The coherent complexity in itself makes the difference. Make a computer think, and you have a person, especially if you put human-like latex around it. Create a human from scratch, and you have a person. But bottom line the concept of a "person" is much there for convenience, and we have to respect a person, so that we don't get the the holocaust again. Agree, but we can't have anyone deciding who are more of persons, see my comment above about the potential holocaust.
Agree.

Timed out. As an exception, it probably is sustainable to have a liberal aborton politics in early stages of pregnancy (of course encouraging avoiding the dilemma). It probably has to do with that you haven't got a self sustainable person at all, at any point, before termination.

I understand this concept. Another way to put it is that the probability of any one person winning the lottery may be 1/1,000,000 but the probability of the lottery being won is 100%.

I don't see how this pertains to the question at hand though. While it is certain that 1 blade of grass will be hit, or one person will win the lottery, my friend only constitutes a single blade of grass or a single lottery winner, and in the example of my specific friend, any old blade of grass or lottery winner will not due. It has to be him specifically.

I'm not talking about life in general (although it probably can be argued with the same logic, that it takes an EXACT string of events to get the type of life we observe today) I'm talking about an exact and specific living being.

This partly answers OPs question. Close to zero probability a person is just like he/she is right now.

But probably close to 1 probability the person comes to existence at some point, if there are the parallel universes.

Vantek,

I don't think anything you've stated there is supported by evidence. It seems logical to suppose simply recreating our cells in the same way as they are currently organized will recreate a living being... but of course we cannot do it nor can we really know there is not more to it than that. Perhaps much more.

A substantial difference between a person and an inanimate object such as a PC is that a person is conscious. This seems intuitively "magical" to many of us because consciousness is as of yet still not understood. I think the only way to make the claims you are making is to assume consciousness is an illusion. But as some wiseguy once said, I think therefore I am!

Why do you think there is more to it? What would that be?

What is so special with consciousness, by the way? Why wouldn't the skills of the brain be coordinated in a manner that gives the subjective feeling of "consciousness"? The skills activated for action.

Oh of course. I did not mean to say that the concept of a person is meaningless. Even if a person is not magical or fundamentally different from a pile of dead matter, that doesn't mean a person can't be something very meaningful and important.

We already are, and should be.

The only reason why holocaust is bad, is that the people who get murdered are not significantly less people than the ones doing the murdering (sometimes you can say they are actually more). For you to be able to say that holocaust is bad, you must already be making a judgement on who is more person and who is less (and conclude, that no ethnic or socioeconomic group is significantly less people than any other). The point you want to be making is not that we can't have people deciding who is more and who is less of a person, but that we are deciding, and we are concluding that pretty much any human being is enough of a person that no institution should be given the power to murder or severely abuse him.

It's cases more like animals when it is not so clear-cut. Some animals have some properties of a person. Some people apparently think some animals have so many properties of a person that they are close to the same level as human, in which case abusing or neglecting them is immoral. Some people on the other hand think they do not have nearly enough properties of a person, in which case burdening real people (humans) for their sake is immoral. Also, there are some people (basically severely mentally ******ed people) in which case we can truly say they are not really people, but thankfully they are rare enough and resources are plentiful enough that taking care of them isn't a big deal at all so we can draw the line very low (barely above braindead). However, if we were ever in a situation where mentally ******ed people were so numerous and resources were so scarce that it would be impossible to keep everyone even adequatly nourished, I would say it would be immoral to waste food on the mentally ******ed people. Just saying to illustrate the concept.

Based on the evidence, we can see a very clear pattern that people are likely to indulge in certain false beliefs. For an example, every culture believes their own religion and myth of creation, all of these are in conflict with each other, and all of these are not based on any sort of evidence and are completely in denial about scientific fact.

I have noticed, that when talking about the concept of "person" (also, by the way, stuff like "meaning", "truth", as well as many moral issues), that people show a similar kind of pattern of false beliefs unsubstantiated by evidence.

Your concept of consciousness is exactly what I was talking about. Your concept of consciousness is based on a very strong intuition that is completely false. The concept of consciousness is just the "magic" that you attach to the concept of a person. It might have been efficient for stone age human mind to be built like that, or it might have happened by accident, either way it is not difficult to imagine that there would be a deep fundamental difference in our mind between how we think about inanimate objects and people. When it turns out that there is no evidence to support that people are fundamentally different from inanimate object, a strongly built-in assumption of the human mind turns out to be false, and people are very reluctant to accept it.

Only reason you are asking me for evidence that there is nothing special to a person or consciousness, is that you assume beforehand that there is something special. All I need to make my case is Occam's razor. How can you prove that there is not an invisible pixie living in my head that is in no way detectible to any human being? You cannot prove it, but that does not mean my proposition has any meaningful content whatsoever. Your demand for evidence that there is nothing special to what makes a person is unsound. Saying we don't understand consciousness assumes that there is something to understand. There is not. Or well, there is - you should understand that there are strong intuitions built into the human mind that are in conflict with reality. And as discussed in a recent thread, reality is under no compulsion to honor our intuitions about it.

Plaaynde,

I don't. But we can't do it, nor are we really that close yet. We don't even really understand what it means to be a living being, e.i., what consciousness is, so it seems a bit presumptuous to me that we think we know how to recreate it.

I think history has shown it's best to stick to the notion "all humans are equal".

The animals are gradually getting more respect, which is a good thing. The "more developed" apes, with the chimpanzee up front, are getting some kind of a special status, and are especially well treated. I feel a dilemma with eating meat, but maybe I have to accept it, don't want to become a vegetarian, which shows that moral is relative.

Please restate my concept of consciousness as you understand it. Are you positing that consciousness isn't real?

Yes, as I said, scientific fact states that all vaguely normal human beings are close to equal, and the ones who are so badly messed up that you could start arguing, are so rare and affordable that it's not worth making a distinction.

Only if you believe they truly have what it takes to constitute much of a person. I'm not so sure myself that I feel that way, actually. I can see a lot of people getting very upset about bad treatment of animals, and I am willing to accomodate to these people to some extent. But I'm not sure it would have occured to me to see such a huge problem with bad treatment of animals myself. (Within reason of course... I see a problem with sadistic pleasure in torturing animals, simply because I'm afraid that one day it might well develop into sadistic pleasure in torturing human beings. But raising animals in bad conditions and slaughtering them for meat? It does not constitutes a risk to humans, and I'm not sure I care enought about the animals to see a problem.)

Well contrasting consciousness to unconsciousness certainly makes sense. But that is not what you are talking about, is it. It makes the exact same sense when applied to a bug or a worm or even a computer (it's "conscious" when it's on and running, "unconscious" when it's sleeping or shut down, "dead" if I smash it against the wall), there's nothing special about that, that's not what you are talking about. I know exactly what you are talking about. I have that intuition myself.

Consciousness is an emotional reaction we assign to objects that give certain cues. It just so happens that so far the only objects that consistently give these cues in consistent abundance, are human beings, and only objects that consistently give these cues to some extent, are limited to animals (especially mammals and birds and a few reptiles but I guess you can make the argument for some other groups). However, not a single bit of evidence suggests that there is something "magical" going on. It's just our emotional reaction that insists there is something magical. Your emotional reaction certainly is real. But there is no genuine fundamental specialness to the objects that cause the reaction.

I anticipate you also want to talk about self-awareness. I will again say that it makes sense only to the extent that you can also apply to a computer (it is self-aware if it is able to analyse itself, which computers certainly can do). However, you also feel there is something magical to it. There isn't.

Oh, I remembered another angle I should have talked about in my first post:

4) Our intuition tells us that as time flows, a person is "the same person" from birth to death. This is wrong. The "right way" to look at it is that while at present there is indeed typically a meaningful causal chain of events that results in one distinct and consistent configuration of matter continuing itself, there is nothing fundamental about it. If we learned to rearrange matter to such a precision that we could replicate people by instant synthesis, this intuition would stop making sense. What if we create an identical copy of a person, that's a new person, while the old is still an old one, right? But what if we create an identical copy and destroy the first one? How is that fundamentally any different from the progression of a normal old-school human through time? What if we create an identical copy, and alter the original to have different personality? Which is the "same" and which is the "new" one now?

Unfortunately, at least currently, in a situation where very few people challenge their intuitions like this, doing it is pretty bad for your health. But I can't help it.

You are using the term "magical" where I might use the term mysterious. There is nothing wrong with being mystified by things we do not understand; however, I wouldn't call anything observed in the universe magical because that implies it has no physical explanation.

Anyhow, now we're getting somewhere. I disagree with your suggestion computers are self-aware because there are none that can yet pass a Turing test. I believe consciousness/self-awareness is a reality simply because I observe it daily, but I accept that it may be an illusion.

Moving forward on the assumption that my consciousness is an illusion would be no different from assuming that all my perceptions are also an illusion. Therefore, all of reality is an illusion. If this is the case, then so be it. I choose to move forward with the assumption that my consciousness is not an illusion - as do most people I believe.

Exactly.

Yes, but to extend the analogy, you wouldn't interview the blades of grass that didn't get hit, would you?

Nothing special about your friend other than the march of time and innevitability that you didn't see coming. A set of probabilities met their time and came to fruition.

It was both innevitable and completely unexpected that I'd write "it was both innevitable and unexpected" just now.

Probability only deals with unknowns. "Unknown" does not imply anything other than a lack of knowledge.

Your friend exists (as he specifically does) because the things that happened led up to him existing (as he specifically does). No one saw it coming. That just means that our models and available data are insufficient for the task of predicting Acemanhattan's friend.

.

Nit: People have failed the Turing test too. Are they not human?

No, I suspect they are probably replicants...

I should probably have been a bit more specific. For one, I was referring to the silver Loebner Prize much in the way Ray Kursweil predicts strong AI may pass it in 20 years or so: http://singularityhub.com/2011/04/04...-2029-video-2/

We will sure have something to talk about when that happens.

This question seems to just depend on whether you believe in determinism or not. If you believe that everything in the universe is completely determined since the beginning of time then technically you could say the probabilty of a certain person coming into existence is 100%. Of course you could then say the probability of anything that has or will happen is 100%.

If you assume uncertainty then obviously the probability of a certain person coming to be is a number to small to ever compute. No person is capable of calculating the position and movement of every atom in the universe so we must assume uncertainty in everything we do regardless of whether anything truly is.

I assume your friend understands all of the things that need to happen for a person to come into existence like you say. The question is whether those things had to happen.

I personally do believe that everything in the universe is completely determined. I believe this goes right down to every miniscule thought or action within yourself. Here is a video that pretty well explains this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BAXswgpVmM

This and this:

aren't at odds.

I am a determinist at heart, but have no idea what I am going to have for lunch tomorrow and I think that what I choose to buy at the grocery store in the morning is pretty important in regards to what I will eat.

You are right about that it's a kind of fallacy that we are the same person throughout life. But I have to note that destroying one of two identical copies of a human would be murder. It has to do with that every individual has the inner universe.

And I agree about the downside of challenging things. I have to do that too, searching for the truth. In a way I have decided I have to be tough enough for it, but it has been walking on a tightrope at times. I try to be as comfortable as possible in my interactions, believing in doing good. You have to take breaks at times from dissecting reality, but I guess it's a talent, that can be developed to some extent, to feel how much you can take and what to do when overloaded.

What exactly do you observe daily? What meaningful content does the concept of consciousness have?

I am maybe not saying that what you call consciousness is an illusion altogether, but that while there is a real meaningful content behind the concept, your intuitions distort it up very badly. It is a gradual difference, not a categorical one. You can divide consciousness into parts that are less conscious and you can divide those into parts that aren't significantly conscious at all. My PC is "conscious" to some modest extent. There only difference between conscious and nonconscious is the degree of sophistication, nothing more. Your intuition (as well as mine and everyone else's), however, tells you that consciousness is categorically different from non-consciousness, that it is not divisible, that it is something *special*. But there is no evidence to suggest that it is. Evidence is best explained by human mind having developed a radical difference between how it handles intelligent beings and how it handles inanimate objects, not that there is a genuine underlying radical difference. It's not at all hard to imagine why our mind would develop such a mechanic either. In stone age conditions where we evolved, the vast majority of intelligent beings that were worth communicating with, were indeed extremely similar to ourselves, so it was perfectly efficient to consider anything either entirely a conscious being, or entirely an inanimate object, and lack any ability to imagine there being anything in the middle and realise that consciousness is composed of non-conscious objects.

I do not mean to say that you should not apply your concept of consciousness to anything. I am saying that you should apply it consistently. If a human being has 100% consciousness, then a chimp has maybe 70% or whatever, a dog maybe 40% or whatever (I mean I'm pulling this out of my ass here but it's just to illustrate the point), a fish 10%, a worm 1%, my computer 0,1% or whatever, and so on. And an intellect much more sophisticated than human being, will also have >100% consciousness. And you can principally take it apart, if you can somehow take my brain into pieces that still preserve their function, then each of these part will have a little bit of consciousness as well, maybe the sum of all these parts will not be anywhere close to 100% when they are taken apart because a lot of the 100% might be cooperation between all these parts, but still each of the parts will also have some bit of consciousness. And to make it consistent, I guess you will have to say that a single quark or lepton or photon or whatever smallest particle that can even exist, also technically has some of that same quality, perhaps not anywhere close to enough to be worth talking about it but technically some amount still.

But not that everything is either 100% conscious or 0% conscious and there is nothing inbetween and there is something fundamentally special about it.

I can comprehend various stages of consciousness, with humans having the highest known level and lower forms of animals exhibiting the lowest level. There is probably a lot of theory on this, which I will look into.

I'm guessing a central nervous system is required, so that plants likely have no level of consciousness, and obviously neither do rocks. By the way, I would also hypothesize more evolved aliens would have a higher level, but that 100% would not be achievable - possibly because there may not be any upper bound. Either way, I'm having trouble with your presumption that inanimate objects can have any level of consciousness at all. Rocks and atoms do not think, much less feel, so how can anyone suppose they are conscious on any level?

Is a single nerve cell conscious? How about two? How about three? At what point can we talk about consciousness? I cannot imagine a meaningful definition where at some point of increasing sophistication you can say, BAM! It was absolutely not conscious up to this point, but now we just add this one bit, and BAM! now it is conscious! It might not be conscious enough to be worth talking about before, but there is no fundamental difference, just degree of sophistication. Inanimate objects definitely don't have enough consciousness to be worth talking about, I am just saying there is no magic threshold (which people stubbornly like to act as if there was) where you go, oh, it was inanimate before, and now we add this one more thing and suddenly it has a tiny bit of consciousness. It's all relative. Consciousness is just certain pattern of organisation. Where you draw the line is ultimately completely arbitrary.

Why necessarily a central nervous system? Why not some sufficiently sophisticated computer?

Wether it is a nervous system or not is completely beside the point. If you could create a synthetic human that was indistinguishable from organic ones, he would be in no way less conscious. The ability of plants and some other organisms to rearrange their physiology based on various signals is certainly comparable to some primitive animals with a nervous system in its degree of sophistication. Same goes for modern computers.

You still talk about consciousness as if it was some fundamental property of things the presence of absence of which is not up for debate. But it is just an arbitrary, even if perfectly meaningful and useful, concept that is delimited only by its users' relative judgement. Just like wether or not a certain number of grains of sand adds up to a pile. It's not like "pileness" is a fundamental property of a pile of sand. Neither is consciousness a fundamental property of conscious beings. It's just a degree of a certain kind of complexity of organisation and a question of where we draw the line.

Humans have consciousness. Dogs have less. Fish less. Bugs less. Some minuscule roundworms have like less than a hundred nerve cells. Even organisms that have no nerve cells can display complex reaction to signals. Even unicellular organisms can do that to some extent. Even some cell organelles or complex molecules can do that to some extent. Rocks resist to a force that is trying to destroy their pattern of organisation. Even atoms resist to such a force. I see no clear line at any point where you can say, *this* is where degree of consciousness goes to absolute zero. The degree of sophistication between the different ends of the scales is enormous, and comparing rocks or atoms to human mind is meaningless in most contexts, but at no point on the scale do I see a clear dividing line that says here it ends. It is relative and arbitrary. That's what I was trying to say.

EDIT: wow, this is has been a total hijack. I hope OP doesn't mind.

Otherwise the posts 24-27, 30-38, 40-41 and from 44 up to here could be thrown in a new thread.

No, don't mind at all.

Thanks, Ace.

Vantek, would you agree that self awareness lies somewhere on the scale of consciousness well above what any plant or rock may exhibit?