battle of reason and unreason in governance of the public mind? — Pantagruel

Reason is not an absolute thing, it is relative to the culture of a society and even relative to each individual as you go down to the level interest you touch (national interest, individual interest, etc.).
What do you think, is it god above all of us or humans rights? this is the quid of the question.
We see nowadays conflicts between western and middle-east... the root is all in this dichotomy: human rights or god above us?
It all ends-up into unavoidable conflicts (natural state of human history is war) as long as religions keep building the identity of peoples and nations. An when I say religions I include as well laicism.
Humans are afraid of dying... this generates religious believes and as we get more and more people... the social system generates wars...
What is the only solution? Reduce world human population to the critical mass that we know will not generate more than one religion, that is to say maybe few hundreds?... even there, in small villages, people kill themselves because "he looked at my wife".... jealusy, vanity, egoism, avarice... it is all in our brains :-)

The only solution is to find our "soma" (A. Huxley) and mae sure everyone drinks it every morning :-D

What moral indignation? If you do not yet understand that making life healthier and happier and more secure for the people living it as sufficient purpose — Vera Mont

That cannot be sufficient. Making people healthier and happier and safe can be done in a bubble for certain elite while the rest of the world suffers. Read Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, it is a good starting point.

You need to understand what conscioussnes is and what it is not. I'm not going to explain it here. Read it from the experts.
What I can tell you regarding your question is that consciousness is not a ON-OFF thing. There're grades of consciousness as well as states of consciousness.
Can an AI be conscious, yes of course. An AI can have a very low or high grade of consciousness depending of the amount of integrated information and it modularity (Tonini IIT).
But that consciousness is far from ours as humans, because the AI is conscious of "its world", that is to say, that if we talk about an AI in a google-car... that AI is conscious within its "traffic-world" not beyond that.
That said, keep in mind consciousness is not the same than self consciousness and take into account as well that feelings and emotions are as well other components to take into account.

Net,
An AI will be one day conscious and self conscious in the sense we understand human consciousness but it will have to:
1 - be embodied
2 - be more than one AI... interact with similar AIs in order to develop a social self. We humans could be similar and can interact but it will need similar "replicants" to fully empathize :-)
3 - will have to be directed by the "survival" pulsion
4 - will require an architecture that generates a rich gradient of feeling and emotions. Never like ours that require "flesh" but synthetic ones linked to its source of energy, protect its body feeling temperature, pressure, etc.. similar to what we do...

Nothingness is not only possible, it can be scientifically and mathematically proof ... the zero!
Zero is the mathematical artifact that contains our concept of nothingness and it was a revolution when it was invented.
This is where we should start with when talking nothingness...

Making those questions means you didn't understand the theory of the origin of our univers. Time and space and thermodynamic laws where being created during bigbang, so it doesn't make sense to ask what was there before or where it happens... time and space were being created!
You should study a bit more physics to understand it.

Your questions are like when people where wondering where was the end of the planet earth because they thought it was flat... then we discovered it is a sphere and the question does not make sense anymore... same for your questions, make no sense!

Your understanding of consciousness is a mess.
One thing is consciousness, another one is the self-consciousness. Read a bit more about the topic...

You don't understand consciousness. I recommend you read some of the authors I mention in my posts above.

I'm not saying they re not conscious but a primitive immature consciousness and so his experience is... very simplistic and immature.
Nevertheless it is a mistake done by several neuroscientists like Koch to say that consciousness is experience. It is too simplistic and doesn't help to understand consciousness, its complexity and its function.

Of course they have experiences but they don't have a mature consciousness and as a consequence they don't have a Self but a kind of proto/primitive self that is arising and that will get richer and richer as they keep growing in an environment that will help developing its potential.

I agree with you that characterising consciousness as a 'state' is wrong, but not for the reason you give. The difference between experiencing something and experiencing nothing can only be a binary difference, no? There's no intermediate state between something and nothing, don't you think? — bert1

You're wrong, "things" can be experienced in different levels, it is not an ON/OFF. Don't confuse consciousness with experience (as Koch does). Do you think you experience things the same way when you're drunk? Consciousness is not a state as I say above but there re different states of consciousness ....
Consciousness makes experience richer and enables integrating it in a broader way in the "model of the world" that a conscious system has. Would be long... anyway, when you go to sleep you go to sleep gradually independently of what you remember the day after (this is studied and well known).
No one remember anything before having 3 years old because his brain was not ready to store memories and integrate them with your consciousness...

I think it is based on a confusion between consciousness and the content of consciousness. — bert1

No Bert1, there is not confusion on my side. You weren't born conscious as you re today. The capabilities of your brain have changed. Your brain is born with the potential of being conscious and then it is the environment it grows in that enables and develops your consciousness. Your senses and the funcitonal areas of your brain will make your consciousnes more or less powerful. Ask your parent or your grandparents and they will tell you how their capacity to be consciouss diminish with time. Driving a car for example is not as easy for them as it is for you... The context of consciousness is within the functional areas of the brain that are synchronise (i.e memory, language, vision, etc...)

Why can't a system integrate information (or whatever function you want to specify) without being conscious? — bert1

This is a good question Bert1, the answer is in physics and how complex systems auto-organise. I suggest you read Alberto Felice de Toni for example on how complex systems auto-organise. Do you know Conway's "Game of Life"? It will help you as well understand and get rid of naif intuitions.

Consciousness is a state. — Bartricks

CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT A STATE.
"state" is not the right word to define consciousness, it doesn't help, it is too simplistic. Consciousness has certain characteristics that differentiate it from the state of matter or the state of a system. Consciousness is the result of a dynamic and synchronous exchange of information with a very special function.
Consciousness is more an ability, a funcition that has arise from biological evolution because it has been a competitive advantage for those living beings that developed it but you cannot say that it is just a "state". The word "state" is used differently in current or professional language and it has different connotations that do not help understanding the complexity of consciousness.

But the most important thing why you should not use word "state" for consciousness is that consciousness is not an "ON/OFF" thing while the word "state" suggest it. Consciousness is, let's say, analogical, it grows as you grow and it fades in a gradual way as we get old. And to be more generic, a system could be more or less conscious depending on the grade of functional synchronisation and complexity (see Tononi's PHI)

There's no proof for any theory of consciousness afaik — bert1

There is, it is you that don't want to see it. Read my post if you're really interested in knowing about consciousness and the self.

Is that what convinces you so strongly? — bert1

It is simple Bert1, I experience my consciousness waking up every morning and fading out every night. Anything else is not consciousness, it is something else.My interest is in understanding this thing that wakes up and goes to sleep, this thing that correlates with the global neural space of your and my brain (see Dehaene), this thing that grows in my brain as we grow and stops as we die, tis thing that Tononi measures using his PHI methodology. This is what is interesting, and I call this "CONSCIOUSNESS" and I'm even more interested in how the SELF comes to mind (as Damasio would call it). All the rest is not interesting for understanding what we're (panpsychism, spiritualism, metaphysics, etc...).

The Self, you, me, is a process that is confined to a synchronous integrated information exchange activity between the cortex pre-frontal ventro-median area and the temporal and parietal (praecuneus) lobes. This is known, it is proof and all the rest is speculation.

So instead of bombarding one with arbitrary impenetrable walls of disbelief, perhaps it's better to entertain others, gosh you might actually learn something you didn't know already. — Benj96

Right, this comment is perfect for you.
Read the people I mentioned in my posts, from what you write it is clear that you will learn a lot.
Take it easy my friend.

First of all you just contradicted yourself saying "no one is saying quantum physics is not contributing" and then said "it is not needed". — Benj96

are you saying we need now a quantum physicist to explain everything?

I do understand to well. — Benj96

Whatever!

It should be mentioned that the ideas that make their way into Darwin’s theory of evolutionnor Newton’s physics come from many aspects of the surrounding culture outside of science ‘proper’( if there ever was such a thing). — Joshs

No my friend, the scientific ideas and scientific method did not come for free in a magical way thanks to philosophers or artists. Many people in history have died and fight against religious and metaphysical views of the world that have been governing the people and the society for milenia. They still do it in countries like Afghanistan to mention just on. Metaphysics is dangerous because it can lead to religious thoughts that are even more dangerous (history teaches us).
Science is the only way to talk to nature in an honest an dopen way and it has shown right. Science has done its way alone in history with many heros (poeple dedicating their lifes just to observe planets, plants, etc... using scientific method), these herost have defended their ideas in an honest way to make of us what we're today, an advanced and technological society with its goods and bads but better than the past...
Artists and philosophers are another thing... and it is not fair to say it is thanks to them that we have made progress.

science also is nothing but a bunch of folk sharing just-so stories after smoking a crack pipe — Joshs

Ok, next time you get sick don't rely on the science of medicine, don't go to hospitals, you can do a lot of metaphysics, something like 1 hour of metaphysics in the morning and another 1 hour in the evening and I'm sure you will recover quickly... well... you could get a huge headache as side effect :-)

Would be funny to show your sentence to Hipocrate... you tell him, look all the progress made by science in medicine is ridiculous, we keep curing and treating people the same way you did 2400 years ago...
Same applies to engineering, physics, astronomy, etc..............

I only have issue with people that pretend they do known with no credible evidence to support the claim. — Benj96

Like you claiming consciousness requires quantum physics to be explained?

What are the intricacies of quantum physics that deem it impossible as a contributor to consciousness? — Benj96

Many people, like you, puts their hopes on quantum physics to explain anything that is misterios today, it has a kind of exotic attraction because it is complicated (no one really understand it well) but quantum is about the super small and microscopic world that works in a conter-intuitive way .... you don't need it to understand consciousness the same way you don't need it to understand how an airplane works.

No one is saying quantum physics is not contributing, I'm saying it is not needed to explain consciousness because consciousness is a macro-phenomena already fairly well explained by people like Dehaene and Tononi. They re quite exhaustive in their explanations and studies, still a lot to be done but they have shown the way that is far from quantum mechanics...
Chalmers and the nobel price Roger Penrose could not agree maybe but they tried already to seriously related consciousness to quantum physics and scientific community is not agreeing with them...

manifested in a non biological — Benj96

Yes, consciousness and even the self could be one day created artificially by us... But we re far from that.
So far consciousness requires a brain, full stop.
The rest is wishful or religious thinking full of naif intuitions... Intellectual massages... However you want to call them..

quantum physics — Benj96

You won't need quantum physics to explain consciousness the same way you don't need it to explain many other physical or biological phenomena. Consciousness is a macroscopic phenomena...

:up:

In essence of your were a God, would you prefer to manipulate others beliefs to be in alignement with your own (autocracy), or would you rather discourse, where people are allowed to object and explain the grounds for doing so? (democracy). — Benj96

God is a naif intuition of mortal humans... but my asnwer is that, as everything in life, IT DEPENDS. We have situations where we, ourselves ask for certain traumas to get fixed because are painful and need manipulation. In other cases it is not justified.
Technology gives us power to cure and so far has helped to improve the quality of life, at least in western countries. But we always have to be vigilant to the risks that it brings as well.

But back to the original statement, thoughts are biologically based. No biology, no thoughts!
Spiritual or inmaterial theory or system of believes have a social purpose (important but just that) to calm and govern our sufferings and fears (see role of religion and spiritual systems of believes in past and present wars) not understanding what we're.

If only the material is real we ought to dismiss innovation, lateralised thinking, creativity and invention as these things precipitate into the material world from the "non material sphère- the mind". — Benj96

Not really, all those things are material, those things (symbols, meanings, etc.) are in our brains within neural-traces that combine always following physical laws (in some case deterministic, others are not, ... physics and biology are very complex).
And as such those things can be manipulated, like we can eliminate or induce ideas, words, concepts in your brains, we can as well see where and how they re located, etc... we can induce and create a "religious" brain since religious thinking is quite understood today (see Ramachandran's studies), and a long etc... And we can manipulate in traditional ways (talking, educating, ...) or in more sophisticated ways (using chemicals, electromagnetic fields, brain-surgery, etc.)...

you're misusing the concept of identity. I think you're talking the self.
Nevertheless, when you sleep you lose both consciousness and self/identity (except dreaming and lucid dreams, etc)
There is no reboot after death the same way you did not exist before you were born your self ends when you die.

There is "no-one self", ok (Metzinger's being no-one), the Self is an illusion ok..... but "it is", there is something we call a self that is being studied and understood via hetero-phenomenology (authors I mention above).
As we can do with consciousness we can manipulate and study the self using technologies like chemical substances, MRI, etc.. and the results are stunning.
Hume could not experience consciousness as we do today, there was not the technology either the conceptual basis to do it.

Churchlands are the Way ! :-) :up:
you can add them to my list above :wink:

Some points to help you spotting the problem of consciousness:

CONSCIOUSNESS "IS A FUNCTION OF THE BRAIN". This doesn't mean that it can work in an isolated way, in other words the brain is not sufficient but is necessary for consciousness to emerge.Consciousness is a dynamic process that requires a continuous interaction of the brain with the rest of the body and the body with the external world.

MATTER DOES NOT HAVE CONSCIOUSNESS. When panpsychists talk about consciousness being a property of matter they're talking about something different, they're not tackling any issue or adding any value to the explanation of the matter that we're trying to explain: "that thing that awakes in the morning and dies with us".

CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT AN ON/OFF THING BUT HAS GRADESConsciousness is something that has grades. Your brain's consciousness emerges and grows since you're born and starts degrading after certain age as well as your brain does.

THE SELF EMERGES WITHIN CONSCIOUSNESS. in order for you to make progress on understanding what consciousness is you need to do 2 things: 1) make clear to you what is NOT consciousness (you computer doesn't have consciousness "yet" :-) but a dog does have it)2) understand as well the difference between consciousness and the SELF. A brain can have consciousness but could not have a self. I invite you to read Vallortigara, Dehaene, Damasio, Dennett and Tononi's theories of consciousness. They will help you to better understand and dissolve some meaningless questions.
You will realize that the interesting problem would not be about consciousness but about the Self. Understanding the self and how the self emerges in a conscious brain is the interesting thing to investigate. The subject in our language, the I, You, He... this is the interesting topic.

:kiss:

How you get your jollies is a matter for you. I do imagine that You do receive emotional rewards in the same ways I do. You again demonstrate your sterile thinking.

:up:

I think, because I can and I do, that your comment is intellectually sterile, but I'm convinced it has been emotionally rewarding for you as this one is for me. :smile:

I mean futuristic scenarios that is to say pure sterile speculation.
I didn't say anything about thinking about the future.
Actually you can see, as per my pot, that I'm thinking about the future.

It is not about willing to have kids or not but what value do we give to the DNA as a society.
When we grow and start wondering about ourselves, the biological parents play 2 very important roles: psicológical and health related as well.
Same sex couple would then have a kind of challenge that other couples that raise their own children don't have.

I would not go to futuristic scenarios at the moment as that is quite sterile thinking but, staying pragmatic, pragmatic: a society that foster heterosexual couples?
The law is anyway the interpretation of how a society sees nature and the world and it makes sense, because we re the result of heterosexual evolution, that societies remain pro-heterosexual still for a long time.

I think science and technology play a role here.
Now that we know better how genetics work, don't you think heterosexuality should have a kind of social advantage because of the fact that they re the ones transferring their ADN to their children? Or you think this does not make any difference?

thanks Gregory. My point is not about what "will" for Schopenhauer was but more about its paralelism with contemporary "intentionality".
I find myself a lot of similirarities as noted by Jack above too.
And I find this fact as very interesting and worth revisiting Schopenhauer read with this intentionality-favor. Could it be he was the original precursor of this idea?

Right, I agree. Thanks Jack.