The same matter cannot exist in two places at once, so you are not copying the matter, you are making a facsimile using OTHER matter.
But you’re not copying the matter, you’re copying the pattern and superimposing it on other material.
I asked whether or not one could make a choice AND have everything be determined by neurochemistry.
Monist in that spirit/material are not separate entities, they are one in the same. I guess sure, it’s dualistic, but not in that it’s either or, but that the spirit is a pattern and the material is medium.
Well I don’t see it as a hijack because I am actually arguing my position on spirituality. Most everyone else just came in with their IMHO and left it at that.
Again, we’ve reached the limits of the analogy. Again, as I have said the user is left out of the analogy and that’s where it falls apart.
Do they really make decisions? Or do they make calculations? Can a computer decide between two equal options?
Ok, fair enough. But give some thought to my perfectly balanced on an apex thought experiment. How does one decide to disrupt the balance?
Taking the two together, how could a decision made by the “spirit” not be determined by the neurochemistry? Everything about the function of the spirit is determined by the neurochemistry, because it relies on the function and arrangement of that biochemistry to encode the pattern itself.
Okay, let’s put the user into the analogy. The user is something outside the computer and its pattern, which interacts with it only through specific data inputs. Information from the user is something that the computer reacts to based on its own, internal decision-making systems.
To me, the user analogizes to the guy across the table from you. He’s interacting with you and providing input, which you react to based on your own internal cognitive mechanisms.
If you propose the user is some noncorporeal thing that’s external from the body, brain. and cognitive pattern, and makes decisions for them, then you’re a dualist. Though if you’ve put half the personality/memories/whatever in the body, then what condition is the spirit going to be in when your body dies?
Not all calculations are decisions, but computers routinely choose between different courses of action based on conditional statements. (If this, do that, else do the other.) Nothing can stop you from arbitrariliy saying “computer decisions aren’t real decisions”, but I’m not seeing how that can be anything other than an opinion. They assess data and based on it choose a course of action. Sounds like a decision to me.
And the way a computer chooses between equal options is they make them unequal. The common way to do this is to do whichever is first in the list of options.
To be “spiritual but not religious” is to be unwilling to accept a canonical faith but to still be willing to hold on to vapid, nebular notions of consciousness, life and death, meaning, and morality. People who are “spiritual but not religious” like to throw around new age terms and lend unjustifiable levels of credence to Eastern religions, especially Buddhism. They like to have fashionable but largely nonsensical discussions about the human condition.
That’s what copying is! And in this case, it would be identical to the original, because atoms are atoms.
I still don’t understand why the user is important to the analogy. As Begbert says, that’s equivalent to another person interacting with you.
They make decisions every bit as much as we make decisions. And what’s the difference whether you call what goes on in your head, a decision or a calculation?
The same way a very complex computer would decide. Take a bunch of inputs and a complex internal state, and make a decision. I honestly don’t get why you think this example is troublesome for the computer analogy, it seems very straightforward that it’s equivalent.