Posted: 4/20/2006 2:43:32 PM EDT
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Some people just live life for what it is. Not everyone sits down and wonders how they got where they are. Some figure "Well, i'm here. Let's make the best with the time we have." Some people ponder why they are here, but never get convincing evidence one way or the other. |
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I understand that some people just live life for what it is, but that's not really what I'm getting at. This is not a question about origins or God. Christians, athiests, and people of other persuasions have questions they don't know the answer to. And even if you can't find out or figure out the answer, the question remains. Consciousness boggles my mind. I see my hands in front of me. How? I'm not talking about optics and mental data processing. I mean there is this image I am aware of. I observe changes in it. My mind is processing data, fine, but how am I awareof it? I am a christian. Therefore I know I have a soul. Is a soul necessary for consciousness? I don't know that it is or that it isn't. If that is true, then do animals have souls or are they unconscious biological computer machines? I don't know. It is a perplexing question for a christian. It seems it would be an even more perplexing question for someone who does not believe there is any such thing as God and souls. That's why I'm asking. |
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I posted this in another thread as an explanation of concsious awareness: Now in Genesis 2:7 it says, "And the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." The word soul in Hebrew is nephesh and it means: a breathing creature, i.e. animal of abstract vitality. Used very widely in a literal sense. (Strong's Concordance). Read 1Corinthians 15:39-49 for an explaination of the different kinds of bodies and how our earthly body will be exchanged for a heavenly body. It also says in Genesis 2:7, "...and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;". The word breathed in Hebrew is naphach it means: to puff or blow. And the word breath is neshamah it means: divine inspiration and intellect. This is the definition of the word intellect according to Webster's Dictionary: n. 1: ability to reason 2: high intelligence. Now we see that we have a different kind of life than the animals. They have life but not the breath of life. No where else in the Bible is it expressed as it is in Genesis 2:7. So we have been given a similar attribute of GOD in that we have the faculty of reason. C.S. Lewis described it this way: "We are and we know that we are." Animals are but they don't know that they are. We are conscious of our existance. This is an attribute of GOD. Yet we are not at present fully aware. But we will be. (Read 1John 3:2) It is like I stated before, It is like seeing your image in a mirror. The image itself is not you. It is your likeness. The regenerate spirit of man is fully inhabited and ruled by the Spirit of GOD. And GOD only imparts what He is. But we are not now fully spirit and we do not at present have a spiritual body. Only a likeness or an image of GOD. |
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It is probable that conciousness is derived from the interactions of neurons of the brain, but how it happens, no one knows. No one has been able to emulate conciousness in a laboratory setting, so no one really knows how neural nets work. There is evidence to support that the human brain is a more powerful computer than the current Turing-type model, although no one has disproven the conjecture that a neural network and a Turing machine are equivalent in computational power. That leaves the potential for something greater to be involved in the human conciousness. Even the nature of conciousness isn't that well understood, even in something like a worm or roach. The human brain is a magnificent instrument and you have to consider the possibility that we might be unable to even understand its full capability. We would be using a human brain to try to define the capabilities of the human brain...if the human brain can do that, then there is a good chance that humanity might one day acheive limitless understanding, although not a certainty given that we don't know how computing machines are constrained by their limitations in general. So for now? Calling it a soul works just as well as anything else. |
It is an interesting question, but not one I need an answer for right now. I'd prefer to wait for an answer backed up by science. If God exists then obviously everything that occurs is his doing. Science tells us how God did it. I'll wait for the scientific answer, saying God did it isn't an answer. If it turns out I'm right and there is no God, then the scientific answer is still useful. The same can't be said for the religious answer. |
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More of Deist than an atheist here. I tend to believe that the mind inhabits the brain and uses it as corporeal expression of function via electrical impulses, which, by extension bring that inhabitation and function throughout the human body. The important question then being: What is the mind? I posit that the mind is but an extension, a 'droplet' if one will, of The Mind, what some term the Oversoul, the Univeral Divine Life Force, or Divine Energy. Some call this (and I am among them, but only after many 'caveats') that the Mind, the Oversoul, is the Mind of God Itself. Then why are we not all "perfect" as is the Oversoul, or Mind of God? Because we are subject to all of the frailties of the human condition! Hunger, thirst, cold, need for companionship. We suffer pain, we are subject to distortions of thought such as worry, fear and anger, when the corporeal essense is threatened or injured. Such fears make us petty and greedy. That is the Human (and animal) Condition! Have there been humans who are more keenly attuned to this inner Oversoul, the Mind of God? Of course. And I believe that for example, Jesus was entirely devoid of concern for his corporeal frailties, and was a perfect "translucent" vessel of this Divine Mind. Was he more than that? I do not know. But he was at least that. Such ideation puts me outside of most Christian theology, and into what is commonly known as agnosticism or Panendeism, which has much in common with Advaita Vedanta. Do I believe in "an afterlife"? Emphatically Yes. The basic Law of Conservation of Energy tells us that Energy is never "ended", merely transformed. Do I have any idea what it will be like? I contend with that great Deist thinker Thomas Paine, that the same Creator which gave the prudent among us wholesome satisfactions to hunger (nutritious food) thirst (water), warmth (fire) and sex (monagamy), will also vouchsafe us a wholesome satisfaction to that deepest of human needs: eternal life. |
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Your question should be why do you care...What happens when we finally program enough into a computer that it has "A.I." It's just learnig...When you were a baby did you know they were hands? Nope...Did you care? Nope? Did you insitctivly know that they were for grabbing keys and putting them into your pie hole? Yip.  I think what makes us what were are is we have a HUGE storage area for all these learned things...If you are an evolutionist...Why we devoloped this much and for what need is up in the air...no other animal on the planet can store as many learned actions as we can. Just about everything can learn... Put a zap pad in the corner of a rats cage and after a few times the rat will avoid that area like the plauge. Take it out and after awhile the rat 'tests' the area...caution is taken. Why is it cautious...did it forget why it avoided that area, just knows that it was a bad spot...or does it want to know why it was bad...does it just want to pee in that corner cause it made it mad? LoL You can read into it as far as you like but it doesn't get you to far except for maybe gaining a little understanding on crazy rats... |
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To keep with the computer comparison what sets man apart from animals is the sophisticated programing coupled with a large amount of rewritable drive space. All animal brains are like computers, some being much more complex than others. For example a dog may have a good "program" in its brain, but it is not the same as ours. Also his brain can store a good number of things (commands, tricks, who gives him the most food at the dinner table etc.) but it lacks the space to store vast volumes of information. A crocodile's brain runs on a very basic "program" that just covers the bare essemtials (breath, eat, sex etc), it has little if any capacity to learn new things. My thoughts are the human brain is complex enough to allow us to be have the intelligence to be "self aware". The problem with comparing computers to living things is we have no computer that is "alive". However, just because we haven't created AI yet, doesn't mean its not possible. To be fair to us: nature had billions of years to produce our brain and we have only been making computers for less than a century....give us time. |
So your claim is that the human brain is equivalent in power to a Turing machine and all knowledge can be expressed as an algorithm? I have my doubts on that one but no one knows for certain. |
| I believe we are made from one far greater than us. GOD......... him |
If you read the Bible you will see that GOD is omni present. He existed since the begining of time. His presense has no begining and no end. |
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It seems to me that from a purely scientific standpoint it is impossible to determine whether another person, animal, or thing has consciousness. It cannot be observed. Reaction, interaction, facial expression, problem solving, etc. can all be conceivably a product of computing power without consciousness. Suppose that technology advanced to the point that we could build a person atom for atom to be identical to another living person. And suppose we could jump start it and make it work. It could learn, it could talk, it could develop ideas of its own, it could become your best friend. But would it be conscious? How would you know? I don't think it could. If electrons are jumping from cell to cell and chemicals are being altered here and there it is still just electrons, chemicals, energy etc. The storage of information does not result in consciousness, otherwise paper and ink when combined in print would be conscious. The processing of information is just a mechanical process requiring only information, a medium, and time. It doesn't seem to follow that matter and energy alone could develop consciousness. No matter how complex their interactions, it is still just matter and energy. Does a rock know it exists? I'm sure it doesn't. Do I know I exist. Yes, I observe it. How about a bug? A monkey? Does a comatose person have some level of consciousness even if none of his five senses work? |
And that is the million dollar question. What is consciousness? How do you define conciousness? Artificial intelligence is a hobby of mine, so excuse the in depth explanations below. Since AI kicked off they have used a murky concept known as "emergence" to describe how complex behavior can arise from a collection of simple interacting elements. It is very crude and not much has been made of it. Is it even the right approach? There aren't many other options, since converting these processes to algorithmic knowledge has proven impossible. Computers, for all they can do, are not conscious. A computer running the most complex software made doesn't know it is a computer and doesn't have any concept of semantic information. Plus, no computer in existence is fast enough to account for all of the rules in the natural world that we take for granted. It was tried in the 1960s and was called Blocksworld. The idea was to list all of the physical rules needed on the Newtonian level, then provide the software with a goal and some simulated blocks on the table top and allow the software to design structures using blocks to achieve the goal, all without violating physical rules. It was hideously slow, and when you scaled the problem up, the time requirements increased exponentially. So build a faster computer and try again in 100 years? A Turing model computer can't even determine its own limits. That is, given a program A, another program B cannot tell if program A will ever end. It is called a halting problem and this is a quick and dirty explanation. To figure this out, program B must simulate the program A in question...if program A never halts, the simulation never halts, thus program B can never know if program A will halt. A minor problem, but it has enormous implications. Humans can solve this problem, and humans can reconcile paradox. Humans have intuition, and some sort of search process that allows them to discard bad logic without explicitly testing it. Humans display creativity. Most of these concepts haven't even been defined scientifically yet. So there are a whole host of things that even the abstract mathematical model of a computer, with infinite memory and nondeterministic operation, cannot do that humans can do. If you were hoping for a Skynet, AI gone wrong, scenario, I'm sorry to disappoint you. It will most likely never happen on current architectures, no matter how fast they are. And since nothing done to date has worked, and the human brain is more amazingly capable than ever thought, that leaves the door open for a lot of things. I certainly wouldn't discount the possibility of a soul, although it isn't really scientifically testable. I won't entirely discount the possibility that someone might figure out how to create a form of AI on a Turing-based computer, but I'm not holding my breath. In short, if you knew how half-assed all attempts at creating AI have been up to this point, you'd be even more in awe of the human brain. |
I'm not sure I agree that these excerpts are addressing the issue of consciousness. I do agree that God has made humans unique and treats us much differently from all the other creatures. As for the changes that will take place in us, my understanding is this: God created man in the image of God. That statement alone is worthy of much study. It does not mean that God has two legs, two arms, and stands about 6' tall. It does, however, include that He is holy and He made man holy. But man lost holiness, lost the image of God, with the fall into sin. For those who are saved by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, our risen Lord and Savior, we will be made once again to be holy and righteous, like Christ, when we are at last raised up on the last day. That's what Paul is talking about in 1 Cor. 15. "As was the earthly man [Adam and all who sinned], so are those who are of the earth [sinful us]; and as is the man from heaven [Christ], so are those who are of heaven [redeemed and sanctified us]. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man [Adam had fallen into sin and we were born into it], so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven [we will be made once again perfect, holy, and flawless like Christ]." |
I'll leave aside the fact that omnipresent is one word (not two) and doesn't have anything to do with having no beginning and no end. I understood the gist of what you said and the the problem is circular logic won't convince anyone. How do I know the Bible is true? It is the word of God. How do I know God is the Alpha and Omega? The Bible says so. That may be good enough for someone who already believes, but for someone who does not it is nonsense. 
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If you have FAITH you don't need to be convinced. I suppose we will all find out the truth in the end. Believers and non believers..... I'd rather be on the believers side. Matthew 10:33 "But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in heaven. |
The idea that the universe is and was eternally is equally dissatisfying. Back to your post, a better example of circular logic would be: The Bible is the word of God. How do I know it is the word of God? It makes the claim. How do I know the claim is true? [Back to top] But, (as you suspected all alongh "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." 1 Cor. 2:14 "No man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost." 1 Cor. 12:3 I believe because God enabled me to believe and worked faith in me by the Holy Ghost. |
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If you are waiting for proof of the correctness of Christianity, you'll be waiting a long time. Christianity cannot be proven correct by living men, otherwise faith would play no role and hold no significance. You can gather evidence to support Christianity, but it will never be incontrovertible. It is something the athiests should keep in mind. We're not going to know for sure until we are either standing in front of Him or rotting in the ground. |
You do realize that for William of Occam, the only truly necessary reality and undeniable entity, is in fact God? |
No, the razor is God. Occam was simply the first to see His Divine Majesty. 
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