Are spirits stupid?

[_SeekerofTruth]

Tarski said:
I've seen that before. You seem to think that the Churchlands decided to be materialists and then suddenly realized there was mind to account for and then dishonestly tried to fake it.
Not so, I think we all start out with this intuition. But it never gets articulated in any sensible way.
I started out being really into the immaterial nature of consciousness when I was quite young. I took guys like Dennett to be fools and my intellectual enemies with regard to consciousness. But then slowly I started to get the point. It took me three reads of Dennett's book before I got it. It is very counter intuitive but at least is is articulate and not a brute intuition. Words have meanings and can be connected to experiement etc.

Your experience seems to have been very much like that of Susan Blackmore. As I recall, she started out as a parapsychologist but was never able to find convincing supporting evidence.

Tarski said:
I challenge you to make any sense out of "immaterial consciousness". What does it mean? What characterizes the "immaterial"? How do you know you are saying anything meaningful? Lets have some precise or functional definitions. How does one distinguish material from immaterial? This line of thought never ever gets of the ground. Lets have at it!

Let's assume that I am a materialist and I want to give the simplest explanation for human behavior. As such, I believe that all behavior can be explained in terms of brain function. Therefore anything anyone says is a result of neurons firing, say, in Broca's area.

I ask you, "Are you conscious?"

You may say, "Yes I am conscious."

I assume the simplest explanation: that there is no such thing as consciousness. All that happened was that the appropriate neurons in your Broca's area fired to give the verbal response, "Yes I am conscious." But I play along and say, "Prove to me that you are conscious."

First of all, are you having the experience of being conscious? If you are, is it real to you and if so, how do you prove it? How can you demonstrate your consciousness to me in some physical way so that I would be convinced that you are having an experience of being conscious? Switching hats, now as a non-materialist, I contend that the experience you are having, that all of us apparently have, has no physical representation, but for each of us it is very real.

[_The Nehor]

So what would be the point of learning anything in the pre-existence if it were all just going to be erased? Why not just start our intelligence at birth?

I assume there are attributes that can be developed without access to your memory. Of course it's also possible that for a Spirit to be able to inhabit a human body there must be some kind of progression to a certain point in which case it's necessary just to get here, whether or not it helps. I'd put my money on the former though.

1. what are you using to establish that a veil exists? The fact that we don't remember our pre-earth lives could be because there was no such thing. Isn't it entirely possible that the concept of the veil is simply man trying to explain what he doesn't understand?

2. how does anyone know what a spirit looks like? Does my spirit have gray hair, blue eyes, and red-painted toe nails?

3. can a spirit learn? or are we just relearning what we already knew?

1. God told me so no to your second question.
2. Some have seen them. Me too.
3. Yes, and a partial yes.

[_asbestosman]

Is the spirit the shape of what the human will be and then have to shrink down to fit the baby? I mean, does the spirit already look like the human will look like if they grow to old age? Or is the spirit just human looking in a very generic sense and then takes on the trait of the human it inhabits? Are the spirits assigned to humans? Are the humans already paired with the spirits -- as in foreknown that this babe will be born? I hope that makes sense.. It's sort of confusing to me and I'm not certain I'm asking my questions in a way that makes much more sense. Sorry.

We don't know precisely how much like a particular human a spirit will look like before it is assigned to a body. All we know is that the have gender and looks humanoid before they inhabit a body.

So, the spirit is shapeless and then takes on the form of the human? That's right?

Nope, it already looks like a human and has gender.

Why are spirits placed in humans? Is it so that they are somehow linked to God? Then the spirit takes on the shape and form of the human, has the experiences of the human, etc... and then when the human life is through the spirit returns to the spirit world with all the qualities of the human it inhabited?

I don't know why spirits are necessary. Essentially the spirit is the core of who we are and it is immortal. Why do we need a body? I don't know that either, but apparently the answer is usually because God has one and it helps us learn.

[_Gazelam]

Our spirit bodies had their beginning in pre-existence when we were born as the spirit children of God our Father. Through that birth process spirit element was organized into intelligent entities. The bodies so created have all the parts of mortal bodies. The Brother of Jared saw Christ's spirit finger and then his whole spirit body. "I am Jesus Christ," that glorious Personage said. "This body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit; ... and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh." (Ether 3:14-17.)

We had spirit bodies in pre-existence; these bodies are now housed temporarily in mortal tabernacles; during the period between death and the resurrection, we will be inseperably connected in the resurrection to form immortal or spiritual bodies.

Animals, fowls, fishes, plants, and all forms of life were first creates as distinct spirit entities in pre-existence before they were created "naturally upon the face of the earth." That is, they lived as spirit entities before coming to this earth; they were spirit animals, spirit birds, and so forth. (Moses 3:1-9.) Each spirit creation had the same form as to outward appearance as it now has in mortality - "the spirit of man," the revelation specifies, being "in the likeness of his person, as also the spirit of the beast, and every other creature which God has created." (D&C 77:2.)

See also 1 Nephi 11:11, a personal appearance of the Holy Ghost, who is in the form of a man, and in this verse acts as a teacher to Nehi, showing him the Savior and his ministry which was yet to come.

[_Tarski]

So am I conscious?

So I check.
How do I check? Look inside myself? What does that mean? Is that like when my computer runs diagnostics. Could it tell me what it was doing, how it knew this or that about itself? Well, I could program it to say things like, Oh I feel good about that harddrive. Or my memory is “fullish”. I can’t describe it!
I could program a robot to detect birds in flight and yet not program it to explain what it is "like". I could program it to say “oh the sky just goes all “birdish” when there is a bird”. It wouldn’t think this was a problem unless I programmed it to think it was a problem.


So I check myself now.
How do I check? Look inside myself? What does that mean?

Let me try?

Hmmm. Well, should I close my eyes? OK, I sense blackness. Is that consciousness or just a lack of light? I open them, I see the yellow book again. Is that consciousness or is it a yellow book?
Now I wonder. I imagine programming a super powerful computer to use the language of consciousness. I imitate the brain with my design. I teach it, innately to use terms like consciousness, inner feelings etc. I do such a good job that it cries or gets angry if I challenge the notion that it is conscious. It talks just like you. It argues philosophy even better than you. It calls its consciousness "immaterial". It can't see what is happening so I programmed it to think in these terms (just like evolution and society programmed me to use certain standin terms and ideas like consciousness. I am committed to them, they are emotionally held, innate).
"I am conscious damn it!" my robot shouts! It is looking at the yellow book and reminding itself sublingually how hard it is to say what that "yellow” is. (I didn't give it the ability so it confabulates emotionally in desperation)
But it can't be real consciousness can it? It is just a robot.

How do you know I am not just so programmed?

I ask my robot how it knows that the book is yellow. It doesn't know. But social pressure means it must have an answer. So I programmed it to respond in a way accepted by others. It says, ”I don't know, it is just yellow, there is this something, it is beyond words” (yah, I know, I didn't waste space giving it the power to see what was really happening).

Now, maybe this consciousness thing is just a failure in us to see what is really happening. We certainly can't see if we look inside the head. We don't understand what we see. We can't read the meaning of all that neural activity. So we say it can't be there, it’s not material.
Oh really. Why not? Because is SEEMS like it isn't. Because it seems obvious? Is that a good reason?

OK, so it seems we can't even say what is at stake. You can't even say what it is and now you have met a “conscious person” who claims to have realized that it’s a magic show, that it isn't what it seems.
What could that mean? Did I become a machine?

We have been wrong about the true nature of what we encounter in other areas. Things are mostly space and made of atoms. Heat is just vibrating molecules. It doesn't seem like it but that’s what heat is.
So, why should we be any less confused about the information we get from inside ourselves? Why should we have better categories to describe our proprioception?
We call it consciousness, like we called that material property heat (which also seemed ghostly). But it isn't what it seems. It isn't a given irreducible. It seems continuous and immaterial because we aren’t privy to the reality.

So what is this consciousness? An intuition? An innate magical theory about what is going on inside us?
An irresistible innate emotionally held and mostly inarticulate theory about what goes on in us that makes us say this or that?
Shall we just point dumbly and say “it’s that!”. “You know, you know, that!”, what it’s like to be me! (“like”? like what? Is that a comparison with something else?)

[_Tarski]

Our spirit bodies had their beginning in pre-existence when we were born as the spirit children of God our Father. Through that birth process spirit element was organized into intelligent entities. The bodies so created have all the parts of mortal bodies. The Brother of Jared saw Christ's spirit finger and then his whole spirit body. "I am Jesus Christ," that glorious Personage said. "This body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit; ... and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh." (Ether 3:14-17.)

We had spirit bodies in pre-existence; these bodies are now housed temporarily in mortal tabernacles; during the period between death and the resurrection, we will be inseperably connected in the resurrection to form immortal or spiritual bodies.

Animals, fowls, fishes, plants, and all forms of life were first creates as distinct spirit entities in pre-existence before they were created "naturally upon the face of the earth." That is, they lived as spirit entities before coming to this earth; they were spirit animals, spirit birds, and so forth. (Moses 3:1-9.) Each spirit creation had the same form as to outward appearance as it now has in mortality - "the spirit of man," the revelation specifies, being "in the likeness of his person, as also the spirit of the beast, and every other creature which God has created." (D&C 77:2.)

See also 1 Nephi 11:11, a personal appearance of the Holy Ghost, who is in the form of a man, and in this verse acts as a teacher to Nehi, showing him the Savior and his ministry which was yet to come.

Yes yes. And not one bit of this makes any good sense in light of what we now know about ourselves, why we have teeth, why we look so much like apes, why we look like our parents, how our DNA developed from lower forms, how it gets changed and coded and so on. . We know that this shape is what it is becuase form follows function. Functions that are mortal and meaty, muddy and earthly. Functions that match a mortal situation that could make no sense for an ominpotent God. The idea is no more sensible than the idea that the grand canyon has its exact shape not becuase of its tortuous history of erosion but becuase it was an imitation of an eternal grand canyon of the exact same shape. Its like thinking that there has always been a Coca Cola logo since forever and ever, like this planet was copied from another one that also had a United States with a Florida down there looking like genitals.

We are a living history of a bloody tooth and claw history of death and fighting to survive. Unique circumstances that have never happened just like this before. Our form has a reason in biology not in theology.

God could not be expected to be a primate shape anymore than he could be expected to be an ardvark shape.
If a primate God gave rise to us, it would be like a lawn mower giving rise to a lawn mower factory and all before there were lawns to be mowed.

Explain this shape in terms that actually explain something. Your view explains nothing. It just makes it a brute unexplicable fact. Well we do have a story to tell that explains why we look like apes, why we have eyebrows and flat feet and hair, and asses that crap and toenails.
Why would a God have toenails? Why nipples? Why hair just on the head and a little bit elsewhere? Why would an omnipotent being need to deal with gravity when he can fly?
Most of all what led up to that shape?
Now listen! If I look like I do because I was procreated by a primate looking God then why does an ape look like it does? Why does an elephant look like it does? Mother and Father elephant Gods procreating elephant spirit bodies??? Our shape is just an animal shape. Not special.
--->

[

[_Tarski]

Essentially the spirit is the core of who we are and it is immortal. Why do we need a body? I don't know that either, but apparently the answer is usually because God has one and it helps us learn.

Can you imagine a future where people loose track of technology and then far in the future somebody finds a room with power and working computers. After a while they figure out how to use them. But they have no idea how they work. They look inside but they see nothing that seem like it could produce what shows up on the screen.
They notice each computer is a bit different. They invent the idea of a thinking or computing "essence" in the computer. Broken ones don't have this essence anymore and that's why they don't work. They are "dead".
Then someone wonders why the essence can't exist on its own? They conjecture that it does but we can't see it.
Now when someone comes along and say, hey you know what? I think this essence is not a real thing. Its all just those parts in there. Everyone is incredulous (lets say that they have gotten really used to this--like as used to it as we are to using our brains). They think this guy a fool. They claim he can't see the obvious.

Can you see my point?

[_SeekerofTruth]

Tarski wrote:

So am I conscious?

So I check.
How do I check? Look inside myself? What does that mean? Is that like when my computer runs diagnostics. Could it tell me what it was doing, how it knew this or that about itself? Well, I could program it to say things like, Oh I feel good about that harddrive. Or my memory is “fullish”. I can’t describe it!
I could program a robot to detect birds in flight and yet not program it to explain what it is "like". I could program it to say “oh the sky just goes all “birdish” when there is a bird”. It wouldn’t think this was a problem unless I programmed it to think it was a problem.


So I check myself now.
How do I check? Look inside myself? What does that mean?

Let me try?

Hmmm. Well, should I close my eyes? OK, I sense blackness. Is that consciousness or just a lack of light? I open them, I see the yellow book again. Is that consciousness or is it a yellow book?
Now I wonder. I imagine programming a super powerful computer to use the language of consciousness. I imitate the brain with my design. I teach it, innately to use terms like consciousness, inner feelings etc. I do such a good job that it cries or gets angry if I challenge the notion that it is conscious. It talks just like you. It argues philosophy even better than you. It calls its consciousness "immaterial". It can't see what is happening so I programmed it to think in these terms (just like evolution and society programmed me to use certain standin terms and ideas like consciousness. I am committed to them, they are emotionally held, innate).
"I am conscious damn it!" my robot shouts! It is looking at the yellow book and reminding itself sublingually how hard it is to say what that "yellow” is. (I didn't give it the ability so it confabulates emotionally in desperation)
But it can't be real consciousness can it? It is just a robot.

How do you know I am not just so programmed?

I ask my robot how it knows that the book is yellow. It doesn't know. But social pressure means it must have an answer. So I programmed it to respond in a way accepted by others. It says, ”I don't know, it is just yellow, there is this something, it is beyond words” (yah, I know, I didn't waste space giving it the power to see what was really happening).

Now, maybe this consciousness thing is just a failure in us to see what is really happening. We certainly can't see if we look inside the head. We don't understand what we see. We can't read the meaning of all that neural activity. So we say it can't be there, it’s not material.
Oh really. Why not? Because is SEEMS like it isn't. Because it seems obvious? Is that a good reason?

OK, so it seems we can't even say what is at stake. You can't even say what it is and now you have met a “conscious person” who claims to have realized that it’s a magic show, that it isn't what it seems.
What could that mean? Did I become a machine?

We have been wrong about the true nature of what we encounter in other areas. Things are mostly space and made of atoms. Heat is just vibrating molecules. It doesn't seem like it but that’s what heat is.
So, why should we be any less confused about the information we get from inside ourselves? Why should we have better categories to describe our proprioception?
We call it consciousness, like we called that material property heat (which also seemed ghostly). But it isn't what it seems. It isn't a given irreducible. It seems continuous and immaterial because we aren’t privy to the reality.

So what is this consciousness? An intuition? An innate magical theory about what is going on inside us?
An irresistible innate emotionally held and mostly inarticulate theory about what goes on in us that makes us say this or that?
Shall we just point dumbly and say “it’s that!”. “You know, you know, that!”, what it’s like to be me! (“like”? like what? Is that a comparison with something else?)

Your self-analysis is interesting but seems to avoid my question. Perhaps I did not phrase it clearly. Do you have the experience of being conscious -- of being aware of what's going on around you -- even of metacognition? When you wrote were you aware of what you were writing or was it purely unconscious behavior?

I assume that I am interacting with a sentient being similar to myself and not a biological machine or a computer, although I may be deceived. Do you admit to being conscious? If so, demonstrate your consciousness in some physical way that cannot be misinterpreted as the activity of your brain.

Maybe I misunderstood and you do not think you are really conscious -- that what you are experiencing as consciousness, if you are experiencing anything, is an illusion (if so, who or what is experiencing the illusion?). It can't be real because you are only your functioning brain and a brain cannot be sentient or aware of itself. If it says it is, it is only the brain saying it is and nothing more.

Who is the we -- or in your case the I -- that you are referring to that is so astutely analyzing consciousness? Do you experience this "I" as real and that it has some degree of control over your behavior? Does the "I" have any material substance to it? Is it stupid?

[_cinepro]

When considering spirit-filled humans with spirit-less humans, can we use the pre-Adamites as our control group, since Adam was the first human to have a spirit?

[_wenglund]

Are spirits stupid?

They would be if they bought into Al Gore's global warming scam. ;-)

Thanks, -Wade Englund-