/zellig/ - Ongezellig

I don't believe in the possibility of humans not having souls. The way I see it consciousness itself proves the otherwordly. Human consciousness is something completely off the table for us humans, we can't recreate it, we can't even understand it. In a camera of a machine the information isn't seen. Machines cannot behold what they "see". The rays of light are merely stored in a bit array and later go trough algorithms to be converted into a pixel array, but it isn't a picture the computer sees. The computer is just a machine and the machine can only calculate, it cannot behold as we humans can. There's a beholder behind our eyes, we aren't just algorithms and anyone can be a witness to this. A computer isn't consciousness yet we are, what's the difference? It's the soul. Consciousness itself proves the existence of a soul and kills materialistic understanding of the universe and life.

>>20579
yeah
>>20584
>we aren't just algorithms
While I agree with you on that, there is no proof of this. The materialist posits that human consciousness is just am algorithm we do not understand. If your statement was so apparently true, there would be no materialists.

>>20592
Materialism is just a cope philosophy for midwit STEMautists to look smart. It posits that the fact that our senses can only discern a material reality, means there is only the material reality, despite those very senses telling them that being a non-material construct.

>>20579
The existence of soul could be proved if we could prove there is an acausal component to the human behaviour, i.e. not explainable by or going against the laws of physics. But to do that we would need to have a complete understanding of physics, and be sure it's complete, which we cannot be due to the problem of induction.

>>20595
But do you believe in souls?

>>20592
I do believe it to be apparently true, obvious even. But something being obvious has never deterred people from rejecting it, indulging in delusions or coping as >>20593 said.
Of course, by the nature of the question at hand it cannot be debated, it's abstract and untouchable (as something immaterial would be). You can posit that the human consciousness is just an algorithm but I don't think you can convince yourself of that. One thing that I pondered heavily is artificial intelligence. Materialists believe we will one day be able to construct a mind, a conscious mind, out of material parts. It makes sense to them, brains are just machines after all. But I see this as the height of absurdity. I remember seeing a video of a person that made a simple binary calculator using gravity. That is to say, he made logic gates out of falling spheres and obstacles. This really made it clear just what computers are, calculators. Everything a computer does is a calculation in binary. It's memory is just a long array of these bits, it's processor just calculates, the graphics card just calculates, it's all merely calculations. These calculations are done with electronic components, but that doesn't make it special. In the past they were done with vacuum tubes and as I said earlier, it could technically be done even with falling balls. Now Here's the question I posit, how many balls need to be falling at the same time to construct consciousness? We all understand the difference between a ball or a rock or a tincan hitting a hard surface, and us having a thought. A physical collision isn't conscious (I suppose there is no proof for this notion but I believe it is self evident, this isn't a debate) but a human mind is. However, if a human mind is just a collection of calculations, similar to a computer, then enough collisions would make a mind. If you were to theoretically create a giant vacuum tube computer, or a giant gravity powered physical collision computer, you would get a consciousness. I find this notion absurd, it is to me after this thought experiment beyond obvious that consciousness cannot be something material. The high complexity and unfamiliar nature of computers only serves to obfuscate (through ignorance) the actual issue of constructing a consciousness. No material interaction seems capable of generating a beholder. I believe that anyone who ponders consciousness itself will arrive at the conclusion that it cannot be material.

>>20596
I'm not a materialist because being a materialist means asserting with certainty there are no acasual entities (like souls) despite the fact we cannot possibly have any evidence for or against their existence. And the existence of souls subjectively makes more sense to me than non-existence.
>Your request looks automated; post discarded.

>>20601
>Your request looks automated; post discarded.
I literally had to switch device because of this, it needs to be switched off.

>>20601
>>20602
newcrackas, just copy your comment and refresh the page, then paste it back and post

>>20599
>I do believe it to be apparently true, obvious even. But something being obvious has never deterred people from rejecting it, indulging in delusions or coping as >>20593 said.
Of course, by the nature of the question at hand it cannot be debated, it's abstract and untouchable (as something immaterial would be). You can posit that the human consciousness is just an algorithm but I don't think you can convince yourself of that. One thing that I pondered heavily is artificial intelligence. Materialists believe we will one day be able to construct a mind, a conscious mind, out of material parts. It makes sense to them, brains are just machines after all. But I see this as the height of absurdity. I remember seeing a video of a person that made a simple binary calculator using gravity. That is to say, he made logic gates out of falling spheres and obstacles. This really made it clear just what computers are, calculators. Everything a computer does is a calculation in binary. It's memory is just a long array of these bits, it's processor just calculates, the graphics card just calculates, it's all merely calculations. These calculations are done with electronic components, but that doesn't make it special. In the past they were done with vacuum tubes and as I said earlier, it could technically be done even with falling balls. Now Here's the question I posit, how many balls need to be falling at the same time to construct consciousness? We all understand the difference between a ball or a rock or a tincan hitting a hard surface, and us having a thought. A physical collision isn't conscious (I suppose there is no proof for this notion but I believe it is self evident, this isn't a debate) but a human mind is. However, if a human mind is just a collection of calculations, similar to a computer, then enough collisions would make a mind. If you were to theoretically create a giant vacuum tube computer, or a giant gravity powered physical collision computer, you would get a consciousness. I find this notion absurd, it is to me after this thought experiment beyond obvious that consciousness cannot be something material. The high complexity and unfamiliar nature of computers only serves to obfuscate (through ignorance) the actual issue of constructing a consciousness. No material interaction seems capable of generating a beholder. I believe that anyone who ponders consciousness itself will arrive at the conclusion that it cannot be material.

>>20605
epic fail quote

>>20605
holy FAIL

>>20604
If that works, then the filter doesn't really work and is useless.

>>20605
mother of all failquotes

>>20605
Hey would you look at that

>>20605
monumental failure

>>20612
It's actually exactly 142 if you include the first paragraph

>>20599
I would advise against confusing consciousness with having a soul. Do you lose you soul when you are unconscious? It's nonsense. Consciousness is just the subjective experience of being in a body and perceiving the world and as such is a purely bodily sensation. Could you even know you are conscious if you hadn't any senses? I think the problem comes from separating the object of consciousness from the subject, who is conscious of it, and the reification of the concept in consequence. People can be conscious of something, which means they can receive the information about it and adapt their actions. I would even oppose calling machines conscious if their behavior proves they take into account the existence of objects they are supposed to be conscious of. Same with bacteria etc. Soul, on the other hand, would be what allows a person not to be an automaton with actions completely determined by the influence of its environment.

>>20631
What happens to the soul when the body sleeps? Perhaps it sleeps with it. I don't see the inconsistency, a human is the body and the soul, the two give us life, they are part of one whole. The soul isn't completely separate from the body nor is it complete without the body, that's why the separation of soul and body is death. But when you are alive and awake it is the soul that allows for the subjective experience. The material cannot have a subjective experience as the material interactions cannot create the beholder that we humans are. On the topic of sleep, why do our lives not go on as if we were asleep? A machine can do it. Every machine goes on as if asleep, it doesn't behold, it isn't conscious. It is just a mechanism, yet we humans are more. Our minds don't just take an input and compute an output, rather, we behold the world. We take it all in, we observe it, we see it, we feel it, we are awake and aware.
consciousness is awareness, it is the beholding of our existence and our senses. As I said, I find it absurd to notion that this sort of awareness is possible without a soul. You said consciousness is just "the subjective experience of being in a body and perceiving the world" and that it is "as such purely bodily sensation", well what about this sensation? How do we behold that sensation? A soul! How could something material behold and be aware, it couldn't! A body on it's own cannot be consciousness because no material interaction can replicate being a conscious beholder, seeing rather than computing. Being aware rather than being an automaton. You say that a machine should be considered conscious if it took into account the existence of objects they are supposed to be conscious of? I believe you miss the point, the machine can be "aware" of it's surroundings but not conscious of them. For example, take a Chinese person with no knowledge of English and put him a room. Now give him a book of every possible answer for any possible question. Now on the other side of the door have someone write a question in English. The Chinese person can give him an answer using this book and even hold a conversation, but will he be aware of what is being said? No, he will only follow instructions, same as a machine that "perceives" it's environment. The information it gathers and how it acts on it means nothing to it, it only has an input and a formula to follow. It's not aware or conscious of anything, it can only appear to be. Give a machine a camera and give it a program that can use the camera to roughly identify obstacles. You can from here write a behavior tree for the machine and it will indeed act while accounting for the objects it can identify. But it isn't "conscious" of them. It computes it's environment and whatever information it can in accordance to mathematical formulas we provide it, the same as a gravity powered calculator could, but would this mean it's conscious? Would we say the calculator is "aware" of it's existence? That it is truly BEHOLDING it's environment? That it's senses and experience are in any way comparable to that of a human? We all know the machine doesn't know what's going on, it cannot think for itself, it cannot behold, it can only calculate, so by definition it cannot be conscious. If I smash a robot no consciousness is lost, no one ceases to behold.

What sets us apart from machines or purely material entities is that we behold the world around us rather than computing it. We see what our eyes see, we behold it, we don't just store it in a bunch of memory cells to use for calculations. This is in part why humans find it so easy to discern and manipulate visuals, while machines struggle to identify objects. For a machine, it has to look for binary patterns in the memory cells, if an AI is learning to draw it needs to analyze millions of pictures to identify what are essentially nonsensical patterns. You can show a human a single picture of an object and he will understand exactly what the object looks like and will know how to reimagine it.

>>20593
>>20612
I mog everyone here

>>20640
I don't really see how "beholding" (which I assume is how you call the qualia of being conscious) from information processing. It's a distinction without difference. The Chinese room argument you have invoked isn't really an argument, it's a verbal trick comparable to insisting that if you use a excavator to dig a hole in the ground then the hole isn't dug as the excavator cannot feel the weight of dirt. Understanding is proved by ability to give correct responses, no matter if it's the understanding of an language or a branch of science. Information processing belongs to the material world, it's purely based on processing physical signals. Consciousness and more precisely self-consciousness is just sensing and processing information about one's own internal state (which can recurse infinitely btw - you can be conscious of your own consciousness and so on). What is more interesting is the action selection mechanism, and in particular the possibility of it being independent of the information coming from the environment, which boils down to the question if a human can be described as a mathematical function (no matter whether probabilistic or not) as all AI models can, or if such a description is not possible due to intrinsic non-casuality of human behaviour.
>For a machine, it has to look for binary patterns in the memory cells, if an AI is learning to draw it needs to analyze millions of pictures to identify what are essentially nonsensical patterns. You can show a human a single picture of an object and he will understand exactly what the object looks like and will know how to reimagine it.
This is just a matter of intelligence and people also differ in their ability to infer patterns from the data. You could take a retard and try to teach him mathematics by showing him countless examples, but it would be a rather pointless exercise as he would never learn.

dont sell your soul

>>20646
Beholding is what humans do which machines cannot. It's an abstract concept but you should be able to grasp it so long as you're conscious. It's the fact that a human doesn't just process information given to it (as a calculator would), he beholds it in a distinct manner not replicated by machines. A computer doesn't have an internal picture to what it's camera is "seeing", it just has a string of bites it preforms calculations on. The human experience is fundamentally different to the cold calculator that the machine is. The human state of not only taking in information and providing a response, but the ability to perceive the world, feel it, think of it and feel it. Not just simulate emotional responses as a machine would be made to, but truly behold emotions, behold what our eyes are seeing, not just use it in an internal calculator to compute a response. If I smash a machine I know there is no consciousness being destroyed, it won't feel anything, nothing changes. The machine can kick and scream but I know it isn't beholding anything and is only responding according to programming. It's cold. But if I kill a person I know there's a consciousness that will cease to be, a beholder than will cease to behold the world. It's not just a calculator I'm shutting down it's an experience I'm killing. This is an idea otherwordly and as such I cannot get it trough to you unless you get it. And the excavator example misses the point entirely, it's embarrassing. The hole in the ground is the outcome, I'm not arguing outcome, on the contrary. I'm arguing that the outcome can be the same and as such deceiving. The Chinese person isn't actually talking to you, he isn't aware of what he's saying. He may appear aware and intelligent but he's basically a formula. The point of it is to say you aren't actually engaging with an intelligent entity, but only what is designed to appear intelligent. If you ask a rude question and the answer that you get sounds upset, you didn't actually upset anyone or anything. The Chinese person in this case is a stand in for a machine, he's cold and unfelling. He doesn't actually engage with you as a conscious person but as a formula, an algorithm. The door can fool you into thinking it's aware of what's going on but in reality it's just a calculator for input/output, nothing more. The Chinese person (or machine) doesn't grasp what is being discussed, the information means nothing to him. The way the information is handled is fundamentally different compared to how an English speaker would handle it, and behold it.
>This is just a matter of intelligence and people also differ in their ability to infer patterns from the data.
The point of it wasn't to pit someone who's brain is practically disabled against an AI but to point out the difference in perception. A person can observe a wholistic picture, rather than compute memory cells. This allows a person to get a lot more from a single image compared to a calculator.

>>20651
So you are referring to the feeling of being conscious. A private event. The problem with private events is that they can be researched only through the consequences they produce – the outcomes. The Chinese room argument shows that when the outcomes are identical no matter what is inside of the room (a computer or a person), then there is no way to tell what process generates those outcomes. It's an instance of the identity of indiscernibles principle. And while you could guess that an other human does perceive it's own consciousness based on the shared experience, you couldn't use the same approach to say, an alien. So the approach of inferring possession of soul from private events excludes a whole class of beings that could possibly have a soul, but you couldn't prove that about them. How would you know if an alien does feel all the things it says it does or just mimics human behaviour to appear more trustworthy? You can never know that for sure, which makes the "beholding" approach invalid for any serious inquiry.

>>20662
You're losing track of what I'm saying. The Chinese person thought experiment only serves to show that something that appears conscious, understanding or aware doesn't mean that it is. So the outwards behavior cannot be used to determine the nature of or study consciousness. This was to reinforce the notion that you couldn't construct a consciousness by demonstrating that you can have unconscious entities acting conscious. This along with the exploration of the inner workings of a machine is meant to demonstrate that the human experience is something unable to be replicated by humans using material means. And if there is no way to recreate (only mimic) consciousness trough material means then it follows that consciousness must be otherworldly: the soul. Whether animals or aliens or other humans have souls isn't part of the idea I'm conveying. It's not a question of who has souls it's the question of is the experience of consciousness (being a beholder and not a calculator) possible without one. I was saying that trough my private experience, that may or may not be shared, I am convinced that my own experience cannot be explained trough material means. Conveying this idea to another person presupposes shared experience but that's not central to what I'm saying.

I think this is in part a dispute over definitions. We can define what soul is based on what it does, as objects that have no influence on the world effectively do not exist. You are insisting that soul is what creates consciousness and I disagree with that because:
1. consciousness is just an information processing (being conscious of one's environment) and therefore belongs to the material world;
2. feeling (qualia) of consciousness is not accessible to research, and therefore it doesn't help with judging whether soul exists.

>>20665
>consciousness is just an information processing
I'm arguing AGAINST that exact notion. I posit that the human experience (consciousness, awareness, beholding) is fundamentally distinct from that of merely processing information. The way humans behold the information that is processed by the brain is different than the information that is JUST processed by computers, and nothing more
>feeling (qualia) of consciousness is not accessible to research, and therefore it doesn't help with judging whether soul exists.
It isn't accessible to the research we use to study the material world, lending more credence to the theory that the consciousness itself is not material.

>>20670
But the problem is, you wouldn't know if you constructed a machine that is conscious by accident. The distinction between a machine that just computes and a machine that computes and is conscious of that fact (even if accidentally) cannot be made, and that means that you cannot exclude machines from being conscious unless you make it an axiom, but that would end the discussion as axioms are to be accepted and not discussed. The alien example was just to highlight that fact in a more acceptable manner, as aliens are presumed to be biological entities. And the fact that something is not available to research does not mean it's not material. There are regions of universe that cannot possibly be studied simply because light speed is finite and the universe expands in a way that points sufficiently distant from each other move away faster than light. And in the case of consciousness the fact that I experience it in a material body doesn't make it more probable to be not material, especially that I can lose this feeling after a very material event of being hit in the head with a heavy object.

>>20675
We cannot accidentally construct a machine that is conscious if we have determined that consciousness is beyond simple mathematical calculation. I am not talking about our ability to determine whether a given machine/being is conscious. I am talking about the self analysis, analyzing our own experience and pondering whether that could be recreated trough material means. I don't believe it can, for the reasons I have extensively stated. The notion that my own experience could be in any material way recreated is absurd to me and I don't believe anyone who ponders it and follows my line of thought can easily dismiss my conclusion.
And as for losing consciousness due to physical trauma, it may only be the processing of the brain that gets stopped, not the beholder, who is simply deprived of information to behold (sight, hearing, touch, sense of time, whatever). I also call into question how conscious we are when we are presumably unconscious. I remember when I was young I used to sleepwalk, and every time I woke up and my parents told me about it I didn't remember any of it. I figured from that that sleepwalking must be an unconscious behavior. One time, as I was sleep walking, I started slamming the door and woke up everyone, who in turn woke me up from the middle of my sleep walking. The interesting thing about this is that I remembered all of it. I was, to my later surprise, conscious the whole time. From this it follows that in the past I had mistaken memory loss for unconsciousness. This I find fascinating because it demonstrates the possibility of our soul being "awake" even when our body isn't.

words words words

>>20684
Yet another brainlet filtered by high IQ philosophy discussions

>>20686
RetardGODS win

>>20684
Yet another genius diluted by low IQ philosophy discussions

>>20688
tsmt

Do you guys believe in ghosts and spirits, if so where do they come from?

>>20692
they're the sovl of all the dead sperm

>>20700
namefag has entered the thread. Pack it up, it's over.

>>20692
Ghosts are the remnants of pagan souls which through supernatural occcurences are still bound to some material thing or physical objective.
Spirits are just demons.

my soul was sent to this world to inflict pain on Mymy's flesh and drag her down to hell with me

>>20692
My house is literally haunted, or was until they got bored eventually.
>if so where do they come from
Unnatural death.

who says a machine cant harbor a soul

>>21124
I did, exhaustively

>>21112
unnatural death like what

>>21140
Argument from incredulity is not a valid argument thoughever

>>21176
It is because I'm a genius o algo