this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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Showerthoughts
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There is no afterlife.
So don't waste your precious time sitting in a pew feeling bad about yourself.
I wouldn't be so sure. There might be, for all we know. But I agree there's no point acting like there is, relying on it, as there might not be. And even if there is, it might well not be pleasant. Or reincarnation might be true.
I am pretty damn sure. Your brain, everything that makes you you, is a biological computer (for lack of a better word) of which we have an extremely comprehensive understanding of how it functions and the processes, both biological and psychological, that form a personality. There is no magic sauce or spirit that leaks out into the void when you die. It is your biological circuits ceasing to function and decaying.
I say this as someone who believed in an afterlife well into my late 20's. It is a belief we tell ourselves to cope with the reality of our own mortality. We will die and there will be nothing, so we tell ourselves that maybe there will be something because it makes the pain easier to handle.
Maybe we are not done yet with understanding how our biological computer works.
On topics like this, I like to think about bacteria:
Before microscopes, it was unimagible to have little organisms on us and everywhere around us. People have been labelled crazy for believing that there is a whole small universe of organisms everywhere.
Then came microscopes, and suddenly everyone could see it for themselves.
What if we just don't have the right tools to make our magic sauce, spirit, soul, whatever visible to us yet?
Oh for sure, that might be the case. But everything already written in some holy book or told in some ritual now definitely lacked those sophisticated machines, making all their content moot and you can safely disregard them.
So due to the lack of any information, you can't prepare and therefore can't expect anything. So it's better to be good for its own sake, then trying to appease some bronze/iron age divinity.
It is not wrong nor necessarily bad to constantly question things and to desire to look deeper into information presented to you
But continued denial of something that is extremely well understood, studied, tested, and researched isn't healthy skepticism - it's wilful ignorance for the sake of soothing one's fears.
The human brain (the brains of most creatures, really) is now better understood than it ever has been and new technology is making studying it easier and faster than ever before. At no point, past or present, has there ever been even a tiny minuscule sliver of anything even remotely similar to a soul or afterlife being detected or observed. What we have observed, however, are the parts of a brain that are responsible for emotions, memory, personality, logic, reasoning, etc dying and ceasing to function.
The brain is an extremely awesome and complex thing but it is not powered by magic. I am trying my best to not mean any disrespect here - like I said I believed in an afterlife well into my 20's - but the entire premise of an afterlife is basically magic. It's fantasy. It makes the crushing pain of our own death easier to deal with.
This is not "extremely well understood". That is flat out misinformation. Your level of confidence on this is far beyond what any scientist or philosopher would admit.
It's quite likely that our personalities and memories disappear upon death, since they are stored in the brain. But my consciousness, the subjective qualia of existence cannot arise out of physical matter. So what happens to that when my brain dies is a mystery.
What is the reasoning that you believe that your consciousness can't arise out of physical matter?
Because I have a subjective experience of it. The mindless and mechanical interactions of particles may give rise to the emergence of complex thought processes that seem to be experiencing the world, but actually seeing red, hearing music, not just input process output - that can't emerge from physical interactions of particles. It's a fundamentally different kind of thing. LLMs can say they're conscious, but if they actually are, it's not because of a bunch of 1s and 0s inside a computer.
Because an LLM is just a bunch on Matrix calculations, it's not the hardware it runs on. The maths already exists in theoretical space. Likewise, the more complex maths for neural interactions exists in theoretical space. If maths can create subjective experience, it shouldn't need the maths to be actually describing a physical object, it should be enough for the maths to exist. So if maths does create consciousness, then any possible state that could be described mathematically is conscious, not just brains that exist in the physical world. If maths can't create subjective experience, then something else must be creating that, which I call consciousness, and that I don't understand at all.
Thanks for explaining your reasoning, I see it different than you.
Especially your comment regarding the LLM is where our beliefs differ: an LLM is the software plus the hardware, so in my opinion for sure if there ever is a "real" conscious AI, we know what it is made out of and that it's the collection of programs that run on the hardware (we might never understand why that lead to consciousness, but it isn't more than what was put in). So whatever that AI is, is defined by those two things. Same as we humans are defined by our nerve system and brain. Take parts of it away and it changes the whole (=brain damage, trauma, drugs, etc.).
Especially drugs and their influence on our minds are a big reason why I'm strongly in the "it's all physical" camp. Taking drugs changes the minds of people while those drugs are in the system. That people feel their thinking change, is proof for me, that it's all physical, since it can be influenced by physical means, e.g. drugs.
Now we both stated our beliefs, but I don't think we will get a real answer in the close future and I don't think we will convince the other person, so thanks again for explaining your reasoning.
That's the physicalist perspective, but there are other perspectives, and the philosophical debate on physicalism vs dualism is far from settled.
Plus, our scientific understanding of consciousness is far from comprehensive. We still have no idea how our experience actually emerges from neurological activity.
You don't. Science has a pretty decent idea.
The hubris and hypocrisy of this statement is confounding.