Group items tagged soul - TOK@ISPrague

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Mar 17 - No Cached

In “Consciousness Explained,” a 1991 best-seller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. Many readers felt that he had shown how the brain creates the soul. Others thought that he’d missed the point entirely. To them, the book was like a treatise on music that focussed exclusively on the physics of musical instruments. It left untouched the question of how a three-pound lump of neurons could come to possess a point of view, interiority, selfhood, consciousness—qualities that the rest of the material world lacks. These skeptics derided the book as “Consciousness Explained Away.”
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The physicalists believe, with Dennett, that science can explain consciousness in purely material terms. The dualists believe that science can uncover only half of the picture: it can’t explain what Nabokov called “the marvel of consciousness
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shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Nov 14 - No Cached

We are predisposed to cooperate with each other, because living in groups gave us substantial long-term survival advantage. But we are also born cheaters, because cheating in the right circumstances gave us a short-term survival advantage. As these two conflicting tendencies tugged for our souls, we simultaneously evolved punishment behaviors—a way to dampen cheating by increasing the short-term costs to the cheater. But our punishment instincts are infected with the same conflict—our brains have been built to punish cheaters, but that punishment urge is intrinsically restrained, in no small part because we all know that we, too, are cheaters.
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shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Feb 15 - No Cached

As artificial intelligence advances, religious questions and concerns globally are bound to come up, and they're starting too: Some theologians and futurists are already considering whether AI can also know God. "I don't see Christ's redemption limited to human beings," Reverend Dr. Christopher J. Benek told me in a recent interview
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But there is an opposing school of thought that insists that AI is a machine and therefore doesn't have a soul.
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shared by markfrankel18 on 15 Oct 13 - No Cached

Why can’t the symphony require all music to be happy? Why can’t a human require all her moods to be happy? Art is supposed to represent, reflect, and confirm the fullness of the human experience; art is the means by which we, as a species, communicate with ourselves. To illuminate even a single soul requires evocation of an infinite depth of emotion, not just one emotion but a whole teeming catalog of them, spilling across days and years and lives, common moods popping up like motifs and disappearing. The sounds of life are written in every key; the sights are painted in every color. To deny this is to deny yourself. To deny art which is not happy is to wall off nearly all of your being from contact with the outside world. I suspect that someone who demands all music be happy has forgotten how to be truly happy.
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