conciousness,

valich said:
Billy T:

What do you people have against doing a scholarly google search? This is beyond me. Certainly searching for facts is a lot better than posting blind opinions without citing any sources! ...
Click to expand...
I have nohing against Google searches, but what you find is often not fact. Let me recommend www.scirus.com where you can restrict the "hits" to only journal articles. Then you are more likely to find "facts." My complaints against your typical post is that you do not evaluate what you find well. I no longer recall the example, but you have posted as fact from a search an article which contradicted another post of your's only a few days earlier. This does not (usually) misslead me (I tend not to believe things posted by Joe Blow Hard etc anyway.) but may miss lead others.
 
If you meant that at some point in the future, humans may understand enough and have the technology to create an artifical being that is capable of independent thought, then I'd have to agree with you, though it's a matter of faith.
Click to expand...
yeah, that's what I meant.... but why is it a matter of "faith"?
[/quote]If you take the viewpoint that organic tissue is itself a kind of construction tool for machines made from organic material, then we have already constructed a conscious machine - she was called dolly the sheep, and she was 'built' using cloning and incubation technology.[/quote]
blah, that doesn't count. If humans had invented all the DNA sequences and knew exactly what each did and stuff, then i would agree... but getting the instructions and putting them in an already "living machine" doesn't count.
My point is that perhaps the only medium in which consciousness can exist is biological in nature - otherwise why didn't mother nature make us out of silicon and solar panels?
Click to expand...
There's no reason why consciousness could only exist in living tissue. thinking that IS having faith.
Why didn't nature make us out of silicon and solar panels? easy- nature is not an entity, it is a concept. Being a concept, nature ISN'T conscious. It doesn't think of what to evolve, and THEY, the silicon and solar panels, are an example of irreducible complexity. They just couldn't evolve. simple as that.
 
Billy T said:
I have nohing against Google searches, but what you find is often not fact. Let me recommend www.scirus.com where you can restrict the "hits" to only journal articles. Then you are more likely to find "facts." My complaints against your typical post is that you do not evaluate what you find well. I no longer recall the example, but you have posted as fact from a search an article which contradicted another post of your's only a few days earlier. This does not (usually) misslead me (I tend not to believe things posted by Joe Blow Hard etc anyway.) but may miss lead others.
Click to expand...
Google has a new Beta search engine out now: http://scholar.google.com that I find much more scientific than just so-called "googling." Whatever that means.

However, I also try to keep up with the daily news by watching the t.v. headlines, listening to NPR in the mornings, and checking cnn.com. If cnn.com posts an article with quotations from an author of a scientific journal that's about to come out. I don't see why one shouldn't post that same quotation and author, rather than wait till I get the latest version of Science or Nature. Same thing.
 
Thanks. I'm often pressed for time and use cnn because it covers U.S., Asian, Worldwide, and Scientific categories seperately, but I'll check out using MSNBC.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top