How many minds can exist within a 1000 cubic foot area?

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by davidelkins, Jul 6, 2016.

  1. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,985
    Ok... i kinda get you'r drift... but i thank it will work out fine as we become more an more mechanical while biological humans become extinct.!!!
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,935
    Speak for yourself. I don't think this way.


    This has nothing to do with the topic of discussion.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Edont Knoff Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    547
    The question is, do we want to believe in minds existing separated from a body? If yes, I agree to infinity or at least a very large number, since they probably exist in some sort of extra dimension.

    But there is little evidence of bodyless minds, so probably the real answer is, "as many as you can fit mind-bearing bodies into the volume"
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. Yazata Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,902
    That's another closely-related issue, whether there is such a thing as "life energy".

    It's an idea that's found in religious texts like the Bible, where God is said to have "breathed life" into inanimate matter in order to make it animate, able to move under its own power. The idea that life is a kind of essential gas, an essential 'spirit' ('spiritus' is Latin for 'breath') that leaves the body at death and can linger around places where death occurs is thousands of years old. That's why ghosts are traditionally imagined as vapors.

    The influence of Greek philosophy in the West (and Indian philosophy in India) made that idea more abstract, by imagining that animating spirits aren't gaseous vapors, that they aren't material at all. So 'spirit' turned into a divine manifestation of a higher spiritual plane. (Another dimension in effect.) The medievals, influenced as they were by Christian Neoplatonism, often thought that way. Hence the question whether spirits take up any space.

    The rise of modern natural science worked more changes. If people go to the Internet Archive or Google Books and rummage around among old biology books that are no longer under copyright, they will find several examples of 19th century biologists arguing for the existence of some kind of unique "life energy". It was a subject of intense scientific controversy in the 1800's. Closer investigation reveals that those arguments typically revolved around developmental biology. They just couldn't understand how a fertilized egg differentiated itself into such a huge variety or organs and tissues, all related to each other in the proper way. So many scientific thinkers in earlier centuries imagined some kind of formative principle, some life-force, inherent in life that doesn't exist in dead inorganic matter, that serves to guide its development into ever more complex forms. And naturally, if they imagined a "life energy" that guides fetal development, they also tended to imagine that the same force is guiding biological evolution of species. So the early reception of Darwin and Wallace often seems to have imagined that there is some kind of sorta-divine principle inherent in life itself that drove life to strive to realize higher and higher forms, leading inexorably to mankind itself.

    Today, advances in genetics, developmental and evolutionary biology and physiology more generally have pretty much put that kind of thinking to rest. About the only prominent representative of it remaining these days is Rupert Sheldrake.
     
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2016
    cluelusshusbund and exchemist like this.
  8. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    Question:
    If we built a AI computer that is programmed to spend a given time for just collecting information, then go in a state of rest, but processing all that information, like sorting, categorizing, storing in its reference library.
    Would that be comparable to digital *dreaming*?
     
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2016
  9. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    7,985
    Well... if the AI was advanced enuff it coud have a dream state which woud be indistinguishable from biological-human dreaming.!!!
     
  10. river

    Messages:
    17,307
    Disagree

    You see none of this ; genetics, developmental and evolutionary biology and physiology ; has really anything to do with lifes energy. At all .
     
  11. Yazata Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,902
    They certainly seem to have provided a plausible and testable reply to the 19th century argument that there must be some mysterious formative principle in life that drives both fetal development and the evolution of species towards 'higher' and arguably more perfect forms.
     
  12. river

    Messages:
    17,307


    But don't go deep enough . Obviously
     
  13. Seattle Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,849
    There is no disembodied mind and our brains don't function like a computer. For instance, our memories aren't held in a storage location as in a computer. Our memories are recombined each time we have a memory.

    That's why our memories are very inaccurate but we are convinced that they are accurate.
     
  14. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    Question:
    Is a Rhumba vacuum cleaner which is able to recognize and avoid obstacles, a form of *AI*?
    How could you tell if you were not aware of electricity and computers? To a person even a few hundred years ago, a Rhumba vacuum would have appeared as having a "life-force" which mysteriously guided the contraption to avoid obstacles as if it had eyes and a could decide to take a different direction when faced with an insurmountable obstacle.
    And mathematically a Rhumba acts exactly like a living thing does, just by a slightly different human devised method.

    As to the term "life-energy" itself, why not drop the word *life* and just use the term *energy*? As far as I know, one common property of all creative or destructive change is energy, either positively charged or negatively charged.

    Bio-molecules are formed by energy, the rest is all mathematical evolution over immense time and spaces, from black holes to living things. Life is a form of energetic expression. The very variety of life in the most hostile environments on earth suggests that life is very probable on a universal scale, and possibly even in our own solar system.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life

    Those "other sciences" are chemistry and electronics, to name a few.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience

    So, if we consider a fundamental energetic particle as an angel, then one could have millions of angels dance on the head of a pin. In fact, they would form the pin head itself...

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
    Last edited: Jul 9, 2016
  15. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    I agree that specific memories tend to fade, but they leave the important general information from which we can reconstruct and recognize similar events. This is an advantage as it reduced the stored information in its most basic forms.

    When you have seen a horse of any color, you will recognize any horse or close relative, regardless of its size or coloration.

    I just realized I'm in the wrong forum, so my simple answer to the OP question is that a 100 thousand seat stadium can hold 100 thousand minds, but the internet (artificial neural network) gives access to the scenario for millions of tv viewers (minds).
     
    Last edited: Jul 9, 2016
  16. exchemist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,451
    Indeed, there seems to be no such thing as "life energy". Life involves energy conversion, of course, e.g. from light energy to chemical energy to heat etc. , but there is no separate or distinct form of energy associated with life.
     
    Write4U likes this.
  17. Seattle Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,849
    It's not just that memories fade. They are recreated from scratch each time which is very unlike a computer. There isn't just one location for each memory as in a computer storage device.

    We bring in the smell from one area, the emotions from another area, sound and vision from other areas. No memory is stored in a singular location. This is why incorrect memories seem very real.
     
  18. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    Not if you consider the Internet. Type a search word (information) and you will receive information from many different areas of the Artificial Neural Net.

    With exception of "emotion" I agree with all those examples, but they are *observations (reception) and processing* of specific forms of information, before being stored in separate *storage files*, just like computers.

    But allow me an example of the limitations of our sensory acuity. Try it, it may surprise you. http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html
     
  19. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    18,935
    This is a much better URL to use, since it doesn't tip its hand:
     
  20. Write4U Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    20,069
    Thanks for the link. It's an interesting phenomenon. I wonder if (many) don't see it because of pure concentration on the task, or if just doesn't register, because it does not belong in the scene and the mind just doesn't make the connection.
    Obviously everyone sees it, but perhaps it just doesn't register as part of the scene.
     
  21. Baldeee Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,226
    My understanding is that memories are stored procedurally, not wholesale.
    By that I mean that what we store is not the image, the sound, the smell, but rather a process by which we can then recreate the memory.
    By way of analogy, there was a game called Doom that took up 2.3Mb of storage, with all the textures, maps, etc already stored wholesale.
    There was another game released a short while later, an experiment of sorts, that was graphically better than Doom but otherwise much the same, and this was written in 90kb.
    The difference was not so much the improvement in technology but that the latter game was written so that the game would effectively create itself.
    It was procedural.
    You installed the game and rather than start playing straight away you had to wait 2 hours or so for the game to generate.

    This is how I see memory being stored: not the wholesale textures, smells, pictures, sounds etc, but simply the procedure by which those things can be recreated sufficiently for us to identify them.
    The core instructions, if you will, rather than the output.
     
  22. Seattle Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,849
    That's not my understanding. That's still too computer like. There is a "link" to each memory that does help with the reassembly process and becomes more fixed over time. Or rather, we could be describing the same thing but I don't see it as a computer like process.
     
  23. davidelkins Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    108
    The question is: how do you interact with a mind without the mind having some kind of interactive body to interact with, which could be a general human body shape or more exotic hub such as a flat planar body? DE
     

Share This Page