Is Soul just a Software?

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
This is just to stimulate some lively conversation.

I am programmer with lots of experience in marketing and to me it's so obvious that spirit and soul and all that stuff is just a programming code. On a small scale every individual is chaotic, but on a large scale, with thousands or even just hundreds of individuals trends are unavoidably visible and for that matter profitably exploitable.

Actually a proof that soul is just software is that marketing and advertising work. If we were all "individuals" and if there was truly a free will, adverting would never work. The main reason advertising work is because we are predominately non-individuals, more like clones with small variations.

what do you think?
 

Kchoo

At Peace.
This is just to stimulate some lively conversation.

I am programmer with lots of experience in marketing and to me it's so obvious that spirit and soul and all that stuff is just a programming code. On a small scale every individual is chaotic, but on a large scale, with thousands or even just hundreds of individuals trends are unavoidably visible and for that matter profitably exploitable.

Actually a proof that soul is just software is that marketing and advertising work. If we were all "individuals" and if there was truly a free will, adverting would never work. The main reason advertising work is because we are predominately non-individuals, more like clones with small variations.

what do you think?
I am a programmer also.

Yes I have thought about the conciousness or soul as an algorithm encoded into our DNA.

I have theorized that Alien Abduction is often a deep rooted warning system vision of potential danger. Basically a game scenario in our heads... preprogrammed vague and self enhanced by our internalization and interpretations from environmental inputs... but it is there for the simple condition of a survival algorithm.

A side effect of our interpretive software allows us to imagine and create, and test possible outcomes, so we are born manipulators of our environment.

Our egos are a side effect of an algorithm to motivate us to be busy... to create, to drive us to create... to drive us to compete with each other, to improve our surroundings... to build our nests and safe havens...

Greed is a side effect of our survival instinct algorithm.
Whereby we surround ourselves with walls, allies, protective measures and warning systems. And the more resources we accumulate the safer we feel...

Yes... yes... we are autonomous yet similar clones of the same software that is designed to replicate and improve through evolution and adaptation.

We are, simply put, a virus to this planet.

No other living thing is as imbalanced as man is when it comes to greed, self supporting greedy protection systems built by ego at the expense of everything else.

We will collapse our life giving environmental infrastructure, and many clones will perish...

Rebooting and starting over with what is left, to re-evolve and produce more clones until we succeed in improving and evolving into a more balanced algorithm, or become the most destructive living thing in the universe.


Yes.. I have thought about it alot...

:Thumbsup:
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
Yeah, I thought about it a lot as well.

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT GOD IS A PROGRAMMER. He just writes code in DNA software.

Anybody who ever wrote a piece of code would immediately understand that we are just pieces of DNA software, with illusion of free will dangled as carrot in a front of our face.
 

Shadowprophet

Truthiness
Just a heads up on the Soul Topic. I've been researching this for literally ever. Apparently, there is the soul and the spirit, and they are different things. Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out the difference myself. But in almost every doctrine, The soul and the spirit refer to different metaphysical aspects of the individual.. :/
 

Kchoo

At Peace.
Oh... metaphysical and spiritual....

Either it is a fantasy program encoded into us to seek a spiritual understanding, or it is something muuuuch bigger than that that guides us externally...

But I think we all have that desire to understand...

Its a mystery though.
 

spacecase0

earth human
if you look at "standard" definitions,
the spirit is consciousness and is what you are, you are the operator.
the soul is your body and whatever programming you set up around it.
think of consciousness as the processor and the soul as hardware/software.

redefine words as you like to move around various objects in this area
 
This is just to stimulate some lively conversation.

I am programmer with lots of experience in marketing and to me it's so obvious that spirit and soul and all that stuff is just a programming code. On a small scale every individual is chaotic, but on a large scale, with thousands or even just hundreds of individuals trends are unavoidably visible and for that matter profitably exploitable.

Actually a proof that soul is just software is that marketing and advertising work. If we were all "individuals" and if there was truly a free will, adverting would never work. The main reason advertising work is because we are predominately non-individuals, more like clones with small variations.

what do you think?
I've been giving this a lot of thought ever since I was confronted with a very compelling argument favoring the block universe model.

Yes, on the one hand we have the body and the mind, and the mind is really just our thoughts and memories, which are biochemical and therefore an aspect of the body. All of that stuff appears to be purely robotic - we're biochemical robots.

But on the other hand, we are aware. That's a genuine mystery. Because as Dr. David Chalmers points out, without consciousness we'd simply be some kind of zombie, but we'd still be just as effective at survival because our actions would be the same. And yet we find ourselves to be conscious. Even when our thoughts are completely silent, we still exist, silently observing ourselves and the world. Why is that? Nobody has any idea.

So we do seem to be dualistic beings; part robot, and part silent observer. The robot part can indeed be considered to be some kind of program (part environmental and part genetic). But the watcher...that seems to elude any kind of description akin to a program. Otherwise, we could program a computer to be sentient...and nobody has ever been able to write such a program. Perhaps one day it will be possible, but it seems unlikely. The content of our consciousness, and consciousness itself, appear to be two fundamentally distinct factors.
 

Kchoo

At Peace.
So it seems to me that the brain is divided into many different perspectives and all of these sort of debate with each other under a central program of consolidation.

Awareness is simply a consensus of all the viewpoints.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
But on the other hand, we are aware. That's a genuine mystery. Because as Dr. David Chalmers points out, without consciousness we'd simply be some kind of zombie, but we'd still be just as effective at survival because our actions would be the same. And yet we find ourselves to be conscious. Even when our thoughts are completely silent, we still exist, silently observing ourselves and the world. Why is that? Nobody has any idea.

So we do seem to be dualistic beings; part robot, and part silent observer. The robot part can indeed be considered to be some kind of program (part environmental and part genetic). But the watcher...that seems to elude any kind of description akin to a program. Otherwise, we could program a computer to be sentient...and nobody has ever been able to write such a program. Perhaps one day it will be possible, but it seems unlikely. The content of our consciousness, and consciousness itself, appear to be two fundamentally distinct factors.

Mumbo-jumbo. Give me a definition of consciousness. There is even no definition of that thing. AI is conscious as much as we are, until we click on the OFF button.

But on the other hand, we are aware.

Every feedback system that is recursively aiming towards a compromise with it's environment is conscious and aware.

Like, your air-conditioning system is recursively aiming itself towards the temperature you set and your air-conditioner thus is aware and consciousness. Only difference between human and air-conditioner, is that we use billions of bytes of information, while air-conditioner works with only 1 byte. We are just talking about a difference in a scale, not essence.

Consciousness is simply a emergence and synergy, or a feature that something is more than a sum of its parts. For example a bicycle. If one gets all the parts that make a bicycle and lays them neatly down on the floor, the parts will just sit there and do nothing. But when these parts are assembled in just right way, suddenly we have machine with a completely new feature, ability to move and magnify human movement.

So human mind is the same. Air-conditioner's 1 byte can't do much in terms of interaction with environment, but after crossing a line in sand in terms of shear numbers of feedback loops, a new property emerges and we call it 'consciousness'. All the while, same as with bicycle and air-conditioner, consciousness is just synergy and emergence that can be replicated inside and scaled up.

Minds can be grown in any interactive medium, be it neurons or transistors or even other minds.

In that sense, nations are actually full grown minds and interactive building block of the nation-minds are human minds themselves. The ultimate 'consciousness' is not human mind but a human nation-mind, or even one level higher a mankind-mind itself. Human mind is limited, although limited on much higher level than a transistor. Because limited power of human mind we are all incomplete specialists. But millions of specialists form a nation and through a statehood and it's institutions nation has both a memory and skill to deal with both threats and opportunities in a bigger environment.

Awareness is simply a consensus of all the viewpoints.

It's definitely not a consensus. We are living organisms, our imperative is survival. We are constantly evaluating environment for existential threats and opportunities. Threats in particular get immediate priority over any consensus. Consensus is only for popcorn time and watching Netflix.



And before anybody says "I have free will, I am not a robot". If you are looking where she is looking, than you have no free will whatsoever and you are probably a sex slave. Just forget it.

Interesting factoid that I read somewhere was, that in an survey, 30% of Germans approved idea that politicians should be replaced by AI for making nation-level decisions.
 

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Mumbo-jumbo. Give me a definition of consciousness. There is even no definition of that thing. AI is conscious as much as we are, until we click on the OFF button.
All of this is nonsense.

First of all, the absence of a consensual definition of consciousness does not suggest that it doesn't exist at all. The problem with defining consciousness is that we don't understand its nature. And there's a very simple and logical reason for that: modern science has confined itself to the study of objective phenomena, and consciousness is a purely subjective experience.

So the only way to study consciousness is at the individual subjective level, which is inadmissible to the modern scientific community. Fortunately, that restriction hasn't hindered the work of several traditions around the world which have conducted exhaustive research into this subject for eons, and their findings are widely available for anyone who cares to investigate them. And those findings point to a model of consciousness which is a type of ubiquitous universal field which the brain/body system accesses in a manner analogous to that of a radio receiver picking up a radio signal.

AI is definitely not conscious. Artificial intelligence is just a heuristic algorithm used to solve problems; it doesn't experience pain or joy or any kind of self-awareness, and it doesn't fear its own death when you reach for the OFF button. Artificial sentience is a theoretical branch of programming that aspires to create a conscious machine. One proposed approach to this ambition involves modeling the full breadth of chemical and electrochemical interactions in the human brain to simulate biological neural activity. But since that task is even more complex than building an organic human brain from scratch, I doubt that any of us will live to see any meaningful progress in this direction.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
Artificial intelligence is just a heuristic algorithm used to solve problems; it doesn't experience pain or joy or any kind of self-awareness, and it doesn't fear its own death when you reach for the OFF button.

In it's interaction with environment AI does experience both pain & joy, and thus the consciousness. It's just a question of scale, not of principle. Where you are wrong is in saying that a quantum of consciousness is not a consciousness, which cannot be.

AI is heuristic only to a very modest part. Majority of AI algo consists of adaptive strategies that both humans and animals use intuitively. Neural networks, for example, have solution nodes and solution nodes that collect the most reward survive and failure nodes that collect only pain die out. That process is called "weighting". More or less neural networks are conditioned in the same way as Pavlov's dogs were. I am no AI expert, just know a little bit.

So, through that reward & punishment process neural networks maintain a few quanta of consciousness, because they interact with environment.
 

Kchoo

At Peace.
The brain is holistic in the sense that everything it percieves and interpretes becomes consciousness.

So I still say it is a melding of perspectives into a general, yet, personal concensus.

We then talk to others and compare our thoughts, potentially bolstering our personal consensus, cuz it is no fun if we don't try to share our thoughts... at least I think so...

But what do I know... I am just one clone with my own personal consensus. :Thumbsup:
 
In it's interaction with environment AI does experience both pain & joy, and thus the consciousness.
No, AI doesn't experience pain or pleasure. It can't because there's no infrastructure for producing sensations, nor the consciousness to experience those sensations. AI today is nothing more than computational software, akin to a calculator or a slide rule.

AI is heuristic only to a very modest part.
No, AI is defined by its heuristic nature, i.e. AI is a self-learning program guided by trial-and-error - that's what makes a program AI and not just a typical number-crunching process.

Majority of AI algo consists of adaptive strategies that both humans and animals use intuitively. Neural networks, for example, have solution nodes and solution nodes that collect the most reward survive and failure nodes that collect only pain die out. That process is called "weighting". More or less neural networks are conditioned in the same way as Pavlov's dogs were. I am no AI expert, just know a little bit.

So, through that reward & punishment process neural networks maintain a few quanta of consciousness, because they interact with environment.
You're confusing "artificial intelligence" with "artificial sentience." We have lots of AI programs these days, but nobody has made any progress with artificial sentience, sometimes also known as "artificial life."

And you're conflating "neural networks," which are biological, with AI, which is simply information processing software running in silicon chips that cannot experience pain or pleasure.

I think that if we start developing computers which are biologically based - and work is being done in this area - then we may arrive at a conscious machine someday which can experience pain and pleasure. But we're still a very long way from that.

Frankly I'm relieved that we're still a long way from creating an artificial life form. It took billions of years for nature to evolve conscious life forms that are reasonably stable. Chances are high that our first success at creating artificial life will be disastrous; I think there's a >99% chance that the first sentient life that we create artificially will quickly go insane because we only have a very rudimentary understanding of the complex feedback systems that allow sentient beings like ourselves to live in this world without going completely mad. For example, I suspect that the tendency of memories to fade with time is actually a necessary feature of the brain that allows us to move beyond moments of suffering and heartbreak - imagine if your memory were 100% reliable for decades; every time you remembered a trauma, you'd experience it just as intensely as the first time it happened. The mind couldn't handle that - even with the safety valve of fading memory, many people still suffer from PTSD for years, sometimes decades.

The brain is holistic in the sense that everything it percieves and interpretes becomes consciousness.
No, you're confusing the content of consciousness with consciousness itself.

Consider a memory for example. The brain stores memories, but we can also store audiovisual memories in the form of video tape and digital files. Such memories are not consciousness itself; our consciousness only observes these memories. So consciousness (the observer) and the content of consciousness (the observed) are two fundamentally distinct things.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
No, AI doesn't experience pain or pleasure.

Yes it does. All of AI is an statistical adaptive algo that dynamically adopts itself through reward and punishment, aka pleasure and pain. It's just a pain registered in a computer memory, instead in secretion of hormones. Both digital and hormonal pain are just metaphors for "don't do it again".

There are many flavors of AI. Genetic algorithms and neural networks were the first algos that were used in AI. Genetic algo is not heuristic, it's algo base on Darwinian evolution, survival of the fittest. Evolution is not heuristic. Heuristic software would be what's called expert systems. Expert system use "crisp" logic, while AI is using "soft" or "fuzzy" logic based on probabilities. Exactly the same as consciousness. And that is why AI is conscious, because it shares it's soft interactive logic with human consciousness. Difference is only in the quantity, not quality.

Touche #1 !

And you're conflating "neural networks," which are biological, with AI, which is simply information processing software running in silicon chips that cannot experience pain or pleasure.

Well, well, all software is "information processing software running in silicon chips". By that definition Windows Notepad is AI. If you think that Notepad is AI than that depth of your understanding AI is not comparable to the depth of your understanding of general relativity etc. So than, this discussion is pointless.

Touche #2 !

Yeah, you are trying to score points by saying what everybody wants to hear, instead being independent observer from the Mars, what a man with mind of your caliber is obliged to do.


The ultimate proof that we are software is empathy. Because we are to large degree similar we can relate to each other's software and "understand" each other.

8953-7c726089a386de9e7de86e46e48efe6c.jpg


I just want to be as politically incorrect as possible and have another look.
 
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Kchoo

At Peace.
I am all for good illustrations. I think my programming likes stuff like that.

Not sure what is PC these days... seems sorta difficult to find the line between what is just fun and what will cause something to bounce off my head.

.. "Boing!" ..
 

pepe

Celestial
We are the ceiling to all artificial intelligence through all times.

It is impossible to equal our level with anything we create and that gap will admittedly close but never the twain shall meet.

It is reckoned by some that many folk are not aware of being aware as others and I bet it's the members only crew that cast that aspersion.

It seems misty, to think that consiousness is there to be understood as anything other than how it feels.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
It is impossible to equal our level with anything we create and that gap will admittedly close but never the twain shall meet.

That's just low quality reasoning based on a luck of knowledge. And I'll quickly destroy it, so that nuisance doesn't re-appear ever again.

Never mind chess and go, because these are perfect information games. AI had completely destroyed and humiliated humans in imperfect information games, like poker. AI is even better at bluffing! As it stands, AI defeated human world champion by outdoing him by a factor of 800%. There is a tip for you, hook up to AI, go play poker with some humans and take home bags of money. So much so for "It is impossible to equal our level" x30

Our mind and particularly our communication are mostly serial interfaces. That is directly caused by our weak brains. They process situations word by word. And indeed if there are multiple sound sources, like 3 people talking simultaneously with same loudness, our minds instantly get overloaded and confused. While it is practically feasible to receive information on multiple channels simultaneously, because your WiFi is doing it all the time.

I am saying that, because that is actually what comes from some UFO stories as a capability that minds of aliens have. Apparently, aliens have a language that can fit a whole book into what would be one paragraph for us. And they speak in very high frequency pitch, so they sound as chirping of birds, so they can transfer more information. But that is speculative.

So, there you are, I'll even conclude it for you: "It is impossible to equal our level". That is only true if you are totally ignorant. We can improve both our machines and our minds with knowledge we have. Even better, many adaptive systems, like AI can improve far beyond what we can do.

It seems misty, to think that consiousness is there to be understood as anything other than how it feels.

Of cause it's "misty". AI is seen as existential threat so humans are politicizing it. Whenever us humans see our territory endangered we instinctively go for "misty" stuff in order to buy the time. While politics is important for keeping piece at home, we should never let politics mess up with our future. Because if we stop the progress, our enemies might not. And once our enemies get ahead of us they'll take over our resources. Not a nice thought. Just as reality check, China is already filing AI patents faster than US. Not to mention that, according to Michio Kaku, 40% of all PhD students in US are foreigners.

So, just to nail it down, "misty" is good enough for playing politics, but "misty" is useless when it comes to fighting for survival with your competitors.

It is plainly obvious that Nature by itself is second rate as designer. Life is much superior to Nature as a creative power. We are already outdoing nature in practically everything we try. From that follows that we will, given the time and resources, improve ourselves beyond what nature had done.

If we make aeroplanes that fly 100 times faster than birds, why should we be stuck with puny little brains that nature built for us with a "throw some random s..t at a wall and see what will stick" method?

If you have a guts for another AI vs human reality check, I wrote a post of how AI is effectively closing retailers around US and the world, here: 22 Retailers Closing Stores
 
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spacecase0

earth human
if anyone cares,
this has all been figured out long ago,
look into raja yoga (or at least that is what I saw it called last, but given the internet, maybe searches will not find useful things)
simple exercises can show you what and where you are.
trying to prove any of this is an odd hobby as logic from this world is not at the correct level to understand it.
think of reality as an invention of consciousness and then things start to make sense.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
Actually, AI is democratizing capitalism, through process of inventory distribution: 22 Retailers Closing Stores

There are lots of ordinary folks leaving their 9-5 jobs and reaching turnovers of $0.5-1.0M in their first year, all thanks to AI. While everyone here is stuck defending 20th century values, zero prejudice millennials are jumping on the trend and killing it. Don't be a hippy, be practical and open your eyes and find out what is in it for you.

Don't trust me? Just search you tube for "amazon shop", "drop shipping", "instagram marketing", "brand development" etc. Every one of these keywords has business model driven by AI.
 
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