Solar wrote:Listen, we're really running in circles here.
Indeed - that's precisely why a divorce is in order.
You simply don't acknowledge anything as understood,
Do I have to say "afirmative" in a reply to every statement I agree with?
you don't make your position clear,
I make my position very clear - you appear to skim read everything and misunderstand half of it.
you don't ask when you didn't understand,
Provide an example.
you're only giving the same pseudo-philosophical / linguistic flak to every other statement people make over and over.
If you can't understand a simple point, there are no other options.
This discussion is going nowhere, and I'm tyring of it.
Which is why I said I wanted out. You can't push people beyond their ability to understand.
The idea of the thought experiment was a perfect copy being made.
A copy is a copy - it doesn't become the original by becoming perfectly identical. Look up a dictionary and see what "copy" means!
Please elaborate how a perfect copy of me would be any different from me (i.e., not perfect).
Every electron in the universe is so far as we can tell identical. Does that mean there is only one electron in the universe?
Your neuro-chemical complexities can't feel pain.
Please prove. Experimental evidence of undergraduate Biology studies (which I attended) are against you.
A neuro-chemical complexity is a kind of complexity. Complexities can't feel pain. Here's a complexity of wires. If I hit it, the wires don't feel pain, but the complexity does? I don't think so, somehow! Now repeat the experiment with any other kind of complexity. This isn't a language game - it's applied logical thinking.
Any part of an organism can be "triggered" in a way that is equivalent to what happens when the organism as a whole "experiences pain". You can stimulate a pain receptor. You can make a nerve trigger without a pain receptor attached. You can trigger the pain center in the brain without a nervous system attached. You can make an adrenal gland produce adrenalin without a brain or blood stream attached. Every single part of the organism can be observed and studied in isolation, and the results are deterministic (to a point). The only thing modern Biology and Psychology lacks is a detailed understanding of how it works all together, because the involved networks, feedback loops etc. are of enormous complexity. But it is understood what "feeling pain" is for each part of the organism.
It is possible that pain is felt at each step, but it is not reported by the organism as pain unless it's in the brain. A lightbulb might be in pain while it's lit, but it has no way of reporting that. If you stand on a drawing pin, your foot has no way of reporting pain so there is no way of knowing if it is in pain or not, but it does send a damage-detected signal to the brain, and it's only in the brain that pain is claimed to be experienced. A person whose leg has been amputated can feel pain that appears to be in a foot that no longer exists, but that's because the pain that feels as if it is in the foot is actually experienced in the brain. I don't know how much more detail I need to go to without it sounding like an insult to your intelligence - I expect you to be able to tie all this together yourself and to get the point. When you put a current through a dead frog's leg and it twitches, pain may be felt by it, but even when it was part of a live frog there was no way for the frog to know if its leg was in pain - from the point of view of a live frog it could feel pain that felt as if it was in its leg, but it would actually be experiencing that pain in its brain.
And the part of you that "feels" pain and "thinks" about it is the grey matter in your skull, and the "feeling" and "thinking" is a complex exchange of neuron pulses and releases of messenger chemicals. No more, no less.
If it's that simple, you can easily make a conscious computer. You could even make a conscious liquid that enables pain to be experienced in a test tube when certain chemicals are dropped into it. But the key question remains, and you can't see it. What feels the pain? Are childrren in chemistry labs in schools all round the world accidentally torturing liquids in test tubes?
(Somewhat like weather prediction. The mechanics are well understood, but we lack the processing power to fully harness the complexities involved.)
Stop trying to hide pain in complexities and try to isolate something that could actually be capable of experiencing pain. If none of the components of your complex system feel pain, what makes you imagine that pain can be experienced at all?
I've shown you where the problem is, but you're determined to ignore it and pretend it isn't there.
No, you
failed to show where the problem is, and I'm trying to nail it down.
It's difficult to make it any clearer than that! If none of the components feels pain, there is no s***ing pain! The "pain" becomes a fiction: a fake phenomenon, and it renders us as nothing more than machines which produce data which documents an entirely fake phenomenon.
Do you understand the concept of hypothesis, antithesis, synthesis? It's a process of explaining, asking, questioning, understanding.
It only works if you put in the effort to think logically.
That thought experiment of yours with the copy machine was a good first step, but you never fully formed your hypothesis, and when I formulated my antithesis to what I understood your hypothesis to be, you didn't elaborate on your hypothesis or argued the finer points, but started to weazel your way around the topic.
I set things out in sufficient detail for a person of normal intelligence to be able to get the point, assuming they weren't half asleep. Where's the weaselling? The problem seems to be that you don't understand the concept of "copying".
I still do not understand what you are actually trying to say.
Because you don't read anything carefully.
You repeatedly refuted the idea that a human is basically a neuro-chemical machine;
If you'd actually read the whole thread properly you'd have noticed that I was accused of being an extreme reductionist earlier when I set out the case for us being nothing more than machines.
you claim that consciousness is something beyond that.
I claim that
if consciousness if real it must be something beyond current science.
At the same time you refute the suggestion that what you're implying is a metaphysical concept of "soul" or "consciousness" beyond physics, chemistry, and biology.
No - I made it quite clear that it was equivalent to a soul, though a minimal one with no magical baggage involving memory. I suggested that conscious feeling might be a property of matter (or energy, given that they are the same stuff), changing perhaps with quantum state.
You talk about perfect copies, yet still insist that the copy, however perfect, is inferior and may be killed with no moral dilemma.
Can you point to any place where I said a copy was inferior? You may think you can, but you'll be wrong in every case - you seem to read all sorts of things that aren't there into what I say. What's this rubbish about me thinking copies can be killed with no moral dilemma? You need to improve you interpretation skills. The context is always important. If I say "a dog is a bird" and "a bird is a fish", then you can correctly state that if those two sentences are true, it is also true that a dog is a fish, regardless of the fact that a dog is not a fish. If I set out a though experiment in which I kill the copy of someone, that's just part of the rules of the thought experiment - the morality of me killing someone within the thought experiment is completely irrelevent and doesn't negate the point of the thought experiment. Also, when I talked about killing copies of people rather than teleporting them back to the space ship, that's within the context of people gaily jumping into teleports at the drop of a hat and killing themselves to be replaced with copies - I was pointing out that in such an insane society, life is so worthless that it would make more sense to keep the original and destroy the copy at the end of the mission rather than destroying the original when the copy is made - it's a pragmatic way of guarding against losing a useful member of the crew where the copy may be killed during a mission and the original no longer exists. I didn't state that last bit before, but there are some things you really ought to be able to think out for yourself, particularly given your expertise in exploring all these science fiction dilemmas.
You aren't even consistent with yourself, and that makes the discussion somewhat... pointless (pun intended).
There are many deliberate inconsistencies involving the use of the word "I" which no one appears to have picked up. I don't know which inconsistencies you imagine you've found: anything that's important to the discussion will be something where you've misunderstood my position due to your sloppy reading of this thread.
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