Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: macleod@drivax.UUCP (MacLeod) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Consiousness, the body, and the soul (long and mystical) Message-ID: Date: 4 Jul 89 00:34:51 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 156 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu Alan Lovejoy writes: In article snap< >snap<, the subjects gave the correct answers. Occam's razor is a mental construct, not a natural law. I suggest that we reserve judgement about the true nature of consiousness until we have more facts. Nanotechnology promises to be an immense help in probing the evolution and responsiveness of consiousness, and I think great strides will be made. :I know for a fact that I remember no past lives. Without such memory, :it is irrelevant whether or not I ever "lived" before. Absent the memory, :what good does it do me? To wipe my memories is to kill me. If I do not :remember the past, then I did not live in it. If I forget the present, :then I have died. I know many people who have very detailed memories of past lives. As I mentioned above, I can't remember much of my own life, so I have no problem with the concept of amnesia. :Suppose you use nanotechnology to make a perfect copy of yourself. Which :"copy" gets your "soul"? This is really very related to the question of :what happens to the soul of a reanimated cryonics patient. The answer :is so obvious that most people can't see it: your "soul" is simply you. :If you make a copy of yourself, you make a copy of your soul--by definition. :Neither copy has precedence. Bacteria and other cells do this all the time. :If there is a spiritual "soul" that has some sort of existence independent :of the body, then IT IS INDEPENDENT OF THE BODY. The "soul" would then be :analogous to a recording or copy of one's memories/personality/identity. :There can be multiple instances of the same soul, just as there can be multipl:tapes with the same recording. The "copy" of you that goes to heaven is not :affected by what happens to the copy of you that remains in your brain cells. :There is no reason why these copies cannot be played by different instruments :at different times at different speeds--in different universes. But why :would God bother making the last backup when the original copy isn't going :to be erased just yet due to cryonic suspension? Your analysis is, if you'll forgive me, superficial. What is all this about God and heaven? While belief in reincarnation is a widespread phenomena worldwide, believers completely disagree about the nature and existence of various deities and after- or between- lives. There is nothing which forbids reincarnation in a Godless universe, except the stark terror such an idea generates in theists and mechanists alike. I don't think anybody but Nietzche is confortable with living in a succession of material bodies for eternity. How does the soul's independence from the body imply that it can be recorded and taped and stored? Even if consiousness were an epiphenomena of the body, how does that make any kind of point-to-point mapping possible? Do those who lose a leg lose one leg's worth of consiousness? What do I think? Well, I have to interpret my own experiences as I can. Since I cannot prove them, they must remain in the realm of mysticism. I have experienced the act of separating >myself< first from my memories, then from my personality, and finally from my consiousness. I have memories, personality, and consiousness, just like I have a head and hands and feet, but I am not them. Now, here and there on the net there are those who dismiss me as an acid burnout who has lost his stack pointer. But let us return to the telephone analogy. Suppose your telephone was affected by some condition it was not designed for, analogous to taking LSD in terms of putting a foriegn neurotransmitter into the brain. Suppose the telephone still operates normally, but with the added feature that every time you pick it up to call somebody, they are there on the line waiting without your having to dial. How do you interpret this? That the telephone is broken? That it is operating incorrectly? That the people on the other end aren't really there? That your consiousness has been corrupted because such things "can't be"? Lost in this confusion is the fact that the telephone is really doing what you wanted it to do in the first place; it's just doing it in a new and strange way, which if you stopped to consider, actually simplified making telephone calls. Superficially, taking psychedelics causes a range of novel effects and experiences. The significance of the experience is more subtle; it is the perception of awareness of awareness. Even that is not the end: the most important realization seems to be the awareness of the intentionality of awareness itself. That is, the experience that the telephone went through did not simply rearrange its functionality into some random combination of matter and energy; nor did it become a turnip. That is, the telephone became an entity which carried out your >intention< in a better way; it is only your lack of perspective which interprets this as a damaged device or abberent behavior. What does this have to do with anything? I experienced the separation of >me< from memories and personality and consiousness completely without drugs, but I instantly recognized the separation effect from prior trips. Moreover, such separation is a major part of every kind of mystical and occult tradition I know of, though they approach it from all kinds of oddball directions and with all sorts of eccentric rituals. If it is in the end pathological, as Christian churches assert, then most of mankind has been wrong to seek the experience. By the way, it's quite wonderful to look at these faculties (memory, personality, consiousness) and to suddenly realize: these are not me. These are only my tools. The artist is the crucial link in translating the true reality of subjective experience into the true reality of objective experience, and such cognitions are of great use. Michael Sloan MacLeod (amdahl!drivax!macleod) [Indeed, there are quite a few people who remember being Napoleon in a past life. Some of you call them reincarnated; most of us call them insane. People on drugs often experience things that they *know* for a *certainty* are deep eternal profoundly insightful utter truths. I suspect this is due primarily to the fact that their facility for judging the importance of things gets randomly toggled and the most trivial notion can be accorded the aspect of divine revelation. Chemical and social aids are not necessary to sort your consciousness out from the rest of your mental equipment, though I doubt that one person in a hundred has the combination of intelligence, introspection, and open-mindedness necessary--particularly the ability to stare at a blank wall for hours while cataloguing their cortices. In my experience, this is roughly as useful in understanding the mind, on an hours invested basis, as reading published research in AI... --JoSH]