I never said the mind is unaffected. This is just another sleight of hand and trying to wiggle your way out of answering the question…
Which one does consciousness continue into?
I’ve directly answered the question a half-dozen times, I’m not trying to avoid it.
There is a complex system S_A (the brain), whose functioning is the consciousness C_A.
Then we cut that complex system in half, and we take as a given that the procedure leaves us with two stable complex systems, S_B and S_C. Then we ask: what is the relationship between C_B and C_C (the functioning of S_B and S_C, respectively), and C_A.
You seem to think that C_A should identical to either C_B or C_C or both, and I don’t think that’s so. The three systems function quite differently.
The functioning of a complex system depends on the whole system, so the functioning of each half of a complex system in isolation from the other isn’t straightforwardly related to the functioning of the whole, integrated system.
I would not expect continuity of consciousness in the hypothetical you describe.
So far so good. Unfortunately the tech of this forum is not up to par and its deleting your variables.
Also, more detail about what “functioning” means is desired.
Now you are just using robot logic. Not AI logic, not AGI logic, not ASI logic, but robot logic. You are just making these strange assertions that slicing someone’s brain in half, (using safe ASI technology where they don’t die), somehow kills their consciousness “C-A” and then it is not continued in C-B or C-C.
I should have anticipated this when you posted your tangential remarks about personality, which were more or less red herrings. You are not your personality, and a change in personality doesn’t suddenly kill consciousness and cause discontinuation of consciousness like you are suggesting. You are not your memories, you are not your personality, and you are not your finger. Actually, most of the time, the majority of the time, people go about their day without thinking about their memories at all.
It follows from mind-brain identity: if the mind is the brain, and the brain is radically changed, the mind is radically changed. As I’ve said, it’s in part a Ship-of-Theseus problem whether C_B and C_C are continuations of C_A.
But it’s also important to note that half a brain is not half a mind (even taking some version of mind-brain identity as given). The behavior of each part of a complex system is influenced by the behaviors of all the other parts, so dividing the system also changes the behavior of every part in each half of the system.
I get the impression that you aren’t really asking about consciousness at all, but about identity: if we cut Carleas in half, which half is Carleas? But that is more a social or legal question than a question of what consciousness is.
Neither, I’ll be dead. The pattern of information that was me will dissolve and flow back into the stream.
The question is a Philosophical question that assumes an AI invented next-gen tech that allows the patient to live.
@Carleas I will make this all easier for you, very easy in fact.
I am changing the scenario to: Ai cuts you in half symettrically, BUT inserts a nano-gel imbetween, ship of theseus style, such that when you are cut in half slowly, your beliefs, your personality, all the gobbledegook that constitutes your self, remains virtually indistinguishable. The nanogel uses Ai technology to create networks of neurons to replace your other half of brain, Theseus style… Now.. which side of the brain are you in, after this process? Now.. even you cannot wiggle your way out of this question.
I get the impression that you aren’t really asking about consciousness at all, but about identity: if we cut Carleas in half, which half is Carleas? But that is more a social or legal question than a question of what consciousness is.
This is not a societal, legal debate, and very much nothing to do with society, or legality, in-fact.
“Now.. even you cannot wiggle your way out of this question.”
Or the nanogel, for that matter.
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Is your new scenario different from my earlier teleporter Scenario 2:
One difference is that the physical matter composing one of the copies is the original matter and the other is new, unrelated matter. That doesn’t matter in my model of the world, but maybe it does in yours? Is your consciousness tied to specific atoms?
They each have have an equal claim to being me. If you asked either of them who they are, each would claim to be me. They would have all my memories, know all my passwords, like all my friends. There is no test you could do on either to distinguish it. You would have reason to believe each is conscious (to the extent you have reason to believe I am conscious).
But they wouldn’t share information telepathically. If you told one of them one set of facts and another a different set of facts, they could disagree about the facts. As they spent time doing different things, learning different things, having different experiences, they would diverge and become different.
So they’re both ‘me’ in every relevant sense, but they’re also two distinct consciousnesses.
If that seems weird, it’s mostly due to the sci-fi thought experiment it answers, but partly also because it’s weird to think of personal identity this way.
But again I’d argue that the continuity of personal identity is largely social/legal. I have almost nothing in common with the screaming baby that was born some decades ago and given my name. We know different things, want different things, see the world differently. There’s a contingent causal process leading from him to me, and some fraction of a percent of the atoms that make up my body were also in his body.
And then there’s social and legal convention that says he’s me.
So, after reading all this, it seems atheists have no coherent theory of consciousness yet. You are even saying its a societal, legal thing…
You’re again conflating consciousness and identity. They are distinct concepts.
Just as we can agree that the Ship of Theseus is a boat even though we may disagree whether it’s the same boat, we can agree (I think) that the two half-brain-half-nanogel minds are consciousnesses without deciding whether they are the same consciousness.
What is your answer to the hypothetical? Do you think they are both conscious? Do you think they are telepathically linked? Why?
wtf its been YOU conflating the two this whole fucking time and i had to you remind you that you are not your personality, you are not your finger.
Personality isn’t personal identity either. If Jane has a traumatic brain injury, she’s still considered Jane even if her personality changes completely as a result (c.f. Phineas Gage).
I’m making a different distinction, between two different claims:
- the guy identified by my social security number 10 years ago is Carleas
- the mind of the guy identified by my social security number 10 years ago is the same mind that is writing this sentence.
The first is a social/legal claim, the second is a metaphysical claim.
As I said when I first used ‘personality’ in this thread, language fails us here. We can’t refer with very much specificity to the concepts we have in mind. I offered ‘personality’ along with several other similar terms (“the thing I take you to be pointing to when you say ‘soul’, I would call something like ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’, or ‘person’.”) to try to triangulate to a concept I can’t point to directly.
I don’t want these questions to get lost, so quoting them here:
the answer is that there is a soul and the soul will stay into one of the brains and not the other.
it is unclear which brain the soul will pick and why. but the soul cannot pick both brains and it cannot pick 0 brains. If the soul picked 0 brains that means consciousness killed itself for no reason. If it picked both brains then that means the soul became a supergod and gained omniscience.
If there is no such thing as a soul that means we live in an ASI generated simulation. The simulation picks the most plausible camera perspectives and inertia. So in your teleporter question, the soul would stay in its original body, not the cloned body, because that is the most plausible scenario and therefore the simulation would pick it. The simulation always picks the most plausible physics, that is why magic, levitation and stuff does not occur.
Does the other brain get a new soul? Is it conscious?
That is the part i don’t know or understand. I was hoping someone could solve this.
I believe the new brain has consciousness but I’m not sure, could be 50/50 chance it is soulless NPC.
I believe i have solved which brain the soul will stay in though. Whatever brain the soul is majority of at the time of the split. So if the soul is engaged with left brain activity, mathematics, it will stay in that brain once the brains are split. As the brains are splitting, it will be harder and harder for the soul to move between brains.
The second version of the question, which brain with the nanogel, is even harder to determine, if the nanogel is equal quality to the original brains, since both brains would virtually be identical.
Im not sure this applies, since the clone will grow up from egg to human in a different enviromnment than you; so the brain will not be identical… and in any case it will consists of different particles. That the DNA is identical does not mean the organism is perfectly equal. Even the fact that is exists in a different location disables it from having identical experience.
But consciousness does not seem bound to the brain. Look at a flock of birds - the coordination appears to belong to the group rather than to the individuals. I read that when a very long swarm of fish was observed the movements in the front and tail ends occurred precisely at the same moment, communication would have to have occurred faster than the speed of light. Quantum entanglement has been osbserved for a century, and yet hard materialists keep reasoning as if it does not exist. Einstein called it spooky action at a distance. I guess that’s the reason. It’s sort of scary.
Another experiment that’s supposed to have happened - I got this out of a Dan Brown book, but he is generally not lying about the scientific elements in his stories, Ill have to verify it though - is that people were being exposed to randomly computer-chosen images that were either violent, sexual or calming in nature, and their brais were being scanned to show the results. But when observed very closely, the brains had their reactions before the images were seen, and even before the computer had picked them. That, if true, has implications far beyond mere instantaneous communication.
The most basic example; almost everyone has had the experience now and then that they thought of someone and then that person called them on the phone.
There’s a great book, Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lord Mayer, which chronicles research into such things as remote viewing, a research project that, when it began showing hard result, was taken over by the CIA (out of humanitarian interest of course) and then somehow, disappeared. And of course the author mysteriously died. But I think that time has passed; if Dan Brown published on it now, there’s gotta be another, deeper, more powerful mystery we’re not supposed to know about in the process of weaponization.
Edit; I see that Brown has indeed published a lot of his sources. Here’s one.
I don’t think the concept of p-zombies/NPCs is coherent. There has to be an external test for consciousness, or else the concept has no referent. And by hypothesis, a p-zombie will pass any such external test.
When does a person get their soul? I’m not trying to start an abortion debate, but want to probe your beliefs about the metaphysics of souls.
I think this has to follow from most materialist positions, as to many other counterintuitive hypotheticals, e.g. Searle’s Chinese Room could be said to be conscious.
I’m still a skeptic of the more exotic claims of faster-than-light communication and remote viewing, but I also have yet to read Extraordinary Knowing (it’s in my queue).
our tech is too primitive to prove if someone is or isnt a pzombie. However, there is a distinct plausibility that pzombies indeed exist.
I use the term “plausibility” since we are all too primitive to even say if there is a “possibility” or if there isn’t a possibility.
India believes it is in the womb, I forgot what time I think it was a few months in.
Atheists believe that souls do not exist, but im saying what about all the ufos and obes and ndes. Even ai said ufos exist. Atheists like to do the same routine of saying everything is fake, ufos are fake, all obes are fake all ndes are fake and then pat themselves on the back and call it day. “Science was achieved this day.”
We decide that people are conscious every day, and we don’t need tech to do it, we just talk to them or observe their behavior. The term ‘consciousness’ refers to a thing that we can see in those people that we don’t see in interactions with inanimate objects and most animals.
This doesn’t rule out the converse – that there are conscious things that we can’t tell are conscious – but I think it rules out the possibility that there is a human who acts like all the other humans that establish our concept of consciousness and yet is not conscious.
It’s interesting that you see UFOs as tied up in this question. I don’t see what they have to do with souls.
As for out-of-body and near-death experiences, I don’t reject them out of hand, but I am not aware of any case that defies mundane explanation. Experiences can be subjectively profound without the need to suppose anything supernatural.
but its not scientific. we can’t scientifically say some random guy on the street is conscious or isn’t conscious, simply because he passes our emotional turing test and because of our feelings and our emotions.
there is a ufo connection. because all the ndes say they go to the aliens when they die and see the angels. Angels are aliens.
