Evolution and Wisdom of Crowds

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Nov 28 2007, 02:53 PM) [snapback]545328[/snapback]</div>

Ooh, now this is getting interesting.

So this makes me curious as to what is the most simple life form that still has a soul?

My pet mammals?

Wild mammals?

Birds?

Fish?

Worms?

Bacteria?

How is consciousness defined, and which organisms get to have souls and which don't?

Do all souls get to go to heaven regardless of their decisions, behaviors, and goodness/evilness?

 

You misapplied the quote....not my line.

Your questions are exactly what I'm trying to get at.
What IS the soul?

You cannot believe in the afterlife without believing in a soul, or non-physical entity.
Yet this is an undefineable concept. Is the soul injected at conception? at birth? Pick a spot and there will be logical fallacies to it.

And yes, it must be that any "conscience" animal must also have a soul, unless you are a young earther and don't believe there is any shared genetics from humans to the animal kingdom. (Despite the mountains similiarities in the genetic structures.)

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Danny Hamilton @ 2007 11 28, 12:04) [snapback]545336[/snapback]</div>

This is exactly the train of thought that started me on my 'road to redemption.' I started out in a religious family, and even sang in the church choir, bizarre as that sounds now even to me, but my mind's relentless curiousity led me to conclude that there's no such thing as an eternal soul, and that heaven is a fantasy. Everything makes so much more sense now.

 

Ditto. Alter boy and all. Even a Catholic University, where I studied Neurophyschology and it cemented my doubts about religion. Religion treats the "soul" as some sort of magical spark that is either present or not and then they equate it to conscienceness. However, biology has clearly proven that conscienceness is not an either or situation. Even humans have varying forms of conscienceness (such as hypnosis) and it is something that grows out of nothing and develops. As for death, if you watched someone close to you die as I have, you've likely experienced "fading" conscienceness. It's not an easy thing to watch the candle flame flickering and fade out. And this is where religion is a helpful tool for many to cope with the loss. I won't denigrate someone who uses it as a crutch, we all have our "crutches" we use.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Nov 28 2007, 03:25 PM) [snapback]545354[/snapback]</div>

Congratulations! You've defined the undefinable concept. We now understand the soul to be "something" that exists in some mysterious fashion in a creature with "conscience".
What defines Conscience? What level of conscience is necessary? What about the mentally deficient, or the individual on life support?

 

"We now understand the soul to be "something" that exists in some mysterious fashion in a creature with "conscience". "
I think my defintion would include the word "hypothetically" somewhere.
Again, this is a religious term, so there is no accepted definition.

The definition of conscienceness is a life form's ability to perceive, process information, and react to it.

A mentally impaired individual could certainly have a weaker stream of conscienceness, but then again, there are MANY types of mental impairments, and not all of them are related to ones ability to take in information and react to it. (reacting poorly still counts)

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MrK @ Nov 28 2007, 02:45 PM) [snapback]545319[/snapback]</div>

Yes. But a negative that can not be proven does not mean its probable, it remains an unknown. It is possible every time you open a door the gnomes in the room vanish. However, no one would posit vanishing gnomes as a tenable proposition.

Religious beliefs have about the same probability as my vanishing gnomes preposition.

 

Curiously, the rejection of evolution is a phenomenon limited in modern times to the United States and to foreign offshoots of U.S. sects. While most fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. seem to reject evolution, most foreign-grown fundamentalist Christians have no problem with evolution. The exceptions are fundamentalist sects overseas founded by evangelists from the U.S.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(hycamguy07 @ Nov 28 2007, 08:09 AM) [snapback]545221[/snapback]</div>

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(richard schumacher @ Nov 28 2007, 12:00 PM) [snapback]545332[/snapback]</div>

Richard beat me to it, but I'll say it in my words anyway:

The personality and the consciousness (or, in religious terminology, the soul) is not an object, which must occupy a location in space, and which, upon leaving the body must go some place. Rather, it is a process. Life is a process. It is the process which distinguishes a living person from a corpse. Life is a process, and consciousness and personality are a process. And just as the candle flame does not "go" anywhere when you extinguish it, so the "soul" does not "go" anywhere when you die. It simply stops.

I find it curious that Christians first declare that the process of personality is some kind of intangible object occupying the body, but that then when the body dies, this object moves from the material world to a supposed "spiritual" world.

The candle flame is an excellent metaphor. The flame, like the body, has material in it, but what makes it a flame is the process of combustion. When you blow it out, the flame does not go anywhere. It merely stops. The flame is a process and the process stops.

Poof: you're gone. The material of your body remains, but the process which is your life, your consciousness, your personality stops.

This, however, is such a terrifying and unacceptable prospect, that people invent religions to give them hope that their consciousness will continue when their body dies.

 

Ooooohh...well said Daniel.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Alric @ Nov 28 2007, 05:04 PM) [snapback]545417[/snapback]</div>

It's like the light in the refrigerator: I never really know if it actually goes off when I shut the door!

---------------

I feel like, I'm not afraid to go to sleep, and that's what death will be like.

Siesta grande.

In the meantime, I do what I do not out of fear or retribution or hope for reward, but an innate/developed sense (sometimes flawed, admittedly) of what might honor myself and not exploit others.

I do not know, I'm pretty simple that way.

Also, I have a problem with a paternalistic view of the Creator...although --no offense, guys-- it's pretty obvious that, if anyone created the world, a man did!!

 

Christians and other religions help people cope with the end of life. In their memory they have always been here and they find it hard to comprehend that when you die it's all over. They can't imagine what it's like to be dead.

I believe everlasting life is refering to passing your genes to your children.

When you die you are no more than the cow that died to feed you, just a bag of meat and bones, worm food.

 

On my good days I believe that religion is a mostly harmless way for people to cope with things that they don't understand or have any control of. Turning to religion to find some solace in the death of a child can be a fine thing. Praying for safe deliverance prior to a long car trip doesn't do much harm. Deciding not to fund research into road safety or childhood diseases because it's all down to *God's will* is criminal.

So on my bad days I think religions are nothing more than thought viruses created by humans and cynically used by some old bast**ds to maintain power over others. Sowing hate and intolerance, churches have probably brought as much evil into our midst, as religions have brought good.

People have been looking for the soul for quite a while. Talk to the average person and they describe it in terms that can be equated with personality, self-awareness, or consciousness (elements of cognition). Can cats think? of course they do, ergo they have a soul. Do cows have personality? You bet! Very tasty ones at that (sorry to the vegans and hindus out there, but I raise 'em and I know).

Pat, I'll disagree with you when you say "When you die you are no more than ... a bag of meat and bones..." I think you are more. You are the sum of your deeds -- good and evil. If you've procreated and raised your children well, you've lived well and your deeds survive you (your *children* can be books, works of art, and other creations also of course). If you're a lying cheating bast**rd, well your evil deeds will serve as your undying legacy.

Darwood, I don't think love or faith or memory can be reduced to some string of amino acids. Yes I could describe them in those terms, but its not very satisfying. One of the roles of science is to develop a rational, fact-based level of explanation that aids prediction. So different levels of explanation give us physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, anthropology, etc (Oh, and if you had been a student in my neuropsychology class, you would at least know how to spell it correctly by the time you finished )

To the OP, while I'll agree to some of the sentiments in the article you linked to, it is pretty weak stuff.
Evolution IS NOT like wikipedia, prediction markets, or Amazon recommendations. Those things lead to locally coherent banalities, not inspired excellence. Regression to the mean (the wisdom of the crowd) brings us down, never lifts us up.

 

NOVA - Judgment Day (Nov 2007), DVD available January 2007 from PBS.org answers many of these questions. Primarily what is and is not science. Creationists - Intelligent Designers (ID) state that astrology qualifies as science (It does not). They also refers to irreproducible complexity (also shown to be a false concept). Another factor is that the ID folks want to publish, but not test hypotheses (hence, do not meet the minimum requirements for peer-reviewed journals). ID wants to be accepted as science, but has clearly been designed as a wedge issue right from the start, without testing.

The discovery phase of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial brought out evidence for these issues. ID is temporarily knocked back, but the ID folks will be back with untested assertions again and again.

 

I have a curious hypothetical question. If one were able to identically replicate a person right down to the atomic level, would replicant have they same memories as the original?

I always wonder how memories are stored. After all, they aren't stored in a single measurably physical location. From what I understand, when a memory is evoked, a pattern is seen on PET scans. Similar patterns can fire to different evocations of different ideas. Scientists(neuropsychologists like yourself) are still doing research to answer this question, but I'm hopeful it'll be as elucidated when I'm still alive as DNA has been elucidated in modern days.

Which brings me to another curiosity. How do flash drives store their data. I'm assuming when you download the data on to a flash drive, the data isn't in a physical location. I'm assuming lots of 0's and 1's are involved but my computer literacy pretty much ends there.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(burritos @ Nov 28 2007, 05:36 PM) [snapback]545496[/snapback]</div>

Since, as I said, life is a process, you would have to not only replicate the exact position of every atom, you would have to replicate its movement (speed and direction).

Memories are stored as potentiated synapses: synapses that trigger at a lower stimulation level than otherwise. So to replicate a person with memories intact, it might not be necessary to reproduce every atom exactly: You would only need every cell to be a functional equivalent, especially all the nerve cells and synapses, which is to say the chemical state of the spaces between. The combination of quantum uncertainty and the effects of chaos probably makes it impossible, even theoretically, to determine all these states. (Star Trek, having been written by scientific illiterates, clearly does not understand the implications of quantum uncertainty for the development of a machine to "beam" people around.)

I bet we have people on this board who can draw a schematic of a memory cell in a flash drive, and explain the workings.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(burritos @ Nov 29 2007, 02:36 PM) [snapback]545496[/snapback]</div>

I suppose so, isn't that how kirk, spock, & the others got from place to place?
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(burritos @ Nov 29 2007, 02:36 PM) [snapback]545496[/snapback]</div>

More seriously, this is something we know a fair bit about. The answer is that it depends on what kind of memory you want to talk about, and at what stake in the "life cycle" of a memory. There's all sorts. Veridical representations of an event (which turn out to be not all that veridical) initially get soaked up by the hippocampus (a lovely area of the midbrain) only to be consolidated with other memories (including context free semantic information) when you are at rest. Consolidation can take years. There are other memories in lots of other places too. Would you consider an acquired motor skill (like playing a piano) a memory? It started out in the hippocampus, subsequently morphed into a semantic memory in addition (stored in the cortex), finally a procedural skill as well (in several places depending on the motor, visual, and other components required for the skill). So if I ask you to remember *that* piano you will probably bring up the image and sound as well as the contextual information (where, when, why), also the semantic (what a piano is, 88 keys, etc), and if you sit down to play, the skill is there automatically. All of these require different cognitive representations, and different amounts of processing resources to store and retrieve them.

If you wanted, we could go on and discuss convergence networks, category-based and property-based knowledge systems... and then we could talk about applications and implications for things like driving and highway design, which is where it gets really really cool.

But maybe this would bore other readers to tears.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Nov 29 2007, 02:59 PM) [snapback]545502[/snapback]</div>

Technically correct daniel, but only one of a number of possible levels of explanations. Thinking of a memory in terms of individual synapses hasn't been very productive historically. Sort of like talking about the content of a pointillist painting dot-by-dot. You can do it, but you tend to get lost in the forest.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Nov 28 2007, 08:59 PM) [snapback]545502[/snapback]</div>

It's an impossible exercise with today's technology, maybe impossible forever. But yes replicate everything exactly down to the atom, thus the nerves, brain synapses, thickness of the axonal relays, identical number of cells, same locations, same positioning; everything(except that which quantum theory limits us to), so that if you were to take the most sophisticated microscope that we have today and scanned the two, everything would look identical between the 2 persons. Hypothetically, would the copy have the exact same memories as the original?

Yes, ideas and memories are "processes", but these "processes" are derived from structural entities. Biochemistry is just physical phenomena at the atomic level.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Pinto Girl @ Nov 28 2007, 04:27 PM) [snapback]545429[/snapback]</div>

I do. I've touched the light bulb as soon as I open the door, and it's cold.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(burritos @ Nov 29 2007, 03:34 PM) [snapback]545512[/snapback]</div>

Yup, but only for an instant. Then they would start to go down divergent paths wouldn't they...

***PS -- even then retrieval of a particular memory is probablistic. The same person might not remember it the same way twice.
Not quite as bad as dipping a spoon into a bowl of alphabet soup, but not too different either. The two identical copies (of the single
memory system) would have the same stock, but drawing samples from it independently with slightly different results...