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@Mopac
But what you are really saying is that we Christians worship a man as God.
I would say you worship a god that does not exist. The jesus you worship never existed - I believe the 'son of god' is a character in a myth that has at its historical core a real, flesh and blood person. I don't think you do not worship a man as God... I think you worship a fiction as God.
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@nagisa3
By hypothesis, the actor is not a racist but pretending to one. The actor is ontologically non-racist - one issue is whether that fact is discoverable. If what is discoverable is that he is a racist then that is a problem.
I'm not really sure what is being discussed!
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@Stephen
It seems we agree that the bible makes the Jews out to be the bad guys. But.... the Christianity that really took off was Paul's 'gentile friendly' version rather than the more othodoxly Judaic version promoted within Israel.
I think Jews - especially Jews inside Israel - may have been sympathetic Jesus, but less so to Paul's reformulation. So the Paulines more or less gave up on converting Jews and focused on outsiders, hence in their version of history it was Romans good, Jews bad.
If so, the historical consequences over the millennia have been vast.
But I want to learn more about the relevant history and my opinions may change... but I don't think there is much hope of finding anything deifnitive now, after 2000 years!! Certainty is not going to be possible.
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@3RU7AL
Do you think it would be fair to call this person a racist?
In short, no, but you raise an interesting general philosophical point.
The way you set up the scenario, the actor is not a racist but as all an outsider can observe is his behaviour a rational observer would conclude he was a racist. However you specified in the scenario that he is not a racist so the rational inference is wrong!
We are butting up against the distinction between 'epistemology' and 'ontology'. In the scenario, the ontological fact is that he is not a racist (he is specified as good hearted so that's a given), but that fact is not epistemologically accessible - ie we cannot know he is not racist, and indeed by using reason we would incorrectly infer that he was.
Quite a lot to think about... I'll stop there and spend a month or two on it...
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@Stephen
I'd say Jesus was executed
a) by the Jewish religious establishment for religious reasons
or b) by the Roman authorities for political reasons
or c) both!
The only near contemporary accounts of his 'trial' are in the gospels which are not impartial sources. The evangelists certainly want their readers to lean towards a), with the Romans somewhat reluctant to get involved.
However the gospels don't paint pontius pilate as the harsh dictatorial figure described by Jewish historians such as Philo and Josephus. Pilate was quite capable of ignoring and even flouting the demands of Jewish priests. Pilate was even recalled to Rome to account for the severity of his rule.
So - and you call it fence sitting if you like - the causes and circumstances of Jesus' death are far from clear! Short of inventing a TARDIS I don't think it's possible to know 'who killed JC'.
Personally, I'd say its probably more a) than b), but I'm open to persuasion. I'm not married to any particular interpretation.
But what didn't happen is the disappearance of Christianity. The early church hit on the idea of putting a positive spin on the disaster of losing it's figure head ie 'atonement' (although it got that name much, much later). As with James Dean and Kurt Cobain, dying was probably the best career move Jesus could have done!
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@Stephen
I think that Jesus was a person,not a god or a divinity. I think he probably did say some of the things ascribed to him, but he couldn't perform miracles. I think he probably was crucified, but he certainly wasn't born of a virgin.
I hope that clears up what I mean by 'partly historical'. Did Jesus exist? If by 'jesus' you mean a charismatic human preacher who founded a religion, then yes. If by 'Jesus' you mean the miracle working, divine virgin born son of a god then no.
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@Castin
@Stephen
Good question. The answer is that there is no group demanding it.I mean, what group would demand that?
The swedish government looked into the usage of traditional symbols that had been appropriated by hate groups but seem to have decided no action is reuired.
Right wingers tried to spin this into an attack on national history and tradition by an unholy conspiracy of liberals, foreigners and Islamists. What is disappointing is how quick some people were to believe them.
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Following D's 'salvation' thread I'd like to discuss atonement.
I can accept that Jesus was partly historical, and that he was very likely crucified. Over the centuries, Christian theologians have speculated on why it was necessary that Jesus had to suffer and die.
Some of the theories aput forward are described in wikipedia as the ransom theory, the recapitulation theory, the satisaction theory, the moral government theory and others.
It seemsthat there is no consensus amonst Christians about its most central events! They agree Jesus was crucified, but not about why or how it helped with man's sinfulness!
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@TheRealNihilist
Since Christianity is false they don't really need saving from anything.People can say sin but can't prove their God exists so who cares.
People are motivated by what they believe, not what is true! One will never get much understanding of the world by underestimating the power of belief so it is something we should all care about.
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@TheRealNihilist
If you aren't alive you can't die.
NSS.
I think what kills you is the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
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@disgusted
So you are being saved from what? No one has answered yet.
I think the idea is to be saved from the consequences of sin. Sin is unavoidable, and the consequences of sin are not good at all, but "whoever believes in him [Jesus] shall not perish but have eternal life." (Jn 3:16).
And that's Christianity in a nutshell.
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@Mopac
Whether gods exists or not, any society that persists more than a generation or two is going to need rules.
I know nothing about ancient Chinese law codes, but despite almost zero contact between the Chinese and the Hebrew god 4000 years go the chinese wiould have outlawed murder and theft etc.
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@Stephen
But then again any remotely civilised society is going to outlaw things like murder and theft and will want to discourage challenges to established authority. The similarity could be due to shared purpose rather than explicit borrowing. Something like the code of Hammurabbi also bear comparison with the 10 commandments.
I wonder if ancient Hebrews culture and religion derives much more from Mesopotamia than Egypt.
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@disgusted
Of course we are talking about legend, not history! I think it's safe to say the 'plot-hole' of which language the commandments were written in was ignored for the sake of the narrative, a bit like the way aliens can speak English in sci-fi movies and we are not supposed to wonder how or why.
Writing was the preserve of an elite and that elite would be keen to maintain its air of mystery and magic to the hoi-polloi. Ordinary Hebrews could not read, and didn't really know how writing worked. For the masses, writing was part of the magical world of the priests.
The priests and scribes could rely on no one outside their circle raising the problem... I admit I hadn't thought of it until gussie pointed it out! It's all part of the 'suspension of disbelief' needed to make fiction work.
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@3RU7AL
How do you know if I "experience blue" like you do? How do you know if I "experience love" like you do?
Precisely! You know such questions are not answerable given our present state of ignorance. So how can you say there is no problem of qualia? With most problems the dificulty is finding the answer but with matters of consciousness the difficuty is finding the right questions!
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@3RU7AL
Please convince me there is a "problem of Qualia".
Look at something blue. It looks blue, doesn't it? How do I program a computer to see it as blue? Not as some encoding but as the subjective colour blue.
I'm not interested in anything functionally equivalent to seeing blue - I am interested in a computer seeing blue things as blue.
it's something my brain does naturally.
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@secularmerlin
I'm not sure I am ambitious enough to tackle the whole of consciousness! For many decades my pet problem is that of 'qualia'. When I see something couloured - blue, or yellow whatever - I have an experience in a modality called colour. There is a way blue appears to me that isdifferent from the way yellow appears to me. I'm sure it is the same for you!
But when I learned about computers, I found that to a computer blue is a pattern of bits (FF0000 say) and yellow is 0000FF. it was clear that if acomputer was aware of colours at all, it was not in the same modality that I am aware of colour.
What the brain appears to do is translate physical quantities (what brutal calls quanta) into qualia (subjective experience). For example wavelength of light (quanta) is translated colour (qualia). It is quite general - air vibrations are turned into noises and musial notes, tempertaures into feeling of warmth and cold, chemical interactions into tastes and smells. I don't know if doing that sort of translation is necessary,but it is how the brain has evolved to work,and it seems to work quite well - we do survive in a potentially very hostile world!
When we try to dosoething similar using a computer we use a different technique. We do not translate information about theoutsideworld intoqulia but into numbers and apply numerical techniques to them because we know how to do that! For example if you usethe flood fill tool in a paint prograam it operates on quale-free numerical values in a way that mimics identifing qualia. The comupter flood fiils a region because the pixels have the same numers, not the same colour.
Now I happen to believe the brain is a meat computer. But the meat computer in my skull supports qualia, but my expensive laptop most definitely does not, I now that because I know it works purely numerically. So unless meat computers a magical powers by virtue of being made of meat, it should be possible to get a silicon computer to support qualia.
40 or 50 years ago it would have sounded obviously true that conscious computers were ust around the corner. When Space Odyssey came out in 1968 nobody though its conscious computer (HAL) was the least likely part of the story - but many people might well do so now!
In my view the lack of a decent theory of subective consciousness is a major lacunae in the physicalist world view. It's not enough to make me doubt the validity of physicalism... not on most days, anyway!
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@Mopac
I spit at your justification for perverting language in order to make right a fool's sophistry.
A rather stronger reaction to what I thought was a very uncontroversial post!
The way language works it's normal for the same word to have different meanings depending on context. Orthodox theologians may well use the word 'noumenon' in a particular sense when talking to each other which is quite different from what it means when Kantians meet up to discuss the categorical imperitive, or whatever it is Kantians do amonsgt themselves!
I'd say orthodox theology was a small niche field outside of which Kant's usage dominates. As you, Mopac, are not talking to orthodo theologians you should be the one that adapts, just as you should adapt to posting in English even if your preferred languge is croatian because it's up to you to make youself understood - its not our job to understand weird specialist jargon.
'darmok and jalad at tanagra'.
I'll go and wipe your spittle off now.
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@secularmerlin
sometimes a stage magician does a trick that is truly baffling. You know its a trick, but you can't think how it was done. Kowing it is a trick but not knowing how it works can be very annoying, and thatshow I feel about subjectivity. I'm not a dualist or a woo-woo fan - but subectivity/consciousness is a trick I can't work out!
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@secularmerlin
So how do I program a robot to feel about killing the way do? If you aren't a c# coder yourself, a flowchart would do! Don't forget I have no problem with it being easy to create a functional copy... it's implementing your subective feelings that is what Chalmers calls the hard problem.
There is no pracrical application intended...it's the purely theoretical question of how subjectivity works - without hand waving!
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@secularmerlin
Surely the point is there is no difference from a physics point of view.... so where does the difference originate? One can alays deny there is a difference, but that strikes me as feigning blindnstress to avoid addressing a tricky question beause there is something intrisically different about breaking a manequin and killing a person.
my partial solution is to think of 'reality' as consisting of the physical and the mental. Traditionally, science has always concerned itself with only the physical (ie u1). The result is that we are pretty good at explaining the physical world, but pretty awful at at explaining the mental. We have good theories for quarks and supernova, no theories at all for qualia. As humans, love and duty are as much causes forces as are gravity and magnetism (perhaps even more so), but traditional science has steered well clear of them!
The focus on physicalism has served us very well - its given us the modern world. But it fails in acoulpe of ways. One is that science gives no insight into moral issues. Science is - by design -amoral. That is not a defect of science; science is (in my vocaulary) the study of u1. If there was no consciousness in the universe, science would tell you all there was to know about it. But in a universe with consciousness (u2, our universe) it does not tell us 'what is a good life'?.
The reason I introduced the notion of u2 is to illuminate the difference between a universe with and a universe without consciousness. Because consciousness exists, desciptions in terms of u1 only describe only part of reality.
Theists are right about one thing - a purely physical universe has no meaning or purpose. They are wrong to think the solution is the eistence of a god. The reason the universe gained meaning and purpose is that matter self-organised into structures that manifest consciousness - ie sentient brains. If no brain existed, things would still happen, but nothing would matter, nothing would be good or bad.
But consciousness DOES exist. I think that is why one-eyed physicalism can appear empty of meaning and nihilistic.
A longer, more coherent exposition of my ideas will have to wait until I write my book!
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@secularmerlin
How do you approach the problem that there is a difference between a manequin falling down a mine-shaft and a human falling down a mine shaft?None of that changes that all brain function would seem to be physical. Unless u2 is more than physical it is simply u1 and the distinction is artificial.
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@3RU7AL
On the rare ocasions I may have said 'noumenon' I would have meant it in Kant's sense, regardless of what meant to an ancient greek.
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@3RU7AL
There is relevant material in the wikipeia article on noumena. I think its true that Kant adopted non-standard meanings, but they were pretty rare and obscure terms beore he adopted them for his own purposes.
The wikipedia article quotes Schopenhauer's crticism of Kan't usage compare to that of ancient greek philosophers.
I've never read Kant, and I doubt I ever will! But what I have read about him doesn't interest or impress me. German philosophers like Kant and Hegel are unreadable! Give me the analytics any day over the waffle of the continentals...
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@Mopac
What aword means is what it denotes. it's history and etmology is only of acaemic and historical interest. A case in point is 'billion' which has evolved in meaning from million million to thousand million. A pedant might claim everbody uses billion incorrectly, but in the real world it is correct to use billion for 10^9 and incorrect for 10^12.
Kant's use of phenomon and noumemon have superceded any previous meanings and are now the 'correct' meanings. Language is not static which is why new editions of dictionaries become necessary from time to time. I am not saying that is a good thing and it is a source of confusion and miscommunication - it's a fact of life we have to put up with.
Wikipedia identifies this as the 'etymolocical fallacy', a variant of the 'genetic fallacy'. I offer no solution. other than to try avoiing reliance on the greek,latin (or french orerman) roots of a term. I'm not a fan of posh words. I don't think you will findmany appearsances of 'noumeon' or 'apodictic' in my posts! if I don't use aword in my everyday speech, I try to avoid it in my posts. But I readily admit what works for my style may not work for anybody else.
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@secularmerlin
This does not logically follow. Hydrogen was not always a part of u1. It did not exist until conditions arose that would support the formation of atoms so clearly not having always existed does not preclude inclusion in u1.Unless of course you have another reason for making this distinction.
Consider a rafia fruit bowl. it is a rigid shape that can serve as an effective container. However it consists of strips that are neither rigid nor bowl shaped. A random arrabhenent ifria dtrips would not serve as a fruit bowl - there is a theory of rafia that eplains which arrangements ofstrips produve an effective bowl.
The state of play with consciousness is that people assert that consciousness emerges from the compleity of the brain, but Ithink its obvious that most arrangements of rain matter would not produce a conscious mind, just as random rafia strips wouldn;t produce a fruit bowl. At a trivial level, u2 is a sunset of u1, but the specifics of the difference is barely explored.
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@3RU7AL
My hunch is that you and minksi are right. I am not a new-age hippy!
The unresolved problem can be illustrated if you look at some coloured obect in the room - a pink pencil sharpener, anything.
It is almost fatuous to say when you look at it you experience pinkness. It is a different experience from that you would get if it was a blue pencil sharpner. To you, pink things look pink and blue things look blue.
If you hook up your webcam to your computer and point it at the pink pencil sharpener, what colour does your computer experience? My guess is that because you and I share evoltionary history, if we both look at the same pink pencil sharpener we will have the same experience of its pinkness, but I am not convinced a webcam/computer combo has the same experience of pinkness we do. If the computer has any experence at all, 'pink' will be a range of numbers. But to you and I pinkness is not a range of numbers, is it? Pink is a particular quale.
My argument is that reductive physicalism is almost certainly correct, but we have no adequate theory to account for subjective experience. I cannot deny that pink things look pink - I wish i could! I feel that a theory of consciousness that glosses over the problem of qualia is unsatisfactory. It might be a good partial theory, but it leaves the door wide open to dualism.
If brains can experience qualia but machines can't then dualism must be true.
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@3RU7AL
You only need to design a machine that DESCRIBES its experience of red in the same subjective way you do.
That depends on what the obective is. If the end point is to make a toy that appears to have subjective experience that might do,but it wouldn't explain how subjectivity actually arises in human brains. I take it you do have subjective experiences? You don't just utter descriptions of experiences you don't actally have?
You must have read about p-zombies?
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@rosends
I would not quibble that Judaism is without its own theological disputes!
My feeling is that the Sadduccees position reflects an older tradition than the Pharisees.
My purpose was that Christians (most DArters have a Christian heritage) are used to the idea of a posthumous heaven and hell and personal relationship wth God. The Matthew verse conveniently shows it was not always that way. The oldest writings imply that YHWH rewarded obedience and punished disobediene in earthly terms in this life, by such means as military conquest or defeat by enemies and operated at the tribal level, not the individual level.
It'smy view that history has yoked two very differnt conceptions of god. The development of how the Judaeo-Christian god was imagined over the millennia is a huge topic in is own right (it needs a bloody big book to do it justice!), but incidental to the gist of my OP which is that there is more to religion than the fear of death.
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@3RU7AL
Any sufficiently sophisticated device indistinguishable from a human being would necessarily have the same (unverifiable) quality of "consciousness".
If so, it should be possible to at least outline the operation of a device that would manifests human like consciousness. As to verifiability, I cannot verify you are conscious, but I know that I am conscious! That is to say whatever consciouness is, it is present in me, that is it is produced by my brain,even if it is present nowhere else. Even if that is so unless my consciusness has a magical origin it shouldbe implementable in a machine.
Put another way,the challenge is to design a machine that experiences red in the same subjective way I do. Note - I said 'subjectively', not 'functionally'. Functionally is easy!
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@3RU7AL
I think it's very hard to express things clearly in this area - ordinary language wasn't invented for doing philosophy! But i was a programmer and I know what I can get a computer to do and what I can't get it to do.
I defy anyone to put what it is like to be 'subjectively conscious' or 'aware' into plain unamiguous words without relying on circularity. All I can do assume is that you - and people in general - have the same sort of experience I do. but however it is described, i cannot imagine how code can instaniate subective experience
Consider the classic examle of the colour red. To you or I red is a particular subective exerience ('quale'), but to a computer red is,say $0000FF. Acomputer with the number $0000FF in a memory cell is not having the same experince of redness that I do when I see a london bus. I know that because I know a bit about how computers work - they are not designed or constructed to have subjective experience. I suppose someone could ask how I can be so sure aout that comutersdon't have the same subective exeriences as people. My answer is that even if that were so, it doesn't explain how it works!
A computer 'sees' a scene rather like a 'paint by numbers' before its filled in, with regions having no 'quale' but marked with a subectively neutral code number.
but we don't eperince the world like that, with uncoloured regions labelled '3' or '5'!
I don't know if I can express what interests me about computerising subjectivity any better, inadequate though the attempt is.
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@Castin
This is a fake story whipped up by right-wing anti-immigrant groups. The soberest analysis I have found is here.
I sincerely hope, Castin, that you have not based your response only on what you read on this thread. It seems that a right-wing Swedish website/blog (samnytt) started this, which has been picked up by a network of ideologically similar sites. That created a layer of dis- and mis- infomation that all but buries the underyling fact.
I am surprised that people are - apparently -willing accept nonsense at face value.
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@Stephen
Is it any coincidence that Sweden has appointed a Pakistani Muslim Head of the National Heritage Board?
Here are some useful links, purely for background.
According to the swedish national heritage board website,
The Swedish National Heritage Board is Sweden’s central administrative agency in the area of cultural heritage. Lars Amréus has been Director General since 2012. He is an archaeologist with more than 25 years of working experience in the fields of cultural and historic environment and cultural heritage. Before he was assigned as Director General he was superintendent of the Swedish History Museum. Lars Amréus is assigned by the Swedish government as Director General until 1 March 2021.
The 'news story' seems to originate here:
"The site(samnytt) has been labeled a racist hate-site, xenophobic and right-wing extremist by Swedish, Finnish, and international media."
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@3RU7AL
Even a hypothetical god cannot violate cause and effect without being indistinguishable from random noise.
Yet...suppose god arranged for a dice(*) to come up 6 every single time forever, no matter how it was thrown or even placed very carefully with the wrong side up.
Coming up 6 every time forever is distinguishable from random noise!
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@janesix
We do have very big brains - i's likely we can have deeper and more subtle thoughts than non-human animals.
Another factor could be that most non-human animals have pretty tough lives - personal survival may have to be prioritised more than in a human society which depends so much on co-operation. Indeed, i wonder how robust human ethics are when we are stressed!
So perhaps morality is a luxury few non-human animals can afford. On the other hand we humans have to have morality to prevent the socierty we depend on breaking down.
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@3RU7AL
Interesting videos, but I think artificial consciousness and artificial intelligence are different things with very different goals. Crudely, an AI chess program will beat a grandmaster but wouldn't gloat; an AC chess program might play rubbish chess but hate losing.
AI has come on leaps and bounds, but arguably only by concentrating on efficient algorithms which do not resemble how brains work. Chess programs use brute force to explore huge trees - its only the blinding speed and power of modern hardware that hides the fact it's basically trial and error!
My quick surf on google threw up very little in the way of any new stuff on AC. I suppose that's because there is more commercial value in AI than AC,especially as no one knows how to begin programming an AC!
I am a retired programmer, and I was always vexed by the seeming impossibility of programming 'subjectivity' into a computer. But brains clearly do implement subjectivity! I'm sure brains don't work by magic, so what's going on?
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@Mopac
Your steadfastness is admirable in its way, albeit it renders you somewhat predictable!
You post is noted.
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@janesix
Religion exists because God exists.
May be the gods do exist, but religions are man made.
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@3RU7AL
Not on the fact of unpredictability but the cause of the unpredictability.
I take it you don't know what I will drink with my breakfast tomorrow (I don't!)! But why not? Pretending the data could be processed, would a cmplete description of my physical brain state (andwhat will affect that state) be sufficient? Can my preferences be inferred from physical measurements or is there a non-physical element involved?
One can dismiss non-physical elements on dogmatic grounds, but the problem with that is that one has to as how to manifest subjective desires in a purely physical object. I see it as a 'special case' of the problem of consciousness - ie how to implement 'mental states' in a mechanism.
It's not far removed from the problem of writing a computer program that hates losing at chess. It's trivial to et achess root to simulate eing angry, but no one (afaik) nows how to make a root feel 'real anger'. Nor do we know how to make a machine with a desire or preference.
As a non-dualist, I am extremly annoyed that these days almost no-one is even trying to produce 'artificial consciousness'. There are two proects that are trying to reverse-engineer brains
But they don't seem to have a guiding theory - the idea seems to be to copy the structure of a brain and hope - it's cargo cult science.
Chalmers (and others) have presented arguments that dualism of some sort is essential for human-like consciousness.
Temperamentally I am an anti-dualist - but after 50+ years the excuses we physicalists trot out are wearing thin...
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A popular - if facile - argument is that religion is poplular because people are scared of dying.
A counter argument is that the grand-daddy of the Abahamic faiths - Judaism - had no notion of posthumous existence. The most familiar expression of that is in Matthew 22:23 "The same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection..."
AFAICT belief in an afterlife remains widespread but not universal amongst Jews today.
Early Judaic writing is sometimes ambiguous as to whether death is or is not permanent oblivion, but there is scant support or the idea of posthumous reward in heaven or punishment in hell. All - rich and poor, good and evil all have the same fate of 'sheol'.
Ecclesiastes 9:2 "2 All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad,[a] the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not."
The idea of an afterlife more familiar from a Christian perspective appear in later writings, almostcertainly the result of syncretism from Greek ideas. An example is Daniel 12 “Many of those that sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to eternal life, others to reproaches, to everlasting abhorrence” — implies that resurrection will be followed by a day of judgment. Those judged favorably will live forever and those judged to be wicked will be punished."
Ancient mesopotamian legends also say almost nothing about an afterlife. There was no heaven for dead babylonians to look forward to!
in contrast, the Egyptians took great pains to ensure the afterlife was comfortable - at least for the rich and powerful. But the Jews had little time for Egyptian religious notions!
In hinduism, re-incarnation would seem to be a palliative for death's sting, but a pious hindu does not seek to re-incarnate. Life is a punishment, and the goal of Hiduism is the peace and oblivion of nirvana.
In Christianity,the idea has developed to the point where earthly life is reduced to a mere testing ground. In Christianity, there is a strong tradition that suffering is good, because it leads to posthumous rewards. Presumably that has roots in Greek ideas about the grossness of flesh and the fact that early Christians tended to be poor - hence their inescapable suffering at the hands of grasping landlords and corrupt priests could presented as a positive.
All in all, it is overly simplistic to suppose religion exists because people are scared to dying.
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@3RU7AL
The way I understand free will, randomness would be inimical to free will. It may well be that 'noise' in the system means the precise evolution ofbrain states is inherenty ineterminate/chaotic (or insert prefered term here!), but such randomness is neither 'free' or 'will', for most common meanings of the words.
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@secularmerlin
@Mopac
@3RU7AL
What are the odds we all mean the same thing by 'free will'?
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@secularmerlin
One quantifiable difference is that brains are more complicated and sifts chemicals and electrical signals rather than sand.
True,but that isn't the difference that gets people to say sieves don't (but brains do) have free will.
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@Mopac
No it isn't. It is a fact that we can reprogram our minds, and turn around from being a punk to a better person.
Or, in my case,vice versa!
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@secularmerlin
How do preference, emotion, intent, desire or rational thought free you from choosing based on your specific proprogramming?
But why on earth would I want the power to choose what I don't desire? A mail sorting machine is a glorified sieve that lets small grains through and blocks larger grains. Sieves have no desire to distinguish between large and small grains - they do not choose. If there are common features between how sieves work and how human choice works they seem less important and less interesting to how sieves and people are different.
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@Greyparrot
It's 100 times more likely they were run-of-the-mill drunken yobs.
They were arrested in no time, so I would presume they were well known to the police as serial scumbags.
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@TwoMan
note dennett said 'important decisions'. i'm sure DD is right - we can think logically about important decision to come up with a rational course of action. i am far more interested in trivial choices where cold logic plays little part - tea or coffee with breakfast for instance. i don't think Dennett's model is helpful in such cases.
Returning to #575,
Based on this rudimentary definition, do you believe that sorting robots have freewill?As I have already answered this question, I will again say no, it is not identical to but--> @3RU7AL
I think a sorting machine is very unlike a human. If i want to know if a mail sorting machine will send a letter left or right i only have to examine the post code on the envelope. I can ignore the details of the machine completely. But if i want to know whether Twoman will say he wants tea or coffee I would have to have an enormous amount of information about him - his history, his habits, his preferences and even then it would be a guess until he tells me! If an envelope is addressed to croydon, the sorting machine has no choice - it will route it to croydon. But twoman can can choose tea, coffee or vodka. So I dispute 'similar to a human choice.'.
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@3RU7AL
What necessary function does freewill perform in your worldview?And if it doesn't serve any (identifiable) critical function, why bother clinging to it?
Free will is not necessary - there was no free will for the first 13 bollion years of the universe. Free will - an aspect of consciousness - came into existence as a consequence o the evoution of minds (implemened by brains). but once Free will/consciousness etc came into existence it was a a game changer. In a universe without consciousness, nothing matters. It doesn't matter if a dead planet is blown up by a supernova, but if that planet held conscious life then there is loss of civilsations, of art, of science and knowlege.
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@3RU7AL
i am certainly more comforable than as a slave to anyone else's desires! I could be an entity with no desires - a lowly amoeba or a leaf blowing in the wind. After 13.8 billion years the universe produced and entity with the set of wishes, desires dreams and aspirations that consistute me. my inscrutale desires are not things sepaerate from me - they are me and define me.Then you are comfortable being a slave to your inscrutable desires.
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