On our conciousness
Offline I was have a conversation with a Theist earlier today, and I admit I was stumbling slightly(Only recently have I become a full-fledged Atheist) when he brought up the notion of our consciousness as strong evidence for the existence of a particular deity. This immediately struck me as absurd, and I brought up the fact that this is the result of us being the most intelligent, highly evolved species on this planet--this is what you would expect from such a species. But he refuted saying that no, this is a completely unique trait that no other species even comes close to having. I haven't done much research into this, but I thought that other primates had shown, to some degree, a sense of "self". (Showing some primate a mirror, ect)
I'm hoping fellow Atheists here could help me further understand the absurdity of this line of thought, it would be much appreciated in my naiviety! Cheers.
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You got it right.
Even Monkeys (chimps, gorillas and organgatans are not "monkeys"
show signs of self awareness:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050723/fob6.asp
In fact, these monkeys show an interesting middle ground between self awareness and a lack of self awareness: (from the article)
"Capuchins' reactions signal an intermediate self-awareness that lies somewhere between seeing the mirror image as another individual and recognizing the reflected figure as self, according to a team led by psychologist Frans B.M. de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta."
Originally, it was held that only humans, orangatans and chimpanzees had shown evidence of self awareness in mirror tests:
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521025915
http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327078in0902_6
But now we have evidence for dolphins as well:
Evidence of self-awareness in the bottlenose dolphin
http://www.earthtrust.org/delbook.html
And this article discusses how self awareness is a product of evolution:
http://cogprints.org/4533/
"Hitler burned people like Anne Frank, for that we call him evil.
"God" burns Anne Frank eternally. For that, theists call him 'good.'
"Consciousness" goes beyond self-awareness and also includes subjectivity and sapience. I don't know if those traits are shared with any animals, I just wanted to ensure you had opportunity to explore the breadth of the subject.
"The map appears more real to us than the land." - Lawrence
I don't think you can say anything about consciousness that you couldn't say about an piece of software that routinely checks and updates the status of the operating system. Consciousness simply looks like a programming trick that allows us to model ourselves as being separate from our environment and thereby allow certain social and technical perspectives.
Lazy is a word we use when someone isn't doing what we want them to do.
- Dr. Joy Brown
The two qualities I mentioned, subjectivity and sapience, are not posessed by software. A program is purely objective, never subjective. These things permit decisions to be made despite conflict and contradiction. At best, a program can only pick a random outcome in these cases.
"The map appears more real to us than the land." - Lawrence
Why? We can have evolved these traits naturally. Is he saying that we couldn't possibly have evolved these traits naturally?
Following his reasoning, there is also strong evidence for aliens from another planet etc...
It seems his contention that no other species have self-awareness is flawed (above posts). But even so - were we the only species to have self-awareness, then what does that prove?
Religion is the ultimate con-job. It cons the conned, and it cons the conner.
Mr.T : "I ain't gettin' on no damn plane [sic]" - environmentalism at it's best
Are you sure?
Machines have subjective inputs just like the rest of us.
Sapience seems to be a matter of complexity rather than of 'type'.
In what way are programs objective?
If I understand you as I think I do then the 'objectivity' we program into our machines is because we are not looking for a subjective thinker from them. We want them to carry out tasks based on an objective database rather than subjective 'character' and 'personal experience/inputs'.
The fundamental language of programming is ultimately binary - on or off. It's because a program is meant to take input and translate it to electronic circuit output. Either a circuit is open or closed, active or dormant. No matter what complexities we layer onto this, they will always boil down to zeroes and ones. This is not subjective.
If someone wanted to argue that people are not subjective that might be more valid, but also extremely difficult to prove or disprove. That's why subjectivity is axiomatic - taken for granted.
"The map appears more real to us than the land." - Lawrence
Like you say, the physical states of machines do not involve subjectivity. The machine has a physical state and that state is a matter of objective fact. However, when we talk about subjectivity we are not referring to a physical state. When we talk about 'input' and 'output' we are talking about functions rather than the physical states that 'realize' these functions.
How about this example:
Cooking an egg is a function.
The physical realizer of this function could be a person boiling an egg in a pan of water using an oven. The physical state depends on the person cooking, the pan they are using, the type of oven they are using... all of these variables affect the physical state but not the function of cooking the egg. You start with a raw egg and finish with a boiled egg.
Likewise, our mental processes are also functions.
We have inputs (our senses) and outputs (our actions).
Subjectivity is based on the fact that our inputs are unique to us. Anything with an 'input' function can have this kind of subjectivity.
The objective conditions of the 'realizer' don't affect this.
So I see it theoretically possible for there to be a mind like a human mind in that it has all the same functions, just that these functions have a silicon realizers rather than biological ones.
Did that make sense?
I tried to use technical terms as sparingly as possible.
I appreciate your trying to steer clear of technical terms. I don't think I'm yet understanding what you're saying. I'll tell you what I think you're saying, so maybe you'll be more able to correct me.
A machine or program is subjective because it is subject to variable inputs. The process is constant, but because the output is based on variable input, it is in a sense biased to the input. Thus, subjectivity.
Is that the idea, or drastically off base?
"The map appears more real to us than the land." - Lawrence
That sounds more or less right to me.
Our subjectivity is the input we get into our minds.
Our senses, our feelings, our thoughts, they all constitute our unique experience of the world. The one having this unique experience is
the 'subject' and all facts that depend on the subject's person experience are called subjective. So my personal tastes in food depend on what my tougue tells my mind about the food it is tasting - it depends on my subjective experience.
Objective facts do not depend on a subject.
The biological make-up of a person is objective.
So if our minds, feelings and experience are a caused by my biological make-up then they are determined by objective facts about the world.
Yes, I understand now, and in that sense I believe a program can be subjective.
What of sapience?
Is sapience a synonym of wisdom?
Wisdom is a complex idea.
It's a combination of knowledge, experience and intuition.
These in turn can be described as functions.
Knowledge is when propositions are evaluated true or false and then this information is remembered. Intuition is a subconscious processing of information around you. Experience is the process through which we build up our knowledge and train our intuition.
So as a person has more experience of the world, as faced more problems, has practiced over-coming them, this is wisdom. Ofcourse, it's not simply a matter of experiencing things. You have to learn from these experiences. So a young person can be wiser than an older person, and through complacency or other possible downfalls this younger person might lose wisdom as they grow, but generally as rule one tends to grow in wisdom.
This is my understanding of it anyway.
What are your thoughts on wisdom?