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[MaximumZero]

Worse than that = toxicoma ghandii (right spelling?)

Toxoplasma gondii. I don't think Gandhi had anything to do with cat poo.

[scrdest]

Worse than that = toxicoma ghandii (right spelling?). It affects your personality. A lot of people have it, too, and what's worse, it makes you like cats (DF is the perfect antidote to this, making you like !!cats!!).

Also, how many people would respond to being duplicated against their will with immediate retribution against the perpetrator, and how many with sheer chaos and confusion concerning the situation, do you think?

It allegedly affects personality, and the cats thing is not 'liking' them, it's tuning you (or at least mice) to not perceive the smell of cat pee as bad.

[LordBucket]

Circular logic that didn't answer the question. Things with souls have souls. Well. Why do they have souls? What determines having a soul or not?

The statement was not intended as a logic process at all. Your question doesn't make a lot of sense. You may as well ask "what 's the qualification for having an apple on your desk?" The qualifier for there being an apple on your desk is whether there's an apple on your desk. The qualifier for having a soul is whether you have a soul.

What determines having a soul or not?

What determines whether you have an apple on your desk?

Your question isn't meaningful.

Souls cannot be seen, measured, detected or inferred. Where do they come into play? Memories and the personality generated by the brain can be seen via brain activity. They can be changed by altering the storage medium i.e. the brain. This suggests that personality - the 'you' - is generated by the brain. Where do souls come in to that? What do they do? We don't need to imbue programs with some mystical ether to make them run. Why would humans need it?

Consciousness can be observed, by consciousness. I am aware of my own self. That is a fundamental. I observe that I am. If you're going to complain that my observation of me isn't something that you can simply take on faith because you're unable to observe my observation...that was a point I made myself in the pot you're replying to. I am unable to observe the consciousness of dogs, insects, or any of the other thing you listed. I can't vouch for their consciousness, I can only vouch for mine because mine is the only one I'm able to observe.

If you're going to try to respond by pulling the "science" card, then let me remind you that your observer process is the method by which you are aware of the instruments you're using to measure. If conscioiousness observing itself is somehow not valid to you, then why would you place faith in conscoiusness observing a mechanical measuring device?

Nobody knows what matter or gravity are either. We can describe how they behave, but we don't really know what they are or why they are or how they came to be.

Consciousness is in a similar boat.

I assert that I am a conscious entity. I know this because I am able to observe my own awareness. If you're a reaction machine, I can't speak to that.

[Tack]

...
Apples are visible, Tangible, and (in my belief) - real.


And after reading further forwards, you seem to have the belief that consciousness is, or is irrevocably linked with: a soul.
I believe that most of the Atheists and Transhumanists present in this forum does not carry that same belief.
So this argument really comes down to there.

I believe that we are nothing but reaction machines. But unlike the modern day cleverbot, we can internalize and process completely confounding ideas without any necessary input. Even our imagination is just our brains taking properties which we know and adapting variables to create a hypothesis world.

So if you believe that you close your eyes and can Feel that you have a soul, and that you'd notice if it was tangibly gone, then there's no argument here. It's just faith vs realism.

[SalmonGod]

What determines having a soul or not?

What determines whether you have an apple on your desk?

Your question isn't meaningful.

Let me rephrase this for him, because this is painful to watch.

If souls are a real thing, how is it determined who or what has a soul.

You can observe the apple on your desk.  As an observer, witnessing the apple on your desk is what determines whether you have an apple on your desk.  You can't observe a soul attached to a person.  So what determines having a soul or not?  I think this is how he came up with his wording.

[Tack]

I think we should just leave it.
LB (no offense LB) has a tendency to pick arguments without thinking them through and then attempt to win them through obstinance instead of intelligence.

[LordBucket]

...
Apples are visible, Tangible, and (in my belief) - real.

By which you mean, you are able to observe them, and therefore they are real. Ok. I'm able to observe my consciousness, and it is therefore real.

Right?

Let me rephrase this for him, because this is painful to watch.

If souls are a real thing, how is it determined who or what has a soul.

You can observe the apple on your desk.  As an observer, witnessing the apple on your desk is what determines whether you have an apple on your desk.  You can't observe a soul attached to a person.  So what determines having a soul or not?  I think this is how he came up with his wording.

I'm not sure how to answer this except by repeating myself. I observe that I am a conscious entity, therefore I conclude that I am a conscious entity. I am unable to observe whether you are a conscious entity, therefore I try to avoid making too many assumptions about it. You're right that I am unable to "see a soul attached to another person" as you've phrased it, and I've said basically the same thing phrased differently a number of times. That doesn't change my own observation of my own self, and it doesn't change my assumption that if you're a conscious entity you should probably, I assume, be able to also observe your own self.

Are you saying that you can't observe your own consciousness? You can't, right now, observe the fact of your own observation?

I think we should just leave it.
LB (no offense LB) has a tendency to pick arguments without thinking them through and then attempt to win them through obstinance instead of intelligence.

If you people are p-zombies and I'm the only conscious being here, as some of you seem to be implying...that would explain a lot of the disagreements that have taken place over the years.

[Bauglir]

I think they're saying that you can't observe your own observation in a way that meaningfully distinguishes it from another allegedly conscious being's observation. Maybe. I was lost a long time ago, though.

[Tack]

I'm saying that being conscious doesn't mean you have a soul.

A clone or suitably advanced AI would be conscious, by my definition.


I'm wondering if you've purposely shifted the argument to a place where you can get easy agreements, rather than actually trying to justify your base reasoning.
But I'm glad you've realized that calling us P-Zombies and saying that B12 is an obtuse community which doesn't understand you is a much easier way to deal with things than admitting that you're wrong.

[Bauglir]

LB, I agree that it's obvious that what you refer to as a soul exists because it's a fundamental necessity for observing whether or not something exists in the first place (it's similar in that regard to the anthropic principle. "Of course we exist on a planet well-suited to us, how could we come to be on any other?"). I just don't see how you're getting from that to other properties of this soul. It seems like you've arbitrarily decided what a soul is, found something with some properties you ascribe to souls, and concluded that it must be the genuine article. As far as I can see, it's fairly straightforward to say that consciousness is a pattern, which is kinda nonphysical, in that it's the information, but then it arises entirely from physical causes so I don't think that's what you're going for.

[wierd]

Mindfuck time:

If you program a robot to believe it has a soul, does it?

This is a serious question.

The concept of a soul is a qualia.

You fundamentally cannot describe what one "is", anymore than you can describe what "red" is.

In this resepect, if you create a fully autonomous robot that processes external sensory data through a proceedurally generated matrix that is initially created (and continually modified) by an adaptive program that attempt to create causal relationships between those sensory processes, and it comes to believe that it has a soul--

Does it?


The implication of this question is paramount to LB's line of argument.

LB is asserting that he/she experiences having a soul, and therefore does. (Basically.)
If we replace the physical nature of LB with that of a robot, (admittedly, a very very complicated one), does it asserting that it experiences a soul, actually mean it has one?

Afterall, we can induce many perceptions of qualia in humans by stimulating their brains with electrical signals. Further, schizophrenic people's brains produce signals identical to those of people processing real sensory data when they have their hallucenatory episodes.

For them, the hallucenations are indestinguishable from reality.

How can LB be sure that what he/she is experiencing, is in fact, a soul?

There are many ethica and philosophical implications riding on the answers to this question, because it questions weather or not what we actually experience is actually "real", and calls into question the very conceptual nature of what "real" represents.

For example, if we make the assertion (for sake of argument, mind), that we are merely complex signal processors that are generated from a biological template, using an imperfect process that leaves variability in our physical construction which is made up for by a dynamic data processing algorithm that can cope with these inconsistencies between physical productions of the hardware gracefully--

How do we know we actually have bodies, actually are in front of our computers, and that the universe around us is in fact real, and not a very complex, interactive simulation?

How can we trust any sensory input we have?

How can we possibly ascertain what is and is not actually real?

I don't believe we can. I believe we can only ascertain what is conserved between observations, and what is consistent.

In this scenario, "the matrix" can have us, and we would never know.

If we cannot trust our perceptions of reality to begin with, how can we determine that our perception of having a "soul" are real?

All we can do is assert that we do.

Which brings us back to the robot.

It says it has one. We built it. We know every diode, every circuit, every line of code.

Does it have one?

[Tack]

That's an interesting theory.

So LB's soul could be a Tulpa?

[HAMMERMILL]

No such thing as soul in the first place. At best humans are machines made of meat and their brains are seriously flawed CPUs with dodgy programing with unreliable results.

To convince a machine it has a soul? You could convince a machine anything, through programming.

[wierd]

Assertion: no such thing as a soul

How do you derive this? If you use the material universe as the basis to produce the conclusion, how do you reconcile the necessity to first assert that the universe itself exists?

Internally, inside the mind, there is no basis from which to make that determination. It is purely an assertion.

The universe may not exist, and you may be a brain in a tank, experiencing a complex interactive simulation. The brain itself has no sensory aparatus. It experiences ONLY what its external organs convey to it using electrical and biochemical signals, as far as we are able to determine. Since the brains we have examined are unable to tell truth from fiction, when a known fiction is applied, how can you be certain that you yourself are not actually experiencing a fiction?

We can't even be sure about the brains we have tested. How do we know that other people are real, and not simulation?

Schizophrenics make this even scarier-- the converse with people who do not manifest a tangible presence to other people, and do so in a fully interactive manner.

How do we know that we ourselves are not hallucenating the entirely of the universe?

We can't.

That's the point here.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

"Never walk again" is not a statement you're allowed to make any longer.