They do exist--as physical and energetic processes. They don't exist as ethereal or non-material or whatever other fantasy could be thrown at them. Fantasy is a defective but sometimes useful computation. It is useful because it appeals to useful but defective processes such as emotion.

Cloning doesn't work that way.

Humans will never become gods. There are no gods to become, and you can't just become whatever you imagine.

Cloning doesn't conflict with morality, it only conflicts with religion. Oddly enough, the same people who would say that cloning is unnatural would be fine with inoculation or open heart surgery.

If we are human, and we behave in a certain way, then we're playing humans, not playing gods. No one knows what gods would do or how they would behave if there were gods. The reason people feel compelled to add so much fancy decoration to the concept of gods is because it's not a powerful idea. It requires nth degree embellishment in order to appeal to our urge to have the wool pulled over our eyes. We don't like reality, so we willfully bury it under layers of mythology.

The only thing that will end the process of evolution is extinction. If anything, technology is slowing evolution. There's a lot of nonsense rhetoric lately from otherwise seemingly intelligent people--rhetoric about technology being an extension of intellect and a next stage in our evolution. It's outright lunacy. The only thing technology is "evolving" is our dependence on technology. We will of course continue to evolve through or around technology, or despite it.

The sensation of "mind" is a series of chemical and energetic processes that result in self awareness, felt similarly to how a ghost limb can be felt after limb loss. We have evolved to adapt and tolerate many things, the "mind" is an evolutionary adaptation whereby the body tells itself that it exists.

My view is that it's nature's way of leading a complex organism toward replicating itself non-organically.

So from the brain then. That's what I said.

If I come in swinging trying to punch everyone in a room, but I only end up punching myself over and over, I'm not a victim, I'm just ineffective and an asshole, possibly with cognitive limitations.

Correct. All evolutionary tools.

A body made of cells is not "somehow" able to think. It's able to think because it's made of cells. We're not just cells, we rely on water, minerals, vitamins, bacteria, etc.

There's no such thing as mind, it's a label for an illusion of being we don't understand, what we perceive as a space where thoughts happen but is actually not.

Being self-aware doesn't seem insignificant and very likely isn't.

I think you might need to look up the definition of "victim".

If you guys want some real philosophy, you should read the last few books Jack Kerouac wrote before he died, when alcohol had really begun to eat away at his stream of consciousness.

Philosophy is the disaster which led to science, which is the disaster that led to what some claim is destroying the world while others disagree. Philosophy could make it worse or if anyone still cared about philosophy enough to lend it an iota of credence, but it's now primarily up to science to determine better or worse circumstances for humanity. Standing in front of human "progress" with philosophy as your asset is like sitting on a bicycle playing chicken against a locomotive.

The "greatest minds" of modern civilization are soberly and with conviction commenting that it will require artificial intelligence, which is nowhere on the horizon, to pull humanity out of the hole it's dug itself into. Whether you believe the hype about our impact on the planet or not, whether a meteor crashes or not, whatever happens will happen, and there isn't a thing any of us can do to stop it. We're a species dead set on wrecking everything we touch. We can't even agree on basic facts and are regressing to theocracy and fascism, destructive education, fighting over inconsequential horse shit from the least to the most intelligent among us, whatever intelligence means.

No it is not. Full stop. The government isn't suppressing it. It's not being conducted secretly. Science fiction movies are fictitious. It's fun to think about if you like incomprehensibly paradoxical poorly explained reading or viewing entertainment exhibited poorly using bad ideas and bad actors and impossible plots.

All these god threads go to exactly the same place, especially when people defy reason and expound imaginary proof. Could you imagine how many innocent people would suffer if as a society we punished based on "proof" in the absence of evidence?

Oh wait, that was standard procedure under dark age theocracy, when all of these "proofs" of god were documented...hmm.

What worsens the pursuit of certainty is faith in the unknown, or even worse--the unknowable.

And in that certainty, he may or may not have been correct. There's no way for him to know for sure that thinking is being or that he is alive separately from other beings without those other beings. If he was the only human, where would his certainty go?

That's false, genius is organic, technology isn't an "extension of genius" any more than dirt is an extension of ants. Will ants never build another hill if you step on their hill? A catastrophe, what catastrophe, with the exception of extinction, we'll continue to have ideas and build things, it's compulsive.

It should have been "I think, therefore I might be".

I appreciate good ideas--having a favorite philosopher is pointless.

Which ancient or modern philosopher did I praise or quite as a basis for an argument?

Work that could have come from anyone given the opportunity of education, which was exclusive to children of affluent families. That a guy came up with one or two hits in a sea of misses, doesn't make him the "father of philosophy" in my opinion. That we were all stupid enough to fall for this nonsense for two thousand years doesn't make it intrinsically genius philosophy. There are lots of things we've been duped about.

Aristotle was incompetent.

All Aquinas showed was a bias toward a very particular brand of religion.

"Estimation" isn't synonymous with "imagination".

I use Schick razors, they're obviously better than Occam's. I believe I've said this to you before, butt I'll iterate--I don't ignore things, I ponder and then disregard them, they go into the recycle bin, ignoring things can be equated with idiocy, sure, and laziness, whether they're obvious or not.

He might believe he has the last laugh, like William Lane Craig when he thinks he's got an ontological argument for the existence of god and says "I'd like to see someone provide evidence against god" before spewing out nonsense from the 1400's, an "argument" which begins with the assumption that god exists. You need two PhD's to talk pedantic jibberish on a stage. You don't need any PhD's for Philosophy Forums.

Everyone who argues this argues the same tired points from the middle ages every time because confirmation bias makes sense of ancient writing. It's strange that no one has come up with a new god argument in 600 years.

You don't know what's funny about "surviving death"?

This conversation is a source of laughter not hostility.

Also it's "I could have" not "I could of".

You started a troll thread based on percentages you made up in your head and you're pretending it's fortifying claims that have no foundation in reality. There are people who spend 40 years on one math problem, you must be a prodigy. You need to get off this forum and go to a prestigious university, I'm sure they'd all be ecstatic to place you in a teaching position and siphon your vast knowledge.

Your argument is make believe. I don't have to contest it any more than I have to contest a child who says their toy car can jump a million hundred feet in sixty hundred fifty seconds.

You haven't yet presented a sound argument for or against anything.

This thread is a prime example. You presented something you're pretending is math, or "probability" or whatever you want to call it, to found an argument about something--that you're already convinced exists and are grasping at straws to try to explain--for which there has never been a hint of evidence.

Prejudice isn't an argument, and it has a negative impact on arguments. Atheism has a definition, and most atheists couldn't care less about arguing nonsense. Atheism doesn't come in a package with whatever else you imagine it comes with. Confirmation bias is also not an argument, neither is it a good foundation on which to conduct philosophy, or science, or mathematics, or any other thing you might pretend you're incorporating into it.

Unfortunately not even good credentials can support bad arguments.

Technology doesn't philosophize, and technology can't save us from cataclysm indefinitely.

My primary directive is to drive across the country, which includes flying into the sun, which is an interdimensional portal.

I have math to back it up.

Yea that's what I thought, you have no counter argument.

"our primary directive is survival and this directive extends beyond the grave."

Hahaha hahaha--is about as insightful a comment as I believe this OP deserves.

You must be trolling. There's no way you're this oblivious to reality. Stop wasting people's time.

.

You can't just imagine a poor argument and some fairy tales into existence and then tell everyone they're losing a battle against what you've mistaken as valid because they can't prove leprechauns don't exist.

And probability is way beyond your imagination, go spend a lifetime learning how it actually works.

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether people are just trolling.

I think the odds of me winning the lottery are 800% x10 because a bunch of stuff I just made up in my head. Looks like I need to go get a lottery ticket.

The burning of the Alexandria library was a technological and philosophical catastrophe, and it didn't make philosophy disappear. Short of extinction, there's nothing to stop philosophy in its tracks.

Philosophy doesn't require technology, and technology hasn't advanced philosophy, it's made it less useful. What would a "knowledge and technology catastrophe" look like?

What you're proposing has already happened, and here we are.