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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[Rolan7]

I think Surqimus is saying that "self" is no more than the simulation running on the meat computer.  In which case it does end, by definition, at the grave, because the meat computer stops computing.

Which I generally agree with, though I do like to keep an open mind about currently-supernatural spirits.  Despite the lack of evidence for their existence.  As silly as it sounds, they *could* just be hiding.  Ooor, they could be unable to exert any change on the world whatsoever.  Which would mean ghost stories are all fake, but we still might keep going in a way after death.  Just only able to at most, observe this world.

[wierd]

It is also a self-referential axiom.

"I am the physical manifestation of myself, because my physical manifestation is myself."

Basically.

Nevermind that the atoms in your body are not all that special. Over the course of your lifetime, you will have replaced basically ALL of them with new atoms. Yet your physical self persists, right?

It is not the physical being's existence, it is the arrangement of the parts, and the process those parts are undergoing.  Hence, my definition of self.

[SirQuiamus]

Ah, we encounter the fundamental issue with trying to understand spirituality. It's a pretty good answer, though.

I'm starting to think that we're encountering a fundamental clash between infinite and finite spirituality: Apollonian versus Dionysian, Eternal Life versus mono no aware. Very interesting.

[Rolan7]

@Weird
The idea isn't that you're the hardware (the brain), it's that you're the software running on it.  The software grows and changes too... and can get really broken in some cases... but I think it's fair to call it a single changing entity.

[Arx]

Ah, we encounter the fundamental issue with trying to understand spirituality. It's a pretty good answer, though.

I'm starting to think that we're encountering a fundamental clash between infinite and finite spirituality: Apollonian versus Dionysian, Eternal Life versus mono no aware. Very interesting.

Well, I'm quite happy to accept that 'you' are a meat computer. I'm also quite happy to accept that the meat computer breaks down irreparably at a point. I just don't see why that means the data is irretrievable, and the data is almost the entirety of how I define the self.

So yeah, probably some kind of clash at the basic level.

[wierd]

Rolan, Arx:  Exactly.  The meat computer is in and of itself, not that special.  It suffers the "Grandfather's Axe" problem over the course of a single human's life span. If you replace both the handle, and the blade, is it the same axe?  obligatory wikipedia

In this case, replacing the parts over time has no net negative effect on the person, because the "person" is not the physical body per se-- but is instead the process being hosted by that physical body. 

The issue gets further complicated however.  Let us look at a more easily examined system of similar ontological nature: A personal computer.

Over the years, a person builds a home-built computer from modular parts. As parts fail, they replace them. One of the parts to fail is the hard disk. Prior to cycling it out, they copy all the data off of it.  The ontological question now is, did the old data get discarded with the dead HDD, or was the data salvaged from it?

I hold that the question is moot, because in the case of the human body, such copying happens anyway, as the physical atoms are replaced one by one over the person's lifetime. 

To continue the computer analogy, we could say that the process supporting human conciousness may operate like a RAID array. As a part of normal operation, parts are swapped out with new ones, and old discarded, and data is recovered internally automatically.   That way the organization of the "RAID array" remains constant, even though the data inside, and the drives that make it up, are both "lost" under some notions of ontological origin, and are just replacement parts and copies.  Now, we can "fail" drives on the raid array sequentially, and drop in new drives to replace them, and rebuild the array from the parity data.  The Raid array will do what it does naturally, and repair the array with the new parts, and continue to serve data as long as you stay under the threshold of replaced parts before parity is unable to reconstitute the array's contents.  You can then have drives from each bay in the array that you have swapped out and rebuilt.  You can take all those "failed" disks, and pop them into another raid controller, and tell it to resynchronize.  You now have a complete copy of the array, on another controller.

There is nothing magically special about a human's conciousness, any more than the data on the raid array.  There is nothing special about the physical body of a human, any more than the drives that make up the raid array.  Both can be replaced and duplicated within the realm of reasonable justification.

I exist as the currently instantiated process that gives rise to my conciousness. That process can be seamlessly transferred to another substrate through incremental replacement, just as the data on a raid array can be.  That process can likewise also be copied onto a new substrate directly while retaining the original, just like with the raid array.  I am not magical.

[TD1]

 With a computer you know the data is there to be copied. It is done through a physical process... when a human dies, the data becomes arguably irreversibly corrupted.

[SirQuiamus]

It is not the physical being's existence, it is the arrangement of the parts, and the process those parts are undergoing.  Hence, my definition of self.

Your definition of self is identical to mine, but I'm taking issue with the idea that the "arrangement of parts" is separable from the parts themselves. The concepts of "pattern" and "simulation" sound somewhat incoherent whenever we are talking about reproducing reality (I am real, am I not?): Where does my pattern end and another pattern begin? How does one "read" a constantly shifting and changing pattern? If my pattern is imprinted upon matter, and matter is curvature of space-time, how does one simulate matter without simulating space-time itself? You could easily produce a functional equivalent of me with a few lines of BASIC (something like: "IF Sirquiamu$ = "Thirsty" THEN GOTO BEER"), but what would it take to accurately reproduce this phenomenon that extends temporally and dimensionally across this small slice of reality? You would almost need another universe for that...   

[wierd]

Not necessarily.  We know that a great deal of neural processing happens from the interconnectivity of the neurons themselves. While the actual synapse junctions break down quickly after death, the positioning of the remnants remains pretty well there.  This would be allegorical to dumping a partition table, and saying the data is irretrievable, because the data structures for normal retrieval are gone.  However, the data is NOT irretrievable-- one can recover the data pretty reliably with things like TestDisk.

Further, since the body itself is replacing essentially the entire physical makeup of itself over the course of the human's total lifespan, some mechanism of retention MUST be possible, or people would not be able to exist at all as they currently do.

It is thus not logical nor rational to hold that the data cannot be salvaged, either through incremental sampling, or through post mortem reconstruction.


Surqimus:  The basic idea I see for a "Supernatural" afterlife goes a bit like this:

Supernatural actor ("god") decides that he wants to retain the unique pattern of "Surqimus".  It does this by examining the entire timeline structure of "Surquimus", from inception to death, (Since being outside space and time, this actor can examine the entire process statically), then "continues" the processing where it was halted, on a new substrate.  Take for instance, playing a video game inside an emulator. You make a savestate. You then pick up exactly where you left off by loading the rom, loading the savestate, and continuing execution. 

You are arguing that the reloaded process will not be you, because "magic ontological silly".  Basically.

[SirQuiamus]

You are arguing that the reloaded process will not be you, because "magic ontological silly".  Basically.

But in a non-technical sense, the reloaded process would not be "me," but "Surquiamos II," because my life already ended, and the back-up copy would remember the moment of his death. The only way to "continue the saved game" would be to modify my memories or reload the entire universe, and that's clearly out of the question.
...I guess it's more about personal preferences than logical possibility, but I don't see how saying that 'Copy of A' is not 'A' can be considered a cranky ontological commitment. If you make an atom-by-atom copy of someone, they will initially be exactly the same person: They will do and say exactly the same things in an uncanny fashion – but only for a time. Initially, either one of them may disappear without anyone noticing a thing, but what about after ten years, or fifty? They will no longer occupy the same space, they will see different things while looking in the same direction. When they are situated in different environments, they will lead different lives and eventually become different people. It's like copying your DF folder and building two completely different forts: Which one is the original? Does it matter? – they are no longer the same.

EDIT: We are both saying that the self is a unique pattern imprinted upon space-time, is that correct? I am saying that the pattern is magically irreproducible, while you are saying that the pattern can be magically reproduced without creating another unique instance of the pattern? (How is the latter possible without compromising the assumed uniqueness?)
In any case, we are both relying on such untenable concepts as "sameness" and "uniqueness," so the discussion has been irredeemably magical from the get-go.             

[Arx]

But in a non-technical sense, the reloaded process would not be "me," but "Surquiamos II," because my life already ended, and the back-up copy would remember the moment of his death. The only way to "continue the saved game" would be to modify my memories or reload the entire universe, and that's clearly out of the question.

So would the memory of your death be what causes the exact copy of you exactly as you were to no longer be you? And I would say it's more comparable to building a fort, copying your DF folder, and then continuing to build the fort. Is the copy of the fort somehow no longer the same fort?

[Descan]

I've never understood that line of reasoning - when, for example, you sleep you still dream. When the conscious is out of it, the subconscious takes over. It's not you, precisely, but it is a part of you.

Aye. For me, "me"-ness comes from two things: The physical substrate, and that substrate being connected temporally to previous substrates that still held "me" in them. Right now, that's neural cells of all types, and it's continuous by virtue of being more-or-less the same cells as since I was born, talking to each other continually over time. (The wording is a little wonky, I'm not a dualist, so the substrate IS me. However, I don't feel I need this specific substrate in order to continue being me.)

My goal is to replace that substrate over a period of time so as to maintain that continuity of substrate. One day those neurons will start talking to a hard-drive of sorts, or a robo-neuron, or a more durable biological neuron, or nano-bots/particles of some kind. Eventually, those neo-neurons will make up all the substrate, with no more neurons floating around, getting old and dying and alzheim'ing it up. But because there is a chain of connection to each previous substrate state (100% human-neuron, 90%, 80%, etc, etc) it would continue to BE me. I could feel confident that the person typing this right now, in-so-far as they were the same person who was born in '93 and is the same person who first started the whole neuron-replacement process, would be the same person who popped out in the end as a wholly-immortal being. (in-so-far as it's possible; even if we can't beat this entropic universe in the end, I'm not going to forego a few trillion more years of life even if I can't *be immortal* entirely. Maybe I have to die sometime, but I want to put it off for a few eons, and just because I can't put it off forever doesn't mean I'll say "fuck it!" and settle for only 80 years)

@Wierd: I take some issue with "There is nothing magically special about a human's conciousness, any more than the data on the raid array." There's not magic about it, but I can pretty much verify (from my POV at least) that there is SOMETHING about human consciousness that's different: The "I"-ness. For all I know, the data does have a self-reflecting portion. Not sure how, but sure, whatever. But I DO know that I do have that part, and it's that part I would like to retain, and that I feel is destroyed (and perhaps recreated, but with a different "I") if you just do the whole "scan the body and re-create the connections elsewhere" style upload.

[SirQuiamus]

But in a non-technical sense, the reloaded process would not be "me," but "Surquiamos II," because my life already ended, and the back-up copy would remember the moment of his death. The only way to "continue the saved game" would be to modify my memories or reload the entire universe, and that's clearly out of the question.

So would the memory of your death be what causes the exact copy of you exactly as you were to no longer be you? And I would say it's more comparable to building a fort, copying your DF folder, and then continuing to build the fort. Is the copy of the fort somehow no longer the same fort?

Since you put it that way, I guess that's what I'm saying. (I'm not entirely sure myself, but this is interesting.
See, when my fort falls to the zombie apocalypse and my dwarves are strangled by animated donkey hair, I can always savescum and build better defences, but I will never again see that particular scene of precious, tragic Fun. So yeah, it's no longer the "same" fort.

[Arx]

Ah. I suspect the critical difference here is that I see no need to savescum in order to resurrect the fort. Does that sound about right to you?

[TD1]

Also, a minor point. I believe "I" am influenced heavily by my body. Give me a new body, I would be different even if only in the respect that I would know it was a new body, and my old self was rotting. That would have a profound effect on me, I'm certain. It's the same way I see books. Sure, the book I had was old and tired looking, but I still didn't want a new one. It holds the same information, but it's just not the same.