OT: We're all gonna die

[Roger Hayter]

Ignoring religion, there is no obvious reason why it should be impossible.

[The Natural Philosopher]

It is not known whether a human brain is an emergemnt property of Mind, or vice versa...

[Martin Brown]

I'd be inclined to bet that consciousness is an emergent property of any sufficiently complex network of computational elements. It may well be testable within the next decade if Moore's Law continues to hold good.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well you say that, but surely experience of a virtual material world is an emergent property of any sufficiently complex network of computational elements?

How much of the universe is in fact all in our minds?

And is the fact that a huge amount of it is, where the idea of God comes from?

[Roger Hayter]

I tend to agree with you. At least so far as that mind is an emergent property of the brain. I suspect the kind of processing the brain does is especially prone to develop consciousness for evolutionary reasons so the complexity of machine needed is probably a lot less if we know some design tricks. But if mind is independent of brain then we have something metaphysical and we might as well have a god - not a conclusion I want to reach. Nor is it a likely one.

[Max Demian]

I would say that mind is an emergent property (whatever that means) of the brain, by a software/hardware analogy.

Consciousness is a different matter. We don't have any idea what consciousness is, or how to detect it (except that I know I have it to some extent).

[The Natural Philosopher]

The arguiment is that since consciousness is how we know there is an 'external world' at all, the external world is an emergent property of consciousness (and maybe something else).

This actually makes sense of quantum issues like Schrödinger's cat

[Cursitor Doom]

The idea of God arose from early man's understandable assumption, without the insight provided by modern science, that someone *must* have created everything on earth (including the earth, moon, stars etc.). The real mystery is why so many people continue to believe in 'Him' - I'm guessing most humans are just astoundingly ignorant and fearful.

[Cursitor Doom]

Well, Elon Musk (I believe it is) has teams of people working flat out on this issue to make it a reality and they clearly wouldn't be doing that if they didn't believe there was at least *some* chance of success. Though it sounds utterly daft to us, maybe they know something we don't?

[Max Demian]

No they don't, any more than the cryonics nutters do.

[Max Demian]

Maybe I'm a tentacled alien playing a computer game on my own, which is the Universe. You lot are just a few lines of computer code and don't exist except when I am interacting with you. Sorry, guys, you just don't exist.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Why do you assume early man thought it had to be *someone*, rather than something that created everything?

Surely that sort of arrogance came rather later?

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, I can assure you, as someone who has worked for Clive Sinclair,as well as in the Defence industry that it is entirely possible to have teams of people working on something that has no chance of success whatsoever. And that can be proved to have no chance of succeess whatsoever, just don't say so, or you get fired.

DAMHIKT

It is exactly the same in renewable energy today, or climate change. What matters is not being successful in delivery, but being successful in attracting money.

There is a principle of recursion at work here... Can entity X create entiy Y hat contains all of entity X including its knowledge to create entity Y...

Can an entity Y exist that contains all the knowledge of itself plus the knowledge of something else?

Somewhere in one of Penrose's books is a statement that a computer big enough to contain all the data about the universe.... would be as big as the universe...

And that is the point: We operate on reductionist approximations to the Truth - partial truths that serve approximately in limited applications.

The representation of the world as natural law implemented via causality is an algorithmic compression of the truth of *experience* that results in a view that is *approximately* useful - that we do in fact live in a space time matter energy universe bounded by natural and invariant Laws.

Its only a view however, and it looks pretty tatty when we get to Quantum shit, or cosmological scales.

At the quantum level causality breaks down, as does the very assumption that the world is there whether anyone is there to experience it or not.

The world, as we know it, appears to be constructed by the fact of our noticing it exists, from a multitude of probable outcomes, none of which is certain till we notice that they are in fact, fact...:-)

Faced with that sort of advanced view, its not clear as to what a human being actually is? A random artefact of a world-view that needs a subject in order to objectify the unknown, into the known?

Ultimately we dont know anything for sure. The Turing test is no guarantee that what emerges out of a storage 200 years down the line is a human being, or simply something that behaves like one.

But spending money ofn randmom monlkeys fiddling with expensive kit often allows SOMETHING useful to emerge.

I don't think Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie were employed to create Unix, but they did, anyway.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ah Grasshopper, you begin to see..

I tend to think that actually we are just plugged into the equivalent of a sunday afternoon reality TV show in which we (can) participate, and eventually we will wake up and wonder what we wasted our money on...

"21st century schizoid Man - the movie!"

[whisky-dave]

I've seen the southpark episode

Thank God for Robert Smith of The Cure ;-)

[Cursitor Doom]

Because Dawkins said so. Dawkins knows more about this subject than anyone else alive AFIAC, so when Dawkins says something, I listen and learn.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Dawkins got in his Tardis and talked to them, did he?

[anonymousrapscallion]

This amuses me:

Ant.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Dawkins knows sod all about philosophy.

[Tim Lamb]

:-)

I rather liked the bit about the *origin hypothesis of a bronze age pastoral tribe*...