(Yesterday, 07:18 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: I'm far more amenable to the idea that a spirit - as per Richard Gossinger - is drawn to the complexity of certain corporeal forms than I am to the idea that Turing Machines manifest thinking if the right program is run. [The former may be implausible to the skeptical mind but the latter to me seems far more bizarre.]
On the former... that does raise some interesting thoughts for me ~ perhaps it's not just the form, but the environment those forms tend to create, the behaviours, the interactions, that also interest it. Without prior of experience having embodied a particular form, it might be more of a curiosity, to see what the spirit can learn from it, if anything. With more experience, the spirit might then start to develop ideas about what it wants to achieve in the long-run, to experience, to learn.
A Turing Machine offers no such flexibility ~ on top of that, there is no astral archetype for the spirit to tune into, to express through, by which it can embody the fetus or plant-seed or whatever of that form. (Yeah, I've been wondering about plant-incarnation now, as well...)
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
~ Carl Jung
(Today, 02:02 AM)Valmar Wrote: On the former... that does raise some interesting thoughts for me ~ perhaps it's not just the form, but the environment those forms tend to create, the behaviours, the interactions, that also interest it. Without prior of experience having embodied a particular form, it might be more of a curiosity, to see what the spirit can learn from it, if anything. With more experience, the spirit might then start to develop ideas about what it wants to achieve in the long-run, to experience, to learn.
A Turing Machine offers no such flexibility ~ on top of that, there is no astral archetype for the spirit to tune into, to express through, by which it can embody the fetus or plant-seed or whatever of that form. (Yeah, I've been wondering about plant-incarnation now, as well...)
Yeah I'm highly doubtful but I do want to remain open minded. I do feel logically it just raises a lot of questions, for example if a program is consciousness are you creating a new consciousness every time you run it?
What if a thread switches out from running the program to run another, then switches back?
edit: In the intro to Then I am Myself the World, neuroscientist Christoff Koch says in his new book:
"Intelligence is computable, Consciousness is Not"
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
(This post was last modified: Today, 02:56 AM by Sciborg_S_Patel. Edited 1 time in total.)
(Today, 02:47 AM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: Yeah I'm highly doubtful but I do want to remain open minded. I do feel logically it just raises a lot of questions, for example if a program is consciousness are you creating a new consciousness every time you run it?
What if a thread switches out from running the program to run another, then switches back?
If we presume for the sake of the argument that this is happening literally, then you'd be indeed creating consciousness every time you run the program. When a thread switches, you'd be putting that consciousness into suspended animation as the CPU puts it on hold momentarily.
Bring a whole new meaning to the memes around killing and aborting parent processes and their child processes or threads!
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
~ Carl Jung
![[-]](https://psiencequest.net/forums/images/collapse.png)
