ZOMBIE FORUMS

Well I find this disturbingly human-centereed. You say that animals need to be able to communicate with us to be considered sentient. The problem is that if your statement is true, then dolphins could take one look at us and decide that we aren't sentient.

Let's do a little break down:

Sentient implies rationality. Rational doesn't exactly mean that it has to sentient. I see sentient as being rational, being able to express itself, and have some form of ethical code.

Expressing oneself doesn't mean it has to make sense outside of it's own species. Most animals have methods of communicating with their own species (lions roar, monkeys have gestures, etc.) and giving primitive messages to other species (I'm brightly colored don't eat me). They don't need to express themselves to other species in any higher form.

I'm not saying they have to make contact with us, I'm saying that contact between us should be there if they are truly concious and not just running off a set of instincts. With the amount of times that humans have been with animals, if they were concious, we would have had some real life Dolittles, for as a sentient being, they would be able to rationilize and communicate in an interperable manner. With the technology we have, contact should have already happened if they are truly concious. Dolphins may actually be, as their brain size to body ratio is comparable to ours. If so, I don't think human-dolphin communications are so far off. I mean, we already have dolphin loving.

WHAT ABOUT KOKU, DAMN YOU!?!?!?!?
;)
And also, you still haven't addressed the point that we haven't established communications with other species either, except in the case of some monkeys; you still apparently won't admit that, because we have communicated with monkeys, they must, by your definition, be sentient.

We can communicate enough with them for them to reproduce a trained response. And they very might be sentient, but as to be concious on or above are level is a different story alltogether.

Wait...so are you saying that consciousness is the same as intelligence? That's an interesting, possibly good, conjecture, but I never said that they were more conscious than us, only that they were conscious. Now, whether consciousness is all-or-nothing is still debatable....

http://www.btinternet.com/~neuronaut/

This is fairly interesting. The basic point of view presented here is that everything that most of what we normally think of as making us human is entirely a result of the specialized development of our brain through interaction with society and the development of language. The man has quite a bit of evidence to back his claims up, such as studies of feral children (children who've had little to no contact with human society during their formative years). Such children are indistinguishable from animals, and almost all of them can never become fully human. They can be "trained", but only about as well as Koko is "trained" to understand sign language. Another important point he makes is that human beings think using words. According to him, language is not a result of humans trying to express their thoughts; rather, thought is only made possible after language is created.

As for free will - I think I've finally come to accept the nonexistence of free will, and in fact I now welcome it. I've been studying Taoism lately, and the concept of Wu-wei (literally, doing-not-doing). The idea of wu-wei is that you should not think in terms of you doing things; rather, actions arise naturally. It's a somewhat complicated concept, however, by beginning to understand it I'm actually starting to think of the nonexistence of choice as a liberating, rather than confining, truth. I'll explain this in a little more detail when I have the time. For now, I'm done rambling.

What if we really are just impulses in our brains?

What if a dog sees himself the same way?

-H-Kat

Well, this diversion into the question of whether communication = consciousness is fun and all, but *someone*, possibly on purpose (squints at Krylex) seems to be forgetting that the central question is whether or not souls exist and we have them, rather than whether animals would also have them if we do. For that, our official pseudo-soulist Krylex (and any real ones who happen across this thread) has to ANSWER the following questions (no more clever escapes into tangential topics, me boyo!)

Now, Kry has defined souls as non-matter entities which are the seat of our consciousness and free will and which remain after we die, so:

1. What do you think the brain *does*, if anything? How do you explain the obvious cognitive changes in people with brain damage?
2. You say your soul is the reason you have free will. What's to say your soul doesn't behave in a predictably reductionist manner, much like our physical brains seem to?
3. What makes you think souls exist?

The "immortal personality pattern" part cannot really be discussed one way or another, since it takes place beyond the observable physical realm, and presumably has no effect upon it, unlike the "consciousness-causing" definition.


Now for my own tangential excursions :)

Hmm.... I actually liked Ender’s Shadow better than the first book. Well anyway, here’s my top five, authors and novels, in no particular order: (I’m doing this in public in case anyone's after reading ideas)

Vernor Vinge- A Fire Upon the Deep- The aforementioned best space opera ever.
Greg Bear- Blood Music, Slant- One of the most unusual takes on the “ascension of humanity” theme ever, and the second-best cyberpunk novel. He’s also the best creator of 'speculative biology' in the field (Legacy, in particular is full of it)
Neil Stephenson- Snow Crash- Best cyberpunk novel, period (and nuts to The Baron, if he’s reading this :P ) Cryptononmicon is actually his best novel, but it’s a bit more of a near-future thriller.
Greg Egan- Diaspora- Best... um, speculative quantum physics novel. Greg Bear’s Moving Mars is another good example. The book involves five-dimensional statues, how could I *not* like it?
John Barnes- Mother of Storms- Best weather-related sci-fi. It blows Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather out of the water, in my opinion. It also has a nice Singularity-type excursion, something I have a weakness for. See also his books set during the Meme Wars, the refreshingly dark Kaleidoscope Century and the more thoughtful Candle.

Honorable Mention- Douglas Adams, first four books of the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy (he’s not exactly “hard” sci-fi, as he just plants his tongue in his cheek whenever he gets out of his depth, but I’ve still got a soft spot a mile wide for those books.)
2nd Honorable Mention- This one you’ll just have to take my word for, since I can no longer find it anywhere. It was an online novel by the same guy who created Thee Church ov MOO (that’s a partial mirror, the original site seems to be gone). If Douglas Adams had been an occult Discordian magickian who took some acid shortly after reading Gödel, Escher, Bach and a Phillip K. Dick novel, it’s the type of thing he might have written. It was called Don Coyote, and though it was uneven and amateurish in places, it was brilliant nonetheless. If anyone knows of a place it’s still online (or how to track down Floyd Gecko, who seems to have disappeared from the face of the net), drop me a line.

There are plenty of others I like who just didn’t make it into the top five, like Gregory Benford (who has interesting ideas, but a condescending tone that annoys me to no end), Phillip K. Dick (King of the Mindfuck), Alfred Bester (the guy was writing goddamned dsytopian cyberpunk in the *fifties*), Ian M. Banks, early Asimov, Heinlein (Job was great fun), some of Poul Anderson’s work, Gibson, Sterling, Clarke, etc etc. If you really like sci-fi fantasy, I’d recommend John Varley’s Gaia trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon). He has an impish attitude towards sex that I always found amusing. (His Steel Beach is also pretty good, although unlike everyone else I didn’t really find the society in it very dystopian)



While feelings are the only things that matter from a perceptual standpoint, they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the actual nature of objective reality (if we are willing to accept tacitly that there is such a thing, which seems not unreasonable). To use a trivial example, I might feel like I’m flying during a dream, but that doesn’t mean my body is actually going anywhere. Similarly, the fact that your writing seems to “come out of nowhere” could be seen as a demonstration of the fact that you are simply unaware of the inner processes of your own brain as they are happening (and are consequently not in control of them). It would, in fact, be impossible for you or any sentient being we can currently conceive of to be *completely* aware of all the processes which underly their own thoughts, since that would result in a paradoxical Godelian loop. (Here’s a previous, somewhat related post. Interesting how all the philosophical discussions on this board seem to end up relating to each other...)


I think I'd have a hard time respecting him, due to this sentence:

Anyone who would say that has no clue as to what rational reductionism actually constitutes. Or was his point simply that our current brains are unable to properly comprehend a full low-level model of themselves, in which case I can forgive him? (Although it's a pretty damned obvious statement to make). And while I'm not completely dismissive of Psi, as I don't believe there's been enough formal experimentation on it, authors who bring it up around such subjects tend to make me slightly nervous as to their credibility…


Nah, it's pretty simply in and of itself, since it's merely a state of being. The intellectual discourse meant to lead you to that point can be obtuse, but that part doesn't really matter.

-The Wandering Idiot
The only solipsist mystic to go off on anyone who underestimates materialist reductionism…


EDIT: How could I have left out Banks? *smacks self* If I didn't already have Vinge for my space opera category, he might be in the top five.

I studied Taoism a bit in a few classes, and I have to say I was intrigued. Personally, its the closest any religion has ever gotten to how I feel about the order of things. Its not precise, but its close. I know that Wu-Wei is basically "do nothing," but anything said about the Tao is indiscernable and most likely incorrect. The Tao cannot be conveyed with words...

The brain is simply the control system for the body. If said control system is damaged, then, obviously, said people will have problems.



The soul does not behave in the same way as a brain, as it is not the control center for our body, but the soul is the controls for our thinking and morality. The mind alone just acts as an animal. The soul guides us to morality. Whether we act on that morality is our free will.



Human beings are physically little different than animals, yet we are distinctly different from them. Dogs do not sit around and contemplate free will and the order of nature. They just do simply are and do what they do. No amount of mental power changes that. A psionic cat would just be a damn good mouse hunter. The soul is the reason why we are different

Are you sure, Kry?

How do you know that when a gog stares at his food bowl, he doesn't reflect on better times? What if the food isn't just instinctive, or responsive. What if he remembers, and recolects?

Remember, these can't be dismissed. We can't dismis these ideals.

-H-Kat

Here's a twist on that question, and one that I've already discussed elsewhere. I might as well bring it up again.

How do you know human beings are sentient, or even conscious? I mean, how can you prove it logically? How do you know we think, feel, and remember things? Just because we claim to think doesn't mean we do. I'm not talking about the scientific way of describing thought, i.e. impulses fired among neurons in your brain. I'm talking about the actual, philosophical idea of thought. Whaqt I'm proposing is, though we are incredibly complex physical systems, perhaps we can't "think" any more than a rock can think.

There's a quote in Xenocide about free will, I'll get it later. Post it in this post, too.

Also, on a random search through my attic, I just happened to find Godel, Escher, Bach stuck in a box. Am now reading it. And enjoying it immensely.

And I have read things by at least half the authors you mentioned, WI, just never those specific novels. (Well, I have read HHGG, but . . .)

I like the Shadow series too--especially Ender's Shadow. Better research, I think.

Will have to look into a few of those authors. They sound very fun.

I said *cognitive* changes. If the brain is merely the physical control center for the body (not a bad description of the cerebellum actually), then as long as a person is able to move well enough to communicate, through speaking, writing, etc., there should be no difference in *how* they think. There is well-documented evidence that brain damage can produce a qualitative difference in how people think, respond, and experience the world, not simply how well they can control their bodies. 'Splain, Lucy, 'splain...


Wouldn't acting on that morality or not still be a function of either the soul or the brain, either of which could still be subject to predictable behavior?


Don't go bringing up the can of worms known as psi- you're only allowed to Devil's Advocate one questionable concept at a time... And how do you know that the ability to contemplate life (which, as H-Kat mentioned, we can't be certain animals *don't* share) isn't simply due to a combination of our larger forebrains and the historical accident of language?

I find it interesting that you seem to be basing your belief in souls on the differences between animals and humans. I'm not sure what the official positions of the various religions are, but I've heard plenty of other soulists claim that animals do have souls, go to the afterlife, etc. (especially when explaining to their little daughter what happened to their pet cat ;)



What's wrong with the scientific definition? We can think more than a rock can because we have billions of neurons passing around electrical impulses, which recieve input in the form of electrical impules sent from our senses, and which then determine our behavior. Were we able to gather and comprehend a neuron-level model of a working brain, we would be able to say to ourselves "ah, I see- the interactions of those nerons there produce a phenomena within the range of what we would classify "conciousness". Oh, look, he's thinking about girls right now..." Needless to say, we can't do this at present, but as long as you accept a reductionist explanation for cognition (squints at Krylex) there's no reason it shouldn't be theoretically possible.

The "philosophical" way of looking at it is experiential- it's rather like asking how we know "red" exists. We can say that there is light of a certain wavelength, and that it affects our brains in certain ways, but the actual redness is something that can only be experienced (or emulated, by a much more powerful mind).

When I say I'm referring to consciousness in the philosophical sense, I mean the very sensation of... well, sensation... that is, the thing that we call "I". What some philosophers would call secondary reality. When you get right down to it, the philosophical concept of consciousness (as opposed to the idea that neurons interact with each other in such a way as to cause certain effects) is extremely unscientific, or at least unmaterialist - and modern science is founded on at least the working assumption of a materialist universe.

I'm not sure if my idea's getting through here, but that's kind of the point: the philosophical idea of consciousness is almost impossible to communicate through words, but nonetheless every one of us is intimately acquainted with it, and it would be hard for us to deny its reality.

There are three solutions to this problem. One, we could just ignore it. Two, we could posit the soul not as a personal entity, but rather a kind of secondary reality that is a manifestation of the existential, non-scientific but ultimately a priori concept of selfhood. Under this definition, each "soul" would be identical to every other, and the soul would be not a reflection of an individual's personality, but rather some kind of extrascientific force that creates what we call secondary reality or existence. The third solution, and the one I favor, is to simply deny that what we know of as the "self" exists, as Buddha did. This is easier said than done, and has some pretty major implications. The idea here is that we are NOT conscious in the metaphysical sense - the concept of consciousness is meaningless. Rather, we are complex arrangements of organic molecules that happen to pass the Turing Test. We don't actually "think" or "experience" anything - the neurons in our brain simply interact in such a way that we will vociferously argue otherwise.

I hope some of that made sense... I'm not quite sure of what exactly I'm trying to say here myself.

And, to note: The Turing test is designed to prove that you are human--not sentient. Just because to Alan Turing humans represent sentience doesn't mean that that is the universal standard for sentience. So the Turing test isn't really a valid test for sentience. It's a test for humanity.

Does that make sense?

Brother, that makes two of us ;)

Seriously, though- I think I know what you're saying, but it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal. The phenomenon of consciousness exists, whether it is predicated on a bunch of organic molecules being passed around, or a non-physical "soul". We experience "red", therefore red exists, as a high-level concept. The reason it has to exist as a high-level concept for us is that our brains are incapable of understanding (and our technology currently incapble of producing) the low-level representation. Hence the difference between our everyday *concepts* of consciousness, "red", etc. and the underlying physical reality which shapes them. I suppose what I'm getting at is that consciousness, like free will, may not exist in the way we normally think (i.e. as some sort of disembodied ideal concepts- I refer again to my previous post), but we might as well behave as if they did.

Or perhaps I simply *don't* get what you're talking about. Enlighten me, would you, while I'm busy beating the temporarily-soulist Krylex back into Solipsistic Agnosticism...

Ok, I shall concede the soul argument for now. Quite frankly, its very difficult to argue supporting something I personally don't believe in, so I must take some time off to contemplate. I'll come back at you if I get something more substantial. And A little to Icy, you might want to mention just which buddha you are referring to. I know you are referring to Siddharta (sp), but we must remember that there have been many boddhisatvas (sp) since then. Buddha simply means enlightened one...

I think you do understand part of what I'm trying to say, but I don't think you understand me entirely. I'm talking about secondary reality - the "world" that exists inside the mind, and which more or less corresponds to the outside world... This idea is meaningless in the context of materialist science. We could conceivably figure out why neurons interacting with each other in a certain way produce a certain reaction. We could even associate a certain neural state with a person outwardly claiming that they're thinking about a certain object or idea, and through this we could associate that neural state with a "mental" state... i.e. a certain experience in the inner world of the mind. However, the latter association would be entirely unscientific, since the idea of what the person is "actually" experiencing in their inner world (i.e., their mind) is meaningless from a materialist point of view.

Another way of looking at this would be thinking of the secondary reality as the "I" that is opposed to the "it" - the subject as opposed to the object. This idea that subject and object are fundamentally different things that work in different ways lies at the heart of our assumptions about what it means to exist, whether we admit it intellectually or not - and yet this assumption is totally groundless. The only thing it has going for it is its seemingly undeniable truth. We observe things - we simply know we do.

Once again, I'm not sure I'm getting through here... The main problem is, our concept of self is so thoroughly ground into our understanding of things that it's never really talked about, and thus the words with which to talk about it simply don't exist. It's not that it's too foreign a concept - rather, it's that it's not foreign enough of a concept. It reminds me of something Edward Gibbon once said (I'm paraphrasing here): There are no camels in the Koran. If there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would prove that it was an authentically Arab work.



Well, the denial of the idea of the self or soul (Sanskrit "atman") is one of the main tenets of Buddhism - in fact, it's the biggest thing that seperates Buddhism from Hinduism. As such, all the Buddhas would say that the self doesn't exist. I was indeed referring to Sakyamuni Buddha (formerly Siddharta Gautama) though, since he was the first to deny it.

As for the soul argument, I think the best argument for the soul is the one I proposed in a previous post:



This concept of the soul would avoid the problem of personality changing with changes in the brain, and yet would not be superfluous; its function would be to solve the problem I've been talking about for the last few posts. I'd try to defend this concept myself (even though, as I said earlier, I don't believe in it), but I'm having a hard enough time trying to communicate the idea that this concept would be based on - I don't need to make my job ever harder.

I am just going to toss in my 0.0001 cents and say this.

A soul is just another simplified term that humans have been using for something that is easily grouped in the human mind but is difficult to actually define mathematically or systematically. It is like artwork. Computers can't tell a smudge of wasabi from the Mona Lisa. To humans it is an obvious difference.

Scientifically emotions and personality are just chemicals in the brain and the quantities of them. But frankly thinking of everything you feel in life love, fear, rage, bliss, glee as just some chemicals as quite a blow to aesthetics.

As for our differences from animals. Truthfully I don't think there is one feature that makes us distinct. As a society we have a wealth of things that come together to make each individual as versatile as they are. What would humans be like if just left in the wilds with no technology and no knowledge be like after several generations. I highly doubt they would have started a sort of civilization.

But in the end who cares. Whether or not my dog is sentient has absolutely no bearing on what I think of myself nor who I treat my dog.