You mean replicated, or simulated on something like a giant computer? Seems to me they could. (I’m thinking replication would mean to duplicate the physical chemistry of the brain, to make another brain.)
Sure, why not?
Hypothetically, it could.
Huh? Why not?
I’m pretty certain that changing positions is a viable tactic in debate. Please explain why one “needs” to pick a position and stick with it.
Mostly because, if I walked into Monte’s Magnificent Brain Factory and was told that, after the upload, hypothetically the new unit will be me, nobody on the outside of me will be able to tell the difference between the me that walked in and the me that walks out and the me that walks out with the replicated hardware and freshly uploaded software won’t be able to tell the difference either, I would smack Dr. Monte upside his head and walk out.
Think about it, really.
Your concept envisions a giant computer but what does that even mean these days? As Moore’s law keeps chugging along a giant computer today may be molecular tomorrow. Equate this storage space and processing power to the function of the brain, match it’s performance to a specific individuals brain and upload every byte of that individual’s memory then is the resulting product the individual?
As you stand there looking at Cyber-Curt, ingenious blend of organic chemistry and bio-mechanical technology, is that really you?
Once the Cyber-Curt has been fully uploaded and field tested for performance and the Meat-Bag-Curt has been recycled, do you then still exist?
Your friends and relatives will think so. Your co-workers and those who count on you, not just for your effency but your charm and wit, your personality, they shouldn’t be able to tell the difference either. Each and every chemical reaction that took place before and would have been taking place now is, in fact, taking place now.
But is that you? Or did you cease to exist when Meat-Bag-Curt ceased to exist?
I guess what I’m on about is, if you remove God and religion from the equation, if you remove any sembalance of an afterlife from the equation, if you focus only on an athietic point of view, it is possible that there is a uniqueness to each of us that cannot be broken down to simple enough terms to ever be reproduced. Perhaps it is a soul, perhaps it is a spirit that is undetectable, perhaps when we expire it also expires, perhaps it simply rejoins some extra-dimentional cosmic energy that cycles around the universe dishing out life.
Or perhaps not.
I don’t have the answers to any of this stuff, but there are two things I do know.
One, I’m sure as hell looking forward to a day when we do have the answers, even if I can only know for sure when I finally do pass on.
And two, I’m not convinced there is enough information from either side of the arguement that, when held up to the light of consequence, I would be willing to put good money up against. However, given that light of consequence, if I’m going to err, I will err on the side of caution when wagering that which may or may not be able to be simplified enough to be adaquately explained.
Slightly tangential to the topic at hand, but I’ll bite on the off chance you aren’t jerking my chain.
The exchange stemmed from his claim that I was rebutting an assertion he did not make. Of course I replied that it wasn’t a rebuttal if he didn’t make the assertion, and I never claimed it to be a rebuttal. I only made the statement in question because it supported my position.
It was a stupid exchange, because he never specified what I supposedly claimed he said, and I just let it continue down the rabbit hole in hopes of demonstrating to him how ridiculous the whole thing was, but I failed miserably as you can see.
You mean you will err on the side of ignorance, right?
So we don’t have all the scientific answers as to how exactly the brain’s complex interactions translate into our “selfs”. And although all current data points to the ultimate answer almost certainly being a very physical, although extremely complex process, instead you’d rather go with the ramblings and pronunciations of some bronze age sheep herders and wannabe king priests.
Yeah, you just keep on erring on that side of caution, man.
You know, there was a time when the complex interactions involved in say the energy processes of a star were incomprehensible too, and just like now, there were people who simply threw up their hands and said “God did it!”.
Thank goodness for the scientific method!
The only side of the argument atheism has (for most atheists as far as I can tell) is not having belief in incredible claims without incredible evidence. If we knew the answer to the God question could be answered, it would be wise to bet money on His non-existence. Incredible claims never seem to pan out.
You mean by not betting at all or accepting Pascal’s Wager?
Don’t give the scientific process too much credit yet. Sure, we understand quite a bit more about the energy processes of fission but there is still a long way to go before it is fully explained to the point of reproducing it (even if we do reproduce the reactions now there are still questions about how what we reproduced did what it did in the first place)
See, I think there is a misunderstanding somewhere, or a miscommunication. Hell, it might even be within my fellow flock members.
But I fail to see where the dogma of any mainstream world religion requires it’s faithful to abandon science and devote themselves solely to the pursuit of apologetics. Sure, I look at The Big Bang and say “God did it!”. There may be plenty of people for whom this is enough but I don’t think anyone is forcing us to stop there, and I wouldn’t listen even if they were.
“How did God do it?”
“How did The Creator get all of everything to occupy a single point for a single moment?”
Sure, there are plenty of apologetics, but so far there are plenty of technical answers as well. How did God make a penguin? Well, he started with some sort of fish which crawled up on land, selectively bred itself until it developed, most likely scales followed by feathers, possibly learned to fly but discovered more success learning to swim again then finished off by breeding itself until it was well adapted to a cold climate where there is less competition for food. Could have done the same thing and ended up with a puffin but nope, this one’s a penguin.
And yes, I have read The Blind Watchmaker and I have read The God Delusion. I found both to be a difficult read due to Dawkins’ self absorbtion but in the end they turned out to be empty and shallow more in spite of rather than because of Dawkins’ constant ego stroking.
So yeah, I guess you could call it taking Pascal’s Wager, but it’s more a recognition of scale and acknowledgement of insignificance that leads me to faith.
That and the previously posted hypothesis and paradox, neither satisfied fully by either an athiestic or homo-religious point of view. So my wager with Pascal is more of Agnostic vs. Theistic than Athiestic vs. Theistic.
The short answer is, yes I will err on the side of the ignorant.
But, then again, so will you, so will we all.
So it’s all good.
This tells me all I need to know about the validity of your argument.
Sure there are still questions, and there will likely always be. But is that the game you want to play? Everytime we lack some understanding of a process you will invoke God? Those spaces that you can stuff him in will continue to shrink, you know.
I think there is a fundamental and wonderful difference between “God did it!” and our mathematical model for fusion. One is a lazy attempt to feed our primitive need to anthropromorphise the world around us (whilst answering none of our questions in a meaningful way), the other is a reflection of our fortuitous place in this universe as a species capable of asking questions, and more importantly, capable of using reason and science to find rational answers to those questions.
If we should instead continue to simply make shit up on the spot for the sole purpose of making us feel good about ourselves, we might as well have stayed in caves and continued to pray to spirits. It seems like such a waste to think like that.
I’m not getting this. What about Pascal’s Wager leads you to belief and why?
What do you recognize as being insignificant and why does that lead you towards belief in a Creator?
You still fail to understand.
Everytime I see a process that I fail to understand I think “God did it.”
AND
Everytime I see a process that I understand fully I think “God did it.”
So no, the spaces never shrink.
Our mathematical model for fusion is great. It’s wonderful that we can dig into the inner workings of the universe and see how things tick. I look forward to digging further and finding out more about how things tick. I want to see more on the lines of fission and it’s ability to manipulate matter and energy into different matters and energies.
And I thank God every day for the opportunity to understand a little more.
Of course none of this addresses my paradox of individuality if all functions are truely bio-chemical.
And none of it addresses a hypothetical where our awareness ends at a limit below our understanding and, were that awareness to go to the logical next step of existance it could be that our understanding of “God” is simply understated.
And both of these could be circularized and labeled straw man arguements:
“What does individuality and whether or not there is a soul have to do with our comprehension of God?”
“What the hell does our comprehension of a higher power have to do with individuality and the existance of a spirit?”
And I willingly accept the abuse, it comes with the territory as a believer. But make no mistake, the words of Christ hold true now as much as ever:
“Judge not, lest you be judged.”
By your standards those without faith are just as ignorant as those with faith. In the end we will both stand in the same light.
The fact that this blows your mind doesn’t mean that it isn’t valid. Say you take a drug that affects your thinking processes. Is the real you the one without the drug or with the drug?
This very problem has been considered often in science fiction, most notably in Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys. Check it out.
If I believe in God (in God mind you, not in the man made dogma of some German fellow in Rome or the rantings of some other fellow in Westboro KS) and He does not exist, what harm have I caused myself? What harm have I caused others?
If I do not believe in God and He does exist, what harm have I then caused myself? What harm have I inadvertantly lead others to?
That’s what part of Pascal’s wager I see.
And I recognise all of our insignificance.
I am just a tiny speck, barely a morsel, absolutely meaningless when held up against the scale of the universe. If nothing else then I recognize the cosmic scale as a higher power than I will ever understand, no matter how much we as humans study and simplify to solve all of the mysteries. That insignificance leads me to belief. Even if reality created itself to create itself, it still seems to have happened.
FWIW, I have a hard time envisioning an old man with a white beard sitting on a fluffy cloud watching us like a pedaphile at the park and a hard time relating to those who do.
What paradox?
To be quite precise, the resulting product is an exact copy of the individual, which cannot be told from the original by examination of the aspects that were duplicated. If that includes all aspects of the individual which can be observed (that is, if the copy doesn’t look like a desktop PC), then nobody will be able to tell the copy apart from you, and the copy’s assertion that it is the original will be as valid to it as your claim to be original is to you. (Assuming steps are taken to avoid letting slip which is which.)
Unless you pre-emptively and (at the moment) without any impartially observable evidence supporting you assume there’s some part of you which cannot be duplicated or simulated, there is no reason to believe that such a copy could not be created, once you get over the little details of being able to precisely position and attach molecules and atoms and electrons and so forth according to a model. There is no conceptual problem with an exact copy of a printed document or a rock or a cooked thanksgiving turkey or even a fresh human corpse, is there?
There is no observable evidence for an ‘uncopyable’ -and *unsimulatable’- particle. People may wish for it (actually they wish for a lot more than a particle) but that doesn’t make it so. And absent such a thing, the difference between a human corpse and a turned-off (and/or physically damaged) computer doesn’t seem to matter much in this scenario.
It’s your copy. If you copy a file from one directory on your hard drive to another, the resulting copy is distinct and separate from the original. If the original is then deleted, then it was indeed deleted and no longer exists.
The copy is equivallently useful in all situations as the original, though. (Assuming you don’t let the copy or original change and diverge after teh copy occurs and then expect them to still be exactly the same, of course, but I don’t think that’s the problem here.)
There is a distinct chance that when you get your answer, you will not be aware of it. And even if you get an answer…who cares? It’s like “sure as hell looking forward” to the answer of whether you will live out the day. The only reason to even think about it is if you’re worried about not getting some things done that you want to. (In which case by all means take care of such things now!)
Either way, live like it’s the last day of your life or like you’re going to live forever. But spending any real time worrying about the ‘then’ is a waste of ‘now’.
I’ll simplify it for you: we are meat-machines. This does not mean that you aren’t still a special unique flower (at least until somebody finds a way to sell you-brand seeds packets at the local flowershop), but it does mean that, like all other meat, like all other organic matter, like all other matter, thay you will someday decay and die.
The real question is whether life sucks first.
If you stand before a reproduction of yourself, with all bio-chemical processes and physical attributes completely replicated, it is you?
How can you tell?
How can anyone who observes you tell?
If the reproduction continues while the original is eliminated, do you continue to exist?
Do you stop existing when your body stops existing?
What, specifically, is the difference between you and the reproduction of you?
Can that be specifically determined to be bio-chemical?
If so, and that bio-chemical process is included within the reproduction, is it you now or are you “you”?
As with any other decent paradox, lather… rinse… repeat.
This is the same question as “if I copy a file on my hard drive, is it the same file”. As I noted in my prior post, the answer is “For most purposes yes - but to be technically accurate, no.” And while this does raise some of the fancy philosophical questions, I would hardly say that I’m causing a paradox every time I copy a file.
Since I don’t know you, I can’t answer. But belief in God and all sorts of other incredible claims that lack sufficient evidence have caused plenty of harm throughout history. It also causes all sorts of personal harm.
I know a woman whose baby died shortly after birth. Due due her belief in God, she lives every day with the guilt that her baby’s death was a punishment from God for her not being a good enough person. That woman is now in her seventies. You propagating incredible beliefs without evidence rather than stressing the importance in using rational thought to reach conclusions to your children or others can cause all sorts of harm.
Okay, you believe that no harm comes from your belief. So what part about accepting incredible claims without evidence leads to something good? How can you make yourself accept a claim, which is what accepting Pascal’s Wager entails- choosing belief based on what has the better outcome if God ends up existing despite the lack of evidence?
Okay, so you realize you’re insignificant. I don’t see how that leads you to accept a claim that has no evidence supporting it.
It’s really irrelevant. It’s just as outrageous if he’s made out of nothing or is Casper the Ghost like. Why can’t you relate to someone who believes God is made of material? It seems like you’ve got a lot in common with people like that, unless I’m misunderstanding what you believe God to be.
You are correct, there is no observable evidence for something uncopyable.
But as you stand there looking at yourself, the divergent experience has already begun. You know who you are and you know this is a copy. The copy knows who he is (the original) and thinks you are a copy.
A trap door opens and you drop into a meat grinder, your copy thinks that his copy was just distroyed and goes on about his business.
But that’s not your business any more.
And nobody knows it but you. Thus it’s completely unobservable.
That depends. Does your belief in God influence your daily actions? Or is it just an idle whimsy?
If you believe in a God that doesn’t exist you are basing your understanding of the universe on false premises. Starting from false premises can lead you to make false conclusions. And those false conclusions can have very serious real-world effects on other people.
For example, look at Proposition 8 in California. It bans gays marriage. A lot of the people voting for Prop 8 did so because they believe that God doesn’t approve of homosexual behavior. However, if God doesn’t exist then those voters are operating under false premises.
If belief in God were merely an aesthetic choice, like what flavor of ice cream you prefer, it wouldn’t matter what anybody believed. But since many people use their beliefs about the nature of God to govern their actions, it’s a very serious question indeed.