Quark Cognition: Separation of body and mind.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Separation of body and mind.

I believe that the body and the mind are distinct from one another.

As an example, your body can receive considerable damage while leaving the mind intact. Also, your mind can be completely deranged while your body is pristine.

Because of my belief, I am in support of any future technologies that can transfer and store human consciousness on a substrate other than our carbon-based brains. My belief horrifies many religious people, that is, those that believe in souls.

A girl I know hates the notion of storing human consciousness on a computer because it conflicts with her religious beliefs. But consider the advantages...

Let's say that a 9 year old girl has been shot and killed. With our current technology, that girl is permanently dead. In the future, death might be a temporary inconvenience.

Now take that same 9 year old girl that has been killed. Imagine that her mind is backed up on a computer and a new body can be cloned. To her, being shot and killed would be a minor annoyance, since she could transfer a back-up of her consciousness into a new body and continue living. Even religious people would probably agree that such technology could be beneficial, especially when facing their own deaths.

I do not believe that humans have souls, so I have no problem with storing consciousness on a computer, since it's simply an emergent property of connected neurons. There is no reason why consciousness requires biological neurons. A sufficiently advanced silicon substrate could do the same thing.

Since I don't believe that humans have souls, what do I believe we have? Consciousness. That's what I know for sure. I am conscious. I'm not so sure about YOU.

You'll have to excuse my solipsism, but the problem with souls is that I don't see how they can explain anything that is not already a part of consciousness. Although I feel that shaving with Occam's Razor is trite, I am using it to get rid of the soul.

The conscience, feelings, individuality, personality, fears, scruples (or lack thereof), etc. are parts of consciousness. People that believe in souls are unnecessarily complicating the otherwise straightforward notion of consciousness by claiming there is something that is separate from it other than the body.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

I am made of particles, known as quarks and electrons, that are at least 13.72 billion years old. Although my body is very young, the constituents are very old and come and go as they please. It's astonishing that individuality exists when each one of us are made of the same basic parts. It's even more astonishing that self-awareness exists, since even objects as simple as paper clips are made of the same parts as human beings.

My body was here before I was born and it will be here after I die.

So while I am in this brief configuration known as life I try to learn as much as possible, since my personality enjoys it. My first fascination in this short life was dinosaurs; I won a Dinosaur Expert Award in kindergarten. For most of my childhood, I read about the Animal Kingdom. I also read more than 100 Choose Your Own Adventure books and numerous other young adult fiction from my school library. Since age 5, I have been reading at a sometimes voracious pace. I didn't start seriously reading science fiction until age 19, though.

My interest in politics is as great as my interest in professional sports and I drink alcohol as often as I get lung surgery. I am heterosexual, but I rarely date women and prefer to read a tale, rather than chase some tail.

Qool Quotes

"The brain, knowing that a person can't live forever in this world, rationalizes a future, or other-dimensional, world in which immortality is possible. In other words, religion is the earliest form of science fiction."
-Philip Jose Farmer (1977)

"Forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be born."
-Lawrence M. Krauss (2009)

"When you ask what are protons and electrons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave - how they move. I can describe the situation by comparing it to a game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what a chessmen is, the answer would be that it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on a paper, or anything whatever. It does not matter. Each chessmen has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game of chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen."
-Paul Dirac, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1933

"You will be astonished when I tell you what this curious play of carbon amounts to. A candle will burn some four, five, six, or seven hours. What, then, must be the daily amount of carbon going up into the air in the way of carbonic acid! What a quantity of carbon must go from each of us in respiration! What a wonderful change of carbon must take place under these circumstances of combustion or respiration! A man in twenty-four hours converts as much as seven ounces of carbon into carbonic acid; a milch cow will convert seventy ounces, and a horse seventy-nine ounces, solely by the act of respiration. That is, the horse in twenty-four hours burns seventy-nine ounces of charcoal, or carbon, in his organs of respiration to supply his natural warmth in this way, by the conversion of carbon, not in a free state, but in a state of combination. And what an extraordinary notion this gives us of the alterations going on in our atmosphere. As much as 5,000,000 pounds, or 548 tons, of carbonic acid is formed by respiration in London alone in twenty-four hours. And where does all this go? Up into the air."
-Michael Faraday (1860)

"In modern war, one individual can cause the destruction of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. He could do so by pushing a button; he may not feel the emotional impact of what he is doing, since he does not see, does not know the people whom he kills; it is almost as if his act of pushing the button and their death had no real connection. The same man would probably be incapable of even slapping, not to speak of killing, a helpless person."
-Eric Fromm (1955)

“Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that people don’t have to experience it."
-Max Frisch

Quark Cognition

I may not seem like it, but I am a human.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Separation of body and mind.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Labels

Total Pageviews

Links

Followers