Ultimate space simulation software

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Watsisname
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16 Jul 2017 18:11

Could you elaborate on what sorts of things you believe in beyond physics, and why you believe they exist?
I don't have a belief system for things that exist beyond our ability to measure and understand scientifically.  Measurements are fundamental to knowing that a thing exists.  So I claim no knowledge or understanding of things beyond science, but recognize there are realms that science is not yet able to study.  These realms are continually pushed back as we learn more and develop technology.  In the last century, cosmology and understanding of the evolution of the universe was such a realm.  In this century, I think it will be consciousness.

I also like to describe my thoughts about this using the term "supernatural".  In my view, the supernatural does not exist, because if something exists, then it can in principle be measured, quantified, and understood in a scientific framework, and then it ceases to be superatural and is simply natural.  Rather, it was natural all along.

When I say I enjoy deeper mysteries than physics, I mostly mean explorations of dream worlds.  This is beyond physics because physics does not even apply in dreams.  You can bend and break it.  I also enjoy studies of old magical systems.  It's one of my odder eccentricities to be sure, and of course it has zero relevance to accurately describing nature, but I find the systems themselves, their development and use of symbols and geometry, to be intellectually interesting.
 
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HarbingerDawn
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16 Jul 2017 18:18

When I say I enjoy deeper mysteries than physics, I mostly mean explorations of dream worlds.  This is beyond physics because physics does not even apply in dreams.  You can bend and break it.
I suppose in that sense it is beyond physics, though in that same sense any and all fictional universes imagined by people are (or can be) "beyond physics". But as far as we can tell (and neuroscience is getting pretty good when it comes to studying the basics of this stuff) dreams and other thoughts are simply results of activity within the brain, activity which is governed by the laws of physics, so in that sense it isn't beyond physics.
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16 Jul 2017 19:18

for me it a bit complicated about consciousness. now i have consciousness and i live but lets say someone died. now....what make a human this human? what is consciousness? every day thousands of new babies are born....thousands of new brains are born. what makes a brain of a human his own? for me maybe when you die you will be born as someone else but not related to spirituality or religious acts but what if you die and some other brain is born, why it won't belong to "you"? like i mean (hard to explain) now i live as myself and not someone else. i do NOT see throught the eyes of "harb" lets say and i do not think or have his consciousness, i do not live twice at the same time. but when someone die what if some baby is born and the eyes and the mind of this baby is it's own consciousness and he see throught the eyes of his own mind. yes this mind and consciousness will be different than your previous life but you will live "again".
ohh god that's hard to explain what i mean. it's 3:00 right now. i will be glad to try write about it more in the morning  :)
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16 Jul 2017 19:42

what make a human this human?
As a devout materialist there is a simple explanation for this.

You can only ever be you because you are a product of previous events and current data processing within the brain. Current neuroscience suggests that consciousness is not some continual "i" but a fluid progression from moment to moment of a new i being constructed from sensory input. You are no more you from a second ago as you are you from a second from now, the illusion of the continuation of self is just that, an illusion.
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Watsisname
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16 Jul 2017 20:11

Yeah, my thoughts are in line with DoctorOfSpace.  Consciousness is an emergent phenomena from brains trying to model the world in order to understand and interact with it, based on information coming in from the senses.  Dreams are what happen when a conscious brain tries to do the same thing without access to that external information -- the world it constructs is its own, with no basis in or reinforcement from external stimuli.  This makes the dream environment very fluid, surreal, unstable, and not bound by the laws of physics, although the processes occurring in the brain that produce the dream are of course physical.

This is fairly testable.  We can study the neural activity of people during sleep and dream states and figure out some things about what the brain is doing.  We can also see what happens when the brain's ability to correctly model the world is affected, whether by damage or direct stimulation.  A case study I find particularly interesting lies in patients with hemineglect, which I discussed a bit in the science Q&A thread.
 
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17 Jul 2017 05:27

But, what about teleportation? There has been some talk here about would we be alive if we teleported and be ourselves. Let's say that we teleported. So all of our atoms had to be reasambled in one piece. But as we are ripped apart, that would mean we died. And let's say there is soul and we get our consciousness in some other dimension (like heaven, hell...), but everybody thinks that we are alive because we are in one piece and have functioning body. But what if we aren't even as body alive? Could we then create body without consciousness and still be as alive as any other human? Or as any other animal... Same as creating robot AI, but that would feel like normal human...

Only teleportation that wouldn't rip us apart is curving space around us. Or I am wrong with most of the things... 
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17 Jul 2017 06:08

With something like Star Trek style teleportation, what happens is an exact copy of yourself is created at the destination, and the source copy is (usually) destroyed. So technically what happens is that this new copy of you comes into existence at that moment, and the original you dies. But because the copy is exact, it believes itself to be the same person who was destroyed, due to the illusion of continuation of self that DoctorOfSpace mentioned. So the practical effect is that you are moved from one place to another.

If the original version of you is NOT destroyed, then the original and the copy will be two different people who will lead different lives and have different perceptions of the world, but will have identical memories up until the point of divergence. To see what happens in this scenario, see the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation titled "Second Chances" (season 6, episode 24).
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Marko S.
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17 Jul 2017 07:03

To see what happens in this scenario, see the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation titled "Second Chances" (season 6, episode 24).
I have seen some of the scenes, but not the whole episode. Watched also documentaries about that episode and teleportation of that kind.
Gonna watch it when I can.
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Watsisname
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17 Jul 2017 21:47

But, what about teleportation? There has been some talk here about would we be alive if we teleported and be ourselves. Let's say that we teleported. So all of our atoms had to be reasambled in one piece. But as we are ripped apart, that would mean we died. And let's say there is soul and we get our consciousness in some other dimension (like heaven, hell...), but everybody thinks that we are alive because we are in one piece and have functioning body. But what if we aren't even as body alive? Could we then create body without consciousness and still be as alive as any other human? Or as any other animal... Same as creating robot AI, but that would feel like normal human...
There are two ideas of mind at work here: dualism and physicalism.  Physicalism says everything is physical, in principle measurable and functioning according to laws of nature.  Dualism says some aspects of reality are separate from physics and unmeasurable.  E.g. the soul.

If one subscribes to physicalism, then the unavoidable conclusion is that teleportation doesn't kill you even if it rips you apart by the atoms and replaces them with new ones.  Actually, this process is happening to you constantly.  The person on the other side of the teleporter is you because it maintains all the information that your consciousness and sense of self are constructed from.  You are not your atoms but the pattern of the atoms.

If one subscribes to dualism, then they might worry that the person created on the other side of the teleporter actually is not you.  Just someone else who is indistinguishable from you.  You died and are replaced by a mystery person.

There was some good discussion of this subject on the old forum too. :)
http://old.spaceengine.org/forum/23-957 ... 1475737968
 
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17 Jul 2017 23:25

Dualism says some aspects of reality are separate from physics and unmeasurable.  E.g. the soul.
Dualism can be deductively proven false, and anyone who denies that is being intellectually dishonest.  

If I damage your brain, I damage you.  By showing that when those brain systems are damaged those abilities don't magically remain with the consciousness.  If you lose your eyes, damage your optic nerve, or damage the Occipital lobe in the brain you can no longer see, you have no visual experience.  The same applies to memories, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and every other function of the brain.  Many would defend the notion of the soul as the sense of "i", but a swift hit to the head causes the grey and white matter to slide around and interrupt signals between the cortex and the brainstem, resulting in unconsciousness, you can also experience going unconscious from anesthetics.

With all of this information on hand any ideas of a soul become very easy to dismiss as nothing more than wishful thinking of a squishy vulnerable meat machine.  

With all that in mind, I don't dismiss the possibility of unexplainable events, such as ghosts/aliens/UFOs, but I think that if it exists there has to be a real physical explanation for it.
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18 Jul 2017 00:50

These realms are continually pushed back as we learn more and develop technology.  In the last century, cosmology and understanding of the evolution of the universe was such a realm.  In this century, I think it will be consciousness.
Do you think think consciousness is fundamentally an illusion?
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Watsisname
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18 Jul 2017 01:44

Dualism can be deductively proven false
I don't think dualism in its general sense can be proved false.  Rather, it cannot be falsified, which is why it isn't science or a defensible model of reality.

We can quite likely show that consciousness is entirely physical, and thus dualism yields the territory over to science, as like how the weather once moved from the realm of gods to the realm of physics.
Do you think think consciousness is fundamentally an illusion?
I'm having difficulty with the question, actually.  Can you elaborate or give an example of how you mean?
 
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Marko S.
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18 Jul 2017 05:01

Dualism can be deductively proven false
I don't think dualism in its general sense can be proved false.  Rather, it cannot be falsified, which is why it isn't science or a defensible model of reality.

We can quite likely show that consciousness is entirely physical, and thus dualism yields the territory over to science, as like how the weather once moved from the realm of gods to the realm of physics.
Do you think think consciousness is fundamentally an illusion?
I'm having difficulty with the question, actually.  Can you elaborate or give an example of how you mean?
What if soul is in fact physical thing? You know how some people had 'out of body' experience. When they would see themselves just laying.
Maybe it is just too light to be detected. Maybe it looks like some sort of gas? 
There were experiments to prove if soul exist. Don't know if you heard this. In 1907, some guy was testing weight for the people that were about to die. When they died, he messured their weight. He saw that they lost 21 grams of mass. He also tested that on dogs, and they didn't loose weight. After that, he pubilshed the findings to newspapaer. Some scientist said that they lost weight due to lungs not cooling the blood. And that other people that died later lost even more weight. So that experiment can be said as false alarm.
But what if soul was exiting the body? So that's why they were loosing even more weight later. I didn't explain everyting, but you can easily find this on the internet. Just my thoughts.
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18 Jul 2017 08:48

souls existence will break physics laws don't them?  :?:  :?
and why would humans have souls but animals don't?
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18 Jul 2017 11:43

I'm having difficulty with the question, actually.  Can you elaborate or give an example of how you mean?
I was asking for your view on how much consciousness is something real.  I don't know the science in this area, but I can think of ways to determine that the consciousness at least partly has to be an illusion.  For instance, if a test subject is asked to consider something and make a decision, and we measure the brain activity and consistently find that the decisive activity happened well before the subject himself or herself think he or she made the decision, then our thoughts and consciousness can't be quite what we think they are.
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