Ask about Atheism

[Zag]

Except that your definition of sentience isn't useful in deciding whether or not someone/something other than you has it. Mine is essentially the same, except that it is from the point of view of the observer. That is, take your definition, and mine is whether or not I can perceive signs that the other creature seems to exhibit such things.

A definition that only allows for someone to judge their own sentience is not useful.

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[Scurra]

[Zag]

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[extro...*]

[Zag]

I agree that I still don't understand what you mean by sentience. I see other organic beings who exhibit signs of being self-aware -- most humans, clearly, but also other mammals, to some degree. I don't see it in the toaster, nor in the set of physical laws, and I'm having trouble how you do.

How about if I use a different phrase, instead: self-aware. For a being to exhibit signs of self-awareness, there have to be abstractions -- expressions of ideas, desires, concepts, that are not the thing itself. The sun, for instance, does not have a desire to send light our way, it isn't a conscious thing it is doing. The light just happens because a ball of matter happened to come together that was massive enough to force, through its own gravity, to force hydrogen atoms to fusion into helium (mostly, that's what it is, though there is other fusion going on, as well).

My toaster does think, "oh, he wants me to make some heat to caramelize his bread. I guess I'm ok with that." It's just electricity run through a resistor that generates heat. The only conscious effort that went into it was me pushing the button down. Neither the sun, nor the toaster, nor the set of physical laws (in total) have any self-awareness, any ability to for abstract concepts. They just exist, without thought, desires, or self-awareness.

[Scurra]

OK, I'll bite. No, conclusion B is not as good as conclusion A. But I think that you are being a little misleading in your presentation because the choice you are offering is not an either/or. Explanation A largely replaces explanation B when it becomes available as an explanation - the proposition that both can be offered at the same time as equally valid explanations assuming no prior understanding seems odd.

You seem to be maintaining a position that no-one is allowed to change their mind about something when they learn something new. (Then again, because sentience doesn't exist, I guess we don't have minds to change. ) For me, the mistake is to throw the baby out with the bathwater as it were. To posit that e.g. if you believed that God juggled everything in the universe to keep it running, and then Newton comes along and shows that some fairly simple rules do the same thing, you must therefore stop believing in God, does not follow. Unless your only view of God was that He was the juggler and nothing but the juggler.
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_{still Quiz Olympiad champion. Must get a life.
New definitions: COFFEE - someone who is coughed upon}

[Zag]

[Scurra]

Well I guess we could carry on misunderstanding each other all day.

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First, conclusion B is not as good conclusion A.

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[extro...*]

Worth a quick read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

[Jedo the Jedi]

I'm just going to jump in here with a sassy comment about it's pointless to have separate Atheism/Christianity threads if you guys are just going to jump the gap.
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Paragon Tally: 18 mafia, 3 SKs (1 twice), 1 cultist, numerous chat scum...and counting.

[Zag]

I apologize for the personal comment. I did qualify it to say "on this topic;" On it, I think you lose objectivity.

[extropalopakettle]

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[Zag]

Something that you can't define well enough for someone else to understand, is hardly self-evident that it exists.

From the Wikipedia definition you pointed to, I'll take the very first sentence as the thesis: Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences.

There's nothing there that can't be explained by the physical, chemical, and electrical make-up of the brain. There is certainly information involved, but we more or less understand how the brain stores information (both chemically and electrically). The fact that any signs of sentience disappear at the same time that the chemical and electrical activity end supports this claim rather well.

You act as though sentience is a "fundamental medium" like "matter" or "electrical energy," which would have to be the case for us to be able to measure it as you suggest. It is no such fundamental medium. It is merely an incredibly complex interaction of media we already know about.

On the other hand, in speaking about the soul (or the blgnitso, if you prefer -- or, it seems, what you are referring to as sentience), I say that this can't be claimed to exist until you describe the media upon which resides. I specifically include as part of the essential definition of blgnitso that it persists after the body with which it was associated no longer lives. (Perhaps you are not implying this as part of sentience.) It is this persistence, commonly referred to as "the afterlife" that I claim makes the entire concept untenable.

Let me restate: my argument against the existence of a soul is because its definition precludes its existence on media we already know about. Without evidence of some new medium to hold it, the superior theory is that it doesn't exist. Sentience, on the other hand (by the definition above, at least) can easily be explained as a complex interactions of media we already know about. There's no radically new concepts needed to explain it, just the acknowledgement that the subtlety of the interaction is still too complex for us to understand fully. However, we know how to interfere with their workings, and, with 100% correlation, this interference also stops all signs of sentience in the being so interfered with -- strong evidence that this theory is accurate.

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[Zag]

[extropalopakettle]

[extropalopakettle]

btw, here's a source of the Schrödinger quote with more context:
http://books.google.com/books?id=dg2bYMwdaBwC&pg=PA154&lpg=PA154#v=onepage&q&f=false

(bottom of page 154)

[extropalopakettle]

Human beings can see three primary colors, red, green and blue. The colors we see naturally fit into a three dimensional color space. It is conceivable that some organism might have (in fact many do) a fourth primary color it can see, and it's color space would be 4 dimensional. This could be the case even if the visible light spectrum it sees is identical to our own (really, light is irrelevant to the discussion, and the light spectrum we see is distinct from our space of subjectively experienceable colors). The fourth primary color could be yellow, for instance. Our color space has red, green and blue dimensions. We can't distinguish between yellow light and a combination of red and green light. We see yellow, but it isn't primary for us. An organism that could see a fourth primary color would see it as different from any that we see, just as we see bluish colors different from all combinations of red and green. This would be a color we can't imagine, outside our experience.

Explain what sort of physical conditions within a brain would produce such a color experience (the one we can't see or imagine), what it might look like, and why it would look that way (i.e. why the subjective experience of it would be such as it would be).

Easy? A theory of how physical processes (neurological, whatever) produce subjective experiences of color would need to answer those sorts of questions. Methinks you underestimate the difficulty, not practically, but fundamentally.

[BraveHat]

Zag, do you exist? If so, how did you come to know that?
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"I am declaring it a terrible tragedy for me to die. You may disagree..." --Antrax

[BraveHat]

(re: above, please note that I'm not trying to be a smart ass or ridiculous. I'm trying to get to a sense of what extro is trying to say)
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"I am declaring it a terrible tragedy for me to die. You may disagree..." --Antrax

[extropalopakettle]

[Zag]

Edit: I had to rush off after just starting my last note, and am still responding to what's before it. I still haven't caught up with what's after it.

[Zag]

[extropalopakettle]

[BraveHat]

[Zag]

You never said whether or not the Venus Fly Trap feels. However, you said that we understand the mechanism of its response, so I guess you're saying that it doesn't.

Is your thesis that if we don't understand something, that means it is more "special." So you have subjective experiences. So what? I never denied that you did, nor that I do. As the first mobile DNA replication machines started to exist (i.e. the animal kingdom), the ones that could learn were more likely to survive and pass on their DNA than the ones that couldn't. They were more successful at finding food and avoiding the other creatures that considered them to be food. What is learning but subjective experiences, applied?

I'm astonished that you find it so difficult to see that everything we are, including our really impressive ability to experience and to learn, all exist because OUR ancestors, the ones who acquired those abilities, lived to reproduce, when the ones without them perished.

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Yes, the colorblind buy with the special glasses perceives red vs. green. He does it in a different way than you do, but how do you know that I don't, too. If his parents had recognized when he was an infant that he was colorblind, and he grew up with the special glasses (perhaps built into his contact lenses, to put a science fiction spin on it) he would have grown up knowing that when he saw things one way, they were green, and another way, they were red. Are you going to say that he didn't experience red and green?

THIS IS A TRUE STORY!
I had a friend in college who did not have lenses in his eyes, because they had to be surgically removed. He had these really thick glasses and he could see well enough to read, recognize faces, etc. I noticed once in class that when he shifted his gaze from his book to the blackboard, he crinkled his nose so that he glasses were shifted down a bit, farther from his eyes. In looking back at his book on the table in front of him, he would push them back up with his finger. I asked him about it, and he said that he never realized that he did it. We did experiments, and it was clear that he crinkled his nose different amounts for different distances. He almost couldn't prevent himself from doing it! If he looked from reading distance to far away, concentrating on not crinkling his nose, he could do so, but only with serious concentration, and he would have to look away because of how disconcerting it is to see something which is blurry.

My point is that his crinkling his nose to adjust his glasses served the exact same purpose as the muscles you have in your eyes for adjusting the lenses in your eyes. It was a totally different mechanism, but worked just as well, just as consistently. Does HE experience the adjustment a body makes to focus? Yes, of course. Does he experience it differently from you? Sure, but not fundamentally. I imagine that I experience it different from you, too.

[BraveHat]

Extro, I completely understand what you're saying. Sentience is subjective experience of things. The point of my question to Zag was that the way you know that your existence is true is by your subjective experience of it. And I see now that my point is more on what Zag would call the useless side than yours, because while my subjective experience tells me I exist, a non-sentient observer need only detect one thing about me to determine that I exist, whereas it would be more advanced to determine how crushed and disappointed I was when I first saw The Phantom Menace. But I tend to agree with Zag that an advanced enough non-sentient observer would be able to answer the question of how disappointed I was. It just wouldn't share the experience of disappointment. It would see my disappointment, as it sees everything, as a force that it itself cannot participate in. Basically, it seems that your point is widdling down to the fact that a non-sentient observer cannot experience sentience, which is skirting the edge of becoming a useless tautology. Of course a non-sentient observer cannot experience sentience, it is non-sentient. (I'm not saying you said that explicitly, it just seems to be the underlying point of your argument)
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"I am declaring it a terrible tragedy for me to die. You may disagree..." --Antrax

[Zag]

Remove the phrase "skirting the edge of" and I'm right there with you.

[extropalopakettle]

OK Zag, you're a busy guy, and I geus you don't have the time to read what I write. If you did, you wouldn't be taking such pains to explain what I've taken such pains to explain to you! But you're still mising much of it, but I think we're making progress:

[extropalopakettle]

[extropalopakettle]

[extropalopakettle]

Someday a computer wil be programmed to pass a Turing test. You won't be able, via a conversation, to reliably distinguish it from a person. You will even be able to back it into a corner with a conversation about sentience, and it will behave as if it understands (unlike Zag). It may be able to distinguish between colors, and say it has subjective experiences of them. It may emulate wondering whether it sees colors the same way you do, and converse intelligently about that.

Now, I'll take a duplicate of that computer, wipe out its "sentience program", and load up some web server running web based accounting software, and make it public.

Two identical machines, with bilions of bits, flipping on and off every microsecond. One talks about having subjective experiences of the color red, and you believe it? WHY??? Sorry, that's just plain gullible.

[Zag]

Sorry. TL; DR. Also, I'm getting tired of this argument. You and I are never going to convince each other, and it can only go around in more circles.

By the way, Zag is really an acronym for Zeta Algorithm Generation. You've been having this argument with a sentient computer all this time.