G
Ghosty
Guest
And that is why it’s a dream, or a superstition, and not a fact. You are presuming that if we wait long enough and work hard enough that something will occur which we have no proof will occur, and no evidence to suggest it necessarily CAN occur.
In that way it’s no different than standing outside and praying for rain; it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that if there are spirits that control the weather, that praying to them can cause a change in the weather. That it’s reasonable doesn’t mean it isn’t fantasy. Likewise with A.I., it’s reasonable to assume that if the human brain is purely material that it can be replicated materially with a computer system.
The flaw in that thinking is that it assumes too much, namely that there are weather spirits or that the mind is material. There is no proof that the mind is material, and plenty of evidence that points to it NOT being material. Until the evidence against pure materiality is accounted for there is no reason to abandon the theory of an immaterial soul, especially when it remains objectively useful for explaining why our minds work the way they do (why the human mind can universally apply material concepts, such as shapes, to immaterial, even unreal concepts, and can easily communicate these new ideas to other minds through language).
From a purely scientific perspective it’s throwing out working theories for a (as yet) half-thought out hypothesis, and that’s bad science by any account. When it can be shown that any kind of purely material process can do what our mind does, then we’ll have the beginnings of a new theory, but not before then, and even then it will still be a ways from any kind of useful certainty.
The difference is that the theory I’m putting forth fits both our personal experience AND the facts as they stand. The one you’re putting forth does neither, or at least doesn’t account for everything (such as the fact that the same idea occurs in totally different physical-neological arrangements in two different brains). Again, I recommend reading Dr. Searle’s works on the subject if you haven’t already, and also the link I provided above. They delve much more deeply into these issues than we can do here.
But I’m not talking about the shape, but the idea, or ideal. Shape is a matter of sensory (name removed by moderator)ut, and it’s by sensory (name removed by moderator)ut that we abstract ideas from matter. Animals also deal with sensory (name removed by moderator)ut, and in many ways they do so with greater precision than humans. There is a HUGE gap, however, between association of sensory (name removed by moderator)ut, by which the most basic lifeforms experience the world and distinguish different things, and the ideal associations that only humans seem to make.
A dog might recognize the sensory shape of a circular object, and associate it with another object with the same sensory shape, but what they DON’T do is associate it in an immaterial way, such as the aforementioned “time-loop” association between an imagined temporal event and a physical shape. The former is the normal function of the material soul, while the second is the work of a spiritual soul (though the spiritual soul ALSO shares the functions of the material soul, such as sensory (name removed by moderator)ut, it just has greater functions beyond the material).
So far there is nothing that can account for this very basic human function of abstracting ideas from sensory (name removed by moderator)ut, and applying those ideas to totally new or unlike things, whether real events that take on an ideal form in our common understanding (like the cycle of seasons, when we apply “circle” to seasons) or imagined (like the time-loop).
We can’t simply say “all is material, therefore there must be a material reason of these connections”; that is sloppy science, and very irrational. That’s putting the assumption before the experience, dogma before common sense.
I’m a Catholic, and therefore not as Dogmatic as most materialists.
Peace and God bless!
We’re saying the same thing. 
