It is not wrong nor necessarily bad to constantly question things and to desire to look deeper into information presented to you
But continued denial of something that is extremely well understood, studied, tested, and researched isn’t healthy skepticism - it’s wilful ignorance for the sake of soothing one’s fears.
The human brain (the brains of most creatures, really) is now better understood than it ever has been and new technology is making studying it easier and faster than ever before. At no point, past or present, has there ever been even a tiny minuscule sliver of anything even remotely similar to a soul or afterlife being detected or observed. What we have observed, however, are the parts of a brain that are responsible for emotions, memory, personality, logic, reasoning, etc dying and ceasing to function.
The brain is an extremely awesome and complex thing but it is not powered by magic. I am trying my best to not mean any disrespect here - like I said I believed in an afterlife well into my 20’s - but the entire premise of an afterlife is basically magic. It’s fantasy. It makes the crushing pain of our own death easier to deal with.
This is not “extremely well understood”. That is flat out misinformation. Your level of confidence on this is far beyond what any scientist or philosopher would admit.
It’s quite likely that our personalities and memories disappear upon death, since they are stored in the brain. But my consciousness, the subjective qualia of existence cannot arise out of physical matter. So what happens to that when my brain dies is a mystery.
Because I have a subjective experience of it. The mindless and mechanical interactions of particles may give rise to the emergence of complex thought processes that seem to be experiencing the world, but actually seeing red, hearing music, not just input process output - that can’t emerge from physical interactions of particles. It’s a fundamentally different kind of thing. LLMs can say they’re conscious, but if they actually are, it’s not because of a bunch of 1s and 0s inside a computer.
Because an LLM is just a bunch on Matrix calculations, it’s not the hardware it runs on. The maths already exists in theoretical space. Likewise, the more complex maths for neural interactions exists in theoretical space. If maths can create subjective experience, it shouldn’t need the maths to be actually describing a physical object, it should be enough for the maths to exist. So if maths does create consciousness, then any possible state that could be described mathematically is conscious, not just brains that exist in the physical world. If maths can’t create subjective experience, then something else must be creating that, which I call consciousness, and that I don’t understand at all.
It is not wrong nor necessarily bad to constantly question things and to desire to look deeper into information presented to you
But continued denial of something that is extremely well understood, studied, tested, and researched isn’t healthy skepticism - it’s wilful ignorance for the sake of soothing one’s fears.
The human brain (the brains of most creatures, really) is now better understood than it ever has been and new technology is making studying it easier and faster than ever before. At no point, past or present, has there ever been even a tiny minuscule sliver of anything even remotely similar to a soul or afterlife being detected or observed. What we have observed, however, are the parts of a brain that are responsible for emotions, memory, personality, logic, reasoning, etc dying and ceasing to function.
The brain is an extremely awesome and complex thing but it is not powered by magic. I am trying my best to not mean any disrespect here - like I said I believed in an afterlife well into my 20’s - but the entire premise of an afterlife is basically magic. It’s fantasy. It makes the crushing pain of our own death easier to deal with.
This is not “extremely well understood”. That is flat out misinformation. Your level of confidence on this is far beyond what any scientist or philosopher would admit.
It’s quite likely that our personalities and memories disappear upon death, since they are stored in the brain. But my consciousness, the subjective qualia of existence cannot arise out of physical matter. So what happens to that when my brain dies is a mystery.
What is the reasoning that you believe that your consciousness can’t arise out of physical matter?
Because I have a subjective experience of it. The mindless and mechanical interactions of particles may give rise to the emergence of complex thought processes that seem to be experiencing the world, but actually seeing red, hearing music, not just input process output - that can’t emerge from physical interactions of particles. It’s a fundamentally different kind of thing. LLMs can say they’re conscious, but if they actually are, it’s not because of a bunch of 1s and 0s inside a computer.
Because an LLM is just a bunch on Matrix calculations, it’s not the hardware it runs on. The maths already exists in theoretical space. Likewise, the more complex maths for neural interactions exists in theoretical space. If maths can create subjective experience, it shouldn’t need the maths to be actually describing a physical object, it should be enough for the maths to exist. So if maths does create consciousness, then any possible state that could be described mathematically is conscious, not just brains that exist in the physical world. If maths can’t create subjective experience, then something else must be creating that, which I call consciousness, and that I don’t understand at all.