[QUOTE=wincel post_id=1626884213]The idea that you think with your brain shouldn't be radical or controversial, but it is to you people for some reason. Your brain is a physical system. There is no reason why a fuking configuration of a gas couldn't think, for example, in some emergent manner given this fact. There's no reason to rule out thinking physical systems. Our brain is one. Boltzmann thought of Boltzmann brains as another.[/QUOTE]congrats you understand we're constrained by our brain. you are right in a sense, but you are not really addressing the problem. we are talking about the complex systems within them. breh.. i know from experience within this industry that there are not solutions to the problems that have been presented in here

i've posted many things. and once again you seem to be kind of skating on top of it all and not really addressing the problem of what we're talking about. here are some more (how many problems in this quote alone?):

[QUOTE]What does human intelligence mean? And what is the relation with consciousness? Computers already exceed human algorithmic calculations, among many others. A clear example is the recent report of Al****o zero which can learn without human intervention and play at super-human level (Silver et al., 2017). In fact, one option to overcome human abilities might be a cognitive system completely different to the anthropocentric science fiction view. As will be shown later, this kind of computer may reach and overcome some, but not all, human capabilities. That is why; one position could claim that it is not necessary to assume computers like brains or conscious machines to overtake human capabilities. It is a valid point; however, will this kind of computer surpass human brain only in a rational/algorithmic way or also an emotional one? Will this kind of computer be able to dance better than us, to create better than us, to feel better and like us? Otherwise, it will never reach nor overtake human abilities. One reason is that part of being human is to have emotional behavior, to be able to dance, create, etc, additionally to our apparently rational behavior. As it was mentioned above, the first issue emerges: what does human being mean? If what is being a human and which abilities need to be overcome are not understood, how can we ever think about overcoming unknown capabilities? For example, human intelligence may not be only associated with logical, algorithmic, or rational thinking. Types of intelligence have already been suggested, which are closely related to each other such as kinaesthetic and emotional intelligence in humans (Sternberg, 1997; Gardner, 1999). So far, implementing emotions or simple movements in machines is equal to or more complicated than implementing rational or algorithmic intelligence (Moravec, 1988). Actually, current implementations of emotions in machines are based on a logical, computable and deterministic approaches, leaving out essential characteristics of emotions such as that emotions interfere with rational processes and optimal decisions. In fact, these implementations are founded on the idea that emotions play an important role in making humans more efficient, rationally speaking (Martinez-Miranda and Aldea, 2005), when cognitive fallacies are showing the contrary (Gilovich et al., 2002; Kahneman, 2003) and experiments on neuroscience from the called default neural network, which is related to self-oriented information, are suggesting anti-correlated subsystems of information processing (Simpson et al., 2001; Fox et al., 2005; Buckner et al., 2008) which interfere each other. The view of computer non-like-brain does not care about these issues and assumes intelligence as only rational, logic and computable capability; or even worst, the problem of computer non-like-brains defenders is to think that some properties of life could be replicated without the distinctive properties of being alive.

Then, is it possible to define a set of human characteristics? Futurists assume the existence of this set but they do not define it in any way. While any serious attempt to define a human set or a subset should first start with a definition of living entities. One possible definition is the notion of autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela, 1998) which refers to the self-reproduction and self-maintenance of a system. In this view, a living machine is a unitary system or network of processes which is able to regenerate through their interactions and continuous transformation. Even when it is still controversial a complete definition of living beings and the utility of the autopoiesis concept (Fleischaker, 1992), two characteristics, autonomy and reproduction, emerge as key features of living beings. Some critics of this concept state that autopoiesis does not consider external references that can be crucial for the organism. Therefore, a probable better definition of the living being may be a unitary system or network of processes which interacts with the environment to keep their autonomy and increase their capability to reproduce. Of course, any definition of life is a huge enterprise and the goal of this essay is not to answer this question, but state a simple and probably the simplest definition that can help us to decide when a machine reaches and overcomes human characteristics. Interestingly, this general definition does not discard the idea that other systems or machines can reach these two characteristics, even when they should not be considered living machines. In fact, this is not contradictory because autonomy and reproduction are thought here as a subset of living machine properties; it means that they are necessary conditions but not sufficient to be considered living machines. Thus, humans, as well as other animals, are autonomous entities with the ability to reproduce.

Additionally, however, it is also necessary to identify at least one characteristic to differentiate human being from other living beings. One historical proposal has been the notion of morality. Morality and ethics can be understood as high-level reasoning to distinguish between proper or improper behavior and intentions. This notion also implies a community, a culture and social obligations within that community. Morality has been studied by many philosophers as for example (Hegel, 2001) and (Kant, 1785), and connected with concepts as rationality, free will, and consciousness. Nevertheless, when neuroscientists look for correlates or building blocks of morality inside of the brain, it is possible to find areas which are associated with empathy and social interaction, mostly identified with emotional states (Bzdok et al., 2012). In these terms, morality is not only a rational process as some philosophers proposed (Kant, 1785), and it is apparently not exclusive of human beings. Thus, the notion of a uniquely human characteristic remains too elusive and what it is necessary to explain and replicate in robots is still not clear (Chappell and Sloman, 2007). That is why; the suggestion in this work is to define human morality as a complex process where rational and emotional thinking takes part, then, moral decisions, moral behavior, and moral intentions emerge only after this intricate process takes place. In other words, the distinctive ingredient in human intelligence will be considered the capability to integrate rational and emotional thinking to take moral decisions which are adapted to the context. It is not clear that animals can integrate, as a whole, rational thinking and emotional thinking to take moral decisions, however, even if some animals could be able to do it, the assumption here is that the kind of morality emerged would be different and characteristic of each species, culture and even subjects. In other words, as it will be shown later, morality is a complex behavior intrinsically related to context, subjectivity, and consciousness.

The definition of a general intelligence can also be inferred from the previous discussion, at least in a preliminary way. It is interesting to point out that a general definition of intelligence and human intelligence is still a question of debate, since the pioneering works of Turing (Turing, 1950) until our days, where the definition changes according to how science and AI evolve (Nilsson, 2009; Stone et al., 2016). Nevertheless, based on previous comments, general intelligence can be understood as the capability of any system to take advantage of their environment to achieve a goal. Biologically speaking this goal is maintaining the autonomy and reproduction, that is to say: survive; while the goal in machines can be solving a specific task or problem using internal and external resources. This general definition can incorporate living beings as well as robots and computers, and in this way, intelligence is general enough to include different kinds of intelligence, contextual influences and different kind of systems with different degrees of intelligence. Finally, also in these terms, human intelligence would be the ability to take advantage of their social environment to keep autonomy and reproduction thanks to a balance between rational and emotional information processing. This human intelligence definition incorporates the set of distinctive characteristics which define partially being human, and where the advantage can take place through cognition, learning, memory; among other processes needed to achieve the goal.[/QUOTE]some more:

[QUOTE]One supporting fact about the idea of reaching consciousness and overcoming human capabilities with computers comes from the exponential increase of computational capacity or Moore's law (Moore, 1998). This increase should impact on the development of new technologies until reaching intelligence levels of the human brain. Beyond this view, there is the assumption that the brain works as a computer and its processing could work by analogy with computational processes. Of course, the brain is a physical entity as computers are; it partially works with electrical signals, resolves complex problems and is processing information in one way or another. Nevertheless, the way the brain processes information is still unknown and, it may not be a digital computation, or rather not be information processing in computational abstract terms at all (Epstein, 2016). Information processing implies processes where input are changed to become outputs; however the brain could be working in a new regime, where the distinction between inputs and outputs could not exist, even causalities could be completely different to what we know until now. In this context, it should be possible to speak about another kind of processing as “replication processing,” “simulations” (Arsiwalla et al., 2018) or maybe “abstract models,” which could be self-informative to some singular physical systems like brains. It is also known that brains work with complex neuromodulation (Nusbaum et al., 2001), stores information in a sparse and unknown way (Tetzlaff et al., 2012; Gallistel and Balsam, 2014), and most distinctive yet: complex properties as subjective experiences, emotions, consciousness (Cleeremans, 2011; Dehaene et al., 2014; Tononi et al., 2016) and biased behavior (Ellsberg, 1961; Gilovich et al., 2002; Moore, 2002; Machina, 2009) emerge from the brain. These emergent properties do not have any obvious correlation with higher or lower computational capability. For example, the cerebellum has more neurons than any other part of the brain, but it does not play any important role in conscious perception (Tononi and Koch, 2015).[/QUOTE]this is about 1/4 of the page on this website

[URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2018.00121/full]https://www.frontiersin.org/articles...018.00121/full[/URL]

By that definition, you already limit reality to what is represented in the model you propose. I assume that by 'detected by an observer' you mean 'detected by one who observes what can be detected in the observed model'. I'm not saying you won't be able to observe aspects of reality, I'm saying that it is inadmissible to say it's one and the same.You can make any statement you want. The question is whether the proposed exclusive method has the ability to produce such statements or not. I already wrote why I think it cannot, absolutness being the simplest but not only argument against it.

You think I'm talking about logical positivism. I'm not. I'm not talking about that which is true. I'm talking about that which exists. These are different things. The only way you know anything exists is by detecting it in some manner. There's no model being imposed here. You detect chit. You're detecting right now. You create the model. Part of being conscious is being a detecting observer. If there were no detections, you'd have no perception of reality.

There's a reason all our models of reality are also formulated in terms of what is detected by an observer. The word reality itself pretty much is synonymous with what you detect and infer is "real".

The fact that you exist is something independent of all axioms. It's a fundamental truth more fundamental than any other thing you would assume. You already know you exist and have some innate notion of what it means. This is built into your consciousness. We THINK our universe is governed by some mathematical laws of which all phenomena follow, including our own consciousnesses. We have good reason to believe this because physics and alzheimer's. (And the fact that you were once a cell, as I mentioned earlier.)

catch 22

There’s no if brah. It already happened the way it was determined. Sorry about your loss, too.

Let’s try to not overthink things now and just ride the wave.

thanks, man. And yeah, overthinking is basically pointless in cases like this as there are so many "ifs".

If you widen the definition of the term 'detection' to pretty much everything that invokes a thought, that's different. Usually what a scientist means by 'detection' is what he can measure in his specific, well defined model of reality. I was under the impression that you draw your conclusions e.g. about free will from equating thought with electrical signals in the brain.

That's not what I mean. I mean it in the way you said first. Because an invoked thought is also a detection. Think about it. A thought exists in electrical/chemical signals. You are, in fact, detecting the emergent manifestation of this. Your mind perceives and detects chit. Some of that can be measured in his model, sure. But like, even the notion of a circle, for example, exists physically as an encoded association of various ideas, themselves tied in some way to something you once detected. You still physically detect the circle. You detect it via this construct known as your brain. Thoughts are themselves detections.

We GUESS based on emprical data that our universe follows certain mathematical laws, and we infer that our own consciousness is itself subject to these same laws because it exists in this physical system. Looking at other people, we kind of take it on faith that they also exist and that they observe as well. If we can say that, knowing that they started as cells, that doesn't leave much wiggle room for anything other than a materialist interpretation of the mind.

Like I can think of 1=0. That string exists somewhere in my brain. It isn't true, and we know that given some basic assumptions about numbers. But I thought of 1=0, and the perception of this string verifiably exists somewhere in my brain. It's real, but not true. It's detected, but not consistent with my model of reality. But it's still there. We can't escape the basic fact that everything a person is fathoming has some direct physical manifestation. It is detected by the person doing the thought. The person, from many observations, creates a reality (actually a model of reality). It is observer dependent both in this mental sense and also in the more grounded sense of the physical models we use to describe reality.

pfftt.. that's lazy. btw, here are some more:

How is it lazy? At what point does anything external to the system influence the system? You can watch an embryo develop dude. It's just an assembly of molecules working a certain way. The consciousness emerges. From the same building blocks, we can get some variety and extraordinary complexity.

Just because we can't replicate a mind yet via computers doesn't mean one couldn't make one in principle. In fact, a sufficiently advanced quantum computer, being able to simulate a quantum system in its totality, could simulate a mind. Indeed, it HAS to be able to because the brain is made of quantum particles, so unless there really is some external agent from the universe like a soul, that's it.

In my interpretation of the mind, we aren't even unique. Our minds are equivalence classes of sufficiently similar configurations. You wouldn't notice a protein out of place in your brain. Our mind also seems composed of chit too big to even worry about quantum indeterminacy here. I think if you assembled molecules into similar configurations and built a nearly identical person, that person would basically BE you. The only distinction would be your observed locations, and your different interactions there would make you into different people, effectively in the long run.

What is even more bonkers is that if this universe is a Hamiltonian system, which we believe it to be and have good reason to, then the configuration that is your mind ought to be attained again somehow someday. This is the Poincare Recurrence theorem, and it has bizarre consequences to what it means for you to exist and notions of your uniqueness.

Lastly, your mind's information, being encoded by a configuration and manifested as this emergent phenomenon, could in principle be manifested as an emergent phenomenon from other systems with the same kinds of interactions. This is like the Chinese brain idea. You could even appear as a Boltzmann brain in a configuration of particles, for example.

What is really funny is we don't really know we aren't, in this moment, Boltzmann brains and that our entire perception of the past itself is an illusion. But that's too solipsistic and bs for me to entertain.

Jfl at Microsoft spending 1 billion dollars on AI research. Google already invested few billions into AI research and came up with Al****o able to beat humans in Go, which is all around lame, because it is pretty ez to beat humans in turn based games. DeepMind tried with StarCraft too, but it was all lame again, because the AI(AlphaStar) was able to beat pros with brute force without any form of strategical thinking. Given enough time AlphaStar algorithm can be figured out and beaten everytime without any problem even by an average players, which will take no more than a week. Which will render the whole project useless considering the hundreds of millions spend on it. Probably Google realized that and cut the project for that exact reason.

You bring up a lot of stuff in this post, very interesting discussion.

1.) This statement is problematic IMO since it equates the existence of thought with the scientific aspect of electrical/chemical measurements. Electrical/chemical signals is what the scientist detects in his model when he investigates thought. Nothing more.

2.) My point is that not consciousness - or anything else for that matter - is subject to physical laws defined in the language of mathematics. What is subject to it, is the physical aspect of it. And I agree, for a scientist there is zero wiggle room. AI is a very good example. A pure scientistmustclaim that there is nothing else that he can detect about consciousness than what a biological computer can produce. Because the biological computer is the model he chose. The materialistic interpretation of the mind can thus only be empty - if stated by a pure scientist - or false - since it refutes itself if not stated by a pure scientist.

3.) That is actually the big question at hand. Is there a person at all? In the materialistic interpretation, there is none.

1) We're assuming the model of reality. I have good reason to believe thoughts exist in my brain or at the very least, that someone's thoughts exist in their brain. I can observe brain damage causing their thoughts to change, for example. I can watch the brain activity when they are dreaming or thinking of things under an fmri. It's as good as an inference of existence as anything else. After all, remember all I really know is that I exist and am detecting chit. I don't a priori have any way to know what is the reality unless I impose physical models somehow and make some assumptions based on data. This is why experiencing reality is problematic for someone with hallucinations, for example.

2) I take the materialist view, and I think there is good reason to accept this.

3) There is in the sense of what we think a mind is. It being a configuration doesn't lessen it in any way. It just means we have to concede the humble pov that we don't externally influence the universe, which I find entirely reasonable. The universe is a big place and we seem to be made of the same stuff as everything else (again, based on our models, which SEEM to be right). So why not?

We have a bound state of 2 up quarks and one down quark as a proton and we have a bound state of proton and electron as a hydrogen atom. Similarly, in some very abstract sense, there is an equivalence class of states that we can collectively call "wincel right now". There are perhaps many more we can call as "really similar to wincel" or "wincel from the past" or "future wincel". Anyway, these are "persons". They are no less authentic imo. The emergent interactions between my state and the rest of the universe sums up my life in this moment. That's totally ok. It's ok that we are just equivalence classes of states of things.

I think we can concentrate on point 2 since it is the basis. The materialistic view is either empty or false. At least I've not yet come across any argument against this simple logic deduction. It is impossible to claim materialism without stepping outside of it.

How is it empty again? Can you elaborate?

Free-will is an illusion in this world. Doing what your mind orders is not free-will, its slavery.

If I define a model of reality, e.g. the physical model, I can then either make a statement within this model or outside this model. I'm staying within the model if I'm only using methods allowed by the model, e.g. the scientific method and things that are represented within that model, e.g. physical measurements like electrical currents in the brain. I'm automatically stepping outside the model if I'm using anything else to come to my conclusions.

What materialism claims is that there is nothing outside the model, at least nothing that leads to any meaningful understanding. The statement could e.g. be 'There is nothing meaningful to be said about the world other than what physics says about it'.

The logic argument against a statement like this is: If the statement is made from within the physical model, it is obviously redundant and thus, empty. Because by staying within the model, you automatically limit yourself to physics in the first place. Therefore, to make the statement non-empty, you must step outside of the physical model. In this case however, you have created a meaningful statement about the world that does not come from within the physical model, which makes the statement self-refuting = false.

I'm saying it's a tautology, but it isn't useless. It's being used to defeat an obvious absurdity. It illustrates something deeper about this. We exist. We know that above all other axioms. And we experience things. And we formulate models of reality based on our experiences. Given the consistency of our models, we infer or hope that they are somehow getting at describing the nature of existence. The thing is that you can't show me anything nonphysical in nature. For us to even talk about it, there is [assuming the model] innately some sort of physical manifestation. We cannot even formulate the idea so we have no reason to think that the set of things outside of existence is nonempty. In fact, if something is a thing, I can unambiguously define it, meaning I can then present it as some sort of physical manifestation of ideas already known. So, the class of nonphysical things really ought to be empty.

This goes back to apparent things like souls. If I ask someone what a soul is, there is no real definition. They can whimsically describe properties, and we can make these associations in a loose sense, just like I can say 1= 0, and that thought is detected somehow. But, does it have any kind of basis in reality? Is it actually "real"? For it to be real, we must have a model of reality including souls. We need a more direct description of souls. The ultimate test is in our evaluation of what is reality. How do we determine reality? By experience and our best guess as to what reality "is".

I feel like the entire thing is a strawman. You're basically arguing against logical positivism. That isn't what I am describing. I have good reason to believe my brain is a physical system and that I think with my brain. It seems absurd that there is anything else here. What is the alternative picture? That you don't think with your brain?

Humanity is nothing more than a chance deposit on the surface of the world, carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn.

We are insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe.

This is all bullchit because I have no idea what a soul is and you can't really explain it either. I know I exist, and the rest is filled in by my experiences.

That's all a fine model of reality. But there is no reason to accept that.

And who are these highly intuitive people that can predict the future? I mean consistently in measurable way.

It really isn't a strawman. Edit: If you think it is, name a statement that describes your notion of materialism.

Your question regarding what is non-physical is an attempt at arguing dualism against materialism. Both notions are wrong. The point is not that there are physical and non-physical 'things', the point is that physicality is only one aspect of reality.

You do have good reason to come up with the brain as a biological computer doing all the thinking in 'you', but only from the perspective of a pure scientist. Your findings will therefore be limited to that model. Great findings nonetheless.

Regarding the alternative picture, you paint it yourself in your posts. The alternative to a physical thing just processing input and producing output is an actual person ('you') who experiences things, you use that entity all the time in your arguments. There is the duality you're looking for right there. In the materialistic view of the world, there is no room for such an entity.

OP, I agree 100%. When I came to this conclusion, similar to your porn star I had Adolf Hitler in mind. Had Abe Lincoln been born with Hitler's genetics, family, friends, town, history, and had the exact same experiences....he would've killed 6 million Jews. I choose to live life as if I had a choice tho. Cognitive Dissonance...? Yes.

This presents an interesting situation, if you want to do something but are unsure of the outcome and fear failure-its already decided! You are not a failure if you flop. So why not give it a try, see how far you can go? Where does life take you?

That's not true. I just told you what I view myself as and what I view you as. We are equivalence classes of collections of states. Show me any other aspect of reality. A physical thing processing inputs and outputs can be a person.

I don't want to use words that have defined terms in philosophy. I'll just tell you my view. In my view, we know we exist for sure. We then start creating models of reality based on our experiences. The models work pretty well and suggest there is some approximation of truth in the models. I take for granted that I am like the other humns I observe and that they are real. I can observe that they seem to think and how they developed and extrapolate that I am similar. I have no idea what anything "outside of reality" would even mean and no experiences to encourage incorporating that into my models.

I'm only thinking about the fact that if this world ends, it will prolly be for the best. we are cruel, mean, selfish and destructive

I despise how corrupt we are, me included

lol @ how depressed and nihilistic everyone is.

It's a sign of the times, imo.

Free will absolutely does exist and the only people who think it doesn't are certain religious folk, part-time philosophers, and people who have driven themselves insane with theories and possibilities due to their high IQs (actual philosophers).

It's up there with atheism in terms of destructive beliefs. inb4 atheism isn't a belief.

Richard Dawkins & the gang basically declared war on religion and thought they could usher in a Godless utopia where everyone would be enlightened and #euphoric. They would argue that morality can exist without religion. Look at what actually happened. Just lol.

I suppose determinism and nihilism are the next logical steps. The final nails in the coffins of what were once great societies.

(not religious btw)

Every choice we ever make is influenced by our previous experiences and our genetic predisposition. In that sense, there is no choice.
It's also interesting that every experience is compounded over a lifetime. One experience affects our choice in another situation affects our choice in another and so on. That's why childhood trauma is so damaging for an individual and why it's so hard for many of them to ever get over it.
Also, I'm an identical twin and although we are similar in many respects, we have quite a few differences too. It could be because of the smallest things. For example, we're both slightly ambidextrous but maybe because of our position in the womb or how our mother placed us in the crib/booster seats, one of us is left-handed and the other right-handed. Using different hands stimulate different parts of the brain = different brain development over the years. Or, simply being put in different classrooms and interacting with different people = different experiences that create a ripple effect over a lifetime.

Thread got a bit weird the last few pages lol

Woke up to find this thread beaten tf up. Lmao.






OP you have to make a conscious effort to not overthink. Or else you will always end up in the pit of "what's the point?"

1. Find your passion, find symbols you identify with. I was a troubled kid so I love working with kids. My dad was a cook who had to give it up to be a tradie, I picked up where he left off. My mom was a scholar so she got me into the idea of pursuing higher education and medicine. I was obese and found fitness, so working with others on their fitness brings me joy.

Kids, cooking, medicine, fitness. These symbols help me form a loose idea of my purpose in life.
From that image, I formed more concrete and distinct goals.

Eventually as you build your thoughts, you start forming a mission statement for yourself. Stick to the mission statement, and use principles of good character and good ethics to guide you.




If religion helps you, then good for you.