::scr long waffley post about consciousness

[Richard Marr]

...leaving art behind for a while and think about A.I. and stuff:


Assume, if you will, that there is such a thing as your 'soul'.

Where is it? There's no one part of the human body or mind that holds the
soul or binds it to you. Any individual cell or molecule can be replaced and
"you" would still be "you". Therefore the soul must be an emergent property
of the whole.

What property of a thing gives it a soul? It's impossible to say, since we
have no way of detecting the soul. Let me rephrase the question:

What makes something conscious? It's the ability of a thing to transmit
information to the soul. Without that you are unconscious, or dead, or
inanimate (or in Muttley's case, all three).

If the soul is an emergent property of the whole, what happens when one
conscious form consumes another? One consciousness stops. The other
continues. As the soul is an emergent property of the whole, the soul is now
an emergent property of the new whole.

So how come I don't turn into someone new when I eat chicken? Either your
conciousness is incapable of detecting changes in your soul, or your soul
hasn't changed, i.e. it's an emergent property of the *entire* whole, not
just you.

There are two choices here with no clear decider between them. I'm going to
discard the first one since I'd rather save that for another day.

That leaves us with the idea that there is one soul, that is an emergent
property of the entire system, and that each consiousness merely has its own
perspective of it. A bit like the inverse of a hologram: (image real, object
not) or (object real, image not)...

If the soul is an emergent property of the whole, that would have to include
the things you eat: animals, plants, all the way down the scale to
single-celled organisms.

What's so special about organic systems? What makes them different from
mechanical devices and computers? Nothing.

Soul is inherent in the system, and consciousness is just a matter of the
complexity of your sensors and decision-making apparatus.

Your computer doesn't just have a consiousness, but also a soul... your
soul.



Rich