Science vs Science

[Creed]

I was so sick and tired of scientists talking about the impossible to prove God did not exist, so I thought, they're using fire so why can't I? This thought process was developed by me during a period of meditation and constant reasoning. My thoughts started to wander by them selfs, like someone took my hand and was showing me the truth, unimportant. I will use metaphors that you can easily understand so i can get my point across quickly, I have to write a paper tonight. Here I go.. proving God exists in 1000 words or less.

The first concept you must understand is that through freewill you have an unlimited amount of choices. Do to the amount of degrees in a circle and the number of pi, we can conclude an unlimited amount of choices we have to move our hand at any one time. To accept this one fact is to accept that you have an unlimited amount of choices. Yes your choices are limited to the ones you are aware of, but you chose to be aware of a certain selection from infinity.

Where does this go you may ask? Luckily I had some guidance..

Now the metaphor.. Your brain is like a computers hard drive in that it has a finite amount of storage capacity before it reaches full. Now to understand this you have to understand how a computer works. A computer has information.. choices.. but a finite amount of them.. and would be impossible to program infinite amount of choices into a finite object as each choice programed would require room and compile to infinity. Therefore you can say that you can not create AI, you can only simulate AI. Since we have the infinite amount of choices as expressed in step 1 we can conclude that our consciousness does not exist within our body, but rather I would suggest it exists in a form that coincides with the universe simply because there is an infinite amount of space. (Please don't argue there is an end to the universe because you could not describe it, vi save there cant be nothing outside of it.) At this point in my article it is futile to describe to you where the consciousness lies, but I can assure you I have proven it is not in your body, to contradict this reasoning is to be just as ignorant as atheists argue Christians are.

And so we approach the subject of God..
How do I know he exists? The answer is simple, a program can not write itself. -the writer must of understood infinity and could define it.

What is he? A consciousness that understands and can define infinity. If you could understand infinity within the confines of your consciousness I believe you could break reality and mold it.

What do I hope of achieving after writing this? nothing much, just really really needa start my essay so I gotta stop typing. I will leave you here, accept reason or not, the choice is now on your end of the table.

Welcome to reason.

[Beto]

I think Creed's bottom line is that no computer program is capable of processing the "abstract", or the "subjective". As far as I know this is true, and one of the proposed flaws of the purely computational approach for "consciousness". Correct me if I'm wrong, Creed.

Yet, that does not 'prove' god by any means. It just means we do not have the capability to create consciousness via a computer program (yet),

We don't actually know even that much for sure. Creed's premise seems to be that the human mind is capable of accessing any value in an actual infinity -- and that this implies some kind of dualistic transcendence of the material (which then makes a leap to the existence of God).

The first step here seems to rely on contrasting the very obvious limitations of known computer technology (understood to be finite in terms of memory resources) with (what are effectively) unknown mental processes. In the fog of the latter, Creed seems to slip-in a reference to infinity that does not appear to be properly justified. Can we see some clear justification for this first step?

But do you think "abstraction" is possible from a computational approach, with sufficient memory supply? I suspect only a "perfect" simulation of consciousness can be achieved this way, regardless of available resource, though I can't honestly back that assumption.

If naturalism is true then I don't feel it is impossible to have a machine store qualia and map objects it sees into it's own worldview.

A camera could see a red ball and store that image or decompose the image to pick out objects based on edges and then build up a list of objects one of which would be object( shape = "sphere", colour= #FF0000) or it could store that as "red ball".

Animals (and Humans) do that very well, so well that other animals have evolved camouflage to avoid such finetuned detection. It could be argued that current machine vision systems are like baby animals in which everything they see is camouflaged because the machine has not yet learnt how to recognise the shape.

I think all that remains a matter of "simulation complexity", but a "simulation" nonetheless. For some reason I can't get out of my head that the hability to think in abstract terms could be related to quantum superposition, and that's how we can understand "possibility".

[QED]

I think all that remains a matter of "simulation complexity", but a "simulation" nonetheless. For some reason I can't get out of my head that the hability to think in abstract terms could be related to quantum superposition, and that's how we can understand "possibility".

I think anyone interested in the issue of consciousness ought to check out Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett I don't think it quite lives up to its title, but it does explode a great deal of mythology that has grown out of "folk psychology". As for quantum superposition don't forget that it is not qualitatively different from a simulation of the process that can be run on "classical equipment". Sure it can crack certain problems a lot more efficiently in time but I think you might be mistaken in thinking it forms an essential part of any conscious system.

Dennett supposes consciousness to be a "virtual machine" run on the underlying evolutionary wetware. This certainly rings bells when we consider the disparity between the plodding rate of "thinking things through deliberatley" compared with the snap judgements and reactions that we seem to be able to muster unconsciously. He makes many more interesting observations along these kind of lines that I think build a compelling case for an unexpected kind of AI in all conscious animals.

[Beto]

As for quantum superposition don't forget that it is not qualitatively different from a simulation of the process that can be run on "classical equipment".

But that was my point. In "classical equipment" a simultaneous state of "1" and "0" can only be simulated. And with enough memory one could simulate all possible states and their consequences. But the program can only "pretend" to understand "possibility", by actually knowing the possible outcomes.