Maybe I’m a little dim, but I don’t see the paradox here. We don’t have absolute answers to anything. So what?
You said, “Of course none of this addresses my paradox of individuality if all functions are truely bio-chemical”.
What’s paradoxical about what makes us individuals being bio-chemical?
Let’s presume that somebody is watching the whole process, and in fact is the one who made the copy, and even who pushed the button to drop you in the meat grinder. (Presumably while laughing maniacally, since he knows damn well he’s killing you.)
How would the fact that people have observed that your copy is a copy change anything?
What if we don’t kill you? What if instead you pal up with your copies and start a restraunt? Is that a problem?
(Are you disturbed by the concept of identical twins? They’re in a comparable situation - though hopefully without the meat grinder…)
Does this lady suffer because of her belief in God or because of something another human said to her? Does she believe in God or does she believe in man? Is her perception of punishment directed from God actually directed from God (e.g. Did God kill her baby as a punishment?) or is it self imposed and a manifestation of some deep rooted unresolved guilt she may have within herself?
A belief in a continuing soul, a belief in a creating God, these things do not have to burdon us. I don’t believe these things should burdon us at all, such things were meant to enrich us.
Men have twisted peoples beliefs around for thousands of years though. One of the easiest way to manipulate someone is to manipulate their faith. Cause a rational person to believe that you speak with a higher authority than is found in this world and you can cause them to become an irrational killing machine.
This has happened more often than not.
A by product of this is those for whom the machine has no direct use, they become puppets, existing to spread the word and enlist new recruits.
Individual faith only hurts you if you let it.
Because if it’s bio-chemical, if it’s physical, if it’s tangeable, then it should be replicable. But how can it be 100% replicable if the copy is still a copy and not you?
Even if it’s 99.9999% bio-chemical and there is that .0001% part of it that is not, that’s still .0001% that we don’t understand, which can be quite a bit.
I seem to recall that 99.9999% of the population of the earth is about 26 people, 26 people can be quite a bit if you all try to fit into a porta potty.
So either everything is bio-chemical and thus replicable or there is some small bit that is not replicable and thus not bio-chemical but is significant in that this small bit encompasses at least a portion of, if not all of, our individual awareness.
There is still nothing paradoxical about the situation you described. An exact copy of a human body is just that, an exact copy. Is it me? If the definition of “me” includes the exact atoms that comprise my body this instant, then no. If the definition of “me” is something, anything, that substantially duplicates the physical nature of this body, without necessarily being the same atoms, then yes the copy is “me” also. Nothing paradoxical.
This post is just filled with ignorance.
I can copy every file on my computer. Physical process, 100% replicable, yet the copies are still copies and not the “original”.
0.0001% of the world’s population (appr. 6.7 Billion) is 6700, not 26.
Just because you can replicate something does not steal the original’s individual awareness, no more than taking someone’s picture steals their “soul”.
You can keep any analogies drawn on porta potties, they are all yours.
Say you are standing at a fork in a path in the woods. Is the you who takes the left hand fork different from the you who takes the right hand fork? The situation is the same here. “You” refers to the person before the copy is made. After there is you(1) and you(2). You clearly have a preference for you(1), but because by definition the you’s are identical, I don’t know why. If you get knocked out during the copying, how do you know when you wake up whether you’re the original or the duplicate?
You’re misunderstanding the concept of paradox here. You’re uncomfortable with the scenario, but there is nothing paradoxical about it.
You’re failing to understand my overall point. Her belief in God is irrational because it’s a fantastic belief with nothing to back it up. That her beliefs in how a being that has no evidence to back up Its existence chooses to punish is largely irrelevant. That you believe God wouldn’t punish in her case is good for you, but propagating irrational beliefs will in someway lead to unnecessary harm much like it does in the woman I described. Does she believe in God or does she believe in man? I don’t see much of a difference. People mostly have religious beliefs that were handed down to them from people.
There is nothing enriching about irrational belief. We can lead moral, just and fruitful lives and pass down morals to our children without bringing wishful thinking and Pascal’s Wager in to play, and without any of the danger that irrational thought brings along with it.
Alright then. Sounds like you understand why irrational belief is not beneficial. I’m guessing it’s okay as long as others buy in to your beliefs in God’s make believe behavior and through this no further irrational though processes will cause any harm?
This is the path that irrational and supernatural belief always leads to. History has shown that.
BTW, you didn’t respond so some of my other points and questions:
What you have is a classification problem (and a desire to nitpick about it.)
The difference between an original and a perfect copy is that they occupy different spaces in place-time. Whe you use “you” to refer to a specific instance of you in space-time, then the copy is not you - but I don’t need to zerox you to do that. I can just distinguish between different ‘yous’ in different time slots.
You are not the same person you were twenty years ago, for example. (Heck, you’re probably not even a good copy of that person - people could tell you apart in an instant.) You’re not the same person you were ten years ago, either. Or five. Or one. Or six months, three months, one month - you’re not even the same person you were yesterday. Heck, you’re not the same person you were five seconds ago; you’re in a different physical position, with most of your blood cells in completely different places in your body.
Yet, you still classify all those prior forms of yourself as “you”, because they satisfy a criteria that makes such a classification appropriate - you can establish a continuity of location between yourself and those prior selves. You can also establish a continuity of memory and awareness with some of them, but that’s not necessary - you’d still classify your sleeping self as ‘you’ for example.
Copies are ‘you’ in another sense - in that they match you with regard to identifiable properties. We use this sort of classification a lot; multiple copies of a computer file are ‘the same file’ because they are sufficiently similar. The same goes for books. It goes for people as well - when we se a person later we identify them as the same person even lacking evidence of a continuous physical presence moving from one place to another. Heck, we consider Captain Kirk to be one guy even though he was explicitly made copies of, with the original put through the meat grinder, numerous times. (Not to say he actually existed, of course, but nobody had any trouble with the concept.)
You’re making hay about this because you believe, against evidence, that something exists in the original that wouldn’t be represented or simulated in the copy, we get that. But that has nothing to do with whether a perfect copy, if it was created, should be classified as a ‘you’ or not in various situations.
And, by the way, how do you know that non-physical things are not copyable? You’re making a distinction about this without establishing a difference - there is no reason not to believe that even if ‘spirits’ existed that you could not in theory make duplicate spirits out of surplus ectoplasm and thus replicate a person anyway.
Yes. And if the process is non-destructive and meat-Curt isn’t recycled, now there are two of them. Separate versions of the same person; rather like how in a sci-fi story with parallel universes and time travel you can end up with two different potential future versions of the same person in the same room, neither realer than the other or the present time version of themselves.
Meat-Curt ceased when the meat ceased. Now, the the question is was he ever separate from Mech-Curt ? As I see it, the answer to that is if Meat and Mech have the chance/time to think independently and develop into individuals. At that point, they become different versions of the same person.
But there’s no reason to believe any of that.
Erring on the side of caution means not believing wild, claims that have zero evidence to back them up. I can’t, for example, prove that Obama isn’t actually a disguised lizard alien out to steal our oceans who’s softening us up for the invasion; but given the lack of evidence, assuming that he’s not is the side of caution.
Plenty of religions have or did have anti-science positions they demand that their followers uphold. and to the extent that they don’t, it’s because holding onto them in the face of science relentlessly proving them wrong got too embarrassing.
Hardly. Faith is arrogance; you are asserting that the universe works the way you want it to work, because you say so. It most certainly isn’t any “recognition of scale and acknowledgement of insignificance”. More of a denial of them.
No I won’t, and no, it’s not.
How very convenient. So God always gets the credit. :rolleyes:
No, that’s all due to human effort, and due to the believers being beaten back from their relentless efforts to impose ignorance.
There’s no such paradox.
That doesn’t even make sense. And our not understanding something is zero evidence for God anyway.
Ah; the compulsive need of the believers to think themselves persecuted, no matter how much power they have. You aren’t inviting abuse by believing; that’s the mainstream. That’s like me claiming that I’m being oppressed because I’m straight and right handed.
Wrong. The faithful are, by nature more ignorant; and there isn’t any “light” to stand in.
Operating on a delusion screws up your judgement; you will cause harm without meaning to. And so does accepting the very idea that faith is a valid reason to believe something; you say that you hurt no one, but then you’d have faith that was so, wouldn’t you ? And how many people, really believe in some sort of generic God that has no other qualities than being God, anyway ?
And even assuming you directly harm no one, by doing so you validate ( in their minds ) the believers who do.
Same thing; that’s where she got the idea of God, someone told her. And her belief in God is what’s encouraging her to believe in something so self destructive and irrational.
Yes, they do. They promote and excuse both irrationality and extreme ruthlessness. “Kill them all and let God sort them out” is a straightforward extrapolation of those beliefs.
Because that’s one of the main purposes of religion.
Faith is hurtful by it’s nature. It is, in itself, damage.
Oh no I think you did a stupendous job and I am indeed quite proud of you! Rest assured it was a stupid exchange and in my book you proved it.
He proved it? Not to open up a can of worms, but dehacker is the one that started the exchange and x-ray vision is the one that admitted it was silly and said he was done with it. I don’t see what dehacker proved or what there is to be proud of him for (no offense to you, dehacker).
How do you figure I started the exchange? He was the one that initiated the whole “I never said that” silly business.
He left is opinion that there would still be debates regarding God’s existence even if there was some evidence that god exists and you started a debate over it. That’s you starting the exchange.
This is a thread about Scientific evidence for God’s existence, thus a debate about the acceptance of said evidence seems rather germane to the topic, don’t you think? The debate we were having wasn’t silly, it was central to the OP. The “I never said that” - “I never said you said that” exchange was the stupid part.
No, I don’t; it was an opinion given based on his experiences with atheists comments that I agree with (and I’m an atheist). The OP is not about whether or not debates would continue if there was some evidence that god exists. As he explained, some in this thread have already admitted that no amount of evidence would convince them that God is real so I think that suffices as evidence that “some evidence that god exists” definitely wouldn’t stop the debates.
Actually, that wasn’t the stupid part. It seemed you were creating a straw man so he stated that he never said that. You may not have intended it to seem like a straw man so you stated that you never said that he said that. That’s done here all the time; nothing stupid about it.
Just because you happen to agree with a position doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any debate about it. This is a debate forum, or did I just dream that part?
If you want to take up the claim that someone has said they would deny the existence of a being despite scientific evidence for it, then I will say what I said to him – back it up with a cite. Remember though, it isn’t just that they would argue whether the being qualified as “God”, it is that they would deny it exists.
Again, cite that I created any strawman.
I argued my position that was contradictory to his with statements that supported my conclusion. We can debate those statements and/or conclusions if you like, but if you want to assert I committed a strawman fallacy, you need to back it up or back off.
I was very specific in post 224 in trying to layout what I thought his argument was in the hope of getting some clarification just in case I had misconstrued his position, but he didn’t choose to address it.
Uh, that’s not all I said. Nice try though.
Oh boy. This doesn’t mean that any tangential debate breaking out is appropriate, which is why tomndebb stepped in, and why he’ll probably step in again due to us going on about it now, so I’ll make this my last post regarding this and let you get in the last word.
nd_n8stated :
*"No metaphysical miracle will persuade them.
No scientific evidence, accepted globally, published in hundreds of peer reviewed journals, independantly replicated and confirmed on dozens of seperate occations while never, not even once, producing results to the contrary can ever change their minds."*
To which erislover replied:
Probably I am one of those people, for reasons I just explained.
Will that do?
Uh, no. It’s about whether the being qualifies as God. If David Blaine claimed he was God, the posters above wouldn’t deny that he existed; they’d deny he was God.
I can’t prove a straw man was your intent. It evidently seemed like one to x-ray vision and it seemed like one to me.
Fantome, obviously you and I disagree whether or not a debate about the sufficiency of scientific evidence of God’s existence belongs in a thread about scientific evidence of God’s existence. I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is you calling me out for it because you don’t think it belongs in the thread. Leave that to a Mod, or take it to the pit.
This post by erislover, just a few above the one you cite, is why I don’t think it meets the conditions laid out. I read that as stating that he would be questioning the beings definition as “God”, not questioning its very existence itself. However, erislover can be the final judge of what he meant.
Here I think you are agreeing with me. I have been saying all along that people wouldn’t deny existence, they would debate identity.
A straw man fallacy would be easy to demonstrate if it existed. Intent doesn’t enter into it.
Are you sure? I understand that in the past, philosophers argued relentlessly about the existence of x-rays (and sandwiches). But when the proof was presented that they exist, the debates stopped. Why do you think it would be different if the gods revealed themselves to us?