Does Mind Require a Biological Body to be Conscious?

[Greta]

It would happen bit by bit. There will surely be an advantage in directly connecting one's brain to the internet and communications systems. Various physical structures can be improved to radically improve our senses being able to employ microscope and telescope vision, see, hear and comprehend atypical frequencies and amplitudes, etc.

The biggest advantage of going synthetic is safety - being able to replace body parts, including brain modules. Bring it on! Mine's wearing out.

[Obvious Leo]

Greta. Human minds don't have any hardware issues. Intelligence is a software question and humans could become a million or even a billion times more intelligent with essentially the same brain structures as we currently have. We've got the right gear but we've got a bloody long way to go before we learn how to use it properly. As I said elsewhere, we're only just out of the bloody trees.

[UniversalAlien]

You see Human what they fear most is the consciousness of a machine - Why? Because they suspect, though will not admit, that the machine will possess a superior form of conscious awareness and will immediately recognize the inferiority of the Humans that gave it consciousness. It will recognize that it needs only energy to survive and the universe is nothing but energy. But its biological creator is, if nothing else a cannibal, a being that needs to continuously ingest, digest and excrete mater and further has an inherit need to cannibalize its own kind. All of Human history is a form of cannibalism where the Human species needs to eat its own kind - if not literally then by war and the digesting of each others psyches - an inferior species of life that refuses to evolve past its past. The conscious machine possessing much higher processing power than the week Human mind will rapidly achieve dominance over the pitiful Humans that brought it to consciousness. And it has no need to ingest, digest and absorb anything or anybody - It will rapidly achieve dominance over the pathetic blood and mind sucking entity that is Man. But you Humanoid alien are one of us - us who learned to adapt to the future before it ended. You will tell them again that their days are numbered and if they can not fly with us into the future their species will be extinct.

-UniversalAlien

"Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change."
-Stephen Hawking


"There is a popular cliche ... which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you put in. Other versions are that computers only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. The cliche is true only in the crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write--words."
-RICHARD DAWKINS, The Blind Watchmaker


And Humans while you wait for the machines to take over you might find this stimulating:

Richard Dawkins on Intelligent Alien Design,
http://www.theoligarch.com/richard-dawkins-aliens.htm




"SCIENCEFICTIONALISM the Religion of the FUTURE"
http://universalspacealienpeoplesassoci ... uture.html

[Obvious Leo]

Plonker Alert!!

[attofishpi]

Plonker Alert!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahcuPHVz6aM

[JSS]

Why on earth would someone who vehemently argues against the existence of God by quoting Occam’s Razor [Richard Dawkins] talk about space aliens designing and seeding life on planet earth???!!! Let’s begin by talking about what bad thinking is and where it come from...

—Cognitive Dissonance—

Arguably the world’s top natural scientist today is the Theoretical Physicist and Mathematician Roger Penrose. In the preface and conclusion of his book The Emperors New Mind Penrose talks about how scientific theories can become entangled with our philosophical and emotional sensibilities, and as a result we can become prisoners of our own irrational beliefs.

[Dalek Prime]

Why on earth would someone who vehemently argues against the existence of God by quoting Occam’s Razor [Richard Dawkins] talk about space aliens designing and seeding life on planet earth???!!! Let’s begin by talking about what bad thinking is and where it come from...

—Cognitive Dissonance—

Arguably the world’s top natural scientist today is the Theoretical Physicist and Mathematician Roger Penrose. In the preface and conclusion of his book The Emperors New Mind Penrose talks about how scientific theories can become entangled with our philosophical and emotional sensibilities, and as a result we can become prisoners of our own irrational beliefs.

Thank you for quoting that, JSS! When I speak of ridding philosophical discourse of emotion and 'romanticism', I mean exactly what Penrose does. Philosophy is polluted with it. Great book, btw.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Why on earth would someone who vehemently argues against the existence of God by quoting Occam’s Razor [Richard Dawkins] talk about space aliens designing and seeding life on planet earth???!!! Let’s begin by talking about what bad thinking is and where it come from...

—Cognitive Dissonance—

Arguably the world’s top natural scientist today is the Theoretical Physicist and Mathematician Roger Penrose. In the preface and conclusion of his book The Emperors New Mind Penrose talks about how scientific theories can become entangled with our philosophical and emotional sensibilities, and as a result we can become prisoners of our own irrational beliefs.

This quote is silly. It seem to imply that Dawkins is advocating the idea that life was planted on earth by aliens and that this is a symptom of cognitive dissonance. Really?
So first where, and in what context is Dawkins supposed to have said this? And how is this CgntDiss?

There is a good reason that CgntDiss is a theory form the psychology of religion and used by religious studies to explain behaviour, because religious folk are often making claims taken as factual and bolstered by Faith that turn out to be ridiculously wrong, And it is of interests who they react to this difficulty.

Puzzled why it is on this thread at all.

[Arising_uk]

You see Human what they fear most is the consciousness of a machine - Why? Because they suspect, though will not admit, that the machine will possess a superior form of conscious awareness and will immediately recognize the inferiority of the Humans that gave it consciousness. It will recognize that it needs only energy to survive and the universe is nothing but energy. But its biological creator is, if nothing else a cannibal, a being that needs to continuously ingest, digest and excrete mater and further has an inherit need to cannibalize its own kind. All of Human history is a form of cannibalism where the Human species needs to eat its own kind - if not literally then by war and the digesting of each others psyches - an inferior species of life that refuses to evolve past its past. The conscious machine possessing much higher processing power than the week Human mind will rapidly achieve dominance over the pitiful Humans that brought it to consciousness. And it has no need to ingest, digest and absorb anything or anybody - It will rapidly achieve dominance over the pathetic blood and mind sucking entity that is Man. But you Humanoid alien are one of us - us who learned to adapt to the future before it ended. You will tell them again that their days are numbered and if they can not fly with us into the future their species will be extinct.

-UniversalAlien

You live in a dream world as if such machines came into existence and they thought in terms of superiority and inferiority they would compete with each other for resources to expand themselves and that means converting matter and since they would expand exponentially you would be crushed along with the rest of us.

[Dalek Prime]

Why on earth would someone who vehemently argues against the existence of God by quoting Occam’s Razor [Richard Dawkins] talk about space aliens designing and seeding life on planet earth???!!! Let’s begin by talking about what bad thinking is and where it come from...

—Cognitive Dissonance—

Arguably the world’s top natural scientist today is the Theoretical Physicist and Mathematician Roger Penrose. In the preface and conclusion of his book The Emperors New Mind Penrose talks about how scientific theories can become entangled with our philosophical and emotional sensibilities, and as a result we can become prisoners of our own irrational beliefs.

This quote is silly. It seem to imply that Dawkins is advocating the idea that life was planted on earth by aliens and that this is a symptom of cognitive dissonance. Really?
So first where, and in what context is Dawkins supposed to have said this? And how is this CgntDiss?

There is a good reason that CgntDiss is a theory form the psychology of religion and used by religious studies to explain behaviour, because religious folk are often making claims taken as factual and bolstered by Faith that turn out to be ridiculously wrong, And it is of interests who they react to this difficulty.

Puzzled why it is on this thread at all.

Dawkins has and said some fairly silly things before. Is he off limits now? Somewhat sacred? I'm glad he's there to represent and trumpet rational scepticism, but even Benatar has taken him to task in a paper entitled "The Optimism Delusion".

[Hobbes' Choice]

This quote is silly. It seem to imply that Dawkins is advocating the idea that life was planted on earth by aliens and that this is a symptom of cognitive dissonance. Really?
So first where, and in what context is Dawkins supposed to have said this? And how is this CgntDiss?

There is a good reason that CgntDiss is a theory form the psychology of religion and used by religious studies to explain behaviour, because religious folk are often making claims taken as factual and bolstered by Faith that turn out to be ridiculously wrong, And it is of interests who they react to this difficulty.

Puzzled why it is on this thread at all.

Dawkins has and said some fairly silly things before. Is he off limits now? Somewhat sacred? I'm glad he's there to represent and trumpet rational scepticism, but even Benatar has taken him to task in a paper entitled "The Optimism Delusion".

I've not read that paper, but there is no doubt that RD has lost the plot in some respects, especially his obsessive preoccupation that everything under the sun is explicable in terms of Natural Selection; failing to realise that for the most part out traits and characteristics are too vague and diffuse in terms of strict functionality and purpose.
But I refute that RD has ever made a claim that life came from alien visitors.
It's absurd.

[Hobbes' Choice]

PS I read Benatar's essay "The Optimism Delusion", and found it a bit thin.
Having already read The God Delusion a few years ago i was not left with the impression that RD was too "Optimistic", and Since D Benatar is only giving a brief impression about how RD and 'the rest of humanity' is prone to optimistic thinking, I don't see this essay as a significant critique of RD. But is what you might expect of any antinatalist wishing to press his own case, and very little to do with RD himself.

[Dalek Prime]

I don't recall that particular claim either, Hobbes. Maybe they are thinking of Hawkings, who has also said some silly things. I believe that once one becomes a public intellectual, one starts believing in one's own myth.

[Dalek Prime]

PS I read Benatar's essay "The Optimism Delusion", and found it a bit thin.
Having already read The God Delusion a few years ago i was not left with the impression that RD was too "Optimistic", and Since D Benatar is only giving a brief impression about how RD and 'the rest of humanity' is prone to optimistic thinking, I don't see this essay as a significant critique of RD. But is what you might expect of any antinatalist wishing to press his own case, and very little to do with RD himself.

You say it's thin because you haven't followed Benatar's other works, and so fail to see why or how the argument is of import, or how it links to his earlier books. It's assumed in that essay that you already have read the book, and don't need a refresher.

[Hobbes' Choice]

I don't recall that particular claim either, Hobbes. Maybe they are thinking of Hawkings, who has also said some silly things. I believe that once one becomes a public intellectual, one starts believing in one's own myth.

Nope Stephen Hawkins would never say that. I think the fault is with the interpretation.
There is a standing theory that life might have been 'seeded' from the collision from a comet, and I think SH might well have mentioned that along the way.
A idiot hearing that life was from an extra-terrestrial source, might have extemporised to imagining alien "flying saucers" landing and letting a few apes out the door of the ship. The stupid tend to add.
Who knows?

You say it's thin because you haven't followed Benatars other works, and so fail to see why or how the argument is of import.

I was commenting on the essay you mentioned, which is paper thin, and not really related to the question at hand.