Does the traditional atheistic worldview contradict materialism?

[vladi]

Sorry vladi, but this would require something about the "You" that is non-reproducible in principle (Rule 1.2). I will never accept that as materialistic. This is nothing but the age-old soul concept in disguise.

Well, it IS reproducible it's just that when you reproduce it there will be two of them. It is just not transferable. If it was a soul then it would be the opposite - the soul is not reproducible but it may be transferable, because that's what is supposed to happen when you die - your soul transfers out of your body and goes somewhere.
It is not a soul it is just being the one and not the other. It's being yourself. You CAN reproduce that in the sense that the "copy" will be himself and his self will be equivalent to your self and he will feel about himself exactly the way you feel about yourself. For every external observer (I mean external to you and that includes the "copy") he will be you. But you will still refer to him as "him" and not "me", you will not be himself and he will not be yourself.
Then from the point of view of everyone else it won't matter in any way if you die. The "copy" will indistinguishably replace you just like you can replace one electron with another and nothing will change. The only one who could tell the difference was you and now that you're gone, no one ever could find out what happened. The Universe will continue exactly like before except for the pile of ashes of your dead body. I think it couldn't get more materialistic than that.
Just like you can't prove in any way that you are not a copy, made last night while your original was sleeping and exchanged.What difference does it make whether you actually lived the memories you have or you were created last night and those memories were just copied? No difference at all. If tonight the same thing happens to you, i.e. you are copied and killed you will die, and tomorrow's copy will feel exactly the same as you do now, as if nothing happened. In short you can't be sure when the life in your body actually started and it doesn't matter anyway, you can only be sure that it ends when you die.
This means that if such technology existed it would be perfectly possible and acceptable to scan one's body every night for example and store the information somewhere as backup and reproduce it in case you die accidentally. For example if your child was hit by a car you could reproduce it using the stored backup and it will be alive and with you again. And precisely because there is no unreproducible soul, it will be absolutely the same and it won't even know what happened. I think that from a materialistic point of view this would not be unethical given that the death was accidental, i.e. the child died anyway. Of course there is a whole bunch of other unethical things that one could do with such technology.

 

[Dancing David]

I just took two of the 3s out from the sequence. Here they are: 3 3

The sequence now reads: 2.3333333333...

Now you tell me where I took them from!

It is pretty obvious you are not doing it correctly.

So which digits did you supposedly remove?

Do you know what places are after the point?

So did you remove .3 (2.0333333333) or .003 (2.330333333) or .0003 (2.333033333)

Again you seem to ignore position.

Which just shows you don't have a clue.

 

[Dancing David]

After one decays they do not have the same properties anymore (at least different mass now), so of course they are now distinguishable.

Um, position, vector of motion and momentum are properties.

So you aren't discussing materialism but a straw version that you made up.

The particles are only indistinguishable if you make BEC.

 

[marplots]

I just took two of the 3s out from the sequence. Here they are: 3 3

The sequence now reads: 2.3333333333...

Now you tell me where I took them from!

I suspect you created some new threes from your keyboard and are trying to trick me!

Where did I state that two particular indistinguishable particles have to stay that way forever? Of course they can decay, can be annihilated, can have their basic properties changed etc.

After one decays they do not have the same properties anymore (at least different mass now), so of course they are now distinguishable.

But, going in, you know that eventually one will decay before the other. Since we are talking about a property that isn't coming from the outside, but something about the atoms themselves, how can you say they are identical? Wouldn't they necessarily have to have the same future if unperturbed? If they were identical, how could they act differently?

The fact that this difference is only observable by me after the fact is a comment on the limits of what I can observe, not on the atoms themselves. I can hardly claim that the backside of Jupiter and the front side of Mercury must be the same, simply because I can't see either from my attic.

 

[yy2bggggs]

Not quite. From the point of view of the "original, " the "copy" is another human being that's almost identical to himself. Let's say 99% him.

No, the "copy" is another human being that's almost equivalent to himself. It is no more 99% him than the penny in my left pocket is 99% the penny in my right pocket; it is, instead, 100% not him (I would hope!). It is, perhaps, 99% similar to him; just as the penny in my right pocket is 99% similar to the penny in my right pocket.

If you do make a copy of me and that copy is 99% me, then you have created a conjoined monster--with a sum total of 101% of my original mass. If you create something that's not a conjoined monster, then you would have wound up with 200% of my original mass, and two people, each of which is 0% the other one.

Sorry vladi, but this would require something about the "You" that is non-reproducible in principle (Rule 1.2).

That's easy. The property of "me" that can never, even in principle, be reproduced is my causal relation to the universe (this is really a tautology--it is what the "re" in "reproduce" means). You can prick my finger and make me say "ow", and you can prick the copy and make him say "ow" as well. But you cannot ever get him to say "ow" as a result of pricking my finger (at least for the same reason).

And yes, this does count, because the brain inside a particular skull has a particular causal relationship to itself. And based solely on this, it legitimately gets to care about itself more than a brain it has a more indirect causal relationship to, even if that brain is 100% similar.

I will never accept that as materialistic. This is nothing but the age-old soul concept in disguise.

Sure, why not. But it doesn't match your definition in 1.2 of the mortal soul, because it's not unique (the copy has the same relation to my former self that I do; all things being equal, he is just as much not me as I am not him). So call it the material soul.

 

[steenkh]

Yes, if you look at only the particles themselves it doesn't matter. If their basic properties are the same, they ARE the same for all practical purposes. You could switch them freely between my and your computer without changing anything.

They are not the same for all practical purposes: one is at one location, and the other is at another location.

Huh? So you seriously wanna tell me that it's not the particular configuration of interchangeable particles hat carries the information but the particles themselves?

No, I am telling you that location has importance too: Having two exactly identical persons at two different locations means having two different persons, even if all the information they carry is exactly identical. This is why it is still a crime to kill one of them.

 

[Croc411]

Well, it IS reproducible it's just that when you reproduce it there will be two of them. It is just not transferable. If it was a soul then it would be the opposite - the soul is not reproducible but it may be transferable, because that's what is supposed to happen when you die - your soul transfers out of your body and goes somewhere.
It is not a soul it is just being the one and not the other. It's being yourself. You CAN reproduce that in the sense that the "copy" will be himself and his self will be equivalent to your self and he will feel about himself exactly the way you feel about yourself. For every external observer (I mean external to you and that includes the "copy") he will be you. But you will still refer to him as "him" and not "me", you will not be himself and he will not be yourself.
Then from the point of view of everyone else it won't matter in any way if you die. The "copy" will indistinguishably replace you just like you can replace one electron with another and nothing will change. The only one who could tell the difference was you and now that you're gone, no one ever could find out what happened. The Universe will continue exactly like before except for the pile of ashes of your dead body. I think it couldn't get more materialistic than that.

Well, to me that translates to: everything is reproducible except that "me"-perception. Which puts us back to square one.

IMO our subjective "I-can-only-be-one-and-not-the-other" notion is only based on our intuitive experience stemming from the fact that our brains are isolated from each other by design.

How I see the whole thing:
Our brains produce conscious states all the time, let's say one every Planck time for the sake of this discussion (though this is probably far too fine-grained). Every healthy human from a certain age (and most probably some higher animals too) produces them. They are the states of our memories and personalities. Imagine all of these states that are produced by all beings with a "me"-perception over all of (both!) space and time depicted on a plane.

These states, or rather the information they represent regarding memories and personality, are all that matters, both from the inside and outside perspective. The individual "me"-perceptions attached to these states are just illusions, irrelevant and interchangeable.

So, from your perspective, which ones of those states can you consider "you"? Certainly those created by your body in the near past and in the near future (assuming that nothing dramatic happens to your body in the near future). But what about the states created by other bodies? If you restrict the sample of the states to the 7 billion humans currently living on earth (and no copy of you was ever made), it's easy. They are all so different from your current state that you won't think of them being "you" and, if your body dies, you can consider yourself gone.

Now, what if recently a copy of you has been made? On creation the state produced by the copy was identical to yours, but your states and the copy's states will begin to diverge immediately, so now the copy's state at time coordinate X is a little different from yours. But it is still very similar to your current one, so you can also consider the copy "you".

And here's the central point of this model: it is solely for you to decide which of the states you consider "you" (a matter of taste so to speak), nature won't do it for you. Nature will not switch off your "me"-perception when your body dies, because there never really was something to switch off in the first place - just an illusion. Nature WILL switch off the brain processes that created your particular illusion, but all that matters are the conscious states that exist in space and time. This is where the sharp boundaries between (subjective!) persons disappear.

So that is my take on the empty soul concept. I prefer that over the traditional worldview because it does not contradict the data (at least none that I know of), is very simple and does not run into problems when it comes to brain uploading or certain thought experiments (transporters, replicators etc). All it takes is letting go of that intuitive notion that my "me"-perception is something unique and special.

Just like you can't prove in any way that you are not a copy, made last night while your original was sleeping and exchanged.What difference does it make whether you actually lived the memories you have or you were created last night and those memories were just copied? No difference at all. If tonight the same thing happens to you, i.e. you are copied and killed you will die, and tomorrow's copy will feel exactly the same as you do now, as if nothing happened.

Absolutely. It could even be possible that the universe destroys me every second or so and then puts me back together again. And I think this would be totally indistinguishable from how things really are, both from my perspective (that's where we disagree) and from the outside perspective.

In short you can't be sure when the life in your body actually started and it doesn't matter anyway, you can only be sure that it ends when you die.

Yes, the life in my body will end. This body will stop producing conscious states. But my "me"-perception will not end, because it was never really there in the first place. It's an illusion created by the processes in my brain and nothing that can be distinguished from the illusions created by the processes of other brains. What can be distinguished are memory and personality traits, and only those count.

This means that if such technology existed it would be perfectly possible and acceptable to scan one's body every night for example and store the information somewhere as backup and reproduce it in case you die accidentally. For example if your child was hit by a car you could reproduce it using the stored backup and it will be alive and with you again. And precisely because there is no unreproducible soul, it will be absolutely the same and it won't even know what happened. I think that from a materialistic point of view this would not be unethical given that the death was accidental, i.e. the child died anyway. Of course there is a whole bunch of other unethical things that one could do with such technology.

I say: from the perspective of the (original) child that would be like waking up with a partial memory loss (memory between copying and the accident is lost).

You say: from the perspective of the (original) child he died. His "me"-perception has ended forever. Correct?

 

[Croc411]

I suspect you created some new threes from your keyboard and are trying to trick me!

Damn, you got me! That's exactly what I did, I replaced the ones I took with some new ones from my keyboard (and I also mixed up some other 3s in the sequence). But you could not tell them apart, and that's the point.

But, going in, you know that eventually one will decay before the other. Since we are talking about a property that isn't coming from the outside, but something about the atoms themselves, how can you say they are identical? Wouldn't they necessarily have to have the same future if unperturbed? If they were identical, how could they act differently?

AFAIK it is absolutely impossible to predict when a particle decays. This is a quantum effect and totally spontaneous. The time of a future decay is not somehow ingrained in a particle and thus not an information that could (even in principle) be extracted from it. But I'm not a physicist, so correct me if I'm wrong here.

 

[marplots]

Damn, you got me! That's exactly what I did, I replaced the ones I took with some new ones from my keyboard (and I also mixed up some other 3s in the sequence). But you could not tell them apart, and that's the point.



AFAIK it is absolutely impossible to predict when a particle decays. This is a quantum effect and totally spontaneous. The time of a future decay is not somehow ingrained in a particle and thus not an information that could (even in principle) be extracted from it. But I'm not a physicist, so correct me if I'm wrong here.

I'm afraid to make the same mistake, so I'll defer.

But, now it seems like your argument (at least with the 3's) depends on my state of knowledge which shouldn't be important. Can't things be different, even if I can't tell them apart? Certainly it matters when I accidentally get into someone else's red Ford Escort at the grocery store.

 

[Paulhoff]

I still don't see how one not believing in any god that has been shown to them has anything to do with a worldview on materialism.

Why don't you ask me if my not believing in collecting stamps as a hobby has anything to do with my worldview on materialism.

Paul

 

[yy2bggggs]

These states, or rather the information they represent regarding memories and personality, are all that matters, both from the inside and outside perspective. The individual "me"-perceptions attached to these states are just illusions, irrelevant and interchangeable.

No, they're not "just illusions". They represent an entity capable of conceptual thought referencing itself.

So, from your perspective, which ones of those states can you(<-A) consider "you"?

That would be me, assuming you're asking me the question; in particular, whichever "you" (A) you're asking, that person should say A. It doesn't matter how many other copies of that person there are that exist. It doesn't matter how much their states are equivalent--even if they could somehow be and were 100% equivalent. The only right answer would be "A".

Certainly those created by your body in the near past and in the near future (assuming that nothing dramatic happens to your body in the near future). But what about the states created by other bodies?

So, materialist, what does "other bodies" mean? How can you have a criteria by which to judge if body A and body B are the same body or are different bodies, and yet refuse that there exists a criteria by which to judge if person A and person B are the same person (given equivalence, I presume)?

 

[Croc411]

No, the "copy" is another human being that's almost equivalent to himself. It is no more 99% him than the penny in my left pocket is 99% the penny in my right pocket; it is, instead, 100% not him (I would hope!). It is, perhaps, 99% similar to him; just as the penny in my right pocket is 99% similar to the penny in my right pocket.

Fine, OK. Let's exchange identical with equivalent. It's a better word. But I just see no reason to think that the 99% similarity is NOT everything that matters.

That's easy. The property of "me" that can never, even in principle, be reproduced is my causal relation to the universe (this is really a tautology--it is what the "re" in "reproduce" means).

Thx for that, yy2bggggs, this was good. Finally some food for thought. This might make the traditional view a little more coherent (by eliminating the reproduceability issue), I have to think some more about it.

 

[Croc411]

I still don't see how one not believing in any god that has been shown to them has anything to do with a worldview on materialism.

Why don't you ask me if my not believing in collecting stamps as a hobby has anything to do with my worldview on materialism.

Paul

What? You don't believe in collecting stamps?! And you call yourself a materialist, you dualistic fundamental Christian-Muslim-Jewish creationist you ...

Seriously, I know now that the thread title is misleading. I originally chose 'atheistic' because religious people generally do not have the worldview I meant and yes, it was a mistake.

 

[Complexity]

Seriously, I know that the entire thread was a mistake.

 

[Dancing David]

Damn, you got me! That's exactly what I did, I replaced the ones I took with some new ones from my keyboard (and I also mixed up some other 3s in the sequence). But you could not tell them apart, and that's the point.

Then you need to go back to second grade through fourth grade!

You don;t know the difference between .3, .03, .003 so it is pretty obvious you are ignorant of math.

And if you edited the sequence to move around the stuff that means you don't understand reality very well.

 

[vladi]

Absolutely. It could even be possible that the universe destroys me every second or so and then puts me back together again. And I think this would be totally indistinguishable from how things really are, both from my perspective (that's where we disagree) and from the outside perspective.

What you would call "your" perspective is the perspective of the "copy", because if you were copied then the current you is the "copy". The current "you" can't know the perspective of the "original", because the copied you is a separate entity from the original you. And I said that the only one to whom it makes a difference is the original, because he is the one who dies.

I say: from the perspective of the (original) child that would be like waking up with a partial memory loss (memory between copying and the accident is lost).

You say: from the perspective of the (original) child he died. His "me"-perception has ended forever. Correct?

The "me"-perception in THAT PARTICULAR body has ended forever. The "me"-perception as the configuration of particles that produce it, however, still exists in a backup and can be reproduced in ANOTHER, SEPARATE, equivalent body. What if the machine accidentally reproduces two bodies of the dead child at the same moment? Which one will the "original" wake up in, according to your interpretation?
I say when you're dead you're dead. You cannot wake up in another body (even equivalent to yours) after you die. Your copy may "wake up" (come to life), having all the memories you had and having the same "me" perception as you had. But as he is separate from you, you cannot "continue", or "transfer" in his body.
As I see yy2bggggs put it in a way that communicates it better

 

[Croc411]

But, now it seems like your argument (at least with the 3's) depends on my state of knowledge which shouldn't be important. Can't things be different, even if I can't tell them apart?

That's where this analogy gets inaccurate. In the case of the 3's you could (at least in principle) find out exactly what I did by examining my computer in a lab (or by doing some nasty things to my brain ).

In the case of the particles this is impossible, courtesy of natural law. It's not just you that can't tell them apart, no-one can.

 

[Croc411]

What if the machine accidentally reproduces two bodies of the dead child at the same moment? Which one will the "original" wake up in, according to your interpretation?

In both. The two will then immediately start to diverge and, going on with their individual lifes, their similarity will become less and less.

You cannot wake up in another body (even equivalent to yours) after you die. Your copy may "wake up" (come to life), having all the memories you had and having the same "me" perception as you had.

Then it IS me. I see no reason to think otherwise.

But as he is separate from you, you cannot "continue", or "transfer" in his body.

There is nothing to transfer. The "me" is not real, and everything else (=everything that matters) either was there all along or it wasn't.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Seriously, I know that the entire thread was a mistake.

The OP, yes. It hasn't been a terrible thread salvage though. Maybe a little too subjective and filled with people talking past each other, but considering the subject matter, not bad.

 

[Dancing David]

That's where this analogy gets inaccurate. In the case of the 3's you could (at least in principle) find out exactly what I did by examining my computer in a lab (or by doing some nasty things to my brain ).

In the case of the particles this is impossible, courtesy of natural law. It's not just you that can't tell them apart, no-one can.

Only if you ignore their position, vector and momentum.