What are your opinions on..

["couldbecousin"]

In my opinion people who argue against, any belief without providing evidence for there argument makes them just as "foolish" as people arguing in favor of. simply saying there is no evidence is not proof of your argument

scientific evidence which is put through the scientific method? or polls and stats. Or one study found that....?

I believe in gravity.

I believe in the existence of buttholes.

i see butt holes, all the time.

    Now, I understand why you make so much money per week! 

[ProfessorFarnsworth]

In my opinion people who argue against, any belief without providing evidence for there argument makes them just as "foolish" as people arguing in favor of. simply saying there is no evidence is not proof of your argument

If you're referring to me, I actually did provide evidence that our body is all we have. You seem to think that evidence equates to proof, but it isn't. It's really hard (if not impossible) to prove anything.

That idea runs into problems when advanced cybernetics becomes a reality. Because the barriers of what constitutes living and non-living entities becomes blurred when brains can be augmented with processors. Eventually the brain issue will die and a person will be forced to fully integrate their being into a pure machine form which at point emulates the mind as if it's organic. The problem then is, are they still alive because the information is still consistent to their being? Or are they truly dead and the machine is a mere echo of their existence?

Just thought of an idea to test this:

Say you augment a connection into a subject's brain and deliberately induce brain death while linked to a camera with some level of AI capability and memory storage. Then you show this camera a series of cards and engage it in casual banter by making hand gestures. After a couple of minutes you revive the brain and ask the subject to recall the cards while connected. The moment the reviving occurs, the camera's AI is switched off so only the results of the cards test are stored.

Bear in mind it's not if information was attained that's being tested here, it's how it was experienced. If the subject recalls the cards by their content only then they are only accessing data from the camera upon recovery. If they recall it as if they were living like the camera's "mind" and recall the banter too, then they were dead but gained momentary consciousness of a non-living system, thereby demonstrating a potential life after death (just not as you at all).

It's flawed I know, but it was an interesting thing to think about though.

[Calavera]

This assumes dualism if I'm reading it correctly. The mind is not disconnected from the brain as far as evidence goes. The mind is what the brain actually projects. It is just a function of the brain. Degenerate the brain with all its neurons and chemicals produced and its functions are all gone. You can't copy/clone/transfer something that's actually abstract at the end of the day.

But then maybe I'm reading you wrong. Your post is a bit too deep for me to be honest.

[ProfessorFarnsworth]

This assumes dualism if I'm reading it correctly. The mind is not disconnected from the brain as far as evidence goes. The mind is what the brain actually projects. It is just a function of the brain. Degenerate the brain with all its neurons and chemicals produced and its functions are all gone. You can't copy/clone/transfer something that's actually abstract at the end of the day.

But then maybe I'm reading you wrong. Your post is a bit too deep for me to be honest.

My point is if you're slowly augmented your brain over time and it eventually becomes a synthetic system, how would you tell the difference consciously? As far as your brain is concerned, it is you because it serves the exact same function. A brain is only a composition of matter like everything else in the universe. There's no barrier to suggest what constitutes an observer as the system ultimately determines your experience of reality (regardless what it's composed of, cells or chips). That's what I'm getting at. In a way I am agreeing with you but tackling the problem on a deeper level.

I'm touching more on a observer-system relationship. I don't quite have the vocabulary to explain it, that's my problem.

[TheoK]

The Professor is right.

[McGiver]

The Professor is right.

im going with Calavera.

[TheoK]

I'm a former student of theoretical philosophy

[ZEGH8578]

No, no and no.

[ProfessorFarnsworth]

Just thought of another scenario.

What if I engineered nanomachines that emulate neurons perfectly right down to biochemical behaviors, including the ability to mimic the neural patterns of the brain cells they destroy and replace covertly? I inject this into a person's brain and over time this swarm self-replicates but preserves information and cell behavior perfectly. Would the person subjected to this treatment eventually cease to exist consciously or would they continue to perceive reality unaffected?

My money's on the latter because this kind of process is already happening naturally in the body. It's especially evident as you grow from newborn to adult. Cells replicate, cells react, cells die, cells replenish nutrients and excrete waste, so the brain is constantly changing structurally; yet we continue to perceive reality uninterrupted as we age or we think we do at least. This indicates that information of a system by a physical construct, is more important to perceive reality than a physical construct alone.

[TheoK]

---
This indicates that information of a system by a physical construct, is more important to perceive reality than a physical construct alone.

Exactly.

[McGiver]

When I do this.  When we do that.
See a fallacy?

[TheoK]

The thing is that any system of information and some kind of autonomy can be a consciousness. Thus "existence" is more defined by the means to percieve than anything else. This means that a "dead" consciousness, like that of a computer, is as "real" as that of a human brain.

[ProfessorFarnsworth]

When I do this.  When we do that.
See a fallacy?

I see what you mean. But I'm not sure what that fallacy is called exactly.

But you could have gutted my points even more harshly by simply pointing out all my scenarios are impossible to test by 3rd party observation, thereby unfalsifiable.

I'm just engaging in philosophical musings.

[ProfessorFarnsworth]

The thing is that any system of information and some kind of autonomy can be a consciousness. Thus "existence" is more defined by the means to percieve than anything else. This means that a "dead" consciousness, like that of a computer, is as "real" as that of a human brain.

That's pretty much the view I've taken too upon realizing how a brain's physical state is constantly changing and yet consciousness remains consistently attached to it. That's why I would go as far to say a true AI can be classified as a living being.

[Calavera]

The thing is that any system of information and some kind of autonomy can be a consciousness. Thus "existence" is more defined by the means to percieve than anything else. This means that a "dead" consciousness, like that of a computer, is as "real" as that of a human brain.

If that's what's being argued, I don't actually disagree. Consciousness is a construct, and one could argue that a computer may have "consciousness" and even "life". But consciousness would still be something abstract and not something that can exist on its own.