Re: The Emptiness of Theology

From: N:dlzc D:aol T:com \(dlzc\) (net_at_nospam.com)
Date: 08/16/04 

Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 17:43:26 -0700

Dear Dale Trynor:

"Dale Trynor" <dalet@nbnet.nb.ca> wrote in message
news:D6STc.95614$Np3.4601281@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca...
> Robert J. Kolker wrote:
...
> > Is your mind in your head? Is it in your spleen? Is it in your body?
>
> Dale Trynor wrote:
> The most logical guess is that its in the brain of course, asking where
> exactly and it might not even turn out to work that way.
>
> Long ago I came to the conclusion that it's most reasonable that it
> takes many souls to make up a mind and one finds reason to speculate
> that the mind uses some property of them as part and parcel of how a
> mind actually works.

Marvin Minsky, "The Society of the Mind"...

> I am probably out of date on this but remember reading that the parts of
> the brain where we experience images appears to be completely separate
> from areas where we experience sound and it was a mystery at the time on
> why we seam to experience both phenomena at the same time. Perhaps soul
> quanta ( forgive my thinking I am making up terminology )have an
> essential behavior to enable this apparent sharing the experiences so
> that this is all possible and essential to its dezine.
> Unfortunately this is all mysticism now but one finds no reason to
> assume it will never become science when one figures out what the
> questions are and then dreams up the experiments to actually try.

Finding the areas of the brain excited by external stimuli, then finding
the areas of the brain excited to cause action in the body, will not find
the soul. We are or are not more than the "meat", and experiment cannot do
more than investigate the meat.

...
> Logical questions to ask is why even insects would evolve a nervous
> system that at least appears to responds to experience rather than just
> respond to input the way that todays AI dose. It seams like a reasonable
> speculation that it would provide some advantage and this can eventually
> lead to some decent questions on evolution. A few clues to start is that
> one time I estimated the amount of our DNA involved with creating our
> brains and was surprised how small it appeared to be. 3 billion base
> pares and only 3% is claimed to actually code for anything and of that
> only 25% was involved with the brain or at least as I remember reading
> so I could be wrong. . The required 25.5 base pares can be represented
> by only 2 bits to represent the 4 nucleic acids so it goes down to just
> under 7 megabytes when its converted to bytes of 8 bits each.
>
> Somehow I cant see any way one could have an AI program of only 7
> megabytes to develop the whole range of flexibilitys of a human mind.

It should be able to be done with "analog" devices, and with much fewer
elements than 7 meg.

> Its to be noted here that the parts of the DNA that don't appear to code
> for anything could yet prove to be important and I think I herd that its
> now speculated that they control differentianism. I have a feeling and
> more of a guess really that it might prove to be like clock ticks to
> turn off repetitions such as when to stop making a proten when one has
> enough of those type of cells.If these were basically like clock ticks
> they would be very subject to efficient compression giving a much
> smaller size. Someone here please step in and give an educated bit of
> information to my obviously suspect speculations and I haven't had the
> time to look into this more. I am interested.
>
> Could it be that because nature is so good at repatative complexity
> where one makes the same types of cells over and over again, i.e., our
> skeletal structure is made of tiny cells where a cast piece of titanium
> having very little ordered complexity would do as good. Could it be that
> AI would require far to large of a file size and so tax any sort of
> reasonably sized DNA for any sort of AI that could work with the
> flexibility of a mind. So the dezine of a mind is in part due to the
> ease of natures preference in repeating the same complexity over and
> over again and allowing adaption to take care of the rest of the
> complexity . Consciousness might be the result of these factors and
> might even apply for the simplistic insects.
>
> I have often emphasized that knowledge of a question is knowledge.
> Knowledge of an original question is original knowledge.
> For when trying to advance science, it helps to know what the questions
are.

Are you trying to say that the "soul", or your "self" is an emergent
behavior?

David A. Smith

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