Hi Dan,

After 37 days I will send you the key, then you have to find 3 people in addition to you and me who will agree to participate the experiment. They all have to know English, their geographical location is not important. We will synchronize the clocks, then each have to follow the instructions strictly. We will make three series of experiments, each with new key; the participants must not be replaced during the series of the experiment. If the experiment turns successful the new keys will be commercially distributed. As I will send the key via PM then we will have at least 2 extra viewers.

The results of the experiment cannot become a material of a scientific paper or discussion.

It will be very nice if all the participants whom you select were of the same profession as is yours.

yeah, I might have trouble with that one. Maybe some people on this board can fill the other 3 slots?

or at least a microcosmic planet surface

I will keep in touch, I think we will be able to find three voluntaries.
Otherwise I will rearrange the experiment frames for two persons.

yes, sounds likely. After all, we mostly all believe in the 'ghost in the machine' because of the obvious mind-brain reality. However, most people don't feel a great need to believe in a 'ghost in the atom'. Of course, the two are connected as the brain 'machine' is made of atoms and it makes sense that, if a collection of atoms has a 'ghost', a single atom should have a 'ghost' too.

Oh, those entangled fields of atoms’ ‘ghosts’ in the brain, teleporting God knows what on Devil knows long distances, far away through the stars’ lights, talking with the ghosts living in the frozen light in corners of the Universe. Nice science fiction Dan, is not it?

Don’t like twists Trip?

aND TURns!

The paradox of quantum mechanics is that somehow the hardware and software levels of description have become inextricably entangled.

Everything can be software. But software cannot exist on its own. It requires at least one media to exist. Any software is NON-EXISTent without a media.

With this definition, the media obviously cannot be software.
But I am not sure whether it can be called hardware either. It must be the softest thing that can exist. It is as soft as the software, but EXISTS.

This media is the God.
And the software, which is held by this media, is the universe.

I see everything as EXISTENTIAL SOFTWARE, where EXISTENCE is the God and SOFTWARE is the Universe.

There is no hardware, unless you would like to call EXISTENCE as hardware.


I am wondering, will it be ever possible to prove/disprove this model.

No!

I would prefer Bubble gum than a Box to describe God.

Bubble gum is the hardware (God). All its attributes are software (universe).
It can be blown, it can be crunched, ...

I don't think that your conclusion follows from the premise. If concern for others is warranted before one's own self-termination, then that concern should also hold after one's self-termination.

Of course, one would not then exist such that he could actually have concern after self-termination, but such concern would still be warranted, could it exist. If it were not so, then suicide might justify all sorts of wrongs. One might imagine that this exact false ethics is applied in the case of Jihadist suicide bombers, however much they might purport to be "religious."

Pushing the "ghost" down to the atomic (or smaller) level seems to get around dualism. Consciousness then becomes merely one of many other properties of matter. What still needs explaining is how consciousness emerges in the brain.

The "consciousness" of a stone due to the aggregation of the little ghosts in the atoms of the stone is meaningless and inaccessible to us. Therefore, the atomic ghost theory adds no explanatory power, and hence, is useless.

what is a single atom? Nothing exists in isolation. Everything is interconnected. There is no such thing as a single atom without it being understood within its wider context and interconnections. Much less is consciousness confined to a single atom. It is a distributed property arising from coordinated interactions and interconnections, and it is clear that our human consciousness involves interactions among many atoms and, at a higher level, neurons.

Face it: Reductionism has its limits. This is no great revelation to most scientists and great thinkers, which the common folk often misassume to be pure reductionists. It may be a revelation to beginners in the sciences because oftentimes science is introduced and taught to them within the context of reductionism and with the fictitious claim that reductionist science is the only real science around. Not true. This claim is a simplification, and any real scientist making said claim either knows it's a simplication or is not a real scientist.

You don't know this for certain Rick. Just because computers don't exhibit external behaviors similar to humans does not mean they do not have any sort of consciousness. For example, an alert quadriplegic (sp?) who also lost facial muscular control would not necessarily exhibit any outward behavioral signs of consciousness, but we know they are because they are alert humans like us, and since we are conscious, we extrapolate from our experience and infer that they are conscious as well but are not able to exhibit outward behavioral manisfestations of said consciousness like unimpaired humans can. But this does not deny their consciousness. In a similar way, computers may very well possess some sort of consciousness but we could never know about it unless we somehow experience "what it's like to be a computer" and are, furthermore, able to retain memory of said experience. However, there seems to be a contradiction there; because if we retain memory of "what it's like to be a computer" and recall (i.e., relive) said experience in our human state of mind, then we can no longer remain in our human state of mind to remember said experience of "what it's like to be a computer". The implication is that, even if we could experience "what it's like to be a computer", we would never be able to fully integrate into our human consciousness, and thus our memory of said experience would be imperfect and questionable at best.

If computers have consciousness, then it must be a very boring type of existence. Of course, they do not know it's boring because all they do is compute binary and are not sufficiently advanced to be aware of how boring their experience would seem to us.

But who knows, maybe computer consciousness is really exciting after all! Maybe we should be envious of our little computers and their rich conscious life!

there is nothing in space because space is a construct of mind requisite for the perception of objects.

your beliefs may qualify as common-sense but truth has never been a popularity contest, nor does it need to adhere to our intuitions, desires, preconceived notions, or any other personal biases. Your interpretation of space is but one of many. Thus, dogmatic claims are unwarranted and all you can really say is that you believe your mind is in your body (whatever that means!).

It would seem that "unknown" is a sexist.

what makes it 'your' mind? What is 'your' body? So many preconceptions!

Fortunately for human understanding, common sense is often truth. The fact that consciousness is so easily diminished or erased by the administration of anaesthetics (such as dimethyl ether or alcohol) demonstrates the tight connection between brain and mind.

for centuries it was common sense that the brain was a cooling system for the body and that the heart produced mind. For centuries it was common sense that the earth was the center of the universe. For millenia it was common sense that the bible was the word of God. For millenia it was common sense that diverse species could not share a common ancestor. So much for common sense!

do you really think that your common sense will appear any less ridiculous to people centuries in the future than the common sense of people centuries ago appears to you today? It would be naive to think so. How much of your common sense today will appear ridiculous to people a few centuries in the future? What do you figure, 10%, 20%, 50%, 90%? Maybe even 100%.

Hi Rick,

No, I'm not really sexist, just courting criticism, and feeling in a humorous mood at the time. No offence meant to anyone! I respect males and females and all those anywhere inbetween.
And, my computer remembers more than I do.... [I forgot to log-on yet again].

"No necessary relation to truth" is correct. Employing common sense in the general case saves lots of computation and is a great survival (Darwinistic) adaptation.

Lots of little irrationalisms can creep into personalities. That's part of the misuse of common sense. Praise be to common sense, but a rational man will test his preconceptions from time to time. Glad to hear that you have a balanced view.

Common sense is a little like reflex action; it can stifle imagination that has more evolutionary (Darwinistic) advantage. Otherwise humans would not have gotten to where they are? Eh?

Sexism comes natural to sexes. Or is is better to become less like animals, less like present-time humans? What is the alternative? Have changes in the human psyche over the millennia really occurred? Why then are there still aggression, violence, murders, rapes, child abuse, suicide etc etc etc?

If we turned society into a big Skinner's box and controlled behaviour deliberately rather than haphazardly, we could eliminate agression, violence, murders, rapes, child abuse, suicide as well as overpopulation, crowding, pollution, and inequality, etc., etc., and thereby attain utopia.

The noble savage to the cog in the machine.