Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[That Wolf]

This is a thread for discussing topics about spirituality and consciousness, the beliefs of groups and your own individual spirituality.
Be respectful of peoples beliefs even if it is incorrect or insane.

Read the rules before posting.

• Read this
• Don't troll, incite hatred or be a dick on purpose.
• Please no organised religions
• Be respectful to all readers and posters, attempts to disprove their belief is acceptable but do realise that you could also be wrong
• Don't post angry
• Don't bring up gender rights. It obviously has no place here
• Look at this as a learning experience, try to see the other persons point
• Don’t argue

Rules are most probably going to be tweaked.
Please share your experiences and doubts and science is allowed here dont worry.
Please get along with eachother and remember that we are all people and have feelings so be good or I will gently remove your soul and devour it, I already have two.
I have my confidence in you.
That should do it for rules if you want more PM me

[Arx]

Personally, I believe the self and the body are separate. This might change if/when I understand the brain better.

[WillowLuman]

Personally, I believe the self and the body are separate. This might change if/when I understand the brain better.

I also think that's true, in a way. The unique pattern of information that makes up a someone arises from where it's stored, and the input of outside experiences and factors, but I think that it's also more than just the sum of these things.

An idea I've been chewing on lately is that maybe there's a difference between someone's true/ideal self, and their usual self. Like, the person they want or aspire to be, or beliefs and principles the believe strongly in and wish to adhere to, versus the factors that may lead to them not being/doing these things. But there are complications with this idea: maybe people set an unattainable standard for themselves (though it might also be argued that it's worth pursuing some ideals in order to get closer to them, even if they can't be ultimately reached), or chase a false perception of themselves or what they ought to be, or try to deny or suppress some aspect about themselves that they might be better off learning to accept.

[i2amroy]

An idea I've been chewing on lately is that maybe there's a difference between someone's true/ideal self, and their usual self. Like, the person they want or aspire to be, or beliefs and principles the believe strongly in and wish to adhere to, versus the factors that may lead to them not being/doing these things. But there are complications with this idea: maybe people set an unattainable standard for themselves (though it might also be argued that it's worth pursuing some ideals in order to get closer to them, even if they can't be ultimately reached), or chase a false perception of themselves or what they ought to be, or try to deny or suppress some aspect about themselves that they might be better off learning to accept.

That sounds a lot like the Hinduism/Buddhism way of thinking. To sum it up the basic idea is that you have 3 parts, a body (which is the physical part of you in the world), a mind (which is the mental part and somewhat related to the body, but separate) and an immortal soul (which houses your "true" personality and is unchanging). The personality that you see here in this world is the aspect of the immortal soul's personality but is being tinted by the constantly changing lenses of the mind and the body. One of the main goals is to remove the body and mind lenses wherever possible, so that you can act like your "true" self.

That said personally I'm a hard monist in terms of the mind/body divide, mainly due to two big things.
1) Any damage done to the physical brain is always matched with equal damage done to the mind. This is consistent enough that we can use it not only to predict what the damage to the mind is going to be based on the damage to the brain, but also use it for more subtle things like the direct shaping of a brain in a planned way through things like focused damage and drug use.
2) Through MRI machines and similar we are able to do things like detect which hand a person is going to use to push a button with some 60% accuracy; up to 10 seconds before they do it and well before they themselves have determined that they have "decided" which hand they will use. And that 60% number is increasing with more research going into the fields.

[WillowLuman]

I think of it in terms of the information stored in someone's body vs the body itself. Like, the information can't exist without being encoded on something (electrical and chemical signals), but said information is what's ultimately important.

[i2amroy]

I'll give you that. After all someday we'll hopefully be able to translate our brains to something a little longer lasting than our current flesh and blood ensembles.

[Grek]

Another point against dualism: There is strong scientific evidence that most decisions are not actually made on a conscious level, and that "introspection" about such decisions is handled by the same portion of the brain which generates conversational narratives. That is, your brain is deciding stuff without the conscious mind being aware of it and then retroactively makes up a story when the conscious mind wonders why it did what it just did.

E: HugoLuman, that's actually backed up by the same research I mention. The real "you" (the one that is making choices) is actually best modeled as several disjoint processes in communication. At a minimum, there's one process for interpreting sound, one for vision, one for olfactory senses, one for proprioception, a 'narrator' that comes up with credulous, "most simple answer first" explanations for what those sense processes are reporting, a 'skeptic' that looks for flaws in the current narrative and forces a reboot if enough flaws are found, a 'reflective' process that pretends to be someone else so that you can empathize with other people, an automatic reflex system and at least a couple biological process monitors. The ideal you is just a character in the narrator's story, who for the sake of simplicity, is treated as a single indivisible whole that makes choices for abstract, logical reasons.

[alexandertnt]

What happened if we duplicate that information which you are made up of? Computers move data by first making a duplicate than destroying the original. If a brain-uploading situation were to be possible, for a point in time after the duplication you would exist in two places at once.

Do you see through your old eyes? If so, you effectively die, even though nobody will be able to tell the difference as the new you is a perfect imitation.

Do you see through your new eyes? This might imply that some form or concept of a soul exists, you may also be killing a human being by destroying the old you now it is its own independent entity.

Do you see through both eyes? This requires some sort of connection to exist, and again, suggests that some sort of soul exists.

Is it not possible to have both versions at the same time? That also hints at the existence of some sort of soul.

This is the reason why I am sceptical of brain-uploading and other similar concepts. Sceptical does not mean I don't think it's possible, just that there are a lot of unanswered question.

[WillowLuman]

Well, I think it's physically possible, but such questions will remain unanswered until it's done. I think such a process is necessary if there is ever to be any scientific investigation into the nature of qualia (if such a thing is even possible, though being something that exists in the universe, I'd wager it is.) It might provide the path to test such currently unanswerable questions like "is my red the same as your red?"

[Grek]

People aren't information, so much as processes. You can record the information required to run a process, but unless you are actually running it, there's no person happening. If you copy someone's mental processes and then instantiate them in two different places, you now have two people. There's no supernatural connection between the two, but they do share the same cause and effect relationship as you-before-sleep has with you-after-sleep. Which brings up another interesting thought: Did you know that most of your brain turns off for around 8 hours a day, only to be restarted by your suprachiasmatic nuclei? If having your mentality process turned off and back on again later is the same thing as death, then you die every time you fall asleep. I don't feel that that is death in any meaningful sense, and see no reason to treat any other stop and restart event differently. Real, actual death is when something happens where your mind stops and then never starts back up again.

[WillowLuman]

I'd lean towards a duplicate of any kind being technically a different person (even if only the same sense as being a different person than you were years ago). Much like a story translated through the ages, winding up in different languages and cultural contexts, yet still having a continuity from the original iteration. Again, no way to know until it's actually done, but I think, from the duplicate's point of view, they'd feel as if their perspective transferred from one body to another, while the original would continue on (unless the process was fatal). If both iterations persisted, they'd necessarily become different people, because they'd have different experiences from that point on.

[i2amroy]

To get around the whole "copy" thing there are plans for piecewise replacement designs. The basic idea would be that we replace your brain one chunk at a time, possibly even keeping you conscious during the replacement procedure (which they already do for some other types of brain surgery). That should hopefully remove any doubts about you ending up as a "copy" instead of your original self in a new medium, since the stream of your consciousness would be uninterrupted. In addition since your brain would still only exist in a single spot, duplication shouldn't be considered an immediate issue in the migration process.

And as for the transfer of your brain piecewise to a new location once it has been migrated over? I'd like to note that there are neurons in your brain dying and new ones growing pretty regularly (now that we're starting to lock down neurogenesis to be almost certainly true). I'd be willing to argue that the movement of your brain piecewise from one location in a computer to another would be no different than what your brain is already doing, the only changes being that the new "neurons" are now removed from the old ones by distances measured in miles instead of micrometers and that the process would occur over seconds instead of months.

Lastly I'd like to note that we've already done some experiments where nerve implants combined with the internet have allowed researchers at one university to control a robotic prosthetic (and receive some sensory feedback from it!) when said prosthetic was located at a different university, essentially allowing a "nerve" connection to stretch dozens of miles over the internet. At what point does the nervous system stop being part of your "mind" and start being just connected nerves? At the brain stem? What about people that control prosthetics with deep brain implants? Does that count as part of their mind now? Just something to think about.

[Antioch]

I would say the notion of the "self" is a lot more flexible than people think. The "you" of 10/20 years ago is basically completely dead, the vast majority of atoms in your body have been replaced with new ones, you have completely different physical characteristics and behaviour. One of the only things linking you to your former self is the memory of being so. Why would that be different for a copy of yourself? Wouldn't all that is needed to be "you" the memory of being so?

[Orange Wizard]

...

So it's like my thread, but less dead?

Huh. Okay. Go with that, I guess.

[WillowLuman]

Well, an ongoing derail here that's relevant to the topic anyways.