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[Unique Consciousness]
June 21st, 2007Unique Consciousness
I had a rather engaging conversation with some of the Crew. It involved consciousness and whether it exists as some sort of metaphysical entity or just a byproduct of a consistent, albeit creative, collection of synapse-firings in the brain. I’m really steady in my belief on this matter, but I know a lot of people are not. The ‘metaphysical entity’ is called a lot of things by a lot of different people, Souls, Jiva, Essentia, Spirit, and Atma being a few. I like the term essentia and will use it henceforth.
My stance is the latter of the above-stated. Consciousness is a result of experiences for survival based off of nature and nurture real or imagined. Where these experiences came from is irrelevant, if you had a dream about something and it since changed the way you do things it is still a part of your consciousness. This is all contained in your brain as synapse-firings. I’ll call this the Brain-Contained-Consciouness or BCC.
I don’t believe that essentia exists with regards to the following ideas. Proof exists that if you remove chunks of your brain, then how you act is changed. You can suffer from brain damage and from then on you, as a person, as a conscious entity, have changed. The You of Now can be completely different in mannerisms than that You of Earlier. Of course, you can always counter with, “But essentia is tied to the brain and thus any loss to one causes problems with the other.” To that I have Leibniz to back me up. Gottfried Leibniz penned the Identity of Indiscernibles which, essentially and slightly extracted, states that if A looks like B and in all other ways behaves as B, then A is B. This can be re-wrote contextually as: If essentia looks like BCC and in all other ways behaves as BCC, then essentia is BCC. Which states that essentia doesn’t exist and your perception of essentia is actually perception of BCC. For some more help, I’ll consult with William of Ockham regarding Occam’s Razor. It states, translated, “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” Awkwardly enough, the wording is ridiculously accurate in this instance.
This argument is a necessity for the future of computing. Essentially, if this essentia exists and cannot be synthesized, then something of true artificial intelligence cannot exist. Holding to Leibniz’s Law, the instant something passes the Turing Test the argument will be solved.
Furthermore, the way I stand is that if you could recreate a used human brain entirely, particularly mechanically, and perfectly mimic the synapse firings in a way that would allow for some feedback, you’d end up with something that would be a complete clone of the biological version of the brain. This also goes that if you could, atom for atom, recreate an existing human brain and multiply it, you’d have complete clones of the individual. The complete clone would, as my theory, react in the entirely same way as the original.
So there.
Off note:
My new Shuffle high score: 51670
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