From: Matt Paul (lizardblue@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Nov 30 2009 - 13:20:26 MST
You are stuck on this damn soul thing. It's aggravating. It's like a
being that can only perceive two dimensions claiming that someone's
theory of a third dimension is just an airy-fairy reference to a soul.
Is your third dimensional existence a soul?
I don't know why you insist that everyone is stuck in some sort of
medival way of thinking.
If everything you can't currently measure or detect is just a soul,
then why pursue science at all. I think you are pretty damn closed-
minded and unimaginative.
On Nov 30, 2009, at 2:01 PM, "John K Clark" <johnkclark@fastmail.fm>
wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 "Luke" <wlgriffiths@gmail.com> said:
>
>> if we want to talk about a "ghost in the machine", we could posit
>> that higher-dimensional signals which are too small to be measured
>> except by a
>> chaotic process could be significant determinants of the outputs of
>> human
>> brain processes.
>
> New Physics should only be conjured up as a absolute last resort as
> when
> there is just no alternative, such as when it became obvious that it
> was
> impossible to reconcile Maxwell's equations with observed Black Body
> Radiation; the only way out was the quantum. There is no need to
> invent
> new physics (at least not yet) to explain intelligence, we've made
> excellent progress duplicating it artificially over the last 50 years
> without doing so. And your idea explains nothing it just kicks the
> problem upstairs; the key to everything is mysterious signals from
> another dimension without even an attempt made to explain how those
> signals originated in that other dimension. There is another word for
> all that, the soul. I don't believe in the soul.
>
>> If you take Jim's brain out of his body and hook it into
>> a robot body, that robot is NOT going to act like Jim unless you
>> get the
>> robot body to feed it the same patterns of hormones.
>
> Obviously.
>
>> How would you do that
>
> Hormones are just signals that have a very small informational content
> and travel extraordinarily slowly, if electronics can send information
> in gargantuan quantities at the speed of light down a fiber optic
> cable
> I fail to understand why hormone smoke signals would stump it.
>
>> If humans are machines, then isn't the existence of humans a trivial
>> proof that human intelligence can be recreated in a machine?
>
> Yes but most people, even most people on transhuman lists believe in
> the
> soul and do not think humans are machines, they even think that to be
> called a reductionist is an insult. I don't.
>
> John K Clark
>
>
> --
> John K Clark
> johnkclark@fastmail.fm
>
> --
> http://www.fastmail.fm - The professional email service
>
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