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Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist
#31
RE: Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist
(February 20, 2021 at 5:07 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:
(February 20, 2021 at 5:02 pm)brewer Wrote: Conscious first requires life.

That's a claim you cannot currently defend; and which many theories of consciousness reject. For example: The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated...ion_theory

Looks like it requires life to me. My take, consciousness requires a perceived experience which requires and engaged observer.

I've defended it to my satisfaction. Tell me what non living entity (that we know of at this time) has consciousness that you can provide concrete evidence for.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem.
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#32
RE: Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist
(February 20, 2021 at 6:30 pm)brewer Wrote: Looks like it requires life to me. My take, consciousness requires a perceived experience which requires and engaged observer.

I've defended it to my satisfaction. Tell me what non living entity (that we know of at this time) has consciousness that you can provide concrete evidence for.

1. IIT predicts that even integrated systems as simple as photodiodes have a modicum of experience.

2. I take issue with your parenthetical statement "that we know of at this time."  Presumably you feel the need to constrain the temporal requirements because the future looks promising. When it comes to machines and computers, things which are not formally defined as living, it is reasonable to predict the emergence of consciousness without a prerequisite of life. Computers already possess every other cognitive faculty ascribed to conscious beings (perception, attention, language, memory, etc.) without being alive.
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#33
RE: Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist
BREAKING NEWS!!! BREAKING NEWS!!! BREAKING NEWS!!!

The magical mystical potato head groove thing just came back from Narnia. Marilyn Monroe came back also. We had the sex. Lots and lots of the sex. She declared, I say, she declared, I was her bestest sexer, ever. 

Also, I am now apparently the ruler of Middle Earth, and the Jedi council.
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#34
RE: Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist
(February 20, 2021 at 4:46 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:
(February 20, 2021 at 4:07 pm)Apollo Wrote: The list goes on. Underneath everything some law of physics is at play.

I agree; but at each level of the hierarchy scientists are responsible for more information about the things that precede it, than the previous step in the ladder. In an introductory class to perception we had to begin with the physics of light and lenses, the chemistry inside photoreceptors, the neuroscience of the brain and retina, until we were finally in a position to study the psychology of perception.

Physicists have no need to study biology, consciousness, and behavior to be physicists. I know from sitting in an interdisciplinary classroom with neuroscience students, that even neuroscientists themselves are less familiar with psychology than psychologists are with neuroscience. Likewise neuroscientists are more familiar with biology and chemistry than biologist and chemistry are with neuroscience and psychology. And the gap grows larger the further down you travel.

Sean Carroll is too far down the ladder.

Right. So these (biology, psychology etc) are all emergent disciplines based off of physics— what this means is that while you may have many emergent properties on the way (mind, psychosis, consciousness ) as you move up from basic building blocks (particles, forces), when go in reverse, drilling down, many such emergent properties start disappearing and when you get to the very basic you’re left with fundamental properties of nature (spin, charge, mass).

You go even further and you’re merely left with quantum fields which aren’t even represented by some physical property. So even atom is at some level an emergent phenomenon—Sean is taking the most common denominator emergent level (particle level) that applies to all our reality and basically asking the question, which properties exist at this level that further give rise to all other properties of reality and when we look at those properties we don’t see the biological level properties. We only see the fundamental level (mass, spin, angular momentum, charge, symmetry) properties.

If consciousness was a property that existed at this level then we’d have found it or there was some theory based off of some phenomenon at that level that would have come out of it. But philosophers keep saying consciousness exists universally vis a vis panpsychism but they don’t have any reason to propose such hypothesis based off of the fundamental properties of nature at particles and quantum field levels.
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#35
RE: Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist
(February 20, 2021 at 7:15 pm)no one Wrote: BREAKING NEWS!!! BREAKING NEWS!!! BREAKING NEWS!!!

The magical mystical potato head groove thing just came back from Narnia. Marilyn Monroe came back also. We had the sex. Lots and lots of the sex. She declared, I say, she declared, I was her bestest sexer, ever. 

Also, I am now apparently the ruler of Middle Earth, and the Jedi council.

I guess I'll have to work that into one of my Middle Earth stories.  Naughty
"The world is my country; all of humanity are my brethren; and to do good deeds is my religion." (Thomas Paine)
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#36
RE: Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist
(February 20, 2021 at 7:00 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:
(February 20, 2021 at 6:30 pm)brewer Wrote: Looks like it requires life to me. My take, consciousness requires a perceived experience which requires and engaged observer.

I've defended it to my satisfaction. Tell me what non living entity (that we know of at this time) has consciousness that you can provide concrete evidence for.

1. IIT predicts that even integrated systems as simple as photodiodes have a modicum of experience.

2. I take issue with your parenthetical statement "that we know of at this time."  Presumably you feel the need to constrain the temporal requirements because the future looks promising. When it comes to machines and computers, things which are not formally defined as living, it is reasonable to predict the emergence of consciousness without a prerequisite of life. Computers already possess every other cognitive faculty ascribed to conscious beings (perception, attention, language, memory, etc.) without being alive.

I think we're discussing afterlife and consciousness. Now photodiodes??? Really??? (dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge)

I can't predict the future. And if machine conscious becomes a thing (which I doubt), the machine certainly acquired it from a prerequisite living thing.

"every other cognitive faculty"?? Huge stretch.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem.
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#37
RE: Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist
I have been in some depressive moods in which I swore that life after birth was impossible.  Deadpan
"The world is my country; all of humanity are my brethren; and to do good deeds is my religion." (Thomas Paine)
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#38
RE: Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist
I think the good Dr. Sean Carroll is not being very scientific. I might agree that we have enough evidence to confidently say that consciousness is manifested by the brain. The problem is that we are absolutely clueless as to how this happens. Information storage, sure. That's easy. But how does electrical and chemical activity manifest consciousness? We are no closer to understanding that than a cave man is to understanding general relativity.

It can still be argued that our lack of understanding doesn't matter. A brain which quits working means no more consciousness. But what of something recording that consciousness?

I've pointed out before that there is nothing in theory which prevents life like ourselves from evolving to the point where we would be indistinguishable from gods. We've gone from the stone age to today in just tens of thousands of years (perhaps hundreds of thousands if you want to get nitpicky). Where could we go in the hundreds of millions we have left on this planet? Perhaps to the point of understanding consciousness and figuring out how to preserve it after the death of the body. If so, other beings could do it too. Perhaps some already have.

The best I would grant Dr. Carroll is that our current understanding of physics shows us no way for consciousness to survive beyond the body. But his claim that we fully understand all physics which governs consciousness is absolutely absurd. I'm surprised any serious scientist would even make such a statement.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein
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#39
RE: Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist
(February 20, 2021 at 10:58 pm)brewer Wrote: I think we're discussing afterlife and consciousness. Now photodiodes??? 

Seems appropriate―it falsifies your claim that consciousness requires life. That is not something we know and IIT rejects it:

"A corollary of IIT that violates common intuitions is that even circuits as simple as a ‘photodiode’ made up of a sensor and a memory element can have a modicum of experience" (Tononi, 2015, p. 11).

Reference: Tononi, G., Koch C. (2015). Consciousness: here, there and everywhere? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
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#40
RE: Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist
(February 20, 2021 at 11:18 pm)AFTT47 Wrote: I think the good Dr. Sean Carroll is not being very scientific. I might agree that we have enough evidence to confidently say that consciousness is manifested by the brain. The problem is that we are absolutely clueless as to how this happens. Information storage, sure. That's easy. But how does electrical and chemical activity manifest consciousness? We are no closer to understanding that than a cave man is to understanding general relativity.

It can still be argued that our lack of understanding doesn't matter. A brain which quits working means no more consciousness. But what of something recording that consciousness?

I've pointed out before that there is nothing in theory which prevents life like ourselves from evolving to the point where we would be indistinguishable from gods. We've gone from the stone age to today in just tens of thousands of years (perhaps hundreds of thousands if you want to get nitpicky). Where could we go in the hundreds of millions we have left on this planet? Perhaps to the point of understanding consciousness and figuring out how to preserve it after the death of the body. If so, other beings could do it too. Perhaps some already have.

The best I would grant Dr. Carroll is that our current understanding of physics shows us no way for consciousness to survive beyond the body. But his claim that we fully understand all physics which governs consciousness is absolutely absurd. I'm surprised any serious scientist would even make such a statement.

That's not what he is claiming. He is claiming that the laws of physics that govern our REALITY are completely understood and he is correct.

For rest of the post, see my previous response.  There is no fundamental property called "consciousness" at particle level - the leavel at which our reality is transformed from underlying quantum fields. Since all biological system eventually decay into particles, the consciousness, which may exist at emergent biological brain level, stops being existed back at particles level. He is making the claim informed by scientific facts. He's being scientific.
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