Again you assume people have minds but there is no way to prove that. I used the rock as an analogy for why it would be pointless to do something in dreams.
But I’m not assuming that people have minds. I’m asking you: if a person has a mind, why would you be interested in forming a relationship with that person?
Because then any such experience would be real and not a mere orchestration by my mind.
No, I get that you find that important. I’m not asking whether that’s important to you; I’m asking why that’s important to you.
Whose minds, then? If “we” don’t exist, who are you? Meanwhile, if “selfness” is an illusion, it’s a compelling one, one we cannot ignore. Go ahead, don’t eat any food for the rest of your life. Hunger is just an illusion.
Not the same thing.
‘Some people think…’ ≠ ‘pretty much a known fact’
Other people, other scientists, other philosophers strongly disagree. Even some Buddhists disagree, never mind other religions.
Nothing is ‘proved’. You’re seriously deluding yourself if you think it is.
Essentially yes which is what makes Solpisism so sticky for me. I can’t just flat out say it’s wrong. PLus the implications of it being right scare me too much to just let it go.
If it’s right and all this is just a figment of your fevered imagination, the bad news is there is not a damned thing you can do about it. You can’t change one bit of it. It does not bend to your will no matter how much you try. You will never get a glance at what’s behind the curtain.
But if it’s wrong, guess what? You’re already living and doing the only things you can.
Seems to me, right or wrong, changes absolutely nothing. You have no choice in the matter.
You say “it would be like trying to form a relationship with a rock”. If we presume this to be a genuine analogy, we would presume that you would be claiming that the problems with a relationship with a so-called dream person with persistence and memory and personality - that the problems would the same as the problems with interacting with a rock.
This is, of course, obvious bullshit. The problem with being a friend with a rock is that a rock is unresponsive. Your dream-friend is most definitely not unresponsive.
Care to try again? What would be the functional problem with making a friend with a “dream” person who is functionally identical to a real person?
Answers based on anything but functionality will be correctly interpreted as you dodging the question.
Finally, a goddamned link! Something other than a baseless unsupported assertion about alleged proofs!
I’ve read the article. It’s a collection of statements from four different people, but the consistent themes are:
1: The self changes constantly. This confuses them. This isn’t really presented as a disproof of the self; they just don’t like it.
2: A couple of them are spiritualists that wish spiritual soul ghosts were real. They are so tied to this idea that they reject the idea that anything else could cause a self - they acknowledge that physical reality is responsible for the observed self, but won’t call it a ‘self’ because it’s not an immortal ghost soul.
3: Dennet takes the notable position that there clearly is a self, since we can observe that something’s tying all the memories and desires and preferences together, but that’s too easy for him, so he’s going to stop thinking about it, and fallaciously call his refusal to think about it a disproof of the observed thing he can’t explain. Hack psychology at its best.
So to summarize:
Searle: Wishes souls will real, and will not accept material selfs on principle alone.
McGinn: Straight-up says souls are real, but they confuse him.
Blackmore: Wishes souls will real, and will not accept material selfs on principle alone.
Dennett: Sticks his fingers in his ears and says “la la la, if I ignore the self it’ll go away”.
So three idiots and one person who accepts that, duh, the self is obviously real.
Thank you for following the link and summarizing… I was a combination of too scared and too lazy…
Vaguely related, I’ve always been a Strong AI proponent, and so I see nothing whatever wrong with “Making friends with a rock.” (Computer.) Besides, humans have an instinct towards anthropomorphizing, and we often see our cars, our pets, our computers, our hoseplants, even our hand tools, as (to some degree) personified. The problem isn’t isolating us from real people; the problem is relating to non-people in an interpersonal manner.
(I’m always afraid to discuss money matters in my car, lest it learn I have some cash reserves and busts a radiator leak.)
In all seriousness, kudos to Machinaforce for actually providing a supporting link, rather than just baselessly asserting that some other faceless persons had done something they certainly haven’t done.
It’s just unfortunate for him that his link didn’t actually support his position. Not surprising, though - the existing of the self is so manifestly self-evident that even the people claiming not to believe in it couldn’t help but concede its existence en route to trying to deny it!
Humans are meat computers. That’s what we are. So strong AI is already proven to be possible by example; the tricky part is getting it to happen inside a PC.
However, AI in a computer (or human) relies on actively interacting parts with changes to their state happening constantly. Rocks don’t have that. And they’re also no fun at parties, their musical inclinations notwithstanding. I don’t hold it against Machinaforce for not being interested in befriending a rock. (I do hold his fallacious analogy against him, but that’s another matter.)
As for imbuing the inanimate with personality, I will make a shameful confession: the one bit of mythology I amuse myself with is the perversity of the inanimate. It is of course not possible and doesn’t actually happen, but damned if I haven’t got technology to work by cursing at it. And yes, things break down at exactly the wrong time in exactly the wrong way because they hate you and want you to suffer.
You are lucky with the car thing, though - my car doesn’t need me to say anything; it knows when I have too much much money in my primary account, and will have some kind of mechanical problem that neatly wipes out the surplus (but never more than that). This has happened with perfect reliability for multiple decades. (Fortunately for me, it is willing to ignore my savings account - only my primary account triggers it.) Which reminds me, I’m getting a bit too flush. Time to check out Amazon…
Oh, and I’d like to add that I do appreciate that the link presented was written by somebody who knows how to write. Rather than being the rambling deliberately-obtuse glurge of hack philosophers and mystics, it was penned by a reporter. They even managed to extract reasonably clear statements from three of the four people interviewed, which was great. (The last fellow’s argument was nonsensical glurge, but even then the quote delivered the heart of it reasonably succinctly.)
So yeah, more like that please. More cites supporting your assertions, and more of them by people who can actually write and deliver ideas clearly. All things considered that was pretty great.
Grin! You know how your computer will have a glitch, but when the IT help-desk guy comes and looks at it, it works just fine, no glitch? I was a IT help-desk guy, and I had that power! I’d come to see a problem – and there’d be no problem.
I do not believe in this. But it is certainly entertaining to suspend disbelief!
(I actually do believe in solipsism – the idea that nothing but the very self can ever be known for sure. I also don’t care, because existence, whether illusory or not, is compelling…and kinda fun. Keep making 3 Musketeer candy bars, and I don’t care if it’s all just a sim!)
More than once it has been suggested that we ship the programmer out to the customer, because having him looking over your shoulder makes the program work.
I find it entertaining to realize that even if it’s not a simulation, reality functions just like one - everything we perceive is not what it appears to be, but actually the result of much simpler, much lower level objects/data interacting in complicated ways such that the observed properties and behavior are emergent. Apparently-solid atoms are actually full of empty space, and the more levels you drill down through the simpler and more data-like everything becomes.
So, reality is a simulation. The only question is whether there’s an ‘outer’ reality that surrounds it but isn’t a part of it.
We may never know. The deepity stuff keeps getting in the way.
I would also consider reality’s simulation-like properties to be circumstantial evidence against solipsism - if everything is a figment of your imagination, why is your imagination thinking up molecules and atoms and protons and quarks - things that it itself doesn’t really understand? Why not make a tree just be a tree, with none of that other stuff?
Interestingly, it’s also circumstantial evidence against there being an outer reality outside of our own, since when people make simulations, they abstract and simplify, defining a ‘tree’ as simply as possible and coding its custom properties and behavior specifically to achieve their ends with no unnecessary complexity. What we see with reality is more reminiscent of Conway’s Game of Life - where all of the higher-level objects and their behaviors are truly emergent and all derive from the same set of completely universal simple rules.
Just to feed the paranoia, we don’t have any actual evidence of things like atoms that don’t come from instruments and machines. No one has ever seen a paramecium except through a microscope. So “the programmers” don’t have to simulate atoms…just microscopes.
Nah, see, you have to remember that when running a simulation you have to simulate the outputs of the machinery too. To do this in a sufficiently consistent way that science could even evolve as a discipline, you have to track all the stuff even if it’s not “rendered visibly”. Which means, of course, that you have to fully simulate it anyway, just with the added complexity of artificially copying the results from the simulation into the outputs of the microscopes and such.
It turns out that most of the proposed ways of simplifying reality enough to make solipsism plausible actually make the situation more complicated in practice. “Maybe it only renders stuff nearby” has the same problem - for France to suddenly have a history when you visit it, it had to have been tracked all along, just with the extra effort of not bothering to render it because it was mostly out of view.
I don’t agree…but even if that’s so, it doesn’t mean the sim has to track every atom in the cosmos, only atoms near a microscope.
In coarser terms, the sim doesn’t need to sim the entire tree, just the side facing me.