Re: The Emptiness of Theology

From: Dale Trynor (dalet_at_nbnet.nb.ca)
Date: 08/16/04 

Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 03:20:08 GMT

N:dlzc D:aol T:com (dlzc) wrote:
> 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"...
Dale Trynor wrote;
I didn't know that thanks. Did have Roger Penrows book someplace, only
read some of it. Noted he didn't think computers would ever become
Consciousness and that irritated me a bit. What wise person would ever
say never especially since never is a really really long time and when
they do make such claims written in stone they always seam to end up
wrong. I wouldn't have minded so much if he just said computers as they
are now as I might reluctantly agree with a touch of uncertainty.
>
>
>>I am probably out of date on this but remember reading that the parts of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.

It hopefully could lead to clues that would give one more ideas for
theorys that might be testable. But I still think that using the whole
human brain is overkill. I am willing to bet that if one were to
understand everything about a parrots brain one would know everything
one needed. Its quite possible that even insects might provide enough
info and they are commonly not even considered to have brains alto honey
bees and earth worms have a bit of one I have read. If they experience
color for example its likely to be with the same process.

  We are or are not more than the "meat", and experiment cannot do
> more than investigate the meat.

You may indeed be right however given a creative mind and some good
information one never knows what theorys might develop and if they are
good then it can in turn lead to some decent experiment.

[snip]

>>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.

Thats an interesting possibility what makes you think this. Are you
talking about neural nets. Besides what I dont remember now I am really
behind on this subject.

>>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
>
>
Dale Trynor wrote:
I have the impression that the abstract and that is a bit depending on
the degree, ability to understand the self, the future and to put it
into words might be considered emergent. I doubt if insects have much
awareness of anything more than color and if the food smells good etc.

There is one thing I do really puzzle over and thats got to do with how
long might the half life residence time ( more made up terminology )
i.e., how long might a soul quanta reside within a mind on average.
We have no real idea if its a lifetime, years, or even just minutes and
how would you know if only the mind itself has all of the memorys that
tell us how long we are who we are and we cannot if its a lie.
Who is to say if the mind might be no more than a wet sponge in an ocean
of moist air and then trying to guess at the resident times of its
individual water molecules. We just dont know and can only assume.
I dont even know if it would be a good thing to know if one cant do
anything about it.

I am fairly sure that future technology might be able to find a way of
controlled reincarnation if one could find a way to contain all of ones
soul quanta. It may be necessary for experience to remain in effect for
this containment to work however its doubtful if one would require
thinking or anything even mildly complex. Its quite possible that one
might be experiencing for example the color green and thats would be all
thats required for containment.

How would one go about scientifically proving the soul might be simpler
than they think because you dont need much more IQ than an insect.
The problem is that despite the probable simplicity of a device that was
capable of experience it would be too incomplete to do anything to tell
you so, on the other had if it could show a response it might not have
the extra circuitry that could experience. The point I am trying to make
is that even if devices that could experience something were very simple
you would never know unless by accident it also included the circuity
that enables it too tell you this. The extra complexity as a result ends
up being more than whats likely to happen by accident.
This aggravates the problem of how dose one develop the theory without
the theory. One needs to come up with clever guesswork based on
observations we have now and then get lucky somehow.

Only clue I have is a hunch that because soul quanta may have no energy
of its own how in the world could it ever influence the decision to lift
my arm or for a bacterium to wiggle left rather than right. Best guess
is that chaos may prove essential here as its about the only way I can
think of to get around this problem of zero energy to influence a
decision. For example its easy to theorize about a circuit that has two
outputs that are randomly selected so that no energy is used to
determine one output over another, as it was in random flux anywise and
it makes no difference energy wise to chose one or the other. I dont
know how strong the association is but for example the flapping of the
wings of a chicken after its head had been removed is suggestive of a
nervous system that was in a chaotic process anywise and that only its
preferred selection of behaviors had been removed.

This is problematic in computers and electronic circuits that use
transistors, boolean logic etc as its intentional very deterministic and
avoids this type of randomness extremely well. Its particularly hard to
get computers to generate truly random numbers without using thermal
fluctuations or radioisotope disintegrations etc that all might be
considered a bit external and not of the sort one might need for this
sort of synthetic intelligence to be able to function in the world. I
dont think the term AI should be applicable to this sort of thing as it
is rather different because of the way it would involve devices that
experience in the same way as animals and humans do and not just be
programed to tell you its conscious.

Dale

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