dameedna

That's good then, claiming we know pretty much all there is to know leaves science open to too much ridicule, and just gives fuel to the fire of those that find science a threat to their faith.

It's really only a threat to fundamentalism anyway, but they are the ones that can become ideologically fanatical, which is where the problems are found imo.

dameedna

Nope, don't get it. Can you expand on this thought please? It SEEMS you are saying you don't really exist apart from your "external" physical body and that without the body, there is no you? Am I correct or did I misinterpret?

Genuine curiosty



So do you define life as something that replicates itself? Or something with awareness of itself? I think I kind of understand what you are saying, I'm just not sure I can reconcile that with...well simply put..the image I see in the mirror every day I struggle with the concept of the "living" or the "animate" and the inanimate.

Again, I think I understand what you are saying. I've been reading up on Brain plasticity lately, and it appears that it is possible to use completely different sensory input devices(Skin as opposed to the ear/eardrum) to actually generate ultimately the same(sound) concept in the brain. Amazing stuff, and what I believe the choclear implant is based on.

The question is, what is observing it? It's incredibly spooky to be aware that all this 'stuff' is going on behind the scenes, knowing you are observing it, knowing you live and die, but that you are no different than anything else ultimately...made of the same particles.

Do you think there is an "I" , or is the "I" an illusion. If there is no "I" then what is there?

Again curious, interesting throughts you have

Og

Sure. I am, in a sense, saying that you don't exist apart from your physical body. I am saying that you ARE your physical body. You are identical with it. It's like thinking of the spell checker in microsoft word. It is a concept that you interact with, but you know that it is the sum of all of the components that make up your computer all defined to act in certain ways based on magnetic fields on a disk or charges on capacitors in the processor/RAM. But we still say that "the spell checker" exists. It is a certain mode of operation and a certain directed current flow in semiconductors. And it all comes together to interact with your senses so that you can say "spell checker" and totally encompass it.

But to say that there's something about this spell checker that could exist apart from the patterns of charges on the processor and the structure of the logical gates and data buses and buffers is just wrong.

We are biochemical machines constructed in the womb and reconstructed continually by incoming stimuli in our environments and a process of filtering of current environmental stimuli based on comparisons to previous stored environmental states. All our sensory tools and processing power comes together to create the self, but it's not something separate from the hardware just as a spell checker is not something separate from the photons emitted from the monitor or the program code (charges on capacitors) loaded in RAM.

Saying that there is an external body and an internal body is like confusing a portrait of a person for an actual person. The pixels/paint/whatever in the portrait come together to form an image that you can interpret and relate to, but it's not something different than the components that make it up.

I do not think that life needs to replicate itself. That's a useful feature that keeps it persistent, but I see no reason to not call electronic systems that we create "life." Things like the internet are vastly more complicated than single cell organisms that we would refer to as life. Energy is transfered around the internet. Information changes forms and is transmitted from one place to another just as occurs in cells.

Mainly, to me, a useful definition of life is "a sufficiently complex interconnection of signal transduction and correlation." Basically life requires:

1) there is a boundary you can define (like a cell membrane or the plastic case on a cell phone or the skin on a human being)

2) At this boundary, signals are transduced into different forms (this is necessarily the definition of a boundary, so it may be redundant with #1) and combined with either stored signals or signals from other systems to create a behavioral output (either walking/talking in humans or ring/vibrate/voice output in cell phones).

3) Then there's some level of complexity that requires a threshold be met. So even though a rock has a boundary and even though water may enter the boundary, be filtered, and leave the other side, or even though heat may be transfered from top to bottom of the rock, it's not life.

Obviously, the level of complexity that includes single cells and humans can be considered life. But what about cruise control on your car? It's a goal driven sensory feedback system which may have memory and the capacity to compare previous states with it's current states. This is the essence of PID control systems in engineering. What about a cell phone? It's definitely up there towards the single cell end of the complexity spectrum, but isn't carbon based other than the plastics in it's casing.

What makes a cell phone different from a human? Ability to reproduce? So what? That's just a mechanical feature that we could add to cell phones (increasing their bulk considerably). A cell phone receives electromagnetic signals, converts them into moving electrical charges (current), interprets them, compares them to internal stored states, processes them, and creates behavioral changes such as wild vibration, music production, flashing lights, etc.

How is that so much different than a human? Right now, you're converting electromagnetic signals into moving ionic charges (current), interpreting the signals, comparing them to your current concepts about "life," processing them, and possibly, creating behavioral changes in your hands to type out a response. Or maybe this isn't of interest to you just as an FM radio station isn't of interest to a cell phone and you just ignore it. Of course you're more generalized than a cell phone in many ways, but there's all manner of highly specialized life forms out there.


The cochlear implant directly stimulates the nerve cells that code for frequency in you ear. It delivers small amounts of electrical current to cells based on the frequency content of incoming signals. It doesn't really use an alternate mode of stimulus, it just replaces the timpanic membrane and other biomechanical constructions that transduce frequency content into mechanical stresses in a cell that get converted (by mechanically gated ion channels) into ion currents.

There is an I! it is just like the spell checker in microsoft word! It also has this curious capacity to feed back on itself and strengthen it's perceived boundary. I is the boundary of your skin. You also may extend your notion of I to your child or to a political/social concept. Your I is defined by the signal transduction at your skin and the processing that goes on inside your body. Your skin is such a dramatic boundary where signals are converted that this consciousness thing arises and gets confused about how it is a part of everything else.

You have these exquisitely refined sensory systems. For example, each eye has 120 million photo sensitive cells capable of transducing light into signals your brain can interpret. The rest of your body has tens of millions of sensory signals coming in about all manner of environmental parameters that are interpreted and incorporated to produce an internal image of the external world. It's not just the 5 classic senses (see/hear/touch/smell/taste). There's temperature sensing, equilibrium sensing, sensing the location of your body parts (proprioception), etc. Other creatures have electric or magnetic field sensors, ultrasound detectors, polarization detectors for light, or highly refined versions of sensors that we have. This is the field of "neuroethology" and I suggest you look into it if you're interested. It's fascinating.

The "I" is most certainly an ILLUSION. That's different from a delusion. An illusion simply is something that appears as something other than it actually is. A delusion is something that appears to you but doesn't actually exist. This is an important distinction.

The I is a sum of integrated sensory signals that are processed, interpreted, and compared based on rules developed over a lifetime of experiences. As your life progresses, more and more sensory experiences are integrated to form "I"... That make any sense?

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

AB517

Yep Og

I used the word boundaryloosley.

I also agree, Bayes' theorem helps me understand me.

Ice_Monkey

I have no problem with deism. It appears to me to be an honest version of Christianity/Churchianity.

Paine does a good job of demonstrating errors and false claims. He easily demonstrated why Moses could not have written anything in the bible. Much of Paine's book was written without a bible of his own to refer to.

__________________
God created humans to act as if they possessed human nature, and by god, he's not going to let us get away with it!

revpo

I believe he wrote his famous The Age Of Reason while in prison, and had no bible to refer to. His thoughts and writings and his reasoning to me were true to fact, a man made rhyme, written by men, guided by man and told what to write in many cases by the church of the times. If people would clean the slate of what revealed religions tell them what to do and use thought and process , one would see the bible is only a written history<very bad> , showing the times and in many ways guessing what happen before, man today does not use his mental thought and follows what has been driven into his mind from revealed religions, a shame on population.

There are so many messengers from above and so many bibles, how can one follow this crooked path.

REVPO

__________________
HAVE A GREAT DAY
REVPO/AGNOSTIC CHURCH CLERIC

Ice_Monkey

He was in prison in France for almost a year, where he became gravely ill and was not expected to live, even several months after he gained his freedom. He submitted the first part of his book for publication before he went to jail, and the second half was written after he was set free. The first part was written without any use of a bible at all.

__________________
God created humans to act as if they possessed human nature, and by god, he's not going to let us get away with it!