Survival of consciousness (reincarnation)

[skinofevil]

There is no consciousness after death. Consciousness, as has been pointed out, is a function of the human brain. When that stops functioning, consciousness is over.

However, speaking as a Deist, Skin believes that each sentient entity is in possession of a "divine spark" -- something that sets our level of consciousness apart from that of other animals. Is it a level sufficiently elevated to permit a construct we might call a soul? Skin doesn't know. Is it sufficiently elevated from other animals to permit survival of the consciousness beyond mortal death? Skin doesn't believe so. But Skin does believe that something of this lifetime's experiences are retained within that divine spark. Is that the same thing as the concept of reincarnation? No, probably not. If there is a "divine spark" as Deists understand the concept, retention of past life memories would be, if not flatly counterproductive, then useless. The universe seems to do very little that is truly useless.

[IRG CommandoJoe]

No, they are not. They are not what make you an individual, and they are not separate from everything else. We're talking about quantum mechanics here. Leave common sense at the door.

And a new realm was entered...

The uncertainty principle states that it is impossible for you to know both a particle's position and momentum at the same time. That means that if you know the momentum of an atom currently in your body, it is impossible to say whether it is, in fact, inside your body or all the way off on the fucking moon. Seriously. You can't know.

That happens? Atoms of my body can end up on the moon? How???

Yes. That is exactly what I am saying. That is exactly what everyone has been saying since you started this dispute.

So then as long as the mind is conscious, it remains the same consciousness. Then you would agree that people who experience brain death and are revived are effectively a new consciousness?

Its quantum mechanics. If you think you understand it, you don't. Its all about probabilities, and blowing human intuition into quivering blobs of molasses.

You've done a nice job of that in this thread.

You have this obsession with the atoms. You shouldn't be obsessed with the atoms. That is what I am saying, grasshopper. Because what you propose does in fact happen all the time. Like I said, you are literally walking talking dinosaur shit, and before that star-stuff. Atoms aren't agents of creation, they just are what they are. Building blocks that can be used to make anything. So when they get re-used by the environment to make a new brain, that isn't creation or persistence or any other bullshit. The atoms themselves are irrelevant. Consciousness is a process, not a thing. It is entropy in action. Now tell me what that action looks like.

So it seems that the only requirement for consciousness to stay original is to have that an arrangement of interchangeable atoms forever, without ever being separated. Survival of the consciousness would be impossible once that arrangement is disrupted. The reasons why these things are so still eludes me. I don't understand it fully.

Since reincarnation seems impossible now, the only hope for a survival of one's consciousness for a really long time is to transfer it to synthetic form. Sounds like the backstory to the game Total Annihilation.

[Imperial528]

Again, I ask this: If there is no brain activity during surgery or some medical procedure for some period of time and the person later has brain activity and survives, do we consider that person to be a copy and not the same person as before?

In order for brain activity to cease completely, you need total brain death. Even under anesthetic, the brain has merely been slowed down and most functions in a sort of sleep mode. Furthermore, even if brain activity stops completely for a period (Which I don't think ever happens without brain death), I would consider the mind that is there upon the resuming of brain activity the original state, because it had been saved in the same medium in runs in by the act of simply pausing the existing functions, and there was no physical discontinuity of the hardware. This is unlike scanning a brain, destroying it, and making one which is identical, as while yes the state was saved, the save was not a halt of the original functions, it was copying those functions and a point in time and then making a new object with the same state and functions.

So then the hardware is analogous to the brain and the program is analogous to consciousness. Are you saying that the consciousness will be different somehow in an identical brain? You might have to explain that a bit more.

It will be different because it is a copy of the original run state, not a continuation of it. Say I knit half a sweater, later I knit the other half but I knit it isolated from the first. Do I have one sweater? No, I just have two halves. The same is true of running a program to a point, stopping it, and starting a copy elsewhere, or of cloning a person and killing the original, or disintegration then reassembly. The common point is that there is a physical and temporal discontinuity between the two that is not resolved.

Again, if someone dies on the operating table for a few minutes and is revived, is that continuity broken or preserved? Are we to say that that person has a new consciousness despite having the same brain?

Clinical death is defined as a cease in the function of the heart, not of the brain. You can't be revived from complete or functional brain death, however you can be revived from partial if the damage is not too much, which does not break the continuity. Without brain death, however, there is no break of continuity. An analogy would be this:
I'm playing a game, every time I close it and later start a new one, the game runs in a new instance. However, I am playing the same play-through as I was earlier, as I load the save file where it had last stopped, so continuity between each save is preserved.
The equivalent for this in the brain would be the halting of brain functions as they were. In this, while there is a break in temporal continuity to an outside observer, there is no break in physical continuity of the function state, so we can say that when the function is made active again it is the same function, as the discontinuity in this case is resolved by having no bearing on the physical state of the function.

[Formless]

That happens? Atoms of my body can end up on the moon? How???

You know, I'm not actually a physicist, right? I already stated I'm unsure of whether I am truly qualified to explain some of the stuff I've tried to explain, though I'm doing my best.

A lot of stuff in quantum physics is dependent upon the observer. For instance, you can't know a particle's position and momentum at the same time because in order to observe it you have to interact with it. When you interact with it to learn its position, its momentum changes. When you interact with it to know its momentum, its position can change. Also, at these scales particles do not behave as convenient points in space-time. They also behave like waves. This was demonstrated by the famous two slit experiment, which you can look up for yourself. I'll just cut to the point and say that in the two slit experiment, they can actually take a single atom and, because of wave-particle duality, they can make it interact with itself. The way I've come to understand this is that the wave form describes a probability curve, and that there is a non-zero probability of finding a particle as large as an atom at any point on the wave or even multiple points on the wave simultaneously. Therefore, there is a non-zero chance that one of your atoms can exist both on the moon and in your body. Its just a very small probability. When you establish its momentum, you give up the ability to know which part of the wave it exists on.

We don't usually see quantum effects at the scales human beings live their lives at because the probability curves average themselves down until you get a picture of reality where everything appears to stay in one place and only one place at a time. Its an illusion, though, as the Boltzmann Brain scenario illustrates, but a convincing one in everyday life. Also, in the right conditions (specifically, supercooled matter) you can get some of those neat quantum properties to manifest themselves at large scales.

So then as long as the mind is conscious, it remains the same consciousness. Then you would agree that people who experience brain death and are revived are effectively a new consciousness?

Who are these people? Legally, brain death is death. If someone is braindead, but still able to sustain other bodily functions like a heartbeat through artificial means, the law considers it fully permissible to simply pull the plug. To my knowledge, no one has yet managed to reverse brain death.

Its quantum mechanics. If you think you understand it, you don't. Its all about probabilities, and blowing human intuition into quivering blobs of molasses.

You've done a nice job of that in this thread.

You're welcome.

So it seems that the only requirement for consciousness to stay original is to have that an arrangement of interchangeable atoms forever, without ever being separated. Survival of the consciousness would be impossible once that arrangement is disrupted. The reasons why these things are so still eludes me. I don't understand it fully.

Well, that comes back to philosophical questions about identity, and whether a copy of you is just as much you as you are-- or rather, is just as much you as you are at the moment of its creation. Most agree that if two versions of you are walking around, the fact that they experience the world individually means their subjective perspectives become different over time. Like identical twins, you know? Each accumulates different memories that the other now does not possess. But that's a bit of a tangent. First, I think you need to understand what consciousness is. For the philosophical side (as opposed to the nitty gritty of neuroscience) I suggest the works of Douglas Hofstadter on self-awareness. His book I am a Strange Loop is the more straightforward of his work, though Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a classic, and really explores the more general concept of self reference in quite a bit of detail. Oh, and its also very, very literate and dense. Like, Alice in Wonderland dense.

Since reincarnation seems impossible now, the only hope for a survival of one's consciousness for a really long time is to transfer it to synthetic form. Sounds like the backstory to the game Total Annihilation.

Well, I've always been partial to the idea of slowly replacing my nervous system bit by bit with more durable components, though even there the philosophical identity issues of copying aren't really bypassed like some people think (imagine taking all of the old parts of maddoctor's broomstick and making a new broom. Now try and hold your head together before it explodes ).





Edit: fixed quote tags, added just a bit of extra explanation.

[Terralthra]

Formless, I think you're misstating the uncertainty principle slightly. It doesn't say that you can't know a particle's momentum and position simultaneously; it sets a lower bound on the precision with which you can know these quantities. σx * σp >= ħ/2, where ħ = h/2π, and σx, σp are the standard deviations of momentum and position, respectively. h is more or less equivalent to Planck's Constant, 6.62606957(29)* 10^−34 J*s. That is, as the exponent shows, an exceedingly small number. In practice, momentum and position can be fairly well-known on human scales, or even molecular scales.

[Spectre_nz]

So then as long as the mind is conscious, it remains the same consciousness. Then you would agree that people who experience brain death and are revived are effectively a new consciousness?

Covered by Imperial, but basically; no. If you recover consciousness from being declared clinically dead it’s because your brain didn't fully stop functioning. The action potentials and the connectivity between the synapses in your brain didn't degenerate, so when your heart starts back up again, things resume (approximately) where they left off. There is continuity. The memories, experiences and personality that makes you you remained intact enough to recover. If your brain was deprived of oxygen and energy for too long, then those action potentials degrade, the neurons wither and the connections between them break down; if you come back after that, it will be with significant impairment (and probably, an alteration in personality and memory loss.) Longer than that and you won't be coming back at all. Maybe you could call that a new consciousness. Or a damaged version of the original consciousness.
But I don't consider I was a 'new' consciousness after every time I've been under general aesthetic.

So it seems that the only requirement for consciousness to stay original is to have that an arrangement of interchangeable atoms forever, without ever being separated. Survival of the consciousness would be impossible once that arrangement is disrupted. The reasons why these things are so still eludes me. I don't understand it fully.

Have you ever seen a standing wave remaining more or less stationary in a fast flowing river?

If you take all the water molecules of that wave, move them somewhere else and can perfectly replicate their orientation to one another, will you have a standing wave in your new location?
No, you'll have a puddle of water - the wave is not the atoms in it. You can't have a bucket of wave.
It’s the result of a bunch of physical properties and while the water molecules comprise it, they do not fully embody it, they are not the wave. New water atoms are moving through the wave all the time, and old ones are leaving.
However, you can take other water molecules, move them at the right speed over a surface of the right topography and you'll get a wave. If your velocity and topography are identical, it should, for all intensive purposes, look like the same wave.

In an analogous manner, consciousness is an emergent property of the interconnected arrangement of the neurons in your brain and the action potentials they hold (the research in medical science points to this, but it’s a contentious issue and 'what is consciousness’ and ‘how does it come about’ is by no means totally understood)

If you were to perfectly replicate the arrangement of atoms in your body, you would also be perfectly reproducing the position, connections and action potentials of the neurons in your brain, no matter where the atoms you used came from, so you'll end up with a person with identical memories, experiences, thoughts and feelings. And as far as I'm concerned, that’s the same conscious awareness.
Then you get the philosophical discussion of ‘what happens if I perfectly simulate the positions and properties of all the atoms in your brain, on a computer'. Same consciousness? Same awareness? No atoms?

Your consciousness is not the atoms in it. They're just the substrate.

Fun fact; every atom in your body has almost certainly been there less than 7 years (at least, that’s the number that I was taught). Your brain and your heart have the lowest cell turn over, but even then, cells get repaired and re-modelled. Most of your atoms turn over once a year.
72% of your body (ie, the water) turns over every 16 days or so. Thanks google.

[Formless]

Formless, I think you're misstating the uncertainty principle slightly. It doesn't say that you can't know a particle's momentum and position simultaneously; it sets a lower bound on the precision with which you can know these quantities. σx * σp >= ħ/2, where ħ = h/2π, and σx, σp are the standard deviations of momentum and position, respectively. h is more or less equivalent to Planck's Constant, 6.62606957(29)* 10^−34 J*s. That is, as the exponent shows, an exceedingly small number. In practice, momentum and position can be fairly well-known on human scales, or even molecular scales.

Thanks for the correction. Told you I wasn't actually a physicist.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I think this is the most important point (per Formless):

Consciousness is a process, not a thing.

"Consciousness" is simply a term that describes the way we perceive the outcome of a series of neurological processes. It isn't accurate to talk about consciousness as if it were an entity. In this hypothetical brain death scenario, for example, saying that the person has a "new" consciousness upon recovery is about as helpful as saying that they have a "new" metabolism. The processes were not working properly during brain death, and resumed working properly when they recovered. You can talk about the issue philosophically, but from a biological perspective it is an inherently flawed way to discuss the concept of consciousness.

[Modax]

A lot of people seem to think that consciousness must be inseparably tied to specific atoms. I think this may come from a naive, literal view of monism, the idea that the universe only contains of matter and energy. In fact the universe additionally contains information. Information is represented and processed by atoms, but is not made of atoms. The same poem can be represented by marks on paper, patterns of electric charges in flash memory, or patterns of synaptic activity in a brain that has memorized it.

Personal identity is not made of atoms. Nor is strict physical continuity important for it. The atoms representing Shakespeare's plays stored in an ebook reader have never come into contact with Shakespeare, nor with any of the original copies of his plays, but they have the same meaning. Personal identity is a messy, fuzzy, lossy thing that undergos constant change: the sum of your memories, your patterns of thought, your ways of responding to stimuli. This is pure information and it requires no magical soul, special atoms, elan vital, or "continuity" to get its meaning: all that is required is for something to represent and process it.

But unlike a piece of literature, not all of the information that makes up who we are remains constant from one minute to the next, and although normally the change is continuous and gradual it doesn't necessarily have to be. It is simply by convention and for convenience that we speak of having some constant identity, I can see no sense in which it's technically true.

It is possible in principle for any of the of information-states embodied by my brain throughout my life here on earth to suddenly pop-up in a quantum fluctuation somewhere else in spacetime, given an arbitrarily big universe. Given an infinite multiverse the number of copies of one's mental states should be infinite, and although some of these instances may be Boltzmann brains, at least some will have a causal past in a universe like the one we observe. Perhaps a fraction of your possible past histories consist of Boltzmann brain events but for all intents and purposes it doesn't matter.

[cosmicalstorm]

I would happily refer the people in this thread to Greg Egans unflinching take on the purely materialistic base of our mind in Permutation City.
http://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City- ... 006105481X

[Modax]

I would happily refer the people in this thread to Greg Egans unflinching take on the purely materialistic base of our mind in Permutation City.
http://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City- ... 006105481X

No, the OP is an example of a 'purely materialistic' view of the mind. I second your recommendation, but I think the word you're looking for is naturalistic, or reductionist.