The blind ghost

[dantana]

Picture yourself in your car. The windows are all blacked out. The only information you have from with the outside world is through video camera and a monitor. The monitor is your windshield. It's 3-d and the definition is such that you can't tell it's not the real thing. Now, transfer this over to existence as we understand it. Essentially, we are an entity/awareness, trapped inside a physical body vehicle. We are isolated in a separate shell and interact with the outside world of things through our sensory equipment sending information to our brain.

So, the question I have is, when the physical body vehicle dies, and the spirit is ejected, how does it see? Is the spirit also a vehicle with another little man inside it's head? J. Smith says yes. Spirit is also made of matter and entities from the 'intelligence realm' were inserted into these bodies. Ok, fine. Then what about the intelligence realm entities, is there a little man inside their head? Hmm. Anybody? Physics Guy? Bueller?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

[drumdude]

The afterlife is just assumed to be the base reality, and eternal. Of course there is nothing preventing it from being an infinite regression. Well, in Mormonism God has to obey logic and physical limitations, so perhaps that is an argument against there being an infinite regression.

Mormonism is unique in Christianity because the afterlife exists in this same universe. You essentially just get transported to another place: near Kolob. So this life is less like the inside of a car, and more like just a different building in the same town where you're being tested.

[dantana]

The afterlife is just assumed to be the base reality, and eternal.

Good one. I like it.

For me, I think I still cling to some form of Idealism. I think I want to anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism

[Physics Guy]

I suppose Joseph Smith might be commended for biting the bullet and just coming right out and saying that spirit is a form of matter. It's arguably worth something to stop the traditional waffling and take a stand. For my money, though, Smith really bit the wrong bullet. The traditional wisdom was wise to waffle on this one, because spirit as matter simply doesn't make sense.

Instead I'm sure that the so-called "strong A.I." view is essentially right, that mind and spirit and soul and consciousness, whether distinct or synonymous, are patterns rather than substances. My mind is in my brain in the way that a story is in a book, not in the way that ink and paper are in the book.

In a sense this means that we are even more like blind ghosts, stuck inside and seeing the world indirectly, than if we were material homunculi ensconced in our skulls listening to the beats of our pineal glands, or whatever.

If our minds are patterns within our brains, the coding scheme is non-trivial; by no means is everything that goes on in our brains part of our minds. Some of the patterns are, as it were, only carrier waves. They are part of us, but only as infrastructure; it is the subtle modulation of the monotonous basic pattern that encodes our signal. Some of the pattern is perhaps like grammar rather than like story.

And a lot of what goes on our brains is, as far as we are concerned, merely noise. It isn't part of our pattern. Who or what is to say what distinguishes me from the noise? I don't know. I think that may be the big question of life.

Physics hasn't helped me with this question so far. I think instead about fiction. Some fictional characters just aren't real characters. They check the boxes for the stock characteristics of their roles, and they say and do a bunch of arbitrary things in the plot, but they don't have any recognisable personality. Others instead seem more real than their stories or even than their whole fictional worlds. Some fictional characters are so vivid that people write fan fiction putting them into wildly different settings and plots, and dang it you have to admit it: that really is Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple or whoever, looking for the Maltese Falcon in the Mos Eisley cantina.

I'm pretty sure the metaphor of fiction is in some important ways completely inadequate. But if there's such a thing as eternal salvation I think it must have less to do with any subtle wisps of matter surviving outside our skulls than it has to do with becoming more of a Spock than a Red Shirt. If we give God enough to work with, God can write us into new adventures; and if it's God doing that, then that will really be us, living on.

[huckelberry]

Physics Guy, I think your comment is thoughtful and at least to me makes sense, thank you.

[drumdude]

Instead I'm sure that the so-called "strong A.I." view is essentially right, that mind and spirit and soul and consciousness, whether distinct or synonymous, are patterns rather than substances. My mind is in my brain in the way that a story is in a book, not in the way that ink and paper are in the book.

This is missed by nearly all religious apologists. They love to claim it's absurd that we're just "molecules in motion that magically think." I think Peterson has some phrase about "meat bags" to be even more derogatory towards the materialist position.

But they're being as ignorant as one who is surprised that paper pulp and ink could create the world of Middle Earth. Tolkein arranged the paper and ink, and evolution via natural selection over millions of years arranged the molecules which allow us to think.

[dantana]

Instead I'm sure that the so-called "strong A.I." view is essentially right, that mind and spirit and soul and consciousness, whether distinct or synonymous, are patterns rather than substances. My mind is in my brain in the way that a story is in a book, not in the way that ink and paper are in the book.

This is missed by nearly all religious apologists. They love to claim it's absurd that we're just "molecules in motion that magically think." I think Peterson has some phrase about "meat bags" to be even more derogatory towards the materialist position.

But they're being as ignorant as one who is surprised that paper pulp and ink could create the world of Middle Earth. Tolkein arranged the paper and ink, and evolution via natural selection over millions of years arranged the molecules which allow us to think.

And that's why I threw up the Bat signal for P.G. I'll be sure to include drumdude next time too.

[Rivendale]

The afterlife is just assumed to be the base reality, and eternal. Of course there is nothing preventing it from being an infinite regression. Well, in Mormonism God has to obey logic and physical limitations, so perhaps that is an argument against there being an infinite regression.

Mormonism is unique in Christianity because the afterlife exists in this same universe. You essentially just get transported to another place: near Kolob. So this life is less like the inside of a car, and more like just a different building in the same town where you're being tested.

Brigham Young proclaimed the spirit world is here.

If the Lord would permit it, and it was His will that it should be done, you could see the spirits that have departed from this world, as plainly as you now see bodies with your natural eyes. Where is the spirit world? It is right here.

But then again he wanted to make Adam god, again.

[Physics Guy]

As far as I know nobody currently has any idea how consciousness works in the brain. I'm not even aware of any promising hypotheses. At least when I was last following these issues closely, for that matter, even attempting to define "consciousness" seemed to be considered a newbie mistake. It was only going to make you look stupid, because it would be way too easy to cook up scenarios in which your definition would obviously not fit.

Nevertheless there is nothing implausible about the mind being something the brain does. The brain is complicated enough. We do understand microchips, and they can do awfully complicated things nowadays. If matter can run Halo Infinite then I don't see why it cannot run me.

I don't see that this makes much difference for too many religious issues, however. To say that human beings are only matter is like saying that books are only matter. In one way it's true but unless you're speaking in a pretty special context it's awfully silly to say. Form is decisively important even for the simplest material phenomena. H2O can be steam or a snowflake.

As far as I've ever been able to tell, you can pretty much hot-swap strong-A.I. for substance dualism in any religious discussion and it doesn't seem to change anything.

[dantana]

Thanks guys for the comments! The problem with threads like this though is it's difficult to contemplate the hard problem of consciousness, drink beer and watch M. night football at the same time.

I believe I will continue to maintain a worldview seated in Idealism because of reasons off topic to this. As to consciousness though I tend to lean toward a universal awareness as opposed to the concept of separate souls. The eternal regress of the little man in the head being my primary stumbling block. It just seems to me that if an entity is separate and confined in a sphere or shell unto itself, that it has it's own thought processes, it's own personality, then it will need sensory equipment and a main core to interact with anything outside of itself. I mean, even if information received is through some sort of telepathy, it's still information input into a contemplative center.

How is the God of Abraham himself, as defined, not a solipsist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism