The religion of science?

From a biological points of view, the way I understand emotions is this:
1) An entity perceives something.
2) This activates parts of the brain.
3) Some parts of the brain are related to stimulating chemicals that further stimulate the brain in an 'emotional response'.
4) This in turn further activates parts of the brain associated with thinking and reasoning, and most importantly, action.
5) We react.

I see this in my cats. If I give one cat a treat, the other exhibits what I can best describe as jealous behaviour, and gets all antagonistic towards the other cat. I can therefore conclude that one cat is feeling an emotion of jealousy, perhaps not as clear-cut and thought-out as what we humans might say. What is the value in this? Well, I suppose from a survival point of view, a cat needs to eat, and some antagonistic behaviour will help them get their portion of food. So, emotions are vital to survival of the individual and thus species.

Ideas might contribute to the successful existence of the entity thinking it, and thus be a positive influence on the entity and idea together, but there are many ideas that can be thought that won't have a noticeable effect on the entity's survival, but may themselves survive or not depending on the environment they find themselves in. An example would be ideas related to a religious cult that self reinforce each other inside the cult, but that outside, would seem ludicrous. From the outside, we would think these are 'bad' ideas and ultimately, the environment they exist in will come to an end. Like an evolutionary enclave.

The power of art.

I think most animals have innate knowledge hard wired into the brain through Millenia of evolution. As do humans, but we can question some of it.

Brilliant, thank you all for such stimulating responses. I can conclude that you are all (probably) sentient, though might be clever computer programmes for all I can tell. Let me get to the nub of my question, perhaps clumsily put. I’m building complex semi autonomous digital agents that perceive the real world and interact with humans. At what point could one call them sentient? The main measures I see so far are:

1) Appears to be sentient (measured by our own understanding of being sentient ourselves)
2) Built into that seems to be the ability to sense and perhaps control its environment. Even people in a coma will still show bodily responses to, say being hot or cold.
3) Having a mind. The problem with this one is that one can only tell via point 1), even if the entity expresses that it has a mind, how would we ever know this is not just a programmed response?
4) Being complex enough. Is an ant complex enough? Perhaps there are different levels of sentience? What we might call a god might not call our measure of sentience ‘sentience’.

Indeed, whether we can ever detect sentience/mind/consciousness is indeed an interesting debate as well. I have read some articles suggesting that what we call ‘mind’ can be traced to a recurring pattern of activity across parts of the brain, and interestingly that this can be put into a new ‘loop’ by mind altering drugs, sometimes permanently and have a positive effect on people with depression and anxiety.

But back to the original point. I’m not sure I’ve come any further in my understanding, but at the same time, you have confirmed what I was thinking. Of course, there is the question: why do I even want to call These digital agents sentient? Does it matter? I guess this comes back to the old problem of when we can ascertain that a computer program is now ‘thinking for itself’, and of course then we slide into various debates about AI and the singularity.

Ok, but I'm interested in debating this.

They will, and do, but we have enough problem now with people being influenced by technology - this will make it even more complicated.

I think the problem is suggesting that an idea is 'good' or 'bad'. Going back to the evolution of ideas, whether an idea survives or not is not about its goodness or badness, but whether it supports the idea's survival or not. Evolution's fitness function doesn't determine if an organism is 'good' or 'bad', just whether it will survive in the environment long enough to reproduce.

Ah yes. I agree the title is a little odd. The reason for prompting the discussion is part of a larger idea that interests me about human's relationship with technology as this technology becomes more 'human' and natural in their interactions with people. People will fall in love with digital characters (already are, I think).

I agree. The concept of conjecture and refutation means that an idea is only as good as its ability to stand up to being refuted. A good idea also has to be refutable in its design.

I tend to think of ideas have a value to the society or group of minds in which it exists. That value is relevant only to that society at that time, but there I don’t know if there is absolute truth.

That’s an interesting point. Though I don’t know about ideas being ‘true’ or not. Some very destructive ideas can exist in a society and thus keep it going, at least for a while.

Yes, the meme concept is where my thinking started in this area. Yes, culture is the collection of minds and thus it is this collection that evolves ideas. But they don’t always go in a positive direction. In a certain culture of minds, ideas like nazism can grow very well. So, how can we ensure a fitness function that evolves ideas in a positive direction?

Thanks. I’m obviously new to this forum and am still finding out the intricacies of the platform. Though I am presently on an iPad, so not sure if hovering and clicking is an option. Aha, click and select seems to work instead, Hmm, the seemingly infinite reality of a new-to-me interface is an interesting distraction.

I am eternal. If eternal means infinite time, since any moment of time can be infinitely divided, then any moment of time is the same as infinite time, therefore since I exist in this moment, I must be eternal.

I can only perceive that other entities exist, but I don’t know for sure.

Reality exist only as we perceive it, surely?

Aren’t emotions just chemical changes in the brain and thus merely subjective experiences?

Can’t get something from nothing — Devans99

Are you sure about that? My limited understanding of quantum physics suggest that something is being created out of nothing all the time, but that it rapidly decays back into nothing most of the time that we don’t notice. But just occasionally, you get something that hangs around a little bit longer.

Those were examples of the sorts of predictions we should be able to make. One is not ‘right’ per se, and there are no doubt other sorts of predictions we should be able to make as well that could be useful in understanding then how ideas affect groups of people, and how they might evolve in given environments. I think sociologists would have a few words to say on the matter.

From a psychology point of view, people are quite predictable. Many of our behaviours and actions we think of as ‘free will’ are in fact natural steps that we take in a given situation. Many illusionists depend on this predictability of human ‘free will’, and their seeming ability to predict what we will do causes the amazement that we have as viewers. Which is also somewhat predictable.

Is this determinism? At some level, yes, I think so, but not at the atomic level.

So, if an idea is like an evolving organism, what does this allow us to predict? That ideas adapt to fit their environment? That idea evolution is blind and without direction, but tends towards greater complexity?

Could be. Like any good theory, it is only useful if it allows one to make testable predictions.

The question that I have is: what do you mean by ‘understand’? As a human, I can have some understanding about how my brain works. Cognitive science has come a long way in figuring out how people perceive and think. Psychology and sociology comes up with some pretty good rules that can predict how a person will likely act in a given situation. So, yes, I think a human can ‘understand’ how a human mind works. At least to some level.

From the biological / cellular perspective, we simply feel pain or pleasure at the site, significantly what we feel is a gradient of pain or pleasure, and  this dominates consciousness, no reason is necessary, and this gets attended to reflexively as a priority — Pop

I’m curious about this statement. Does a simple cellular organism experience pain or pleasure? It certainly would try to avoid existential threats - which seems to match your idea of what consciousness is for. So, is that organism conscious?

I think humans are the only animal that can be bored (though I do think my cats look pretty glaze-eyed sometimes). How one can be bored with so much interesting stuff going on around you, with the infinite variability of reality and existence to experience?

What is meant by immortality? I think in the context of this discussion, it seems to mean ‘existing for ever’. But time is an aspect of this universe, so a being we might call a god, that can exist outside of the limitations of time (and space), would be considered immortal by our time-limited perceptions. And yet one could also argue that they exist for an infinitesimally small amount of time as well.

Many animals, humans especially, will put up with short-term discomfort and pain if there is a longterm perceived benefit.

The ultimate result of the technique of persuasion and rhetoric is whether the person you are trying to convince actually buys the product you are trying to sell...

So, to the title; a raven is an example of an organism that has evolved, and the idea of a writing desk is likewise, a physical representation of an idea that has evolved over time.

2 follow-on questions: if an intelligent being (what we might call a god) looked into the workings of our brains and could understand it, would they then conclude that we are not sentient because they can fully understand our brains? Of course, their definition of sentience may different to ours.

If my heat pump was fitted with a little screen that showed a happy face when the temperature was ‘comfortable’ and a sad face when too cold or too hot, and perhaps a worried face when something was wrong - would I then perceive it as sentient?

Sentience, as far as I can understand it, only exists as far as I can recognise it in some other entity. I can have no notion what that entity is actually thinking, and indeed whether it only appears sentient, but is not.

The problem I think would be coming up with a suitable conjecture that could be tested scientifically using refutation. Whilst I have not studied this area, many people have come up with ideas about psychic abilities, but as far as I am aware, none of the studies have been able to stand up to a proper process of refutational testing.

I’m also curious about what it must be like to be in the mind of someone with depression. Thankfully, I’ve suffered sadness, but never depression, but to be in that position must be awful. Now, not to belittle depression, but I have seen when animals get depressed, sometimes through incessant pain, or a terrible environment, and whilst they might not wish to kill themselves as we would think it, they can just ‘waste away’.

From a mental health point of view, ‘living in the moment’ or ‘mindfullness’ is a good antidote to many of the depressing thoughts that people have. Having to concentrate on the moment, such as when kite-surfing, or knitting, say, stops the mind from folding in on itself.

I want to know who carried out that study with the dogs - sounds like the ethics board was asleep for that study...

I do like the idea of dolphin monkeys - trying to think what they might look like. Anyway, surely clothing has evolved along with the human need for protection and for practical purposes as we have moved into climates and taken up work that requires it?

In a technical sense, that link posted before does, literally in that it is a URL, refer to this post. However, that only makes sense in the context of the internet, ie the medium that this post is posted on. So, neither this post nor the link can be interpreted without the medium.

If I can create an reality In a computer and someone can experience it as if it is real using a VR headset, then how is that experience different from ‘reality’? I can only know reality as I perceive it.

I think Jorndoe beat me to that point though a few comments above.