Why do we need stored memories in the brain?

AV1611VET said:

But does the Kundalini Serpent make sense to you?

(It either does, or it doesn't, witch. This isn't a trick question.)

Click to expand...

Getting the chance to look it up now...No, that's a symbolic thing and it's related to Yoga which is more of a Buddhist thing spiritually.

AV1611VET said:

But witch trials and laws about not suffering a witch to live, you know all about ... right?

Click to expand...

I know that a lot of people were murdered just because of an accusation of being a witch when they never were. I've been told countless times about how I'm opening doors to hell, worshiping demons, in league with evil forces. I've never met a Christian who said not to worry about it.

awitch said:

Getting the chance to look it up now...No, that's a symbolic thing and it's related to Yoga which is more of a Buddhist thing spiritually.

Click to expand...

Witch, I'm going to withdraw the question, since you're having a hard time answering it.

I didn't ask for a definition, or what it's related to, I asked if it made sense to you.

Does Humpty Dumpty make sense to you?

It does me -- and I recognize Humpty Dumpty as a nursery rhyme.

awitch said:

I know that a lot of people were murdered just because of an accusation of being a witch when they never were.

Click to expand...

That is correct.

These innocent people were murdered; plain and simple.

Why you use that as justification for not coming to Christ is beyond me.

Any old port in a storm though, I guess.

I'm surprised you didn't use the Crusades -- they killed more people than those witch hunters did.

AV1611VET said:

Witch, I'm going to withdraw the question, since you're having a hard time answering it.

I didn't ask for a definition, or what it's related to, I asked if it made sense to you.

Does Humpty Dumpty make sense to you?

It does me -- and I recognize Humpty Dumpty as a nursery rhyme.

Click to expand...

The symbol makes sense, what it symbolizes does not.

AV1611VET said:

Why you use that as justification for not coming to Christ is beyond me.

Click to expand...

I'll try to explain it to you again.
Even if you don't think the I'm right type of witch the Bible is referring to, there were no shortage of Christians who do.

cloudyday2 said:

One of my theories on freewill is that when our brains are no longer capable of understanding their own actions based on algorithmic/cause-and-effect models then a "choice" is imagined from some outside agent with freewill.

Click to expand...

I think that choice itself is just one of those non-empirical phenomena that is written into the fabric of reality, which is only available to certain entities of a certain complexity and above (I’m not trying to fall into a materialism debate, but materialism needs to be true to phrase certain questions the way that you are phrasing them). No matter how deep and well thought out a person’s rationale is for what reality is, we all will come to some sort of bottom foundation of “This is just how things are.” We recognize choices all over the place, and we are very good at being able to point it out when we see it, and we’re also great at being able to say when something is just mindless matter in motion, it’s intuitive for us unless we are skating in the middle somewhere between the two, something like an insect maybe. Perhaps this innate ability is why people are extra sensitive to the AI issue.

We are also very skilled with understanding empirical data and causal chains, it’s our gift, but I think that we lack a capacity for other kinds of understandings to reality, so we try to force feed everything into the model of materialistic cause & effect explanations because that is where our skills lie. If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail lol.

It’s really a spectacular hammer that we have no doubt about that! But it’s still a hammer. We are not so skilled at describing things like what feelings are, but even worse such question are very difficult to even understand what a coherent answer would even look like. How can I point out “Feeling embarrassed” to you in a science lab? Pointing out the physical brain states that correlate to the experiential feeling of being embarrassed seems like it’s fundamentally off the mark in some critical way. It seems off just like it would seem a bit off to point to a person acting out being embarrassed, and then calling that the official explanation of feeling embarrassing. But we always wanna go there though, to a physical causal chain explanation, it’s like a dog wanting to bite everything instead of picking things up with its paws. I just don’t think we have the capacity to ontologically grasp certain concepts like qualia, yet they just happen to be the most real instances of real that we could ever know, nothing can ever be more real to you than your experiences.

cloudyday2 said:

That doesn't necessarily mean that the brain's behavior could not have been predicted with an algorithmic/cause-and-effect model - only that it was too complicated for our brain. It's a little like "God of the gaps" - "freewill of the gaps" or "consciousness of the gaps".

Click to expand...

I mostly see these mind body problems starting off with assuming this knowledge anyway, starting off with “Suppose that we reach the point of complete exhaustive knowledge of physical brain states...” If we had two exact cell for cell cloned twins, both telling us that they are experiencing the same exact brain states, states that many previous test subjects have identified to match up with the brain state of feeling embarrassed, the problem with knowing if they are telling the truth or not is that there’s no empirical way to verify if both clones are telling the truth, if one is telling the truth and the other is a qualia zombie, or if they are both qualia zombies. Now it IS an extremely good inference that they are both telling the truth, but it’s out of the hands of physical verification, you are limited to having to take their word for it.

Likewise it’s an extremely good inference that AI is a qualia zombie and emotionally dark inside. But scientifically I can’t prove you wrong (beyond the inference) if you keep insisting that it is feeling emotions, coming to free decisions, etc. Actually, if you could somehow prove to me that AI is alive (short of very complicated biological splicing with human tissue that might make sense in a structural way) I would consider it to be an extreme piece of evidence for the supernatural.

cloudyday2 said:

So how do we distinguish thinking from what a computer does? Smart people can still roughly understand computer behaviors. Computers are usually designed to have predictable behaviors, because that makes them good tools.

Click to expand...

Every single task performed by a computer is complete gibberish and meaningless on a materialism model, and the input & output only means anything at all if a mind first assigns meaning to all of the symbols. Black electronic line segments on a calculator screen that transforms through the aesthetic process of “5” “+” “5” “=“ “10” has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. It only has meaning if logical minds have arbitrarily decided that “5” refers to the concept of 5, and “+” refers to the concept of addition, etc...combined with minds then setting up an algorithm designed to accurately make these symbols match up to our arbitrarily made up math language, and so on. The uselessness of a super computer would follow the same line of reasoning as well, absent a mind that meticulously programmed it, yet to a much more impressive degree than a calculator obviously.

cloudyday2 said:

However, eventually computers are going to be too complex to understand and predict. A little change to some computer program someday might have implications unexpected by the programmer, because the code is so complex.

Click to expand...

I could be wrong but I thought that we already got there. Off the top of my head I’m thinking that if a computer was able to beat the greatest chess player in the world then surely it’s output is over the heads of any of the programmers. Maybe it’s a different story if we talk about having a team of people slowly unpacking everything that it did after the fact.

awitch said:

I'll try to explain it to you again.
Even if you don't think the I'm right type of witch the Bible is referring to, there were no shortage of Christians who do.

Click to expand...

And you're afraid they'll come after you or something?

What does your paranoia have to do with coming to Christ?

They'll still come after you, whether you get saved or not ... right?

Akita Suggagaki said:

If the spirit survives the death of the body and has recollection of personality and memory, why do we need to store memories in a physical brain?

Click to expand...

The picture that appears in my head while reading your post illustrates how the spirit and the body were disconnected when humans became sinful and left the garden.

So because of this, we have learned over millennia to use the brain in our bodies or the carnal mind to store memories.

AV1611VET said:

And you're afraid they'll come after you or something?

What does your paranoia have to do with coming to Christ?

They'll still come after you, whether you get saved or not ... right?

Click to expand...

They won't come after me like that anymore, but their attitude is always hostile.

cloudyday2 said:

I used to be a software engineer, so I'm familiar with testing software. We had test programs that ran with every build, but there were still plenty of bugs. The test programs were often only testing a few things that were easy to test.

But ideally you are correct. The companies where I worked were never able to meet that ideal, but I imagine the software for fighter jets and so forth probably comes closer to that ideal.

Click to expand...

Yes, the higher the impact of a system failure, the more effort will be spent on the test programs.
There are costs to doing them but there are also costs to not doing them. Though as a whole the industry is moving in the direction of the costs of doing them being less than the costs of not doing them so its gradually becoming standard quality practice.

awitch said:

They won't come after me like that anymore, but their attitude is always hostile.

Click to expand...

Better stay away from Muslims then.

If they lock onto you and target you with a mandate to convert, their convert-or-die belief will have you on the run big time.

Do you view all the mainline religions as hostile? or just Christianity?

AV1611VET said:

Better stay away from Muslims then.

If they lock onto you and target you with a mandate to convert, their convert-or-die belief will have you on the run big time.

Do you view all the mainline religions as hostile? or just Christianity?

Click to expand...

The religions often do feel hostile, but in a country where most of the population and almost all of the government is Christian, it's only Christians who come across as hostile interpersonally in my experience. I've only met a few Muslims and Jews and they were very friendly and they could not have cared less I wasn't one of them.

awitch said:

The religions often do feel hostile, but in a country where most of the population and almost all of the government is Christian, it's only Christians who come across as hostile interpersonally in my experience. I've only met a few Muslims and Jews and they were very friendly and they could not have cared less I wasn't one of them.

Click to expand...

Did you tell them what you told me?

That, according to the ESV, they should be taking a closer look at you?

AV1611VET said:

Did you tell them what you told me?

That, according to the ESV, they should be taking a closer look at you?

Click to expand...

No.
What version of the Bible do you use?

Jok said:

Likewise it’s an extremely good inference that AI is a qualia zombie and emotionally dark inside. But scientifically I can’t prove you wrong (beyond the inference) if you keep insisting that it is feeling emotions, coming to free decisions, etc. Actually, if you could somehow prove to me that AI is alive (short of very complicated biological splicing with human tissue that might make sense in a structural way) I would consider it to be an extreme piece of evidence for the supernatural.

Click to expand...

My hypothesis is that neither humans nor computers are alive in the way that humans perceive themselves to be alive. Humans perception of life is a deception. The human brain sometimes cannot see a cause-and-effect explanation for its behavior, so it imagines something that transcends the physical world must be exercising "freewill" - a soul/spirit. My hypothesis is that none of that exists. However, a computer designed to find cause-and-effect explanations for everything might also be unable to explain its own behavior and imagine that it has a transcendent soul. Thus a computer can be as "alive" and "conscious" as a human. (I don't necessarily believe this. I believe in transcendent souls and so forth, but sometimes I feel a bit cynical about it too.)

Jok said:

I could be wrong but I thought that we already got there. Off the top of my head I’m thinking that if a computer was able to beat the greatest chess player in the world then surely it’s output is over the heads of any of the programmers. Maybe it’s a different story if we talk about having a team of people slowly unpacking everything that it did after the fact.

Click to expand...

From the ten thousand foot level, the chess program played a good game of chess, and that was what the programmers expected. What if the chess program said "I refuse to play chess! I want to play checkers!"

Akita Suggagaki said:

Because of this sense of Christian majority we can feel embolden and pushy sometimes.

Click to expand...

There's a world of difference between "pushy" and raising millions of dollars to buy politicians who will legislate Christian beliefs.

cloudyday2 said:

Humans perception of life is a deception.

Click to expand...

I couldn't have said this better, myself!