Re: ::scr long waffley post about consciousness

[Piers Cawley <pdcawley-scr@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Marr <Richard.Marr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> ...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'.

That's a mighty big assumption.

>
> 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).

Ah, but you see, I don't believe I have a soul. And whilst 'I' appear
to be aware of myself, I'm starting to have the feeling that I'm
fooling myself about having free will (in the sense of the symbol with
which I associate myself actually having any influence on what the
system that is my body does or thinks). Oh ghod. I'm crap at
explaining this; read Pandaemonium by Greg Egan. It's in _Luminous_.

>
> 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? 

You do. The someone that has eaten some chicken is not the someone
that has not yet eaten the chicken. But it remembers *being* that
someone, and 'believes' the someone from the past to be, in some
sense, the same someone as the one that remembers eating the
chicken. Meanwhile, in a different branch of the many worlds, a
different someone that ate a different piece of chicken, or that
didn't eat the chicken, but which remembers the same amount of time
passing as the someone that ate the chicken, identifies itself with
the same 'former someone' as the someone that ate the chicken did. But
the someone that didn't eat the chicken is not the same someone as the
one that did. I argue that the conscious self is being continuously
remade again and again from the sum of our experiences.

Confused, you will be after this weeks episode of The Trousers of
Time.

> 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.

Careful. If you truly do believe that we have souls, you're in danger
of redefining it to such an extent that it it's not actually any
bloody use as a symbol.

> 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.

And everything you breath. And then there's the problem of the fact
that every cell in your body is continually changing the molecules of
which it's made. And since the odds are approaching 1 that at least
one of the oxygen atoms in your body was exhaled at some point by
'pick a famous person from the past' one could raise the question of
whether that oxygen atom 'carries' a fragment of the soul with
it. After all, its trajectory is affected by the time it spent
there. And what about all the atoms in your body that were once part
of your mother or father? Where does one soul end and another begin?
When does your soul become your soul rather than your mothers? Or your
fathers? Could I take your argument to mean that babies do not have a
soul of their own until they are conscious of themselves?

Or is it all just bollocks?

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

Ooh. I can definitely agree with that one.

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

This definition of the word 'soul' is at some variance from the
normally accepted. 

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

Or, one could say that, having reached a statement of such arrant
speciousness, the original assumption must therefore be false, and
there is no such thing as the soul.

-- 
Piers

   "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language in
    possession of a rich syntax must be in need of a rewrite."
         -- Jane Austen?