That’s actually why I dropped out of this debate two days ago blowero. I’m coming back to specifically repond to you because you’re asking me questions. I’m no longer in the firing line so to speak. 
I know, begbert2. That’s not the point.
And reality can’t be described by these systems?
The patterns of interaction between one part of the universe and the next can be represented as a mathematical system.
You’re still missing the point. An information-processing system can be indisruptable only if no possible inputs are incompatible with its function.
You know, I was quite happy to leave you to your delusions of grandeur, when you had to become personally offensive despite a request for politeness of tone.
Hardly relevant to what you quoted. It should be obvious to any idiot that I’m suggesting that you’re making all sorts of assumptions; this has nothing to do with what my view of the soul is. And since it is, in fact, nonstandard, your claim to have disproven it is utter nonsense. In other words, your assumption that my view of the soul is the standard one, and that you’ve hence shown it to be logically inconsistent is, setting aside the not inconsiderable question of whether your argument holds any water or not, an assumption. Frankly, TVAA, I’m starting to wonder whether you think that all assumptions come with big flashing lights and air-raid sirens. Hint: they don’t, and you may wish to learn to recognize them.
Yes, fine. The soul changes the body. Good. What the hell does that have to do with changes of the soul, which was the issue?
Do you even read the things to which you object? This wasn’t a vastly subtle statement on my part or anything.
Me: “A affects B means that A affects B.”
You: “This is not obvious. Newton’s Third Law needn’t apply to souls.”
Follow these 2 steps for me, please.
- Read the above carefully.
- Consider deeply.
There is this hugely complicated concept known as the passage of time. What this means, among other things, is that light travels farther in time T + 5 minutes than it does in time T. What that means, broadly speaking, is that things which are a distance cT + 5 lightminutes away can be seen at time T + 5 minutes whereas before that they couldn’t. And what that means is that the observable universe is expanding. Consider deeply.
**
Ah, progress; things exist which we cannot detect. I invite you to consider that this negates your entire premise. If things which cannot be interacted with by us nevertheless can exist, then it logically follows that if the soul is one such thing, we cannot destroy it even though it can effect us. And since your entire argument seems to center on the concept of destroying a soul…
Perhaps you’ll tell us that it doesn’t matter whether we can interact with the soul, only that something can interact with it. You’ll then claim that because something can interact with it, it can be destroyed. But you’ve just conceded that not all things can be interacted with by all other things. If so, then it follows that not all things need be capable of interaction with that which can destroy them, setting aside for the moment the issue of whether logic requires all things to be destructible. Further, I invite you to consider that if a thing can interact with us, whether we can interact with it or not, then it exists. And if a thing can interact yet need not be interacted with, then it need not be destructible.
Almost as certain as I am that you’re not even remotely qualified to make that judgment.
Let me remind you of a few things. The first is known as “reflection.” The second goes by the name “goggles.” 
Switching to blowero, briefly… As you said, Apos got it. In the last paragraph of the relevant post. Which was my point all along.
As for logic requiring observation… I disagree. Consider the existence of mathematics, after all.
Switching back to TVAA…
- Reality is not, in fact, a formal logical system.
- Reality need not, in fact, be even describable by such a system. We use mathematics to describe it, and that seems to work pretty well, but so what? Who says that the universe has to follow mathematical laws? It would be damnably awkward if it didn’t, but it needn’t be the case that these little fundamental particles are running around thinking “must satisfy Dirac equation. Must satisfy Dirac equation.”
In other words, and you may take it as read that the flashing lights and air-raid siren go here, you’ve just made another assumption. Reality isn’t a logical system, reality is what is.
Suppose, however, that reality can be described by such a system. It does not follow that weaknesses in the description (i.e. the inability to decide the truth or falsity of a given statement) corresponds to a weakness in actual reality. If the formal system can’t tell you whether a given statement is true or false, you can always just go look and see what the damn answer is.
Not, of course, that you’ll bother to acknowledge that this might possibly have even a shred of a chance of being valid, since the person who pointed it out is evidently an idiot who can’t be expected to tie his shoes, let alone understand any of your deep and thought provoking points. Nevertheless, I thank your Majesty for condescending to condescend.
In my usual position of trying to help TVAA clarify things…
You have already been reamed, so I’ll be brief:
Yes, that’s what mathematics/physics/science is for. And suppose for a minute that all of reality can be accurately modeled by math/etc, which is not yet the case, but might eventually be.
Godel’s proof did not shatter mathematics. In fact, math is even still taught in a few of the more out-of-the-way schools, believe it or not. Godel merely demonstrated that not all statements in mathematics were solvable. Now, considering that finding wether statements are true is what math is for, this shocked a few people.
Reality is not for finding absolute truth. (For example, my computer didn’t disappear into non-existence when I wrote “This statement is false,” and if yours did, I sincerely apologise. Oops, did it again. Sorry.) Reality doesn’t seem to be bothered that it can contain things that aren’t either true or false. And, frankly, neither is mathematics; most equations aren’t trick questions. (A few mathematicians were a bit rattled, but they got over it.) Mathematics was not destroyed by Godel, and neither is reality.
And, as we know nothing about the function of the soul, we have no reason to believe that it would find any configuration in the entire physical world incompatible. Therefore it would seem a bit hasty to assume that such a method to disrupt the soul exists.
Particularly to the degree of eliminating it entirely. Keep in mind that even death is a mere change in state; there’s still something left behind that needs to be dealt with. And there is no reason to believe that a metaphysical soul would have inert “death” states that it could enter into. Frankly, we know next to nothing about the things, so it behooves us not to make assertions about that which we know not.
I don’t care what you personally consider a “soul” to be. These attributes are part of the concept that people generally refer to as the soul.
If the body (and the world in which it’s in) can’t change the soul, the soul’s influence on the body cannot be tailored to the conditions of the body. It would be “flying blind”, so to speak.
You’re quite right: I’d read that as “A affects B means that B affects A”. I couldn’t believe that you’d actually said something utterly pointless. I apologize: my implicit assumption about your intelligence was in error.
No, it’s means that the world I observe is expanding. There is a very non-trivial distinction between the world I observe and the observable world.
The observable world, the things that can be observed by me, is static. It’s an unchanging four-dimensional lightcone. My observations of the present moment stretch ever-farther away from me, in both space and time, but the cone itself does not expand.
Ah, progress; things exist which we cannot detect. I invite you to consider that this negates your entire premise.
[/quote]
It doesn’t negate my premise. These things affect things we detect; therefore we must include them in any model of the universe we construct. They are a part of our world. Those things that don’t affect us or the things that affect us: they do not exist.
Irrelevant. Our effects reach those objects just as their affects reach us. Souls can still be disrupted.
The rest of your argument is pointless.
If you’re referring to devices to be worn over the eyes, they can indeed be destroyed. Your point is. . .?
Reality must be describable by some principles; it is necessarily bound by rules. The nature of those rules may be called into question, but not the rules themselves.
It doesn’t matter if all of current mathematics cannot model the universe: the universe still operates according to certain (unknown) principles.
True. His proof places some rather interesting restrictions on mathematical systems.
Which things are these, again? That phrase contains no meaning. . . so what? The configuration of that phrase is still there.
If there were no such incompatible configuration, the soul couldn’t be an information-processing system. People claim that they know what the function of the soul is; these claims are inconsistent with other claims about the nature of the soul.
**
[/quote]
Keep in mind that even death is a mere change in state; there’s still something left behind that needs to be dealt with. And there is no reason to believe that a metaphysical soul would have inert “death” states that it could enter into. Frankly, we know next to nothing about the things, so it behooves us not to make assertions about that which we know not. **
[/QUOTE]
There are excellent reasons. If souls are information-processing systems, they’re subject to entropy. If they’re not, the general assumptions about their nature are incorrect.
Being an information processing system does not make something:
a) inherently fallible.
b) subject to entropy.
How did you come to these conclusions, might I ask?
I’m not sure what you mean. The results of mathematical calculations are tested experimentally all the time. Math is firmly grounded in empirical observation; otherwise it would be useless.
** Apos**
wrote:
You can see your eyes? In terms of direct experience you cannot, i.e. the unmirrored eye cannot see itself seeing.
The soul/consciousness has been called the unobserved observer, as it can observe all except itself. We as observer cannot observe that which is aware of thought.
Besides if souls—consciousness are nothing then what could be observed or perceived?
** begbert2**
wrote:
Yes, but it can’t observe itself, and hence only can make inferences based on these other things as to what it might be.
Whatever it observes is precisely not it.
Consciousness/soul never encounters itself as an object of its own observation.
Can awareness be said to be ‘interaction’? If so, what is interacting? Awareness. But what is awareness? What actually is it?
Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that any system sufficiently powerful to represent the natural numbers is necessarily incomplete: there are statements that cannot be evaluated within the system.
Therefore, such a system is “fallible”: there are inputs such that it can be crashed. This is a well-known aspect of computer science: there’s no such thing as a computer that can’t be hacked.
No matter how souls are affected – no matter what rules they obey – their interactions with the world can be considered an information-processing system.
If souls can be changed, they can be changed sufficiently so that they’re disrupted (in the same way that a crystal goblet thrown to the ground is “destroyed”: the crystal remains, and the original configuration of the crystal is inherent in the broken shards, but the pattern is no longer embodied).
Thus, souls cannot simultaneously be eternal and change.
The eye does not see itself.
Adding a mirror doesn’t allow the eye to see every part of the system. There are always things that cannot be seen.
In our consciousness (the awareness of thought processes), we cannot be aware of that part which is aware of other things. No matter how extensive this module’s awareness is, it cannot be aware of itself.
In this sense, I agree with Iamthat.
As a computer scientist, I can assure you that this statement is false. There are only two ways to hack a computer:
- A flaw in the interface that allows unfiltered, unrecognized input to usurp control from the system.
- Physical access to the box.
If you think 1 is avoidable, then you’ve been running Windows too long. Flaws are added; it is entirely possible to design a Turing machine that can handle all input. But, for complicated applications, it is damnably hard to code one. It only takes one error to make a vulnerability. But the error is not supplied by the system; merely the designers/coders.
And in the case of souls, either the soul is held in the brain, in which case it is accessible and destructible, or it is not and it is not.
I personally have designed uncrashable systems: they recognized invalid inputs and print reasonable error messages. This is the expectation, not the exception.
Also notice that this:
is a rather massive leap, especially since nobody has “crashed” mathematics yet. It never even needed a reboot.
Sorry, but the computer analogy provides demonstrations that not all computers can be crahsed. Where I work, various persons are working on developing a server-side system for managing database access. The strategy: if any unexpected input comes down the wire, cut the connection dead. Hey, that sounds familiar…
Oops; the computer analogy provides demonstrations that not all systems can be crashed. Coder error.
I presume you meant to say that issue #1 isn’t avoidable. Indeed, it’s not: software can be written that won’t crash for any finite set of possible inputs, but not ALL inputs that it could possibly accept.
I’ve asked several computer science experts about this point; they criticized my presentation but not my essential points. Perfectly secure systems cannot be made, only relatively secure ones.
No: either the soul can be influenced and is destroyable, or it cannot and is not.
But not ALL invalid inputs. If the interface could handle all invalid inputs, it would be like making a system that was Turing complete. The system is far too complex for that to be possible.
I presume that the universe is both complex and complete, but it doesn’t describe anything. The universe (seen atemporally) cannot and does not change, and thus cannot be crashed.
It’s relatively simple to make filters and protections against certain types of unexpected input (expected unexpected inputs), but there will always be ways to break the system.
Then I suggest, with all due respect, that you refrain from slinging around things like “all I have to do is show that your conceptualization of the soul is logically inconsistent” when what you mean is that you are attempting to prove that your conception of the soul, or your conception of someone else’s conception of the soul, is logically inconsistent. Precision in language, and all that.
The soul of course must be able to perceive the body. I believe we’ve already agreed on as much.
Such as, for instance, “If the soul can be affected by some configurations of matter, there are mechanisms by which this information can be exchanged.” That is to say, if A can affect B, then A can affect B. Which was, if you go back and check, my entire point to begin with; that what you’d just said was trivially obvious to the most casual observer upon initial inspection. Geez.
Balderdash. To quote elucidator further, “Tommyrot.” The observable universe means by definition the part of the universe which I am capable of observing.
Utter nonsense. Of course the cone expands. That’s what passage in time means. It always opens at a 45[sup]o[/sup] angle, ignoring little details like general relativity, but as the amount of past gets bigger and bigger, the sides of the cone get bigger and bigger. Draw it some time.
Well, not if you ignore the argument that explains what I mean, it doesn’t. Unfortunately, one doesn’t dispose of arguments by neglecting them. At least if one has a shred of intellectual honesty.
I thought we’d already covered this. First you tell me that things which lie outside the presently observable universe do exist; they become detectable later. Now you tell me they don’t; after all, they don’t affect us, either directly or at second hand. So in five minutes, when some new part of the observable universe reaches us and becomes in principle detectable, did it exist before or not? Pick one, please, not both as it becomes convenient.
Now you’re just sticking your fingers in your ears and singing “la la, I can’t hear you.” Blind assertion does not a fact make. No matter how many times you say it.
Thank you for that illuminating comment. I would never have guessed.
Well, in the larger sense, that you are making a hideously vast raft of assumptions and clinging to them as facts even when pointed out to you, but that’s not what you meant. What you meant, of course, was what my point with that comment was. Note the smiley: this might possibly indicate that it was a bloody throw-away line.
Says who?
Okay, let’s play your game for a minute. I call into question that reality is bounded by the rules of a formal logic system. I’ve been calling that into question for what, 2 pages now? And you’ve been insisting that “of course reality obeys a formal logic system.” Why do we assume that?
I would submit that the universe is somewhat more than a truth-deciding device. I would also submit that there is a clear and obvious distinction between the inability to decide whether a given statement is true or not and the ability to be literally destroyed. The earth can be destroyed; it cannot decide a logical statement for us. A logical system can decide a logical statement for us; it cannot be destroyed, although it can be shown to be incomplete or invalid.
The results are checked against observation. But the knowledge comes from deduction. And of course, not all realms of mathematics make observable predictions. Sure, they’re not useful for most people, but they exist nonetheless, and we have knowledge about them. That’s what I mean.
Which means the body can change the soul.
Does it go away if you close your eyes?
There’s a difference between the world you happen to be observing and the total set of things that you can observe.
Not four-dimensionally. Seen from a three-dimensional perspective, we would see a sphere shrinking to a point, then expanding again at a constant rate. The cone is static.
I have picked one. Now you’ve made the same error I did in not paying sufficiently close attention to what my opponent was actually saying. The difference is that you’ve repeated the error.
Lightcones overlap, g8rguy. Reality is composed of all things that interact with each other: i.e., the things whose lightcones intersect.
Let’s assume the opposite. There aren’t any rules. What events can take place? If we say that any particular thing has happened, we’re saying that other things didn’t happen, and that violates the premise that there aren’t any rules.
The substance in which the logical system is embodied can be destroyed. And the Earth could very well be used as a computer: haven’t you ever read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
Dunno what Computer Scientists YOU talked to, TVAA, but systems can be made that handle all input. It’s quite easy; first you must know what sort of input to expect. This can always be defined. Then, you handle all cases, in all possible states of your program, in a reasonable manner. How easy this is do to depends. But then, viola! Crash-proof system.
Of course, most programs can be in as many as 2[sup]bits in their memory footprint[/sup] states, so you can’t just throw things together and expect them to work. But YES, you can prove that individual algoritms won’t crash and can’t be tripped up by funny input. They demonstrated this in one of my 200-level programming classes. Theoretically, you could do that for an entire program. This costs ungodly amounts of money, and is mentally challenging to the extreme, but it can be done.
Sorry, pal, but ALL inputs were covered. This is called “halfway decent programming”. And you have no idea how complicated a system I’m talking about. Yes, a system that operates like a soul, now, that would be complicated. It would take a programming God to design that all in one shot, though I gather that natural selection has a chance at it if you’re not in a hurry. (Heck, monkeys on typewriters’ll do it for you if you wait long enough.)
What can I say? Your position is incorrect. I’m sure you’ll get over it given enough time.
Oh, and you had better watch out with using time as a 4th axis. Because then, nothing does get changed via the “interaction”, thus obliterating most of the discussion. Just be aware…
Oh, and the substance embodying the logical system can only be destroyed if you can get at it, such as appears not to be the case with extraphysical souls. Be careful how you swing your analogies around; they don’t all have the same basic assumptions.
The input that the system will be subjected to cannot be predefined; you cannot know the entirety of the universe if you’re in it!
I can only conclude that you misunderstood. G’sIT guarantees that your system has a vulnerability. You might be able to safeguard a system from input of a certain type, but not all possible inputs. The system must either fail or crash for some input; if it didn’t, it would be sufficiently complex AND Turing complete, which violates the G’sIT.
Change occurs from the perspective of inside the time stream, just as the goblet appears to be destroyed.
We’ve already established that we can “get at” the substance that embodies the system: we can give the system input.