Consciousness is a complete mystery to science. Scientists still don't know how all the parts of the brain create the emergent property which is consciousness. I mean, the fact that the "I" experiences everything as a unified whole is a mystery. We aren't the brain, we aren't our thoughts, we aren't our bodies, we are the illusion of ourselves created by a part of our brain which is actually responsible for hallucinations.
I can't wait until we figure it out. A great book that looks into the subject is "The User Illusion."
I don't think we're that far off. We don't really know yet, but new things are always being discovered, and neurologists can put together all the phenomenom into a working theory that explains them all.
It might not be totally correct, it it's probably very accurate.
Consciousness is a complete mystery to science. Scientists still don't know how all the parts of the brain create the emergent property which is consciousness. I mean, the fact that the "I" experiences everything as a unified whole is a mystery. We aren't the brain, we aren't our thoughts, we aren't our bodies, we are the illusion of ourselves created by a part of our brain which is actually responsible for hallucinations.
So spoketh Timothy Leary.
Unforgiven on
"I know you have come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man."
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Consciousness is a complete mystery to science. Scientists still don't know how all the parts of the brain create the emergent property which is consciousness. I mean, the fact that the "I" experiences everything as a unified whole is a mystery. We aren't the brain, we aren't our thoughts, we aren't our bodies, we are the illusion of ourselves created by a part of our brain which is actually responsible for hallucinations.
The brain doesn't belong to you because you are an illusion created by the brain. You could say you ARE the brain, in a sense, but in your current experience you are really just a perception created by your brain, not the brain itself. You aren't having the experience of "being brain", you're having the experience of a logical life - you are more the linguistic words you type than the brain itself.
Yes, a Renaissance. But how do we get everyone on the same plane of existence? Maybe some type of experiment where a whole bunch of people have the exact same thought or dialogue or idea at the same time... it would have to be perfectly orchestrated. Like a set of dominoes.
Yes, a Renaissance. But how do we get everyone on the same plane of existence? Maybe some type of experiment where a whole bunch of people have the exact same thought or dialogue or idea at the same time... it would have to be perfectly orchestrated. Like a set of dominoes.
The brain doesn't belong to you because you are an illusion created by the brain. You could say you ARE the brain, in a sense, but in your current experience you are really just a perception created by your brain, not the brain itself. You aren't having the experience of "being brain", you're having the experience of a logical life - you are more the linguistic words you type than the brain itself.
So you're a dualist. You think that the brain creates some phantom elsewhere, and that you're that phantom. That's pretty stupid.
The brain doesn't belong to you because you are an illusion created by the brain. You could say you ARE the brain, in a sense, but in your current experience you are really just a perception created by your brain, not the brain itself. You aren't having the experience of "being brain", you're having the experience of a logical life - you are more the linguistic words you type than the brain itself.
So you're a dualist. You think that the brain creates some phantom elsewhere, and that you're that phantom. That's pretty stupid.
What... like a soul?
Unforgiven on
"I know you have come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man."
One of the interesting things about the Matrix is that it is hinted that some prior version was actually consensual between human and robot. I think the architect said something about people knowing the Matrix existed in such a prior version and giving up reproduction/living because it wasn't worth the hassle in a utopian virtual reality.
For anyone who wants a peek in how strange living in a virtual reality you know about and that cares for you but you can't get out of can be, read The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
It basically means that nothing you do matters anymore. Reading that book shows how important it is to value reality. It has some serious shock value, but since it is all virtual it really makes you think about virtual and real violence and why they are so completely different.
The brain doesn't belong to you because you are an illusion created by the brain. You could say you ARE the brain, in a sense, but in your current experience you are really just a perception created by your brain, not the brain itself. You aren't having the experience of "being brain", you're having the experience of a logical life - you are more the linguistic words you type than the brain itself.
So you're a dualist. You think that the brain creates some phantom elsewhere, and that you're that phantom. That's pretty stupid.
I think he's referring to consciousness being, as I mentioned, an illusion. There is no actual entity JamesKeenan. My idea of a self is a byproduct of the evolutionary process of the brain. The idea was first advanced a long time ago, and as of now still there is no portion of the brain, no portion that works with consciousness. The idea of a specific part of the brain that housed your self, your inner voice, you, was called the Cartesian Theatre.
Given this, and other more in depth looks into how the brains processes information, and how it acts when you're just thinking, gave further credence to the idea that your "you" was simply the sum of all the simpler, more basic parts of the brain.
Emotions are chemically controlled, personality is neurological, in that brain damage can alter a person's personality. This happens a lot. Brain damage often doesn't harm the individual, it changes them, dramatically. Type A to Type B kinds of changes, radical personality type changes.
Now, maybe you could argue that the brain is a translator for the soul's intent, so a damaged brain might misinterpret the soul, but... I doubt it. Memory as shown very conclusively to be strictly neurological, as brain damage and drugs can alter, remove or create memories. Also, the part of the brain associated with creating memories doesn't work when you initially wake up, which is why you can wake up during the night, but if you fall asleep fast enough, you won't remember it.
I can't imagine a theory of consciousness that doesn't incorporate these naturalistic explanations for us.
And really, the only part of "you" that's left is the inner voice, which is still mostly a mystery, but tests and experiments done into how the brain acts when you're just thinking give evidence to the theory that your thoughts are just a product of other portions of your brain, like your language center, working together.
Quite true.. I mean, look at all the instances where "Science Fiction becomes Science Fact".. I've always believed that nothing is impossible, just statistically unlikely. Even visionary people say things "won't ever happen" and get proved wrong in time.. I've always wondered if, one day, the laws of reality that we all so readily accept these days.. things like gravity, will be proven wrong.
They kinda already have - nobody has ever found a graviton, so instead of realizing that this might mean that there's not actually a "force" called gravity, they just make up stuff like "oh... um... then gravitons MUST be nearly massless and disappear instantly and just magically evade detection no matter what we ever try." <---- very simplified version of what really happens, but somewhat accurate, at least for many "scientists." There are already several competing explanations of what we currently call gravity, and a few of those don't rely on particles existing that nobody can ever detect.
The brain doesn't belong to you because you are an illusion created by the brain. You could say you ARE the brain, in a sense, but in your current experience you are really just a perception created by your brain, not the brain itself. You aren't having the experience of "being brain", you're having the experience of a logical life - you are more the linguistic words you type than the brain itself.
So you're a dualist. You think that the brain creates some phantom elsewhere, and that you're that phantom. That's pretty stupid.
Calling a philosophy that is undoubtedly at least as valid as your own "stupid" is pretty stupid. :roll:
The brain doesn't belong to you because you are an illusion created by the brain. You could say you ARE the brain, in a sense, but in your current experience you are really just a perception created by your brain, not the brain itself. You aren't having the experience of "being brain", you're having the experience of a logical life - you are more the linguistic words you type than the brain itself.
So you're a dualist. You think that the brain creates some phantom elsewhere, and that you're that phantom. That's pretty stupid.
Calling a philosophy that is undoubtedly at least as valid as your own "stupid" is pretty stupid. :roll:
No it really is pretty stupid as evidenced by the effects of various types of brain damage on people, the laboratory behavior of people who have that left/right splitting operation for epilepsy, etc.
You can change people by fucking with their brains. You're not the phantom, you don't have an objective view of how your brain is functioning.
Who are the people in which brain damage happens to? An assumption develops... that brain damage happens to a personality, in which their self is altered and forever changed. But, if this self was so vulnerable and easily changed, who is to say the brain is not changing every second? And in this case, what kind of stable identity can we claim for ourselves when we can't even remain the same person for more than a moment! As you say, we are not a phantom. We are not a soul living in a body from birth to death, we are in fact not existing at all, but our language can have the advantage of making us think there is a difference between subject and object.
How can there be a subject if there is no such thing as one unchanging self? Subject and object only exist in our language, but because you can define one thing as "yourself" and another thing as "not myself", you can choose where that line is that divides these things and believe all that is on one side to be yourself - usually, most claim they are the body or mind, everything else is something strangely "other". We are more than our personality structures with it's self defining beliefs.
I don't think you speak for "most people".
In my experience, I've met a lot of people who claim they are the same person they were when they were born.
Sophistry is a load of intellectually bankrupt bullshit.
Has that point been brought up yet?
Seriously, the whole "how can you prove reality exists" is like the first thing any philosophy class worth its salt should be dealing with. If you can't even start with the assumption that yes, in fact the world does exist, then you can't talk about anything else.
Sophistry is the belief that everything exists within your mind. Do you think that what I am talking about is Sophistry? Than I have failed to communicate my idea effectively. I am simply saying that our experience as the mind is only one very small part of reality and that outside our personality structure there is an intelligent awareness (call it the human subconscious, the unknown, what have you) which is responsible for the signals your brain receives. The brain is like a radio tuner for certain frequencies, and "we" are the awareness experiencing these different frequencies - for example, the frequency of three dimensional space. This awareness encompasses not just your individual body but is like a shared awareness/existence of all things that share the same frequency.
I don't think you speak for "most people".
In my experience, I've met a lot of people who claim they are the same person they were when they were born.
They'd be wrong though. I can't expect you to believe me just because of my charming personality, but I promise you that I read somewhere, and it was convincingly scientific and thorough, that the rate the body processes everything, and cell death and such... At those rates, your body is atomically different approximately every seven years. So seven years from now, not a single atom that composes your body now will compose your body then. You will physically be a completely different person.
No it really is pretty stupid as evidenced by the effects of various types of brain damage on people, the laboratory behavior of people who have that left/right splitting operation for epilepsy, etc.
You can change people by fucking with their brains. You're not the phantom, you don't have an objective view of how your brain is functioning.
No, actually the stupid is back on you for not understanding something but still trying to look like you're somehow superior. There is no way to know whether or not you change people by "fucking with their brains" - we just know we can change how they appear to be to us. And whether or not one is a phantom (which is not something I subscribe to, by the way, I'm just not arrogant enough to mistake my own ignorance for somebody else's stupidity, as you are acting when you do just that) has nothing to do with whether or not one has an objective view of how their brain is functioning. Though now that I think of it, the "phantom" theory has a lot in common with hologram theory, as both an information storage medium AND as a possible condition of the existence of spacetime (specifically, that spacetime may actually be two/three dimensional but APPEAR to be three/four dimensional, much like a hologram is a 2D image that appears to be 3D to an observer). Despite your "argument's" (if petulant attacking of other poster's philosophies/contributions can be called an argument) need for it to be otherwise, the nature of the "observer" is still very much unknown.
Though now that I think of it, the "phantom" theory has a lot in common with hologram theory, as both an information storage medium AND as a possible condition of the existence of spacetime (specifically, that spacetime may actually be two/three dimensional but APPEAR to be three/four dimensional, much like a hologram is a 2D image that appears to be 3D to an observer).
This has nothing to do with whatever point you're trying to make. I don't even know why it's here.
There is no way to know whether or not you change people by "fucking with their brains" - we just know we can change how they appear to be to us. And whether or not one is a phantom (which is not something I subscribe to, by the way, I'm just not arrogant enough to mistake my own ignorance for somebody else's stupidity, as you are acting when you do just that) has nothing to do with whether or not one has an objective view of how their brain is functioning.
You're arguing for the existence of the zombie, or at least the argument requires it. If people can be the phantom, off somewhere looking back on their brain then we can have zombie's who look and behave exactly like you but aren't you. This isn't exactly compelling to anyone, though I guess comforting for those caring for the brain damaged.
Despite your "argument's" (if petulant attacking of other poster's philosophies/contributions can be called an argument) need for it to be otherwise, the nature of the "observer" is still very much unknown.
Welcome to D&D, your opinion isn't sacred.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
The brain doesn't belong to you because you are an illusion created by the brain. You could say you ARE the brain, in a sense, but in your current experience you are really just a perception created by your brain, not the brain itself. You aren't having the experience of "being brain", you're having the experience of a logical life - you are more the linguistic words you type than the brain itself.
So you're a dualist. You think that the brain creates some phantom elsewhere, and that you're that phantom. That's pretty stupid.
Calling a philosophy that is undoubtedly at least as valid as your own "stupid" is pretty stupid. :roll:
No it really is pretty stupid as evidenced by the effects of various types of brain damage on people, the laboratory behavior of people who have that left/right splitting operation for epilepsy, etc.
You can change people by fucking with their brains. You're not the phantom, you don't have an objective view of how your brain is functioning.
So there's no chance that the mere knowledge that one's brain has been fucked with could produce a significant personality change?
I knew a man who'd gone through several brain cancer operations. In the end, he had quite the whole in his head as they didn't bother to install a metal plate in case they had to open him back up again to operate quickly. He got progressively slower, but his personality didn't seem to change at all.
There are plenty of ways to instill a personality change with resorting to operations or injury. Religious revelation is one example.
Unforgiven on
"I know you have come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man."
What does it even mean to call me a dualist? You mean a Cartesian Dualist who believes there are only two things in existence, mind and body? No, I don't ascribe to this philosophy at all... I believe there are infinitely more processes active in the Universe than simply the human mind and body. The problem comes from this scientific reductionist approach which people want to take and say that we (whatever that means) are just this ONE thing called the brain, and now we've somehow explained our entire existence by claiming that we are a symbol...
I mean, it's logical, I can see how the conclusion is made:
1. If neuron connections in the brain process information
2. And my personality structure likes to use information to classify and divide things into categories
3. Then I decide me, the experience I'm having right now, is (not caused, but IS) the thing in my head - my being is fundamentally brain stuff
See, humans like to divide and classify all types of things and then completely forget that those divisions are completely conceptual and artificial. In reality, we are not one thing or another thing; we are the experience itself; I take a more phenomenological view than anything.
Conscious experiences have a unique feature: we experience them, we live through them or perform them
So it's easy to say that YOU ARE the conscious experience, but you aren't the conscious experience any more than I am. We are both part of the same conscious experience right now, consciousness observing itself. The idea of a soul is confusing because over history we've had so many different explanations or rules about what a soul is. To me it simply means the awareness which makes this experience possible is the same for you as it is for me, and we share in it. If we both became suddenly more aware, and the filters we use to classify and define things fell away, we would suddenly realize that I am experiencing you and you are experiencing me and we are fundamentally inseparable. It's like a hologram, in which each part can be infinitely divided into more and more parts but each part still contains the original projection.
An analogy would be to look at a large white blanket - you can distinguish different bumps in the blanket, different curves, waves, and you could be a bump over here and I could be a bump over there - we are still part of the same blanket. So to say you are a brain is like one bump claiming he is the whole blanket but there are other bumps and they know that they are actually only a part of something much greater.
The brain is part of something much greater which is still essentially us. I believe to narrow our entire scope of experience down to a concept called "brain" is mistaken.
First movie: Good, except the phone dynamic didn't make any fucking sense (among a few other things, like humans being used as sources of energy).
I had wondered that myself. Read an article where someone asked "Why not use cows? The matrix could be a field of green grass." :P
Thing is, machines are limited by their creators. I wonder if the real reason they use humans is to have some sort of "source" for creativity and creation, even if just for our dreams. Their evolution, their continued growth may depend on it.
Yea something like that, I think I remember somebody saying that people were originally intended to be used as side processors of some sort. There was some nice looking explanation for it but it was changed because they didn't believe the regular movie viewer would understand it was much as simply having Morpheus hold up a battery.
I don't have much to drop in the thread but I really just wanted to stop in and say this is one of the most interesting reads I've had in a while.
First movie: Good, except the phone dynamic didn't make any fucking sense (among a few other things, like humans being used as sources of energy).
I had wondered that myself. Read an article where someone asked "Why not use cows? The matrix could be a field of green grass." :P
Thing is, machines are limited by their creators. I wonder if the real reason they use humans is to have some sort of "source" for creativity and creation, even if just for our dreams. Their evolution, their continued growth may depend on it.
Yea something like that, I think I remember somebody saying that people were originally intended to be used as side processors of some sort. There was some nice looking explanation for it but it was changed because they didn't believe the regular movie viewer would understand it was much as simply having Morpheus hold up a battery.
I don't have much to drop in the thread but I really just wanted to stop in and say this is one of the most interesting reads I've had in a while.
Dream batteries.
Nice.
Androids dream of electronic people?
Unforgiven on
"I know you have come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man."
First movie: Good, except the phone dynamic didn't make any fucking sense (among a few other things, like humans being used as sources of energy).
I had wondered that myself. Read an article where someone asked "Why not use cows? The matrix could be a field of green grass." :P
Thing is, machines are limited by their creators. I wonder if the real reason they use humans is to have some sort of "source" for creativity and creation, even if just for our dreams. Their evolution, their continued growth may depend on it.
Yea something like that, I think I remember somebody saying that people were originally intended to be used as side processors of some sort. There was some nice looking explanation for it but it was changed because they didn't believe the regular movie viewer would understand it was much as simply having Morpheus hold up a battery.
I don't have much to drop in the thread but I really just wanted to stop in and say this is one of the most interesting reads I've had in a while.
Dream batteries.
Nice.
Androids dream of electronic people?
They dream of electric sheep... idiot!
There are a few problems with the logic of the movie.
1. The robots couldn't have relied on nuclear power? At all?
2. They could grow humans, but could perform surgeries to those humans early on which would keep them completely functioning, but keep them completely docile. They wouldn't even need to have a matrix if they just kept a bunch of brain dumb things hooked up to a giant incubator.
I'm glad they forwent logic, however. The movie and its ideas were still pretty damn cool.
The brain doesn't belong to you because you are an illusion created by the brain. You could say you ARE the brain, in a sense, but in your current experience you are really just a perception created by your brain, not the brain itself. You aren't having the experience of "being brain", you're having the experience of a logical life - you are more the linguistic words you type than the brain itself.
So you're a dualist. You think that the brain creates some phantom elsewhere, and that you're that phantom. That's pretty stupid.
Calling a philosophy that is undoubtedly at least as valid as your own "stupid" is pretty stupid. :roll:
No it really is pretty stupid as evidenced by the effects of various types of brain damage on people, the laboratory behavior of people who have that left/right splitting operation for epilepsy, etc.
You can change people by fucking with their brains. You're not the phantom, you don't have an objective view of how your brain is functioning.
So there's no chance that the mere knowledge that one's brain has been fucked with could produce a significant personality change?
I knew a man who'd gone through several brain cancer operations. In the end, he had quite the whole in his head as they didn't bother to install a metal plate in case they had to open him back up again to operate quickly. He got progressively slower, but his personality didn't seem to change at all.
There are plenty of ways to instill a personality change with resorting to operations or injury. Religious revelation is one example.
Hmm, if my memory isn't failing me, I am 99% sure in one of my psychology books that there is a document report of a rail road worker who, during the course of work got a metal pole shoved through his head and part of his brain. Miraculously, he survived. However, his personality had completely flipped. I can't remember if he went from being a very clam person to a very angry person, or vice versa.
First movie: Good, except the phone dynamic didn't make any fucking sense (among a few other things, like humans being used as sources of energy).
I had wondered that myself. Read an article where someone asked "Why not use cows? The matrix could be a field of green grass." :P
Thing is, machines are limited by their creators. I wonder if the real reason they use humans is to have some sort of "source" for creativity and creation, even if just for our dreams. Their evolution, their continued growth may depend on it.
Yea something like that, I think I remember somebody saying that people were originally intended to be used as side processors of some sort. There was some nice looking explanation for it but it was changed because they didn't believe the regular movie viewer would understand it was much as simply having Morpheus hold up a battery.
I don't have much to drop in the thread but I really just wanted to stop in and say this is one of the most interesting reads I've had in a while.
Dream batteries.
Nice.
Androids dream of electronic people?
They dream of electric sheep... idiot!
There are a few problems with the logic of the movie.
1. The robots couldn't have relied on nuclear power? At all?
2. They could grow humans, but could perform surgeries to those humans early on which would keep them completely functioning, but keep them completely docile. They wouldn't even need to have a matrix if they just kept a bunch of brain dumb things hooked up to a giant incubator.
I'm glad they forwent logic, however. The movie and its ideas were still pretty damn cool.
Leave Ridley Scott out of this.
1. Maybe the electronic circuitry of the robots neural systems can't deal with any ionizing radiation at all.
2. What kind of power are they harvesting? If its a purely heat based energy source then it's a pretty weak energy source. If they're harvesting brains for processing power then they wouldn't want dumb sheep.
Unforgiven on
"I know you have come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man."
First movie: Good, except the phone dynamic didn't make any fucking sense (among a few other things, like humans being used as sources of energy).
I had wondered that myself. Read an article where someone asked "Why not use cows? The matrix could be a field of green grass." :P
Thing is, machines are limited by their creators. I wonder if the real reason they use humans is to have some sort of "source" for creativity and creation, even if just for our dreams. Their evolution, their continued growth may depend on it.
Yea something like that, I think I remember somebody saying that people were originally intended to be used as side processors of some sort. There was some nice looking explanation for it but it was changed because they didn't believe the regular movie viewer would understand it was much as simply having Morpheus hold up a battery.
I don't have much to drop in the thread but I really just wanted to stop in and say this is one of the most interesting reads I've had in a while.
Dream batteries.
Nice.
Androids dream of electronic people?
They dream of electric sheep... idiot!
There are a few problems with the logic of the movie.
1. The robots couldn't have relied on nuclear power? At all?
2. They could grow humans, but could perform surgeries to those humans early on which would keep them completely functioning, but keep them completely docile. They wouldn't even need to have a matrix if they just kept a bunch of brain dumb things hooked up to a giant incubator.
I'm glad they forwent logic, however. The movie and its ideas were still pretty damn cool.
Leave Ridley Scott out of this.
1. Maybe the electronic circuitry of the robots neural systems can't deal with any ionizing radiation at all.
2. What kind of power are they harvesting? If its a purely heat based energy source then it's a pretty weak energy source. If they're harvesting brains for processing power then they wouldn't want dumb sheep.
R-R-Ridley Scott?! Philip K. Dick, good sir! :x
1. But they could have plants which would convert the energy. The machines themselves don't have to run off of nuclear energy. They just farm nuclear energy to create electricity. That's what nuclear plants do now.
2. I don't know about this. In a fictional world, anything is possible. However, realistically speaking, I couldn't imagine that thousands of brains could be used to create a giant processor. And actually, Morpheus does tell us what the machines use it for. They are collecting the heat energy from humans.
First movie: Good, except the phone dynamic didn't make any fucking sense (among a few other things, like humans being used as sources of energy).
I had wondered that myself. Read an article where someone asked "Why not use cows? The matrix could be a field of green grass." :P
Thing is, machines are limited by their creators. I wonder if the real reason they use humans is to have some sort of "source" for creativity and creation, even if just for our dreams. Their evolution, their continued growth may depend on it.
Yea something like that, I think I remember somebody saying that people were originally intended to be used as side processors of some sort. There was some nice looking explanation for it but it was changed because they didn't believe the regular movie viewer would understand it was much as simply having Morpheus hold up a battery.
I don't have much to drop in the thread but I really just wanted to stop in and say this is one of the most interesting reads I've had in a while.
Dream batteries.
Nice.
Androids dream of electronic people?
They dream of electric sheep... idiot!
There are a few problems with the logic of the movie.
1. The robots couldn't have relied on nuclear power? At all?
2. They could grow humans, but could perform surgeries to those humans early on which would keep them completely functioning, but keep them completely docile. They wouldn't even need to have a matrix if they just kept a bunch of brain dumb things hooked up to a giant incubator.
I'm glad they forwent logic, however. The movie and its ideas were still pretty damn cool.
Leave Ridley Scott out of this.
1. Maybe the electronic circuitry of the robots neural systems can't deal with any ionizing radiation at all.
2. What kind of power are they harvesting? If its a purely heat based energy source then it's a pretty weak energy source. If they're harvesting brains for processing power then they wouldn't want dumb sheep.
R-R-Ridley Scott?! Philip K. Dick, good sir! :x
1. But they could have plants which would convert the energy. The machines themselves don't have to run off of nuclear energy. They just farm nuclear energy to create electricity. That's what nuclear plants do now.
2. I don't know about this. In a fictional world, anything is possible. However, realistically speaking, I couldn't imagine that thousands of brains could be used to create a giant processor. And actually, Morpheus does tell us what the machines use it for. They are collecting the heat energy from humans.
Like I said, lets leave Ridley Scott out of this.
1. But they'd still have to build the plants. Maybe the robots had some sort of civil rights that prevented them from subjecting their own kind to conditions that would result in early breakdown and deactivation.
2. What kind of heat? Currently thought that the brain operates via phonons, a form of discrete packets of heat energy or organized entropy. It's not like anyone plugged into the Matrix ever uses their muscles to generate heat, so the work must be done solely with the brain. By that logic, it would be pretty pointless to have braindead sheep plugged in. Just because you can't imagine it, doesn't make it real. The people plugged into the matrix were already experiencing a form of reality processing as each other them responded to the simulation on a daily basis.
Unforgiven on
"I know you have come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man."
Posts
I can't wait until we figure it out. A great book that looks into the subject is "The User Illusion."
I don't think we're that far off. We don't really know yet, but new things are always being discovered, and neurologists can put together all the phenomenom into a working theory that explains them all.
It might not be totally correct, it it's probably very accurate.
So spoketh Timothy Leary.
You're babbling. Why am I not my brain?
Is it flat? A plane?
Does something happens if everyone exists on the same 'plane of existence'?
A Renaissance, perhaps?
Kind of like this coke commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9zgT3WzTVA
Brought to you by Coke.
*sniffsniff*
So you're a dualist. You think that the brain creates some phantom elsewhere, and that you're that phantom. That's pretty stupid.
What... like a soul?
For anyone who wants a peek in how strange living in a virtual reality you know about and that cares for you but you can't get out of can be, read The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
It basically means that nothing you do matters anymore. Reading that book shows how important it is to value reality. It has some serious shock value, but since it is all virtual it really makes you think about virtual and real violence and why they are so completely different.
I think he's referring to consciousness being, as I mentioned, an illusion. There is no actual entity JamesKeenan. My idea of a self is a byproduct of the evolutionary process of the brain. The idea was first advanced a long time ago, and as of now still there is no portion of the brain, no portion that works with consciousness. The idea of a specific part of the brain that housed your self, your inner voice, you, was called the Cartesian Theatre.
Given this, and other more in depth looks into how the brains processes information, and how it acts when you're just thinking, gave further credence to the idea that your "you" was simply the sum of all the simpler, more basic parts of the brain.
Emotions are chemically controlled, personality is neurological, in that brain damage can alter a person's personality. This happens a lot. Brain damage often doesn't harm the individual, it changes them, dramatically. Type A to Type B kinds of changes, radical personality type changes.
Now, maybe you could argue that the brain is a translator for the soul's intent, so a damaged brain might misinterpret the soul, but... I doubt it. Memory as shown very conclusively to be strictly neurological, as brain damage and drugs can alter, remove or create memories. Also, the part of the brain associated with creating memories doesn't work when you initially wake up, which is why you can wake up during the night, but if you fall asleep fast enough, you won't remember it.
I can't imagine a theory of consciousness that doesn't incorporate these naturalistic explanations for us.
And really, the only part of "you" that's left is the inner voice, which is still mostly a mystery, but tests and experiments done into how the brain acts when you're just thinking give evidence to the theory that your thoughts are just a product of other portions of your brain, like your language center, working together.
They kinda already have - nobody has ever found a graviton, so instead of realizing that this might mean that there's not actually a "force" called gravity, they just make up stuff like "oh... um... then gravitons MUST be nearly massless and disappear instantly and just magically evade detection no matter what we ever try." <---- very simplified version of what really happens, but somewhat accurate, at least for many "scientists." There are already several competing explanations of what we currently call gravity, and a few of those don't rely on particles existing that nobody can ever detect.
Calling a philosophy that is undoubtedly at least as valid as your own "stupid" is pretty stupid. :roll:
You've got to get everyone on the same wavelength.
No it really is pretty stupid as evidenced by the effects of various types of brain damage on people, the laboratory behavior of people who have that left/right splitting operation for epilepsy, etc.
You can change people by fucking with their brains. You're not the phantom, you don't have an objective view of how your brain is functioning.
How can there be a subject if there is no such thing as one unchanging self? Subject and object only exist in our language, but because you can define one thing as "yourself" and another thing as "not myself", you can choose where that line is that divides these things and believe all that is on one side to be yourself - usually, most claim they are the body or mind, everything else is something strangely "other". We are more than our personality structures with it's self defining beliefs.
In my experience, I've met a lot of people who claim they are the same person they were when they were born.
Has that point been brought up yet?
Seriously, the whole "how can you prove reality exists" is like the first thing any philosophy class worth its salt should be dealing with. If you can't even start with the assumption that yes, in fact the world does exist, then you can't talk about anything else.
They'd be wrong though. I can't expect you to believe me just because of my charming personality, but I promise you that I read somewhere, and it was convincingly scientific and thorough, that the rate the body processes everything, and cell death and such... At those rates, your body is atomically different approximately every seven years. So seven years from now, not a single atom that composes your body now will compose your body then. You will physically be a completely different person.
Interesting? Shit yeah it is.
No, actually the stupid is back on you for not understanding something but still trying to look like you're somehow superior. There is no way to know whether or not you change people by "fucking with their brains" - we just know we can change how they appear to be to us. And whether or not one is a phantom (which is not something I subscribe to, by the way, I'm just not arrogant enough to mistake my own ignorance for somebody else's stupidity, as you are acting when you do just that) has nothing to do with whether or not one has an objective view of how their brain is functioning. Though now that I think of it, the "phantom" theory has a lot in common with hologram theory, as both an information storage medium AND as a possible condition of the existence of spacetime (specifically, that spacetime may actually be two/three dimensional but APPEAR to be three/four dimensional, much like a hologram is a 2D image that appears to be 3D to an observer). Despite your "argument's" (if petulant attacking of other poster's philosophies/contributions can be called an argument) need for it to be otherwise, the nature of the "observer" is still very much unknown.
Secondly, see this:
This has nothing to do with whatever point you're trying to make. I don't even know why it's here.
You're arguing for the existence of the zombie, or at least the argument requires it. If people can be the phantom, off somewhere looking back on their brain then we can have zombie's who look and behave exactly like you but aren't you. This isn't exactly compelling to anyone, though I guess comforting for those caring for the brain damaged.
Welcome to D&D, your opinion isn't sacred.
You are your brain. That doesn't mean that consciousness is somehow an illusion, it just means that there's no such thing as a soul.
Why is dualism as valid as materialism?
why shouldn't it?
Because there's no good reason to believe in a soul.
My heart tells me that this isn't so. So there... What have you to say about that?!
You're wrong. I looked it up in my gut.
I think you pulled it out of your ass. My soul is as real as GOD HIMSELF!
So there's no chance that the mere knowledge that one's brain has been fucked with could produce a significant personality change?
I knew a man who'd gone through several brain cancer operations. In the end, he had quite the whole in his head as they didn't bother to install a metal plate in case they had to open him back up again to operate quickly. He got progressively slower, but his personality didn't seem to change at all.
There are plenty of ways to instill a personality change with resorting to operations or injury. Religious revelation is one example.
I mean, it's logical, I can see how the conclusion is made:
1. If neuron connections in the brain process information
2. And my personality structure likes to use information to classify and divide things into categories
3. Then I decide me, the experience I'm having right now, is (not caused, but IS) the thing in my head - my being is fundamentally brain stuff
See, humans like to divide and classify all types of things and then completely forget that those divisions are completely conceptual and artificial. In reality, we are not one thing or another thing; we are the experience itself; I take a more phenomenological view than anything.
So it's easy to say that YOU ARE the conscious experience, but you aren't the conscious experience any more than I am. We are both part of the same conscious experience right now, consciousness observing itself. The idea of a soul is confusing because over history we've had so many different explanations or rules about what a soul is. To me it simply means the awareness which makes this experience possible is the same for you as it is for me, and we share in it. If we both became suddenly more aware, and the filters we use to classify and define things fell away, we would suddenly realize that I am experiencing you and you are experiencing me and we are fundamentally inseparable. It's like a hologram, in which each part can be infinitely divided into more and more parts but each part still contains the original projection.
An analogy would be to look at a large white blanket - you can distinguish different bumps in the blanket, different curves, waves, and you could be a bump over here and I could be a bump over there - we are still part of the same blanket. So to say you are a brain is like one bump claiming he is the whole blanket but there are other bumps and they know that they are actually only a part of something much greater.
The brain is part of something much greater which is still essentially us. I believe to narrow our entire scope of experience down to a concept called "brain" is mistaken.
I don't have much to drop in the thread but I really just wanted to stop in and say this is one of the most interesting reads I've had in a while.
Dream batteries.
Nice.
Androids dream of electronic people?
They dream of electric sheep... idiot!
There are a few problems with the logic of the movie.
1. The robots couldn't have relied on nuclear power? At all?
2. They could grow humans, but could perform surgeries to those humans early on which would keep them completely functioning, but keep them completely docile. They wouldn't even need to have a matrix if they just kept a bunch of brain dumb things hooked up to a giant incubator.
I'm glad they forwent logic, however. The movie and its ideas were still pretty damn cool.
Hmm, if my memory isn't failing me, I am 99% sure in one of my psychology books that there is a document report of a rail road worker who, during the course of work got a metal pole shoved through his head and part of his brain. Miraculously, he survived. However, his personality had completely flipped. I can't remember if he went from being a very clam person to a very angry person, or vice versa.
Leave Ridley Scott out of this.
1. Maybe the electronic circuitry of the robots neural systems can't deal with any ionizing radiation at all.
2. What kind of power are they harvesting? If its a purely heat based energy source then it's a pretty weak energy source. If they're harvesting brains for processing power then they wouldn't want dumb sheep.
R-R-Ridley Scott?! Philip K. Dick, good sir! :x
1. But they could have plants which would convert the energy. The machines themselves don't have to run off of nuclear energy. They just farm nuclear energy to create electricity. That's what nuclear plants do now.
2. I don't know about this. In a fictional world, anything is possible. However, realistically speaking, I couldn't imagine that thousands of brains could be used to create a giant processor. And actually, Morpheus does tell us what the machines use it for. They are collecting the heat energy from humans.
Like I said, lets leave Ridley Scott out of this.
1. But they'd still have to build the plants. Maybe the robots had some sort of civil rights that prevented them from subjecting their own kind to conditions that would result in early breakdown and deactivation.
2. What kind of heat? Currently thought that the brain operates via phonons, a form of discrete packets of heat energy or organized entropy. It's not like anyone plugged into the Matrix ever uses their muscles to generate heat, so the work must be done solely with the brain. By that logic, it would be pretty pointless to have braindead sheep plugged in. Just because you can't imagine it, doesn't make it real. The people plugged into the matrix were already experiencing a form of reality processing as each other them responded to the simulation on a daily basis.