Practical Consequences (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Friday, November 06, 2009, 22:46 (5494 days ago) @ dhw

dhw,
> First, though we need to clear up our usual problem: when I say I don't believe X, you generally insist that I have to believe Y! We don't know how consciousness works, where it comes from, or even what it is, and so I say the assertion that it is ENTIRELY biological is no more than a subjective belief. Your 'challenge' is that we have no evidence that rocks etc. are conscious, the "claim of a universal consciousness has the burden of proof of how this consciousness operates", and it's not enough to say, "We don't know what causes consciousness, therefore we can consider that the cosmos is conscious." I agree.
> 
> Greta Christian's belief that consciousness is ENTIRELY biological is subjective, because there's no scientific evidence to support it. -I must stop you here; the only observations we've had of conscious creatures are ourselves, and in some lesser extent by some other creatures that bear one common fact to ourselves: we're biological. -A truly conscious AI would be the only point where you would have any reason to claim the opposite. We have no evidence that non-biological objects are conscious, so we are 100% safe in ruling their existence out, until such time as we find a single piece of evidence to the contrary. -Her observation is patently scientific: We have no evidence for a universal consciousness, therefore it isn't reasonable to say it exists. Science's scope is exclusively binary in nature; all questions are "true or false," and the determination of "true/false" always results in the rejection of conclusions that aren't supported by the evidence. -You'll likely say that "It is equally true that we can't say that a UI doesn't exist." Since I say it's unreasonable to believe in a UI because of no evidence, you will also say that the same lack of evidence prevents me from saying a UI doesn't exist. However, we come to a practical dilemma that George brought up. What reason do you have to assert that Jesus didn't arise on the third day? What reason do you have to assert that leprechauns don't exist? If the answer is "We have no evidence that a person can come back alive after being dead for three days," or "We have never found a leprechaun," then you have caught yourself in a contradiction of methods; you're using the same method in all three cases, but somehow ending up with different results. If you think leprechauns don't exist, what reason do we have to also believe that a UI exists? Again, we are safe because all it takes to prove these claims false, is a single instance of existence. You've mentioned before that you don't believe in the "hocus pocus" of religion, but your reasoning of "sitting on the fence" resurrects ALL of these monsters. --To conclude: as we have no evidence of inanimate objects and particles possessing any property that we would attribute to a conscious being, we can safely conclude that as far as our knowledge extends, a universal consciousness does not exist. This is Greta's *base* position. She does engage in scientism, but only to the extent that we also have no evidence that any other form of gathering knowledge is as successful as science, therefore if there is going to be a solution, it is going to come from the enterprise of science. I share this view, but I also add that philosophically it is because we are tied to material methods to make discoveries about our universe. We have no other valid option.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"