Immateriality of Consciousness (Humans)

by dhw, Friday, December 03, 2010, 13:57 (5103 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

I was going to post this under "First Hardware NEURONS", but since it ties in with Immateriality as well, this might be a more suitable thread.-MATT: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/moneta-a-mind-made-from-memri...Been talking about this for awhile... not Quantum, but more tangible.-This is a very long but intriguing article, particularly with its detailed description of the way the brain actually works. (N.B."The brain has some brilliantly efficient components that we just can't reproduce yet.") I do wish scientists would stop jumping up and down with excitement at the prospect of what they are still trying to achieve, and would wait until they've actually achieved it. All the same, with virtually unlimited time at its disposal, who knows how far science might get? At present, though, it's worth noting that the aims are strictly limited:-"However, our goal is not to replicate subjective experience—consciousness—in a chip but rather to build functional machines that can behave intelligently in complex environments. In other words, the idea is to make machines that behave as if they are intelligent, emotionally biased, and motivated, without the constraint that they are actually aware of these feelings, thoughts, and motivations."-Bearing in mind the extraordinary feats of conscious experimentation involved in building such functional machines, which even then will fall massively short of the capacity of the human brain, once again I find it impossible to share the atheist faith in chance as the creative force. -I'd like to tie this in with Tony's post, in which he writes: "Your energy uses your brain. I hate to call it a soul, but we are limited by language." Let's use "soul", as we all know what you mean. This, for me, is indeed a crucial question: does our brain produce the soul or is it used by the soul? Every advance made by man in his attempt to build a human machine is a potential step towards proving that the soul is the product. Personally, I'm inclined to share David's scepticism, but it's a fascinating and ongoing scientific experiment. So long as science fails to recreate consciousness, the door has to remain wide open for belief in a form of energy that remains independent of our physical brain.