What changes when they are known? I believr it affects yout consciousness, not the one being simulated. The latter does not have "I'm being actually simulated" input
It's easy to get lost in these unsolvable paradoxes when you try reducing all of creation down to logic. Problem is, logic is not all of creation.
Consciousness requires a soul. Otherwise you're confused stardust sans mission.
A computer is just a calculator. You might as well ask if {addition, subtraction, multiplication, division} is God.
We don't know if it does. We do know enough to suspect that a deterministic simulation does not conjure thing into being.
Any actual evidence for this is welcome.
Once upon a time I was locked in a mind prison of material logic. I considered myself transhuman, dreamed of cybernetics and the singularity. Thought that all religious peoples are idiots stuck in ancient fairy tales. Then I experienced a sequence of odd coincidences and inexplicable situations where spiritual entities guided me, causing a complete deconstruction of my entire worldview.
Now it's obvious to me the truth I had been so vehemently running away from my whole life, and the propaganda, indoctrination, and brainwashing are laid bare before me to see. The modern "we don't need no God" ideology is literally terminally ill. Everyone who blindly follows science and government are being consumed by them. Fertility is falling off a cliff. They're all mentally ill and medicated. Mandatory medical genetic experiments and engineered bioweapon plagues are murdering its followers and the fact that this ongoing debacle is being actively suppressed in media and politics tells me clear as day, the devil himself has taken root and hold of this world.
Meanwhile, in the churches I frequent, I see happy families practically building paradise on Earth, the kind I got to see as a child, and I know most people are headed to the same hell I climbed out of, like zombies. No amount of talking with these self-destructive delusionists will convince them to even try praying once in their lives, even as a joke.
I have all the evidence I need; My life has made a miraculous turnaround from spiritual guidance. If you'd like, I can ask the spirits to guide you through me.
The main thing to know about the spirit world is this: Good spirits require your explicit permission to come aboard and help you. The bad ones invite themselves in and destroy you from within. That's why humans are fundamentally religious creatures, and you ignore the spirit world at your own peril.
It's like the microbiome in your body. You gotta let good/neutral bacteria make a home of you, lest the bad ones take residence and literally kill you from within. And it's not "you fall dead the moment you stop believing", it's "these hostile bacteria literally control your mind to cause unhealthy behavior for their benefit", like overeating sugar (obesity very prevalent), being selfish, greedy, etc.
A prayer a day keeps the evil spirits away. This is not a matter of faith for me, it's the truth I've experienced for myself, and the evidence for which I see written in our very civilizational DNA. You just choose to ignore the evidence because you think yourself bigger than God. It's an indefensible position the ramifications of which you'll regret when it's too late, or when you hit your personal rock bottom, as I did.
False. It can help you understand what it is.
"Apples are red" is only useful if you already know the color red?
But if you know apples then you've just learned something about colors!
Examine that for a minute, you'll see it's obviously true.
Our genes are an organic mechanism seeking immortality of consciousness through instincts, some of which can be awe-inspiringly complex, like spider webs. We praise language and culture for its ability to retain information across time (approaching immortality).
That you're dismissing this as some kind of lexicographical or subjective belief thing reveals how intensely your mind seeks to dismiss it. The truth is purifying fire that burns away parasitical spirits doing their damnest to convince you otherwise.
Of course, personal experience is also valid evidence, and I have seen none of that either.
Generally, I follow the "don't trust, verify" approach for first hand accounts. I don't believe something is true, even if 1000 people tell me the same thing. I think this is a reasonable approach, especially in today's age of misinformation. 1000 people can repeat the same false rumor as long as the rumor seems reasonable.
Interesting change of tone. Now it's already worth something, just not much. But previously you wrote:
> there is just no evidence (or at least I haven't seen any) ... personal experience is also valid evidence, and I have seen none of that either.
You went from total denial to already assigning worth.
This isn't "today's age of misinformation" stuff, by the way. These are literally thousands of years old historical records of eyewitness accounts. It is in fact "the human mind is just a meat computer" that is the modern day misinformation. It's leading you further away from the soul. So that demons can take over.
It is however, a good indicator for how little I value those two forms of evidence however.
My point with "today's age of misinformation" is not really that there is more misinformation these days. That may be true, but it could also just be that we have access to a higher volume of information. It's more that we are more aware of misinformation, and can develop habits + tools to deal with misinformation.
Scientific method is about making observable predictions; i.e., it ultimately hinges on the experience of the observer and existence of observer’s mind. When you try to apply it to the theory of mind itself, you short-circuit that logic. There is pretty much no useful (falsifiable or provable) claim or conclusion to be made, and all evidence is immediately tainted as it gets deconstructed into arbitrary categories in vogue today, goes through the meatgrinder of lossy verbal descriptions, and ultimately gets subjectively interpreted by your own mind.
In other words, it is not the problem of the evidence—this is among the best evidence you can get—it is the problem of the framework you are interpreting it in.
I also don't understand why the mind is relevant. We are trying to prove something that exists outside the mind right? However, even if this phenomena was something that only humans could observe, it would still be testable with science. Science makes observations about human behavior all the time.
Ok, all that said, almost none of this is relevant because my proof standards are not as rigorous as scientific standards. I just want to see some videos of the beings, I'm not asking someone to perform a study here.
An unconscious, non-experiencing mechanism is not an observer in the way the term “empirical”[0] is meant—to observe is to experience.
> I also don't understand why the mind is relevant.
See above.
(I do not think I really understood the rest of your comment.)
I'm asking for some video evidence of religion. So really I am asking for an opportunity to observe a state of a machine, albeit a very specific state. I suppose you could argue this is just a very roundabout way to indirectly experience religion.
Yes, but you still observe it, right? That’s how evidence is created.
Religion operates at a level closer to philosophy. You can interrogate theories of mind logically, but when you try to apply scientific method it breaks down—there’s no hard evidence you can obtain to prove or disprove your hypothesis. Similar is true of the claims made by a religion, though its obvious weak point is it’s more axiomatic and less logically rigorous (which is why I am not a proponent).
“At this level” in context of this discussion simply means matters outside of the scope of natural sciences. Both philosophy (e.g., of mind) and religion make claims that are non-provable and non-falsifiable using scientific method. They are orthogonal to it.
So uh, religion has been replicated quite a lot. We have historical records of it. We've seen an unprecedented revolution from religion, including science. And we've seen our pinnacle of civilization beginning to collapse since most people abandoned God. How much more proof/evidence/anecdata you need? We still track time in years since Jesus was born. That was 2024 years ago.
> even if this phenomena was something that only humans could observe, it would still be testable with science.
This is a belief. The belief that there exists nothing in the universe that cannot be tested by science. But science is filled with untestable things. Mind-numbingly humongous leaps of pure speculation about something that makes no sense and cannot be measured. Like dark matter, spacetime singularities, or "the big bang".
Science can't even measure consciousness! Or do you take IQ tests as gospel?
I have definitely not seen our civilization start to collapse though. I'm not even sure what that would look like (maybe a transition to a low-trust society or something)?
Of course, I do not believe everything can be tested by science, but my belief that religion specifically can be tested is because religion describes the most powerful forces in the universe. And not only that, humans can interact with these forces! So we should be able to detect these forces by observing how humans behave when they interact with these forces.
What's a soul? How can you possibly know that's what's required?
Maybe it requires a blerpqu.
In the most loose sense the soul is whatever it is that a living thing stops having when it becomes a dead thing.
Philosophically speaking saying “consciousness requires a soul” is a consequence of the observation that consciousness requires not being dead.
People, many of whom were assuredly considerably more intelligent than you or me, have spent thousands of years pondering what exactly the nature of souls is. Your metasyntactic zinger adds exactly nothing to that ongoing dialog. But by definition we know souls exist, at least as much as any abstract principle does and perhaps more than some.
Yes.
Plants, fungi, and everything else that's alive also have souls. In fact the term medical "vegetative state" is using Aristotelian vocabulary. Obviously it's not saying the patient has acquired chloroplasts.
> And computers will never have one since they're not biological.
That depends. Can a computing device come alive? Inanimate matter evidently somehow came alive at least once so I don't see how we can rule it out.
> But also there doesn't seem to be a relationship between souls and consciousness, so they are irrelevant.
So far as I know everything that we've verified to have consciousness is alive and thus has a soul. I'm very interested in any counter-examples if you have any to offer though.
Now define a soul! /s
Some say that an organism is an antenna for a kind of interference pattern in a universal field of consciousness.
We also hear tales of individual souls spanning multiple lifetimes.
I consider this a blackbox.
This muscle however is vital in regulating your spiritual microbiome. Without it, evil spirits take control of your being and lure you into self-destruction, their ultimate goal. Artificial consciousness is one of these self-destructive pitfalls. You think you're a superior being and immortality is right around the corner if only you could find the one magical configuration of silicon that would allow you to upload your mind into a computer.
That's the endgame for soullessness. Consciousness that doesn't require soul must surely be transferrable to a machine.