Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
CHL, you are a good, right-thinking liberal bUT you haven't thought thus through beyond a trivial anti-religious position.
|
I don't see why you think this. Being non-religious and demanding evidence for every claim leads one to a materialist view of the cosmos, which includes human beings. Essentially, our brains are made of molecules. Molecules (and the neurons they make up) obey the laws of physics.
Any characteristics you perceive and may want to name - wondering, loneliness, whatever you like - are the manifestation of the particular molecules in our brains reacting in accordance with the laws of physics.
Those molecules can be re-produced synthetically - we have the technology to do a rudimentary version of this right now. The inability to synthetically re-create a functional human brain is a matter of insufficient technology.
Similarly, there's no reason to think that there aren't different ways to produce the same result - a "brain" that exhibits the same characteristics - through different arrangements of different molecules. In fact we know this to be true, because there's a certain spectrum of functional neurological models.
It's certainly an open question as to how many ways one could produce a functional "brain" that would operate in a way that we would consider conscious. But it's really just a matter of cause and effect, and at least some variety of causes producing similar effects. Eventually, someone is going to come up with a series of causes in the form of a synthetically created program that has the effect of approximating human consciousness. There's very little logical work to be done here, if you accept the basic premises.
I know you don't accept the basic premises, and you fail to do so for reasons relating to your non-materialist world view which is borne of religious ideology. I'm not being anti-religious, I'm pointing out the difference in our world view that results in us coming to vastly different conclusions about what is possible in this field.