stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote | We Cannot, in Principle, “Know” Whether a Machine is Conscious
April 9, 2018 Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
And to everyone's surprise, Barry even understands that we can't in principle know this about other humans. Now let's see what kind of powerful, concise insights BatShit has to add to the discussion:
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bornagain77April 9, 2018 at 1:32 pm
Despite Bob’s somewhat flippant remark, the argument from personal conscious experience, that Barry highlighted, is particularly devastating to Atheistic presuppositions. And, if atheists were ever honest in their reflections, should cause atheists to seriously reconsider their beliefs.
First off. in establishing this ‘argument from consciousness’ it is important to point out that the concept of “I”, i.e. personhood, simply does not exist in the atheist’s materialistic worldview,
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“that “You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.”
Francis Crick – “The Astonishing Hypothesis” 1994
8.) The argument from personal existence
1. If naturalism is true, I do not exist.
2. I do exist!
3. Therefore naturalism is not true.
William Lane Craig – Is Metaphysical Naturalism Viable? – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v....CQnmoLQ
“I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense.”
Sam Harris: The Self is an Illusion
– per youtube video
Eagleton on Baggini on free will
Excerpt: “What you’re doing is simply instantiating a self: the program run by your neurons which you feel is “you.””
Jerry Coyne
per whyevolutionistrue
Nature, as Defined Today, Cannot Be All There Is – Denyse O’Leary – October 17, 2017
Excerpt: Thus, when we hear that evolution bred a sense of reality out of us (NPR), our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions (Quanta), there is no “I” in “me,” (Sam Harris), our experiences of being and having a body are “‘controlled hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind” (Aeon),,,,
Jim Carrey summed it up best in a recent interview: “There is no me, there’s just things happening” ,,,
– per ENV
“There is no self in, around, or as part of anyone’s body. There can’t be. So there really isn’t any enduring self that ever could wake up morning after morning worrying about why it should bother getting out of bed. The self is just another illusion, like the illusion that thought is about stuff or that we carry around plans and purposes that give meaning to what our body does. Every morning’s introspectively fantasized self is a new one, remarkably similar to the one that consciousness ceased fantasizing when we fell sleep sometime the night before. Whatever purpose yesterday’s self thought it contrived to set the alarm last night, today’s newly fictionalized self is not identical to yesterday’s. It’s on its own, having to deal with the whole problem of why to bother getting out of bed all over again.,,,
– A.Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, ch.10
At the 23:33 minute mark of the following video, Richard Dawkins agrees with materialistic philosophers who say that:
“consciousness is an illusion”
A few minutes later Rowan Williams asks Dawkins ”If consciousness is an illusion…what isn’t?”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v....=22m57s
“(Daniel) Dennett concludes, ‘nobody is conscious … we are all zombies’.”
J.W. SCHOOLER & C.A. SCHREIBER – Experience, Meta-consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection – 2004
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Moreover, nobody, especially atheists, has the slightest clue how anything material can ever possibly become conscious and have a personal conscious experience:
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“Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness.”
– Jerry Fodor – Rutgers University philosopher
[2] Fodor, J. A., Can there be a science of mind? Times Literary Supplement. July 3, 1992, pp5-7.
“Every day we recall the past, perceive the present and imagine the future. How do our brains accomplish these feats? It’s safe to say that nobody really knows.”
Sebastian Seung – Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist – “Connectome”:
“Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature.”
Roger Wolcott Sperry – Nobel neurophysiologist
As quoted in Genius Talk : Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries (1995) by Denis Brian
“We have at present not even the vaguest idea how to connect the physio-chemical processes with the state of mind.”
– Eugene Wigner – Nobel prize-winner – Quantum Symmetries
“Science’s biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.”
Nick Herbert – Contemporary physicist
“No experiment has ever demonstrated the genesis of consciousness from matter. One might as well believe that rabbits emerge from magicians’ hats. Yet this vaporous possibility, this neuro-mythology, has enchanted generations of gullible scientists, in spite of the fact that there is not a shred of direct evidence to support it.”
– Larry Dossey – Physician and author
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And thus, as an atheist, herein lies the problem for you Bob. You tell me that you are a real person, and that your personal subjective opinions on atheism are valid for me to personally accept without question, but, (regardless of the fact that you have no free will under determinism in which to form opinions), exactly how am I to personally know, with complete absolute 100% certainty, that you are not just some type of zombie going through the motions of personhood? i.e. How do I know for certain that you really are having a personal subjective experience?,, Scientifically prove it to me!
You see Bob, I know for 100% fact that I really do exist, but there is no way for you ever to ‘scientifically’ prove to me that you really exist as a real person and that you are not just some type of ‘philosophical zombie’ going through the motions of being a real person!
Such as it is with the atheist’s refusal to ever accept any evidence for the personhood of God.
As Alvin Plantinga pointed out years ago in “God and Other Minds”,,, “the evidence for God is just as good as the evidence for other minds; and conversely, if there isn’t any evidence for God, then there is also no evidence that other minds exist,,,”
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Another interesting argument comes from the leading philosopher and Christian, Alvin Plantinga—he asked, what evidence does anyone have for the existence of other people’s minds? He argued cogently that the evidence for God is just as good as the evidence for other minds; and conversely, if there isn’t any evidence for God, then there is also no evidence that other minds exist—see God and Other Minds, Cornell University Press, repr. 1990.
http://creation.com/atheism....ational
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Thus Bob, we can have just as much confidence in the fact that the Mind of God really exists as we have confidence in our belief that the mind’s of other people really exist.
One final remark, it is certainly not the case that we do not have more than enough evidence to conclude that the Mind of God really does exist:,, For example, from quantum mechanics we have,,,
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Due to advances in quantum mechanics, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
1. Consciousness either precedes all of material reality or is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality.
2. If consciousness is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality.
3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality.
4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality.
Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness: 5 Experiments – video
https://youtu.be/t5qphmi....hmi8gYE
Albert Einstein vs. Quantum Mechanics and His Own Mind – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v....tZ301j4
“In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind.,,, Mind is separate from matter.”
Kurt Gödel – Hao Wang’s supplemental biography of Gödel, A Logical Journey, MIT Press, 1996. [9.4.12]
The God of the Mathematicians – Goldman
Excerpt: As Gödel told Hao Wang, “Einstein’s religion [was] more abstract, like Spinoza and Indian philosophy. Spinoza’s god is less than a person; mine is more than a person; because God can play the role of a person.”
– Kurt Gödel – (Gödel is considered one of the greatest logicians who ever existed,, ranking along with Aristotle according to some of Godel’s peers)
– per firstthings |
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what a deranged idiot.
Edited by stevestory on April 09 2018,19:37
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