material universe. That's what the "hard problem of consciousness" is all about, explaining how our minds fit in the material world. It's a question as old as philosophy itself and it has not yet been adequately solved.
Now you just have to realize that all qualities are in essence mental constructs, nowhere in the material world does “pregnancy” exist
This isn’t true, the words we use to describe things are just language games, sure, but words like “pregnancy” or “consciousness” are referring to actual real world phenomena. You can’t say because a word referring to something is an abstraction that the thing itself is abstract.
I don’t believe in a hard problem of consciousness, this isn’t a “problem” in my materialist world view. Consciousness is just one of many aspects of certain living things, it may be more complicated than other aspects but that doesn’t mean it “couldn’t have evolved” or “isn’t material” or whatever.
This isn’t true, the words we use to describe things are just language games, sure, but words like “pregnancy” or “consciousness” are referring to actual real world phenomena.
What is the actual real world material phenomenon of "pregnancy"? It's just a clump of matter slowly growing inside another clump of matter, material reality doesn't need your concept of pregnancy to do its work. Why does it need a name? The actual concept of pregnancy lives entirely in your mind, not in the material world. It's a symbol for you to make sense of the world, and it's a part of your mind. Now again, what is the mind?
I don’t believe in a hard problem of consciousness, this isn’t a “problem” in my materialist world view. Consciousness is just one of many aspects of certain living things, it may be more complicated than other aspects but that doesn’t mean it “couldn’t have evolved” or “isn’t material” or whatever.
What are living things? It's all just clumps of matter, why do clumps of matter develop consciousness? Those are pretty big questions for your worldview, you don't really get to just brush them off like that, you need to account for the existence of your mind somehow.
It’s just a clump of matter slowly growing inside another clump of matter,
Yes, so it is a real world, material phenomenon, which is what I said.
you need to account for the existence of your mind somehow.
I did, my mind exists as a result of physical/chemical processes within my body and brain. That’s it. This poses absolutely no problem for me, it’s a problem for you because you insist on treating consciousness as unique, other or above matter. That’s a you problem, I don’t have that problem.
I did, my mind exists as a result of physical/chemical processes within my body and brain. That’s it. This poses absolutely no problem for me, it’s a problem for you because you insist on treating consciousness as unique, other or above matter. That’s a you problem, I don’t have that problem.
Which brings us back to this comment again: https://hexbear.net/post/91483/comment/1013036
I was literally you a year or two ago when I started researching this stuff, I get that you think you've got it figured out but please give it a chance. You're making logical errors in your thinking without realizing it.
Yes, you are. The subjective feeling in of itself cannot be equal to configurations of matter, it's literally like saying the cup on your desk is literally the abstract concept of the number "2". It makes no sense at all, it's a complete non sequitur.
You literally twisted your mind in a knot to force yourself not to think about this properly.
No, you’re honestly just rambling now and projecting. Be a non-materialist if you want, but you’ve presented nothing resembling a coherent argument in favor of it, just circular reasoning and mumbo jumbo.
but you’ve presented nothing resembling a coherent argument in favor of it, just circular reasoning and mumbo jumbo.
I could say the same to you too, your viewpoint makes absolutely 0 sense. Like I get saying consciousness is a stuff that's caused by matter interacting but what you're proposing is just patently absurd.
It's fascinating, it's like you're completely unable to metacognize your own awareness, this is beyond me, I give up.
Please don’t message me anymore, I don’t have any interest in arguing against pseudoscientific nonsense anymore.
Little do you know how pseudoscientific you're being, but whatever, it was a good talk I guess, bye.
Ok well, I disagree. And the article hasn’t changed my mind
By viewing the brain as a computer that passively responds to inputs and processes data, we forget that it is an active organ, part of a body that is intervening in the world, and which has an evolutionary past that has shaped its structure and function.
No, you don’t have to forget any of that to understand the brain as a computer, it just makes it a more complicated one.
I really just disagree with a lot in this essay, it seems like most of the “the brain is nothing like a computer” argument comes down to strictly limiting the definition of a computer to only include certain digital computers already developed by humans. At least the author seems to acknowledge that his opinion about consciousness being impossible to ever replicate with technology is one that a lot of scientists disagree with.
Yeah, I can’t say I really agree with that one either, but I am a materialist and that one is by an author who says he wrote a book called “why materialism is baloney” so I wouldn’t expect to agree with him.
Short of becoming the machine at least for a brief moment, we cannot know whether there is anything it is like to be it.
This is, again, something I could just as easily say about any human that isn’t myself.
In reply to your edit, I appreciate the links and the conversation. I’m not really equipped to defend my position in the way the article writers have defended theirs at the moment, I will just say that my basic argument is that matter is what is real, and human consciousness arises from the way physical matter is arranged to make a human, so it’s something that is replicable even if we don’t have the means to replicate it yet (and even if we might never).
Not speaking for AnarchoMalarkeyist, not sure what they had in mind but IMO it's because a physicalist solution to the mind-body problem doesn't really make sense when you think about it.
I think the most damning argument against mind-body physicalism is this and I've yet to see a proper rebuttal: https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-cannot-have-evolved-auid-1302
Basically consciousness cannot possibly be generated by or equal to physical stuff, so any kind of purely physical model of the brain wouldn't produce consciousness.
like no i am good we could try to not bound a star to our will with an extremelly evil looking machine
This article is dumb but a dyson sphere/swarm is cool and probably feasible
like i am goofing because they picked just the most ominous image possible but yeah it is and it is cool to trully harness the power of the sun in the same sense we did to the atom i get it
like would it look less or more evil if it had like billions of statues on the surface of the machine to trap the sun
They've realized Elon Musk isn't going to invent an immortality serum and they need to move on to Plan B.
I mean, you won't be coming back from the dead. It would be akin to a clone of you, containing your memories. But the neurons and cells that comprised you will still be dead as fuck.
While I agree with the semantics of this, you know what I was saying lol. The new 'you' will lack your consciousness or what have you.
no it's definitely a replica, the old one was destroyed entirely and rotted away like 30,000 years before the sphere dumb ass
But, what if we gradually replaced small amounts of neurons and let the brain adapt over time, that's an interesting thought experiment
If you had a non-conscious coma for a few days but came back fully after, did you die and is the next person inhabiting your body not you? Many of your cells will die and be replaced - neurons are a notable exemption - yet you are still you and call your meat your body no matter how many cells are replaced. But, surely, even your neurons will replace the atoms that make it up over time. You can never step in the same river twice and all that, you will never have this EXACT configuration of atoms and cells that you do right now. But you wouldn't hesitate to recognize you as a continuation from yesterday to tomorrow despite this. And at a high level, you recognize yourself in a photo in the past even though you and that person may have different memories (certainly, current you has more than yesterday you) so in order for "you" to be around you don't even need exactly the same memories. At varying levels, we all accept that you don't need things to be exactly the same in order for your "youness" to be recognized (you don't need the exact same atoms, you don't need precisely the same cells, you don't need exactly the same network of neurons, etc.)
If the only thing that counts as you is this particular configuration, then why couldn't you bring someone back from the dead? If all you are is quantum state vectors and some function over time describing their change, why do those have to be computed by the physical universe instead of a dyson sphere? In this view, "you" isn't a process that has to be unique and sequential, "you" could be distributed and parallel - there can absolutely be many of "you" running around all with equal claim of being you.
There is something to the fact that we are all doomed to die and even if we survive this century and go on to construct technological wonders that can resurrect us in 1000 years, we will have lived and died and something will have been lost in the intervening time. Even if we can't exactly put our finger on what... a soul? The continuity of consciousness? Something does indeed seem to be lost.
Is there some place you can sign up to get cremated automatically?
But also, a digital model of a biological brain (that doesn't have billions of weird glitches) is impossible, change my mind.
What about the brain is not modelable? It clearly exists in the physical universe and we clearly have the capacity to simulate physical things to different degrees of approximation. You might not be able to simulate a mind on a thumb drive but you can drill down all the way to simulating every quantum state vector in the volume of a human mind and nervous system if needed and just slow down the internal computational clock. Maybe you need a computer the size of a warehouse and a digital second of thought might be the equivalent of a year to us, but it doesn't seem impossible to simulate the physical system of the brain from first principles.
Getting a model of a brain from a living or dead human seems like it might be impossible. No idea how you could scan or image someone's total brain.
Why would be digital model of a biological brain be impossible? There are already digital models of small parts of brains of varying degrees of accuracy.
This is basically the ending to The Light of Other Days (which was apparently itself borrowing from the ideas of one Nikolai Fyodorov) but with a Dyson Sphere thrown in for the hell of it.
Nikolai Fyodorov was a Russian dude that died prior to the revolution, but he figured way back in the late 19th century that it is in fact Humanity's common task to eliminate mortality. He was even more radical than merely giving everyone currently alive immortality, he also thought there must be a scientific, material way to resurrect previously dead humans.
Kinda neat that those ideas are still around.
Most people here are arguing whether a computer simulation can be you, but even if it can (the idea I'm partial to), how much "you" can you get just of of recordings left by you? Seems like too sparse of dataset even if you post a lot. There was a Black Mirror episode with this exact premise. "Be right back" or something.
