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>don't take my word for it; try it out - when you die, think to yourself "wow, I'm still conscious without a body!"

Come on :^) What the hell kind of argument is this supposed to be?

Which means that the brain must be able to transmit information to and from the spirit. Please, by all means, point us to a plausible mechanism for such a thing.

You can ask this same question about transmissions between ones subjective experience and ones neurons, and the only serious difference between sams answer and modern answers is that sam makes an unwarranted number of assumptions, and as such must be cut away with ockams razor.

If you really want to feel that you're qualitatively better than sam, you have to bite the bullet and go for full dennett-style functionalism, effectively coming out as a p-zombie, which I personally find quite unpalatable. In the other direction lies lots of other equally weird stuff, like modal realism and panpsychism.

Best to just profess absolute ignorance IMO.

> sam makes an unwarranted number of assumptions, and as such must be cut away with occam's razor.

I agree with you that the logical thing to do with my answer is to cut it away with Occam's razor, and I don't blame you for it.

However, it should be noted that Occam's razor is a general rule of thumb, not some infallible law.

If you were handed a piece of paper with a high level description of how the universe truly works, would you recognize it as the truth or dismiss it as the ramblings of a lunatic?

If you went back in time even a few hundred years and handed the most brilliant thinkers of the day a piece of paper containing just one paragraph about general relativity, how many of those slips of paper would survive Occam's razor?

> If you went back in time even a few hundred years and handed the most brilliant thinkers of the day a piece of paper containing just one paragraph about general relativity, how many of those slips of paper would survive Occam's razor?

I'm pretty confident Newton would get it. He could've verified the speed of light against observations of the moons of Jupiter. He knew about some puzzling aspects of magnets, and was theorising about magnetism while working on optics.

Of course, much better than telling people the answer is telling them which threads to pull, which of the many confusing phenomena in the world bears more investigation.

You're missing the fundamental part about empirical testing.

In the slightly paraphrased words of Dara O'Briain: "Science knows it doesn't know everything, but that doesn't mean you can just 'fill in the gaps' with whatever comes to mind". Claiming that we couldn't recognise an advanced description of our world doesn't mean you can then jump in and say "... and so it's this!".

Likewise, if you were to hand Isaac Newton a paragraph explaining general relativity, something beyond his ability to measure even if he could conceptualise it, there would be no point applying Occam's Razor, because it's not describing something he can detect in the first place.

> Likewise, if you were to hand Isaac Newton a paragraph explaining general relativity, something beyond his ability to measure even if he could conceptualise it, there would be no point applying Occam's Razor, because it's not describing something he can detect in the first place.

Right, so either way, the slip of paper doesn't survive.

I'm not claiming my worldview is empirically testable or even verifiable. I just thought it would be fun to write it down in the off chance that it is true, so that people can later amuse themselves in hindsight.

If you were a scientist in the 1600s, and you read in the newspaper in the anonymous comments section that someone thought that "Time slows down the faster your travel. Time and space are two orthogonal dimensions of the same invisible fabric.", wouldn't it be funny for you to later find out that the random stranger that gave you that forgettable, idiotically insane theory in the paper actually somehow had astonishing insight?

But before anyone took relativity seriously, two things happened:

1. A constant speed of light independent of any reference frame turned out to be a logical consequence of the empirically-verified laws of electromagnetism, and

2. Measurements of the speed of light confirmed that it was constant in all reference frames we were capable of measuring.

Where is the corresponding theory and empirical observations to support dualism?

I'm not claiming my worldview is empirically testable or even verifiable

Then why did you say "(don't take my word for it; try it out" ? Isn't that explicitly saying it is both testable and verifiable?

Your perspective is all wrong here. You can't have a high-level description of how the universe works until it is interpreted as such. Thus if someone gave you a piece of paper, their are far more available interpretations than the two you propose. Most likely, you would simply recognize it as something you don't understand. Like say, exactly what most people do when you hand them a book on QFT. They will neither admit it to be true or lunacy, since they do not have the capacity to judge it as either.

If you had a book that explained how the universe worked, it would either have to explain it in a step-by-step fashion in unambiguous language for your specific consumption, or you're inappropriately putting that spin on it entirely by your own volition.

>If you were handed a piece of paper with a high level description of how the universe truly works, would you recognize it as the truth or dismiss it as the ramblings of a lunatic?

Using false equivalence to convince people that your religious beliefs are correct is unscrupulous to say the least. Your arguments do not prove your claims. It would be better to simply claim up front that it takes a certain amount of faith...then proceed with your story.

>Best to just profess absolute ignorance IMO.

This. It's the ugly truth, but it's best to swallow hard, man up, and just straight up admit it. I know nothing, you know nothing, nobody knows anything. Talking about it, pardon me, out of your ass is pointless and just shows how much we have the instinct to control and understand things, even things that are out of our control and understanding. Explains religions, belief in afterlife, belief in a soul, and similar things.

Isn't that a category mistake? one's subjective experience ~is~ the action of one's neurons. The alternative is, with sam, to grant the existence of an immaterial soul.

That isn't really explanatory to me though. It's like identifying your running operating system with the patterns of electron spins in your hard disk/RAM: while they may be identifiable with each other, that doesn't mean you can derive useful knowledge about one from the other without a huge amount of other information which has little to do with the hard disk itself, and isn't really encoded in it.

The amount of information we need to derive consciousness from neurons could be enormous. My (utterly uninformed) guess is that there are huge frontiers of information theory which need to be crossed first. Similarly to how the discovery of entropy revealed new kinds of knowledge about physical systems, and new ways of obtaining it.

While physics definitely does not have any hiding place for the soul (the relevant energy scales have all been explored,) the interface between biology and information theory is largely unknown, and potentially limitless.

There is something called Integrated-Information Theory which attempts to do that kind of thing, but it doesn't seem to be thought very credible by the experts.

> Best to just profess absolute ignorance IMO.

That, and call bullshit when someone tries to convince you of a position shielded by meaningless phrases, obfuscated by scientific words, that just happen to fit exactly in the hole left by our current understanding and that you'll have to wait for death to confirm but they have, somehow, the ability to know.

Bonus points fot telling them to fo if they try to coerce you (or anyone really) by scaring you into believing their nonsense with punishments, in this life and the next one(s).

I understand the downvotes for retina_sam's comment for the number of unproven ideas it asserts, but as unlikely as it seems in our materialistic view of the universe, I think it's important to not lose sight of the possibility that maybe there really is something special, something non-physical, about awareness. It is really poorly understood, and I still have not seen an adequate explanation for why I can perceive things and be aware of them.

"Awareness is an illusion", as proposed by some thinkers, certainly doesn't do it for me, because there's still something that has to perceive that illusion. It's got to be an emergent property of sufficiently complex logical processing, but how does it emerge? What is it really? I feel like I'm still missing a vital step.

The lack of an adequate explanation does not demand the need for a non-physical explanation.

I think that because consciousness is part of the core understanding of ourselves, we're drawn to a non-physical and spiritual explanation.

But as a phenomenon the conscious mind is not different than other observed phenomenons.

The rational approach would therefore be to expect an explanation that can be provided by our physical environment just as we do with any other unexplained phenomenon we observe.

> But as a phenomenon the conscious mind is not different than other observed phenomenons.

Yes it is, because it's the phenomenon itself that does the observing. If not, then what is it that does the observing?

I have never understood the argument that "observation" is something special and that it must be taken into consideration. In fact, is it really the brain that is observing a phenomenon or is it something else?

In the double slit experiment, it really isn't the brain, is it? It's the screen you place some distance away from the slits, or the electron detector if you place it in one slit only. The fact that "an outside observer" only sees the pattern made by these detectors later and may reason about them is entirely unnecessary to the experiment itself and to the collapse of the wave function. If you leave the results of a double slit experiment lying overnight, has the wave function not collapsed for longer? As such, the "observer" in these experiments are devices, just like in most other experiments.

Just as the infamous cat is an observer of a quantum system, for whom the wave function has collapsed potentially much earlier than for an outside observer. A wave function collapse is in that case much more of a statement of information state than about the state of reality, which is the exact point of quantum mechanics, in that there must be a distinction now between "observers" (which my be single atoms, mind!) inside of the sphere of influence of an event (whether that event may be bounded by physical barriers or a light cone is irrelevant by the way). [Note that Schrödinger brought up the cat example exactly to point out that the world does not exist in a blurry double-state way even if unobserved.]

The same is true for most psychological observations, which get recorded by a computer, by a pen or by an undergrad. The fact that someone else observes these observations doesn't change the phenomenon in any reasonable way.

One more analogy: we now have computers that are entirely capable of recording/observing phenomena by themselves, some of them internal to themselves even, where we have no other way of recording such phenomenon. If you run an A/B test on a web site, let it run for long enough, then look at your analytics page and it says to accept one hypothesis with 99.99% probability, then you have exactly the same situation as if you had done the experiment through other people and publishing it as a paper. Except, of course, no human mind has "observed" the phenomenon, neither directly nor indirectly, until you opened the results page. So what it comes down to is this: did the result exist before you read the results page? I would answer yes.

All of this is a long way of saying that IMHO the observation of a phenomenon does not change the phenomenon itself.

> "Awareness is an illusion", as proposed by some thinkers, certainly doesn't do it for me, because there's still something that has to perceive that illusion.

Maybe the illusion is just perceiving a past/previous instance of itself -- which further sustains the illusion? The recursion obviously bottoms out at the point of emergence, if we assume that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon.

(Don't take this too seriously -- I just think it's fun to think about these things.)

This is no less sensible than any of the other solutions I've heard.

Roger Penrose wrote an interesting (if unavoidably controversial) book about these questions, "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics".

So if strong AI is achieved, this would prove God does not exist?

Yes, basically.

But... Strong AI can be achieved, if nothing else by emulating a brain synapse by synapse, at the molecular level. Therefore god doesn't exist?

> But... Strong AI can be achieved, if nothing else by emulating a brain synapse by synapse. Therefore god doesn't exist?

Isn't this type of thinking a form of cargo cult science, though? According to Facebook's AI director [1]:

> The equivalent [of cargo cult science] in AI is to try to copy every detail that we know of about how neurons and synapses work, and then turn on a gigantic simulation of a large neural network inside a supercomputer, and hope that AI will emerge. That’s cargo cult AI. There are very serious people who get a huge amount of money who basically—and of course I’m sort of simplifying here—are pretty close to believing this.

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...

At any rate, that's a theory you have there (that simulating neurons results in emergent AI), now you have to prove your theory before I will admit God doesn't exist. I contend that without a spirit, no such AI will emerge.

If that's a theory he has there, then you imply god and the spirit are not a theory. If that is the case, please provide proof. Quite literally the entire human race would be interested.

> If that's a theory he has there, then you imply god and the spirit are not a theory

That's just lazy. You can't shift the burden of proof on me when OP was the one making the extraordinary claim (sufficiently sophisticated synapse simulations are guaranteed to result in emergent strong AI). If you want to demand proof of my claims, you'll need to post your demands to the comment in which I made the extraordinary claim.

If you're going to dodge the question on a technicality, then frankly you're not worth the time.

The existence of god is an extraordinary claim. The claim that replicating a brain at the molecular level will reproduce the behaviour of a brain is not an extraordinary claim. It's not even a claim, it's a fact.

Not really a fair comparison - the islanders of the 'cargo cult' were trying to entice aircraft full of cargo down by recreating what the explorers did - build towers, runways out of palm leaves, and wave coconut 'radios' around.

But they didn't know aircraft were built by humans, what radios did, or that there was a huge society far away building aircraft and training people to fly them.

And how many aircraft did they ever see, and how long did they spend trying before they were invaded/educated/gave up?

If they had 7 billion aircraft, seeing them all from scratch, and a thousand years to investigate, would they have progressed further?

We know brains work, we believe they are completely grown and contained within a skull (no remote factories building them), and we keep exploring further and building better tools and gathering more data.

The roundworm C. elegans has one of the simplest nervous systems of any organism, with its hermaphrodite type having only 302 neurons. Furthermore, the structural connectome of these neurons is fully worked out. There are fewer than one thousand cells in the whole body of a C. elegans worm, each with a unique identifier and comprehensive supporting literature because C. elegans is a model organism. Being a model organism, the genome is fully known, along with many well characterized mutants readily available, a comprehensive literature of behavioural studies, etc. With so few neurons and new calcium 2 photon microscopy techniques it should soon be possible to record the complete neural activity of a living organism. By manipulating the neurons through optogenetic techniques, combined with the above recording capacities the project is in an unprecedented position to be able to fully characterize the neural dynamics of an entire organism.

In trying to build an "in silico" model of a relatively simple organism like C. elegans, new tools are being developed which will make it easier to model more complex organisms.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm

Is that 'cargo culting', or is that 'reverse engineering in progress'? And what's the difference - existing knowledge or approach?

> I contend that without a spirit, no such AI will emerge.

A couple of questions seem to fall out of this:

1. If an AI would not emerge from a high-fidelity whole-brain simulation, then what, in your theory, would emerge? How would you characterise it?

2. How would you determine that what emerges is or is not intelligent? In other words, how would you determine whether or not your theory had been falsified?

3. If an AI actually had a spirit (adopting your definition), would you have a way to recognise this?

> Strong AI can be achieved

That remains to be seen. Let Sam have this. How often do you get a religious person to detail exact circumstances that would falsify their religion?

Then, retina_sam, I will simply have to show you [0] that God is not so contingent on human achievement.

[0] Not immediately, but ultimately.

For a given (and arguably limited) definition of "god".

I would say no. Even if awareness is of divine origin, you could still simulate an effect that, from an outside perspective, is indistinguishable from the real thing. The computer doesn't have to be truly aware in the way we are in order to present itself to us as if it is.

Because humans (and indeed all life) have "spirits" which can think independently of the body, and that's the true reason we are conscious/self-aware.

Apart from the obvious "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You claim this, now prove it" angle, this has so many faults it can only be handwavium and wishful thinking.

Why would the spirit need a glove? Why would a glove need a spirit? Do roundworms and algae and cockroaches have spirits? Why couldn't a 'God' create a thinking being without using a spirit? Why is there conveniently a spirit-force that can supply anything from 10k humans to 7 billion humans with spirits? It can't be created or destroyed, then what happens when it runs out? Where is it stored? How does it get from there to here?

What does it mean that the spirit can 'think' independently of the body? As far as we know, thinking is a matter of survival in the physical world - interpreting sensory data, outwitting predators and prey, remembering sources of food and water, outsmarting and outfighting competitors for social standing and mating rights. What use would a spirit have for any of this ability?

Nothing is perfectly efficient, so there will be waste heat in the process of information transfer from body to spirit, where is that measurable heat? What protocol does it use to transmit information? What forces and particles and transmitters and receivers? What power source? Where in your body are sandwiches turned into ectoplasm? Where in the spirit force are memories stored? What use are physical world memories after body death, why would a spirit want or need them? And if they're no use, what's the point in describing it as still 'you' after death?

If the brain can build spirit receiver mechanisms, then they're made out of physical things in the physical world. So where's the chunk of physics (or the gap) which covers them? Where's the Faraday cage that can block them? If brains can grow them, then lab-grown brain tissue can, and human machines can, so we could plausibly build AI / thinking machines and electromechanical/cyborg Gods one day. That's completely the opposite of you saying it's "impossible", since it's still just manipulation of matter, which we are getting ever better at. Take over the communication mechanism and pump adverts and malware into it, right? False enticing memories.

If you were going to invent anything which is not proven, and claim it's the truth, isn't it just so convenient that it's a) based on faith, b) fixes (or nullifies) all earthly suffering, c) addresses all fear of death and illness, d) includes an untestable but scary justification for why you should do as you're told (and not be 'bad') and e) has /literally no compromises or downsides/?

If that's not too good to be true, I don't know what is.

"Spirits are created by God beings from intelligences (which is a spiritual resource that can be neither created nor destroyed)."

"Woo-woo is created by WOW from handwavium (which is a woo-woo resource that {science words to try and sound authentic}"