Re: Materialist Evolutionists

On 19 Apr, 02:43, Sonofagunzel <soas...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 19, 11:30 am, someone2 <glenn.spig...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 19 Apr, 02:24, Sonofagunzel <soas...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Apr 19, 10:53 am, someone2 <glenn.spig...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 19 Apr, 01:21, Sonofagunzel <soas...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Apr 19, 10:05 am, someone2 <glenn.spig...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 19 Apr, 00:23, Sonofagunzel <soas...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


(snip)

Ah, my friend, but you *have* to debate me. If you don't, then anyone
with more than half a brain reading my posts will agree with me and
not with you, and they will see that you have no answers. Come to
think of it, that will happen even if you do debate me.

We've had four debates previously, I think, and you have run from all
of them. This makes five in a row, if I am not mistaken.

If you concede that a conscious robot is physically different from a
non-conscious robot, you are conceding that consciousness is physical
in nature. You lose.

If a robot is concious, that in itself proves that consciousness has a
physical basis. You lose.

A number of people have proposed tests for consciousness, and you have
never explained why they are not valid. You lose.

I have shown how being able to explain behavior in terms of nodal
interactions is not inconsistent with being able to explain behavior
in terms of consciousness, but you have only repeated your logical
fallacies in response. You lose.

You have conceded that proof of your point rests on faith. You lose.

You have conceded that human consciousness exists and affects
behavior, yet the brain does not violate any laws of physics. You
lose.

You won't be drawn on how you know that a ball bearing is not
conscious and a human is: obviously you have a test that you aren't
willing to tell us about. You lose.

You keep arguing that not knowing whether consciousness affects
behavior is the same as knowing that it does not affect behaviour.
That is illogical. You lose.

You constantly engage in ad hominem attacks instead of dealing with
the arguments, and think you know more and are more intelligent than
all the neuroscientists of the world. You're an arrogant and deluded
prick.

But I like you anyway. You're fun. Like a punching bag for the mind.

Just because John Wilkins ran (first the excuse of the flu, then the
excuse of work deadlines), doesn't mean I have to debate the likes of
you. You are incapable of following reason, and in the post above you
have resorted to making things up. You said before you were interested
in how the debate between me and him went, well he ran.

Pick one sentence in the above that I have "made up". Your choice.

John didn't run. He can see that debate with you is pointless and he
doesn't have the time to continue. I'm not aiming to convince you: I
am enjoying the challenge of expressing my points accurately and
succinctly so that you cannot counter them without looking like an
idiot. I am also debating you on the off chance that a lurker might
fall for your crap.

You'd like to think that he thought the debate with me was pointless,
but earlier his excuse for a delay in response was:

"Serious conversation takes time to write. I will answer. "

Then he answered, and I replied, again there was again a delay in
response, this time the excuse along with his reply was:

"I apologise for the delay in replying. I've been doped up with pain
killers due to flu. Not optimal for responding to arguments."

Then I replied, he responded, and I replied again, and his excuse was
then:

"Actually my work has become suddenly seriously deadline driven, so I
won't be able to continue this line here."

No where did he mention that the conversation was pointless. This is
just something you would like to believe.

As for sentances you have made up:

"You have conceded that proof of your point rests on faith. You lose."

"You have conceded that human consciousness exists and affects
behavior, yet the brain does not violate any laws of physics. You
lose."

Also your first point:
---
If you concede that a conscious robot is physically different from a
non-conscious robot, you are conceding that consciousness is physical
in nature. You lose.
---

Overlooks the point that I would be stating that the robot wouldn't be
conscious, but be willing to go through the reasoning that the
assumption that the consciousness emerges from the physical, and that
hypothetically the robot might be conscious, in order to show the
implausibility of us being biological mechanisms that follow the known
laws of physics.

Since you picked more than one, I can only assume that you indeed
concede the ones you didn't pick.

As for the ones you did pick, in this post:

http://groups.google.com.au/group/talk.origins/tree/browse_frm/thread...

you said:

___________________________________

On 8 Apr, 00:11, "ZikZak" <ZXBWDNKFY...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Apr 7, 3:50 pm, "someone3" <glenn.spig...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So are you saying that we should only consider the robot to be
consciously experiencing if it didn't follow the laws of physics as it
would be expected to if it wasn't experiencing?
I would consider it conscious if it seemed to be conscious and could
engage me in philosophical discourse. By this definition, you are not
conscious as (after bing asked 25 times now) you have yet to identify
the process in the human brain that violates the known laws of
physics, thus making it conscious under your definition.

I don't expect to see a process in the human brain that violates the
known laws of physics. That would defeat the point somewhat (no faith
required), though neither could you ever explain human behaviour in
terms of physics. Neither would experiments that would show we simply
follow the laws of physics ever get postive results for the
materialist perspective. Though I would expect there always to be
excuses about the sensitivity of the system.

______________________________________________

Notice the first sentence and the bit in brackets in the second. That
takes caare of the first two statements you queried (and I'm sure you
will forgive me if I have misunderstood your convoluted style of
writing).

As for the other comment, your response simply restates and relies on
your thusfar unsupported conclusion. To get to that conclusion, you
have to demonstrate it by evidence and/or logical argument. You
haven't proved that the robot would not be conscious. You haven't
shown any implausibility. You chose to argue your point in a
particular way, and you can't complain that we don't accept your
conclusion if the arguments you have chosen to defend that conclusion
don't work.

I said I didn't expect to *see* a process that violated the laws of
physics. Not that there wouldn't be any.

And so your conclusion that such violations are there would be based
on ...?

I've already said I'm not getting into a debate with you, as again and
again you fail to be able to follow the reasoning.

So for a final post to you. The reason would be that any mechanism
that strictly followed the known laws of physics, could be explained
without knowledge of whether it experienced or not. In the case of a
robot driven by a neural network for example, its behaviour will
always be explainable in terms of the node interactions, and each and
every node giving the outputs it would be expected to give
individually in the lab given the same inputs. This could be
retrospectively shown to be the case if each node wrote out to a log.

Therefore it means that the behaviour of the robot could be explained
with the assumption that it didn't have any subjective experiences
(even if hypothetically it did). This would mean that even if it did,
it would be behaving the same as it would be expected to if it didn't.
Therefore its behaviour would be unaffected by whether subjective
experiences had emerged or not.

Therefore if we were a mechanism that simply followed the laws of
physics, our behaviour could not be affected by our subjective
experiences. Therefore we couldn't be talking about them because they
existed. It would have to be a coincidence that they existed. The
scale of coincidence is implausible, therefore so is the suggestion
that we are simply a biological mechanism strictly following the known
laws of physics.

There is slightly more to it, but that is a rough summary.

With regards to why I am unwilling to continue the conversation with
you, I will address your comments above, to illustrate how
unreasonable you have been so far.

---
If you concede that a conscious robot is physically different from a
non-conscious robot, you are conceding that consciousness is physical
in nature. You lose.
---

As I have said, it overlooks the point that I would be stating that
the robot wouldn't be conscious, but be willing to go through the
reasoning that the assumption that the consciousness emerges from the
physical, and that hypothetically the robot might be conscious, in
order to show the implausibility of us being biological mechanisms
that follow the known laws of physics.

---
If a robot is concious, that in itself proves that consciousness has a
physical basis. You lose.
---

I would be stating that it isn't conscious.

---
A number of people have proposed tests for consciousness, and you have
never explained why they are not valid. You lose.
---

I have explained, and the reason is that they are all behavioural
tests, which show no signs of violating the laws of physics. In other
words the behaviour could be explained with the assumption that there
was no subjective experiences, so whether it did or didn't, the
behaviour wouldn't be a test. This is explained above.

---
I have shown how being able to explain behavior in terms of nodal
interactions is not inconsistent with being able to explain behavior
in terms of consciousness, but you have only repeated your logical
fallacies in response. You lose.
---

The robot would be behaving as it would be expected to if it had no
subjective experiences. Therefore if it did have any subjective
experiences, they wouldn't be an explanation of its behaviour.

---
You have conceded that proof of your point rests on faith. You lose.
---

This is made up, though it could be argued that it would require faith
that it isn't a coincidence that we experience the subjective
experiences that our behaviour expresses (we talk about for example).
The point though relies on the implausibility of it just being
coincidental.

---
You have conceded that human consciousness exists and affects
behavior, yet the brain does not violate any laws of physics. You
lose.
---

You have been shown to have misunderstood what was written. Even
though the clue that I stated we would never be shown to strictly
follow the laws of physics should have given you a hint.

---
You won't be drawn on how you know that a ball bearing is not
conscious and a human is: obviously you have a test that you aren't
willing to tell us about. You lose.
---

I have stated a test, anything that strictly follows the laws of
physics would not be conscious.

---
You keep arguing that not knowing whether consciousness affects
behavior is the same as knowing that it does not affect behaviour.
That is illogical. You lose.
---

That is illogical, that is not my argument though. It simply is a
display of you either struggling to follow the conversation, or being
more than disingenious in your presentation of it. The argument is
that the behaviour of any mechanism following the known laws of
physics, the robot being driven by a neural network used as an
example, can be explained without knowledge of whether it was
experiencing or not. Therefore it is possible to explain its behaviour
with the assumption that it had no subjective experiences. Therefore
whether it did or didn't couldn't be affecting behaviour.

---
You constantly engage in ad hominem attacks instead of dealing with
the arguments, and think you know more and are more intelligent than
all the neuroscientists of the world. You're an arrogant and deluded
prick.
---

Is that irony?

Anyway, given that you manage to write so much with out making one
valid point, leads me to the conclusion that my time would be better
spent discussing the issue with someone else. I won't be responding
further, but will start a new thread tomorrow challenging the writers
of the talk.origins website to defend their beliefs. It will be
interesting to see whether they avoid responding.





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