What is the soul and/or conscious, really? - a free and open debate wanted here :)

Byron · 2004-04-03 08:43:26

I brought this over from the "what if life was discovered on Mars" thread, as I think it's a good starting point for this thread:

*My speculations on brain-consciousness-soul: I'm skeptical about the existence of a "soul" [defined as a phenomenon independent of the brain's functions]. I think the "soul" is simply another word for -consciousness- [synonymous with "mind"]...which is dependent upon the brain's chemistry. Alter the chemistry and you alter consciousness (alcohol, medications/drugs...). Deprive the brain of blood (which carries the consciousness-maintaining and/or consciousness-stimulating chemicals [either natural biochemicals or chemicals introduced into the blood stream]), the brain dies and consciousness goes with it.

First of all, I'd like to ask if anyone on here has thought what the brain would be like without a conscious? Well, I've experienced something like that, just briefly, back when I was a teen doing stupid things like racing my friend on a bike without looking where I was going...lol. I distinctly remember the front edge of my bicycle tire kissing the rear bumber of a parked automobile and then...<....> The next thing I remember I was "coming to", except I had no idea of who I was, what had happened, where I was...in other words, my brain was booting up from scratch, just like a desktop computer, with me "coming to" being the first step of the process. Then I gathered who I was...when I was...what had happened to me...and then, lastly, I could feel the physical sensation of pain (thankfully I was not seriously injured, just beat up a little...lol). I would say the entire process took about one and a half or two minutes, and it certainly gave me pause for thought about consciousness for a long time afterwards. To me, having a "conscious" or a "soul" is one of the few things in life you can take for granted, so when I experienced those few seconds of actively engaging my senses...while my brain was literally a blank slate...it's kinda to describe this sort of thing in words, except perhaps to say that it felt like I was suspended in some sort of infinite void, and my dazed brain was desperately attempting to grab onto something, anything...lol.

But personally, I think there's more to it than just a chemical / biological process in the brain...simply because it's painfully obvious how *little* we know (from a scientific standpoint) about this sort of thing. How could one ever go about measuring consciousness? How could we ever prove that the soul / conscious is simply the end result of a biological process? If the brain can exist without a soul (however briefly), than might it be possible that the soul / consciousness can exist independently of the brain, like what 1000's of people have related to when they "died" but were later revived? If "consciousness" was ever found to consist simply of mathematical algorithims and data flow, which we could measure as a measure of the brain's function, then could a person's "soul" be transferred into computer databases or some other form of artifical storage as a way of achieving immortality? Or is this something more akin to the visible portion of an iceberg..what we see may be pretty danged impressive, but the part that we *don't* see is far more impressive still. Might the human consciousness / soul represent one of the "higher" stages of life itself, which is united by some unifying force (what most people would consider God or the Creator, etc.)

The problem I have personally with the idea of the soul being merely the result of chemical/biological processes is that this line of thinking has a way of stripping the "value" of life that we (the human race) hold dear to us, which essentially forms the backbone of our civilized society. For instance, I caught this from Bill O'Reilly's column in today's paper, about what's on the radio these days: "My glock is nice, / I shot her twice. / The ho no mo' / I got ta go ..." To me, someone who thinks like that (and the fans of this type of "music" as well) suffers from a lack of appreciation of the soul and life itself...i.e., life is cheap, so it doesn't really matter if you shoot someone or not; life has no meaning, neither does death, why should anyone care? If the majority of the population starts devaluing life to such a degree, then the human race would not be long for the world...

Not that I'm religious or anything, but I really and truly believe think life is something *more* than a series of measurable chemical processes, and that conciousness is something more than a complex series of mathematical algorithms. But what of people's attempts to create A.I. and artificial bacteria? I'm not saying that these things will be impossible or even improbable...but provided that we are eventually able to achieve these things, we might just discover something that we didn't know before...

I hope I've given you guys something to chew on for a while...hehe..

B

Palomar · 2004-04-03 09:37:00

*Hmmmm...that quote in the quote box looks familiar...

What intrigues me most is *personality*. No, I'm not a professional (totally admitted), but here's my speculation on it: Personality is a product of consciousness, i.e. an individual response to its (consciousness') surroundings/environment and influenced by biochemistry (as evidenced by personality changes during inebriation, or mood disorders/mental disturbance due to an imbalance in biochemistry). I suppose this could veer off into a "nature versus nuture" debate...at this point, I'm not interested in going into that (perhaps later, perhaps not). Even identical twins display differences in personality.

The -development- of personality is [I just love it when I'm deep in thought and that's precisely when my husband interrupts me (not intentionally) :angry: ] interesting to me, but it's complex (and I'm no expert on the subject by any means), I'm pressed for time this weekend, etc. Perhaps more later.

--Cindy

::EDIT:: Persons with brain injuries, like my husband, have noticeable changes in personality (from pre-injury to post-injury). The brain tissue is damaged, even though the biochemistry remains (or may remain) the same.

::-EDIT 2-:: I just now saw Cobra Commander's post beneath mine. He says: "Not that this belief in any way devalues the individual human life. If anything it makes it that much more precious, for when it ends there is nothing more."

*I agree. My viewpoint -doesn't- diminish my love of life at all, nor my belief in the dignity and uniqueness of the individual and humanity overall.

Cobra Commander · 2004-04-03 09:59:44

Human consciousness is an amazing thing, that a mess of common elements cen be arranged in such a way to produce a living being with at least the illusion of conscious thought if not the thing itself is astounding to me. All that thought, creativity, everything that makes an individual who they are seems as though it's so much more than chemical and electrical impulses in a few pounds of meat.

There are times I'd like to believe that it is more, but I can't. I've seen personalities, souls if you will, drastically altered by minor changes in the chemical balance within that lump of grey meat. I've seen injury have the same effect. If the soul were independent would not it be unchanged by these things? If a pill can change the soul, how can it be more than a function of the brain?

Not that this belief in any way devalues the individual human life. If anything it makes it that much more precious, for when it ends there is nothing more.

The brain is the vessel of consciosness.

Mark Friedenbach · 2004-04-04 01:09:13

If "consciousness" was ever found to consist simply of mathematical algorithims and data flow, which we could measure as a measure of the brain's function, then could a person's "soul" be transferred into computer databases or some other form of artifical storage as a way of achieving immortality?

I think what you're refering to is called "uploading". It's something cryonists and other immortalists talk about a lot. If you type "mind uploading" into google you should get some pages.. If you believe in Functionalism (a la Alan Turing), which I'd be happy to debunk, then mind uploading should follow. Even if functionalism is incorrect, it should be possible to slowly transition from biological to electronic form, achieving your immortality.

The problem I have personally with the idea of the soul being merely the result of chemical/biological processes is that this line of thinking has a way of stripping the "value" of life that we (the human race) hold dear to us.

I don't think it's any more humbling than the realization that we're just one planet among billions in a practically infinite universe. Because we're all space geeks we're used to and accept the latter, but remember how people reacted to Copernicus and Galileo? In any case, Cobra Commander is correct; removal of the soul only makes life more precious.

Rxke · 2004-04-04 02:25:35

Huh? Functionalism? Care to elaborate?

Cobra, great observation, seen it happen, too: very friendly people becoming very agressive/mysantropic after a bout of encephalitis... What does that say abou the soul?

Anyway i do NOt think consiousness= brains only... Our body is a part of it too, think hormones changing your thoughts (teenage angst, but also mid-life-crisis, heh), hunger, pain, feeling of the spring sun on your skin etc...

"Brains in a bottle" might have consciousness, but it'll change pretty quickly to insanity or some kind of autism w/o those external inputs, our brains are in essence the thing that gathers the info about our environment AND our body, so if you want to discuss 'soul' you have to discuss 'body,' IMO...

Rxke · 2004-04-04 02:33:52

Uh, yes, about 'uploading' your brain: Kurzweill 'the age of the conscious machine' (or something sounding very similar, i lend it out months ago...) describes this in a way that makes it very plausible, if you use the Moore law of computational increase, together with prognoses of scanning techniques...

But again: uploading your brain will result in some weird 'thing' not a human... It'll shout 'where am I' for some hours and go utterly crazy, i'd bet... You will *at least* have to upload some kind of simulated body and environment, too... So that the uploaded brain has some 'scaffold' to keep its sanity, maybe later it can learn (we're good at that) to take advantage of more esotheric in/outputs like IR vision, robotarms etc...

dicktice · 2004-04-04 10:00:01

I was so pleased to find that none of the above replies to Byron's thoughtful observations, regarding soul as a conscious mental atribute of the human brain, elicited no religion-inspired posts. I wondered though, at all the "lol" (Byron) insertions if the observations were serious.
Stripped of any religious association with "a soul," the subject of consciousness could be very rewarding as a subject for discussion, here and now. Consciousness, is still "up for grabs" for hypotheses on the part of anyone interested enough to look into the subject; the final chapters of any books I've skimmed lately all still end with an admission that no theoretical conclusions can yet be drawn. Since the observational data are there, one has to admit that it's still too hard for the mind to understand itself, I guess.
Living, intelligent brains, as "vessels of consciousness" (Cobra), aren't comprised of "lumps of grey meat" (Byron) necessarily, of course. That 's just the way they happened to evolve here on our planet: the only Earth in the so-called Known Universe. Primate brains. octopus brains, dog brains, etc. Given life elsewhere in the Universe, our brain's mental equivalent "mathematical algorithms" (Byron), stored somehow and interconnected with sensors and effectors as needed, should be able to draw the desired conclusions regarding "their" universe, just as well as we do "ours."
The essential aspect of conscious self-awareness, leading to intelligence, must be the capability to think. So there you have it: All the attributes of the mind needed for imagination--which is what makes us Human. There's no limit to what we can understand if only we can think of it. A thinking machine need not be conscious, anymore than an ant, say. But, if we ever figure out how to give machines self-conscious imaginations--whoa, look out!

Mark Friedenbach · 2004-04-04 18:49:18

Huh? Functionalism? Care to elaborate?

Functionalism is the idea in philosophy that mental states (thoughts, experiances, consciousness) are defined by their effects. If you could write a computer program that imitated a human being so well that someone talking to it would never be able to tell it apart from a real conscious person, then a functionalist will say that that computer program is a real person, and has all the qualities of thought that we associate with real people (mind, consciousness, soul). This is also called Strong AI.

Searle debunks this with his Chinese room example. As usual, wikipedia is much more eloquent than me:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

(although I disagree with the author's conclusion: AI researchers may ignore Searle's Chinese room, with good reason as it would make most research meaningless, but there's really an even 50-50 split between philosophers. the counter-points he provides are by no means convincing. but i digress)

Rxke · 2004-04-04 22:58:33

Thank you. So functionalism gives the Turing test the thumbs up? Hmmm... I never understood why everybody was so hung-ho with that test, I think it is flawed, but who am I?

The Chinese room; OTOH, i think is ridiculously easy to debunk, and it has been done over and over again...

Strong AI, weak AI... Guess we still have a long way to go... The real 'emergence' of self consciousness... is it gradual or sudden, after a certain threshold of complexity has been reached... How impoortant is language... etc etc...

clark · 2004-04-05 07:59:17

If we have a 'soul', what is it linked to? How is it defined? What is its substance?

Would it be immutable?

I for one think there is a 'soul'. It is a force, a spark, the first motion of matter. It's not personality- that's a function of our environment, the expression of our genes, and the effects of chemicals within the mind. Sensory input indelibly leaves a mark upon the self in the form of memory, which alters our perception in a feedback loop.

But none of this is related to the soul. The soul is like luggage. We travel with it, we put things in it, we take things out, we bang it up a bit, but it's always luggage.

That's generally why i think everyone has it right, but everyone has it completely wrong. What we believe in the here and now, it's a function of the mind. It's the stuff we put into the 'luggage'. Yet at death, there is no longer sensory input. There is no longer the feedback loop. Our memories exist as neurons, as connections that live within our minds. I think science has developed to the point where we can understand this, that changes to the functions of the brain cause differences in behavior and perception.

Who you are is infinitely malleable. What you are though, is not, at least I like to believe that.

So the soul is simply what we fill during our trip. Try to save some room for the next vacation. :;):

dicktice · 2004-04-06 07:34:44

Clarke: Well (sigh of relief) at least you didn't drag religion into it.

clark · 2004-04-06 14:33:06

It's all metaphysics, at some point, religion results. Whether it's a codified system shared by many, or the rant of a lone individual. There's no right or wrong answer because there is no proof.

There is no evidence for a soul, but that hardly means we don't have one. It just means we can't see it, or it isn't there. Shrug and choose.

Mark Friedenbach · 2004-04-07 00:13:34

Thank you. So functionalism gives the Turing test the thumbs up? Hmmm... I never understood why everybody was so hung-ho with that test, I think it is flawed, but who am I?

That's Searle's point--not that strong AI is impossible (he leaves that open), but that the Turing test is flawed, and therefore so is functionalism (since the validity of the Turing test follows directly from functionalist ideas).

The Chinese room; OTOH, i think is ridiculously easy to debunk, and it has been done over and over again...

Hardly, unless there's a conclusive proof that I'm not aware of (if that's the case, please inform me). This is all very recent philosophy (<25 years), and none of the counter arguments I've seen so far have been convincing (for me at least). In any case, this isn't directly related to mind uploading, only to the validity of functionalism (from which some methods of immortality through mind uploading are dependant), so here's an argument that's slightly more on topic:

Suppose you build a machine that takes apart your body and records its composition and structure. You use this device on yourself, and then have a friend load this data into a computer program that simulates the neuron interactions in your brain that form your mind. The result of course is that you end up with a computer program that responds and behaves just like you would, and has all of your memories. According to functionalism, this computer program would more than just resemble you, it is you. The program is not a copy of you, but the same "you" that sat in the transfer device a moment ago. You would have blacked out when the machine started operation and then woken up moments later in a computer. This is what all those mind uploading immortalists (and a lot of AI people I've talked to) would have you believe.

But now let's extend the thought experiment: what would happen if after loading your mind into a computer your friend went on to load it into six more computers? The result would be that there are now seven separate but identical copies of you, all with the same initial personality, memories, and wants that you had. They'll all act like you, but which one is you? Are you one of them? All of them? What's more, what if the scanning process wasn't destructive? What if you still existed in the flesh and blood over in that machine? Functionalism breaks down here (it would identify each machine individually as you)

The only answer that makes any sense is that consciousness is not defined solely by memories and personality (the basic tenet of functionalism), and is non transferable. Those computer versions of yourself were not you, but merely copies or cones of you. You would have ceased to exist (died--reincarnated, gone to heaven, whatever) the moment that machine destroyed your body (and your brain with it).

...There's no limit to what we can understand if only we can think of it. A thinking machine need not be conscious, anymore than an ant, say. But, if we ever figure out how to give machines self-conscious imaginations--whoa, look out!

But therein lies the difficulty... It's nice to talk about computers 'thinking' (especially when they're slow like mine), but it's really just an expression and nothing more. Computers are entirely deterministic--they just run program. People on the other hand are not. Nerve firings, for example, are known in some cases to be severly influenced or even initiated by physically random events. Is it even possible to write imagination into a computer program?

That's the million dollar question I guess.

Rxke · 2004-04-07 03:55:14

Mark Friedenbach,

Chinese room... I don't remember where i last read about it... Either Richard Dawkins (improbable, he's more into biology, and the meme thing... but tends to "broaden" his subjects...) or D. R. Hofstadter (not in GEB, i believe... maybe in 'fluid concepts and creative analogies? )
Or probably someone else... Been reading waaaay too much, lately... Anyway, i thought it was debunked quite elaborately... When i read it...

And about the 6 or copies, you can go abitrarely far with that, copy and paste, BUT IN THE SAME COMPUTER, let each copy do something else, like "reading" different articles, and you directly have different 'yous'... That won't be *you* anymore... Cloned people would be different *persons*, you can't perfectly copy their experiences, of course they'll have a lot in common, but not some kind of 'fused' mind in different physical bodies...
And something that 'troubled' me: a computer program, running the simulation could conceivably "know" what was going on in the simulation, would be like we humans being able to know what *exactly* was happening in our very minds, real-time... Making the simulation able to receive input about itself on a different way as we do... Either the copies have to 'live' in a fairly elaborate simulated environment, or els they would be able to figure out fairly quickly they are non-carbon-based anymore... What that would do to your 'person' i dare not imagine...

(Blahblablah... Incoherent impromptu reaction, so don't take this too seriously...)

GraemeSkinner · 2004-04-07 04:09:02

And about the 6 or copies, you can go abitrarely far with that, copy and paste, BUT IN THE SAME COMPUTER, let each copy do something else, like "reading" different articles, and you directly have different 'yous'... That won't be *you* anymore... Cloned people would be different *persons*, you can't perfectly copy their experiences, of course they'll have a lot in common, but not some kind of 'fused' mind in different physical bodies...
And something that 'troubled' me: a computer program, running the simulation could conceivably "know" what was going on in the simulation, would be like we humans being able to know what *exactly* was happening in our very minds, real-time... Making the simulation able to receive input about itself on a different way as we do... Either the copies have to 'live' in a fairly elaborate simulated environment, or els they would be able to figure out fairly quickly they are non-carbon-based anymore... What that would do to your 'person' i dare not imagine...
(Blahblablah... Incoherent impromptu reaction, so don't take this too seriously...)

What would happen say if you placed six identical clones (human) in a closed environment, for a prolonged period of time - all with access to the same media (books, films, etc.) but no interaction with the outside world.
If when you removed them from the closed environment, would we expect them to have the same personalities? I don't think we have computers at the moment that could predict how a person would react on being removed from that environment, and from a moral viewpoint we'll probably never find out as it would never be allowed to be tested, but I think they would come out each with a separate personality (they'd just looked the same!)
Graeme

Rxke · 2004-04-07 04:12:35

Hmmm... Chines room... I have to agree (after some frantical diagonal re-reading stuff) it is not been 'debunked' (wich was a too strong word, anyway)

But it does not *exclude* the possibility of 'Real' AI (nevermid strong or weak) That was how I read the 'debunking'

Searle just shows the Turings test is not good enough (or rather our gullibility to believe something to be intelligent, when it is not.. (And i agree 200%, strong AI is not necc. intelligence, or rather self-consciousness... It could lead to it, maybe, in an 'unpure' form... )
Most Strong AI people react on Searle as 'the enemy of AI' wich he is not... Heh, science at its best: yesnoyesnoyesno!

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Re: What is the soul and/or conscious, really? - a free and open debate wanted here :)

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