Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
Mighty One (may you post forever!):
We are on identical, but separate, pages; they are the same, even though they are different.
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Proof of Immortality II
- Thread starter Slowvehicle
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Mighty One (may you post forever!):
We are on identical, but separate, pages; they are the same, even though they are different.
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
How marvellous that I understand your meaning perfectly despite a dearth of random capitalisations, scare quotes, boldings, italicisations and underlinings.
Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
SoRrY...."I" was in a HuRrY.
Monza
Alta Viro
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I have devised an experiment regarding identical objects and immortality:
Last week at work, I wrote a memo to the people in my department. One of the engineers printed the memo and it has been sitting on his desk for a few days. Today, while he was at lunch, I walked over to his desk, picked up the memo, crumpled it up and threw it away. Then I went to my desk, printed out the memo and set the identical copy on his desk in the same location as the previous one.
He has returned from lunch and I am now observing his reaction. As yet, he has not noticed that the memo on his desk is not the same memo as this morning. I just asked him a question regarding one of the items mentioned in the memo. He picked up the identical copy, read a portion of it, and responded to me. There was no indication that he knew he was reading from a different memo. It seems that the emergent property of the memo (the information contained in its text) is identical to the original version, but I want to make sure.
I will continue to observe and record.
In the meantime, I Googled the properties of paper and discovered it is biodegradable. Given enough time it will eventually breakdown and "die". To be certain, I will maintain observation on the memo to verify if it does indeed break down or if it will last for eternity. Please be patient, the reporting of these final results may take some time.
Last week at work, I wrote a memo to the people in my department. One of the engineers printed the memo and it has been sitting on his desk for a few days. Today, while he was at lunch, I walked over to his desk, picked up the memo, crumpled it up and threw it away. Then I went to my desk, printed out the memo and set the identical copy on his desk in the same location as the previous one.
He has returned from lunch and I am now observing his reaction. As yet, he has not noticed that the memo on his desk is not the same memo as this morning. I just asked him a question regarding one of the items mentioned in the memo. He picked up the identical copy, read a portion of it, and responded to me. There was no indication that he knew he was reading from a different memo. It seems that the emergent property of the memo (the information contained in its text) is identical to the original version, but I want to make sure.
I will continue to observe and record.
In the meantime, I Googled the properties of paper and discovered it is biodegradable. Given enough time it will eventually breakdown and "die". To be certain, I will maintain observation on the memo to verify if it does indeed break down or if it will last for eternity. Please be patient, the reporting of these final results may take some time.
xtifr
Graduate Poster
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But most of the implications of "different" are wrong for this case. Which makes it sound like you're planning to try to mislead us through semantic ambiguity. If you don't like "separate", how about "distinct"? That avoids much of the potential confusion inherent in "different". Unless your goal actually is to confuse and mislead.
Anyway, please stop telling us what you're going to tell us. Just tell us.
And while you're at it, don't forget to address the point you actually said you'd be addressing: how brain->consciousness->YOU differs from legs->running->leg-lifting.
And, if you're willing to accept even for a second that what he have here is not a bunch of people who don't understand your point, but a bunch of people who understand and disagree, you might want to contemplate "teleportation is indistinguishable from destroying the original when you create the copy." This is, as I've said several times, a full response to the claim you're trying to make. Just ponder that for a little while, and I think we can probably leap the conversation forward.
Jabba
Philosopher
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- If time is actually infinite (and, as far as I know, no one has proven otherwise), wouldn’t the ‘number’ of potential brains also be infinite.
751
- Good.
- If time is actually infinite (and, as far as I know, no one has proven otherwise), wouldn’t the ‘number’ of potential brains also be infinite.
xtifr
Graduate Poster
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Already asked and answered, and the answer is still no.
1. (Minor point): The fact that something hasn't been disproven does not make it true. So you can't assume time is infinite in order to disprove the scientific model, because the scientific model doesn't require time to be infinite. If you managed to disprove the scientific model+infinite time (and you certainly haven't), the logical assumption would then become that time is finite.
2. (Major point): Even if time were infinite, entropy still exists, and means the universe is going to experience heat-death at some point. After which, brains can no longer exist. And that's going to happen within a finite amount of time. Your suggestion is like saying that because there's an infinite number of integers, there must be an infinite number of three-digit integers. Three digit integers only occur within a specific part of the number line, and are very much finite. Just as brains can only occur during the finite portion of time where matter exists.
(Note that brains also can't exist in the early portions of the universe, before matter existed. So, like three-digit numbers, the number of potential brains is bound on both sides.)
More importantly, though, even if you managed to overcome both of these objections somehow, and throw out the laws of thermodynamics, that would still leaving you facing the infinite monkey theorem, which says that in an infinite and infinitely variable universe, the probability of your existence is one! Not zero!
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
No one has proven that immortality or souls are facts, but that hasn't stopped you from accepting them as axioms. Nor has it stopped you from claiming that others agree with you on these unsupported suppositions.
Pull the other one.
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
One feels safe in assuming that your use of scare quotes around the word "infinity" indicates that even you are forced to acknowledge that it isn't a real number and thus are being dishonest in presenting this proposition.
As has been explained to you repeatedly, there can never be an infinity of anything.
It's also been explained to you that even if the number of potential brains is mind staggeringly huge, none of them are going to produce the continuation of a consciousness such that it could be referred to as immortal.
If only you'd read the thread.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
Only if brains are of infinite size. If you throw a six-sided dice, the number of possible outcomes is six, even if you can throw the die an infinite number of times. For an infinite number of outcomes, you need a dice with an infinite number of sides. Similarly, a brain of finite size will have a finite number of possible states, even if that number is unimaginibly large. Given an infinite amount of time in which to construct brains, eventually you're going to be duplicating brain states.
PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
Jabba
Philosopher
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767
- I didn't mean to imply that a claim not being disproven is the same as the claim being proven. I was doing my usual of trying to present one premise at a time in order to best isolate our different points of departure.
- I'll be back with the complement momentarily (hopefully).
767
xt,
- I didn't mean to imply that a claim not being disproven is the same as the claim being proven. I was doing my usual of trying to present one premise at a time in order to best isolate our different points of departure.
- I'll be back with the complement momentarily (hopefully).
Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
When will you be back to address your claim that the "soul" exists and is "immortal"?
Jabba
Philosopher
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xt,
- Not quite the complement -- but, if time is finite, and there is no limited pool of potential experiencers (which, I think we have agreed upon), a new brain simply produces a new experiencer -- even if the new brain perfectly replicates an old brain. And (here's the hard part), the new experiencer -- not being drawn from a limited pool of potential experiencers, and having no previous formulaic representation, is simply created on the spot. A new brain simply produces a new experiencer...
- That ought to get us started.
- Not quite the complement -- but, if time is finite, and there is no limited pool of potential experiencers (which, I think we have agreed upon), a new brain simply produces a new experiencer -- even if the new brain perfectly replicates an old brain. And (here's the hard part), the new experiencer -- not being drawn from a limited pool of potential experiencers, and having no previous formulaic representation, is simply created on the spot. A new brain simply produces a new experiencer...
- That ought to get us started.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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No, but that's not relevant. The number of potential brains would only be one element in your probability calculation. The probability of a specific brain existing depends on all the events that led to its existence. Those would all have to be included in the calculation.
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godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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Yes. And every characteristic of that experiencer is determined by the characteristics of the brain that produces it.
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
... or just keep us stopped dead where we are.
There is no such thing as an "experiencer." The process of a working brain creates an illusion of such but, as the brain changes from moment to moment, the "experiencer" changes, too.
Second, time is only one factor involved. There is also the matter of matter. There's a finite amount of matter. There's a smaller amount of matter that exists in places that could host life. And there are a finite number of combinations of that matter. And even if time is infinite, and the universe will slowly fly completely apart, most of that time is going to be spent in a dark, cold void where there isn't enough matter in one place to form new stars, let alone planets, let alone people to live on them.
But most of all, nothing comes from nothing. Nothing is created "on the spot." Everything has a long chain of causation. As the causation gets nearer to the result, the total number of possibilities decreases until it hits 1. Had your parents never existed, you would not have been born. When they were alive but before they met, you were a distant possibility. When they met, you became somewhat more likely. When they got married, you became even more likely. When your father's sperm entered your mother, the odds of getting you increased. Before you had breakfast his morning, the odds of you existing as you do now were great but still not fixed.
You cannot count up to infinity. Please stop pretending you can.
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
As usual, your intentions to imply one thing or another are again betrayed by your clumsy use of the language in which you are trying to express yourself.
No, what you're doing is your usual of presenting exactly the same premise over and over and hoping that minor changes to its wording will create the appearance that it's actually a whole bunch of different ideas.
There is but one point of departure: you believe in the existence of immortal souls and nobody else does. The only thing that will help to resolve that difference is your presentation of some evidence to support your claim.
Do eet!
Whom exactly do you believe to be hoping for this?
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
If this has, as you say, been agreed upon then why do you still post things like:
And both new experiencers, being as they are the emergent properties of living neurosystems, will eventually cease to exist
Assuming you were to able to get yourself a Federation Approved Mark XII Replicator and produce 120,000 identical brains, are you able to make a compelling case for them not being extremely likely to die at or about the same time as the original?
Even assuming that this ridiculous hypothesis of identical brains was somehow possible, the duplicate would most definitely not be created 'on the spot'. Everything we know demands that it would be created in a different, separate, not-the-same, non-identical spot.
But of course, that's not what you mean, is it, Oh master debater? What you really mean is 'created from nothing', a proposition too silly to warrant any response at all.
That's exactly where we did start. Years ago.
Pre-literate children have no trouble understanding this basic concept.
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