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mmoa_writes at 09:47pm on 03/04/2010 under brain, doctor who, futurism, me being precious, mind-body, new scientist, stuff
mmoa_writes at 09:47pm on 03/04/2010 under brain, doctor who, futurism, me being precious, mind-body, new scientist, stuffRead this article in the New Scientist a few days ago and it reminded me of an interesting conversation I had with a Gilbert&Sullivan associate just under a year ago (and she had an awesome mind. Talking to her was always amazing. I mean, she was a primary school teacher who had, from her youth, spent her spare time reading every single bit off philosophy/theology/etc she could. And she remembered everything and managed to make even some Kantian treatise sound like a roller coaster thriller novel. Not only that, but she was an expert on comic-comics - ie, not the cool graphic novel type stuff - and was the first person I'd ever heard talk about the Green Arrow).
Anyway, we were discussing our pet peeves about Doctor Who and I started talking about the 'Forest of the Dead' episode, particularly in the context of the writer's interview on Doctor Who Confidential. Basically what happens is that everyone who should die gets saved by the Doctor uploading their 'souls' onto the library computer - described, if I recall correctly, as one of the most powerful in the UUUNIVERSE - and the reason this annoyed me was because it clearly wasn't their souls as they had physical presence in this digital world and surely that couldn't just be a matter of memory... or something like that (the context was that the writer did not believe in souls and said something like it was the next best thing. Of course by soul he meant immortal, transcendent souls) It was a really stupid complaint actually, not least because whatever point I was trying to make was as wrong as wrong can be, and makes no sense to me now.
She, however, pointed out that if one takes the purely materialistic description, the 'upload' of consciousness so popular in sci-fi shouldn't actually be possible. If nature's solution to the mind-dualism problem is a fundamentalistic materialism, where our individual consciousness' - assuming they exist - are an intrinsic [and] evolved* feature particular to this expression of genetic code, any separation of consciousness from matter, mind from body would be beyond the means of any technology (even cloning I suppose, unless you were to immerse the clone in the precise same conditions as the original genetic source).
And that article not only suggests a solution to the mind-body thing in tune with native intuition (not that that's a good thing, but it's something I find fascinating) but also implies that - if consciousness is as much a matter of the whole as it is the brain - my friend's suspicions about the stuff of most futurists dreams could be justified.
It also implies that AI might come about as merely the result of the interaction between an interestingly (or haphazardly depending one your mood) designed 'brain' and a complicatedly operated body.
*And obviously by 'evolved' I mean over the course of the organisms life-span. Stellar as opposed to biological evolution.
Anyway, we were discussing our pet peeves about Doctor Who and I started talking about the 'Forest of the Dead' episode, particularly in the context of the writer's interview on Doctor Who Confidential. Basically what happens is that everyone who should die gets saved by the Doctor uploading their 'souls' onto the library computer - described, if I recall correctly, as one of the most powerful in the UUUNIVERSE - and the reason this annoyed me was because it clearly wasn't their souls as they had physical presence in this digital world and surely that couldn't just be a matter of memory... or something like that (the context was that the writer did not believe in souls and said something like it was the next best thing. Of course by soul he meant immortal, transcendent souls) It was a really stupid complaint actually, not least because whatever point I was trying to make was as wrong as wrong can be, and makes no sense to me now.
She, however, pointed out that if one takes the purely materialistic description, the 'upload' of consciousness so popular in sci-fi shouldn't actually be possible. If nature's solution to the mind-dualism problem is a fundamentalistic materialism, where our individual consciousness' - assuming they exist - are an intrinsic [and] evolved* feature particular to this expression of genetic code, any separation of consciousness from matter, mind from body would be beyond the means of any technology (even cloning I suppose, unless you were to immerse the clone in the precise same conditions as the original genetic source).
And that article not only suggests a solution to the mind-body thing in tune with native intuition (not that that's a good thing, but it's something I find fascinating) but also implies that - if consciousness is as much a matter of the whole as it is the brain - my friend's suspicions about the stuff of most futurists dreams could be justified.
It also implies that AI might come about as merely the result of the interaction between an interestingly (or haphazardly depending one your mood) designed 'brain' and a complicatedly operated body.
*And obviously by 'evolved' I mean over the course of the organisms life-span. Stellar as opposed to biological evolution.