Robot Makes People Feel Like a Ghost Is Nearby 140
sciencehabit writes: In 2006, cognitive neuroscientist Olaf Blanke of the University of Geneva in Switzerland was testing a patient's brain functions before her epilepsy surgery when he noticed something strange. Every time he electrically stimulated the region of her brain responsible for integrating different sensory signals from the body, the patient would look behind her back as if a person was there, even when she knew full well that no one was actually present. Now, with the help of robots, Blanke and colleagues have not only found a neurological explanation for this illusion, but also tricked healthy people into sensing "ghosts," they report online in Current Biology (abstract). The study could help explain why schizophrenia patients sometimes hallucinate that aliens control their movements.
What they don't tell you ... (Score:5, Funny)
What the article doesn't say is the effect is easily counteracted by the patient wearing a tin foil hat.
Don't leave home without it.
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My question is how is this news? We already know the brain is influenced by electromagnetic fields and much research has been done in the field.
I wouldn't apply those fields to my nugget for any amount of money, turns out repeated exposure to these fields can rip the DNA strands in your brain apart.
Re:What they don't tell you ... (Score:4, Informative)
It's science news in that we've isolated a repeatable brain interaction electrical with a specific known effect.
That's a big deal, because it can begin to allow use to attribute direct cause to some human behaviors. Which has potential therapeutic applications, and maybe even someday can allow us to start the previously impossible task of improving on the human brain.
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"...improving on the human brain"
No thank you!
Who will define "improve"? If we're aiming at a perfect society, removing emotions and making people more obedient is the first step, right? After applying this patch noboy will object and everybody will agree it's for the best. Sorry if you don't agree but I doubt we'll be the ones who get to decide...
I'm not too excited about getting brain "enhancements" or apps. I don't want someone from tech support connecting to my brain and rebooting it to fix some issues
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I'm pretty sure there's lots of subjective improvements that could be made to my brain.
Re: What they don't tell you ... (Score:2)
Uh... how about increasing empathy (one of the potential effects of LSD and some other hallucinogens) and thereby reducing sociopathic/antisocial behaviors?
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Not quite a fair counter-argument to them.
That falls under the therapeutic category, and they were specifically objecting to the other subcategory of use I mentioned: improvement.
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"...improving on the human brain"
No thank you!
Who will define "improve"? If we're aiming at a perfect society, removing emotions and making people more obedient is the first step, right? ...
Um... did someone say "Cybermen" ? Or is that copyrighted by the BBC?
8-)
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My question is how is this news? We already know the brain is influenced by electromagnetic fields and much research has been done in the field.
I think opening a door to another dimension is big news. That's why people are looking even though "no one is there." Who knows what evil has been unleashed!
In spite of this and other similar phenomena... (Score:5, Interesting)
Dualists are still staggeringly common.
Why are so many people so adamant about the notion that consciousness can't come from the physical brain?
Re:In spite of this and other similar phenomena... (Score:5, Funny)
Why are so many people so adamant about the notion that consciousness can't come from the physical brain?
Because people are stupid.
(If you're amazed by how many questions are answered by that statement, you might not have a functioning TV.)
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Yeah, but I meant more in the general realm how people collectively view it as less laughable than creationism, even though they loosely fill the same boots.
I guess fundamentalists aren't pushing for it to be taught in science class, which is all I can really ask.
Re:In spite of this and other similar phenomena... (Score:5, Funny)
Dualists are still staggeringly common.
Why are so many people so adamant about the notion that consciousness can't come from the physical brain?
Personally, I withhold judgment on spirituality. As silly as some religion sounds, reality is even sillier. What the catholic church has to say isn't half as crazy as what's coming out of CERN these days.
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It's not about how silly things sound, it's about how directly contrary to observable reality Cartesian Dualism is. I'm pretty flexible about people believing things for no reason, hell I do too, but dualism at this point, is, like creationism, plain old science denial.
Re:In spite of this and other similar phenomena... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not about how silly things sound, it's about how directly contrary to observable reality Cartesian Dualism is. I'm pretty flexible about people believing things for no reason, hell I do too, but dualism at this point, is, like creationism, plain old science denial.
Sorry... but you've got 2 old guys claiming some crazy stuff that makes no logical sense as far as the layman is concerned. They both claim to have rock solid proof. None of witch makes any sense. Neither you, nor I, can test any of it. I, like you, chose to believe that quantum physics is real. But to lambaste the religious side for being stupid? I'm sorry, I'm just not there.
I have faith that physicists have done their work well, and are impartial and not lying to me. But my mother that attends church feels the same way about her pastor. I do not have enough time left in my life to turn around and learn the skills I'd need to actually verify what scientist have told me, nor the money to buy the equipment. So I therefor am going on faith, just like my mother. It would be the hight of hypocrisy for me to scold her for doing the exact same thing I'm doing.
I'm not saying you should dump this science nonsense and start going to church. I'm saying you should get off your high horse and let people believe what they want to.
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I don't feel the need to ascribe a cohesive likelihood of non-dishonesty to faith. I understand and appreciate that some of what is published scientifically is dishonest, but with the more direct understanding that the greater frameworks of academic publishing and the scientific method have ways of isolating and identifying those lies, and that the fundamentals of any field are within my personal ability to retest and examine.
Ascribing that to faith brushes aside the cautious thought that goes into the sys
Re:In spite of this and other similar phenomena... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha.
No I don't.
Familiarity with the history of biblical archeology(how many Noah's Arks have they found now? 12?), translation(hey this version of the inerrant truth means something completely different than this version of the inerrant truth), history, and exegisis is exactly why I dismiss them.
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Inerrancy isn't literalism.
Two distinct concepts, bro.
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How do you figure?
I was mocking biblical archeologists, finding "boats" on "mountains" and declaring them proof of the story we know by a lot of different ways didn't happen, without even a hint of consideration for the previous "finds" of the same thing.
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Re:In spite of this and other similar phenomena... (Score:5, Informative)
You have just committed a fallacy of equivocation. [logicalfallacies.info] You are using two different meanings of the word faith here and trying to say that they are the same when they are not.
For example, when I drive through a green light without looking I have "faith" that others are not going to drive through the red light and hit me. This is based off of experience and is one defintion of faith, which is a trust based on experience.
Religious faith is different. It is a belief that is not based on proof.
Now you may say that you are talking about faith in the individuals(scientists and preachers) which is the same as trust in the individual, but that is a little disingenuous. You are basically relying on extreme ignorance and a severe lack of curiosity in the "believer". In other words you are claiming in this case that you are ignorant of the scientific method and of the importance of evidence. You are also claiming that your mother is ignorant of these things as well as the lack of evidence of the claims of religion.
I sincerely doubt that you and your mother are that stupid.
Don't feel bad. Fallacies of equivocation are very easy to fall into in the English language.
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For example, when I drive through a green light without looking I have "faith" that others are not going to drive through the red light and hit me. This is based off of experience and is one defintion of faith, which is a trust based on experience.
Religious faith is different. It is a belief that is not based on proof.
Uh, your past experience is not proof. So your belief that it is safe to drive through a green light is not based on proof either. (Fact: People get in car accidents from bad drivers violating right of way)
By your very own definitions, you possess a "religious faith" by having beliefs not based on proof.
Note that most any religious faith is based on experience, much like your faith in the safety of green lights. People had "Come to Jesus" moments which overcame addictions, or suicidal thoughts, o
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Faith is, at the least, 'belief without evidence.' What you actually have is 'confidence.'
Otherwise, when presented with evidence that the physicists have not done their work well, are not impartial, or are lying to you, you'd continue to believe them, out of faith, rather than altering your opinion and reacting accordingly, which is reason.
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Faith is, at the least, 'belief without evidence.'
Yes, that's what he's saying. You telling me, "Evidence exists out there that proves this" doesn't mean much to me if I can't understand or reproduce it myself.
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Suspicion of scientists by the common man has been traced to their lack of understanding of science, and that they view scientific statements as coming from just another authority figure, equal to a politician or preacher or any talking head nowadays.
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I have faith that physicists have done their work well, and are impartial and not lying to me. But my mother that attends church feels the same way about her pastor. I do not have enough time left in my life to turn around and learn the skills I'd need to actually verify what scientist have told me, nor the money to buy the equipment. So I therefor am going on faith, just like my mother. It would be the hight of hypocrisy for me to scold her for doing the exact same thing I'm doing.
I'm not saying you should dump this science nonsense and start going to church. I'm saying you should get off your high horse and let people believe what they want to.
The difference is that it is *possible* for you to turn around and learn the skills needed to verify it, and it is *possible* because the equipment exists to allow one to verify.
There are no such skills or equipment to allow you to verify the existence of God.
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Forgot to add: You do not have *faith* in those physicists, you have *trust* in them.
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faith [feyth]
noun
1. confidence or trust in a person or thing
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"I do not have enough time... to actually verify what scientist have told me, ... So I therefor am going on faith"
I guess you can call that faith, but it's entirely different than religious faith because you *could* verify (or falsify) what the scientists are saying. And even if you don't do it yourself, others will, and will build on this work.
Neither your mother nor you nor anyone else could do that for religious beliefs. Religion is set up and religious faith is defined to make that impossible.
So your
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I do not have enough time left in my life to turn around and learn the skills I'd need to actually verify what scientist have told me, nor the money to buy the equipment.
Demonstrating that your mind is the product of your physical brain's functioning is not particularly difficult. You don't even need even any lab equipment. A popular experiment (which anyone can perform, and many do) is to introduce a dose of CH3CH2OH [snowbrains.com] into your brain, and then observe the resulting changes in your mind's behavior. If the mind and the brain were two separate mechanisms, mental changes like those would not occur in response to the introduction of a chemical.
That's not faith. (Score:2)
I have faith that physicists have done their work well,
That's thrust and confidence.
You trust scientists that they know and understand the field of their research based on the fact that they have invested decades of work and study and calculation and experimentation in reaching the conclusions they've reached.
You'd have no such trust in similar claims coming from a guy who came around to fix your boiler.
He starts talking about his calculation and experiments proving worm holes exist and you start backing away. Right?
Nor would you have any trust in claims made b
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... Sorry... but you've got 2 old guys claiming some crazy stuff that makes no logical sense as far as the layman is concerned. ...
That describes most of my career. And no, I am not a preacher. I am an Electrical Engineer. 8-)
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Spot on. Learning just a smidge about brain trauma and/or addiction throws dualism out of the window.
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Umm... No.
You can reject dualism for any number of reasons, but that sure as hell isn't one of 'em.
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Why not? Both examples pretty clearly demonstrate the physical nature of our consciousness. Brain trauma can dramatically alter a person's personality. Addiction is a chemical process that has a clear effect on 'free will'. Did I miss something?
Re:In spite of this and other similar phenomena... (Score:4, Interesting)
Both examples pretty clearly demonstrate the physical nature of our consciousness
Ah, but they don't! That's the rub.
The first example is no different than saying that damaging the yolk coil on my old TV proves that the pictures are produced entirely within the set and that all those 'radioists' are a bunch of religious fools.
To the second, you could replace 'drug addiction' with 'need to pee'. The desire to satisfy a physical discomfort doesn't tell us anything about the nature of consciousness other than the fact that people generally prefer to be comfortable.
Like I said before, you can reject dualism for any number of reasons, just not those.
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The drug addiction and the need to pee come from the same area in the brain. The drug co-opted that neural substructure to warp the person's motivations. There is a shit-ton of neuroscience evidence to back up both of my claims. You can counter with analogies, but the neurological evidence of brain-based consciousness is solid.
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You don't need to posit a soul for that.
Also, there is no reason that a Christain couldn't accept that animals have souls.
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What the catholic church has to say isn't half as crazy as what's coming out of CERN these days.
Perhaps, but CERN dosn't want to diddle the altar boys.
Re: In spite of this and other similar phenomena.. (Score:1)
Because they can't accept death.
Re:In spite of this and other similar phenomena... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are so many people so adamant about the notion that consciousness can't come from the physical brain?
I might be able to answer that for you, if you can explain to me what you understand consciousness to be.
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Very clever, but I'm going to go with a brief verbal rendition rather than attempt recreate the entire field of artificial intelligence in a post:
Consciousness could be roughly described as the ability to respond to complex stimulus in complex ways, specifically including the ability communicate those stimuli abstractly, and self-reference.
I have many other definitions I'm happy to work with.
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The thing is most animals exhibit those same things. A dog changes its tones when it is happy hunting hurt sad or any other emotion.
Do we need to seperate out consciousness from bodily functions? And where is the line? Does using a tool to assist in getting wants count? As dogs monkeys and Ravens have all done that including complex multi step problem solving.
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Uh, who the fuck said animals aren't conscious? Not me. Human intelligence, for all intents and purposes, is just a special case of animal intelligence, and science supports that notion too.
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Very clever, but I'm going to go with a brief verbal rendition rather than attempt recreate the entire field of artificial intelligence in a post
lol I get ya, but you opened this box.
Consciousness could be roughly described as the ability to respond to complex stimulus in complex ways, specifically including the ability communicate those stimuli abstractly, and self-reference.
If that's your definition, then one would need, not just the brain, but the entire body. If we can't say what consciousness is, then how can we say where it is?
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Dualists are still staggeringly common.
Why are so many people so adamant about the notion that consciousness can't come from the physical brain?
Noooo! Answer me this Mr Smartypants: If spirits don't exist, how come activating this spirit detection equipment allows you to sense them? This research proves that spirits exist, and soon it will be scientifically proven that God exists and is exactly as described in the Bible.
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Answer me this Mr Smartypants: If spirits don't exist, how come activating this spirit detection equipment allows you to sense them?
Laugh all you want, but that is an excellent point.
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"Free-will" as a concept was a response to god dictated fate, which isn't the same as determinism.
Determinism vs. Free Will, on the other hand is an artificial construction. Just because the conclusions you come to are a natural result of the inputs you experience and your personality doesn't somehow make them not your decisions.
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I've read at least one sci fi story that suggests that free will is just an "artifact" (in the "distortions on your screen" computer sense) of us experiencing 3 (or 4? Not sure how the terminology works) dimensions. If you bump it up a level such that we can see backwards and forwards in time, do we still have free will?
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Maybe souls, life-energy/chi, operate with energy not recognized by mainstream academics, like orgone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone
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Dualists are still staggeringly common.
Pistols at dawn then!
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Because success within their social group depends on shared beliefs, many of those beliefs are dependent on dualism, and being right about dualism has very few practical non-social consequences.
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You know what? This is an excellent point.
Not looking at what people have to lose pragmatically by not believing is unfair of me.
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Probably because the notion of consciousness as a physical, deterministic property is also messy, leading to conscious arrangements of gears and the ultimate conclusion that you are simply an automaton programmed to believe it is conscious, awake and self-determinate by an elaborate and pointless lie created through the cruelty and caprice of evolution.
My take is we're no better than ancient Greek philosophers arguing over the properties of atoms. We can debate it until we're blue in the face, but we simply
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I don't get this argument. If there was a series of cogs that acted just like a person, with all the emotions, concerns, thoughts, and motivations of a person, I'd see no reason to treat it as magically different from any other person. The only reason to do so would be if you had a vendetta against sprockets.
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Let's use a more practical example. If you wrote an elaborate version of ELIZA which produced output indistinguishable from a human, but which you knew was merely a algorithm operating deterministically on outside input with data structures and subroutines for emotions, concerns, thoughts, and motivations, would it be immoral for you to shut your program off? To delete any of its data? To rewrite it and make improvements to it?[1]
And if you know a Human is also a deterministic machine, do you feel any diffe
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Well, does it want that for itself?
At some level, some piece of that code is capable of examining cause and effect and describing its conclusions about itself otherwise it wouldn't be able to imitate that part of human behavior.
Whatever code that is, by necessity, is self aware.
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I don't get this argument.
We know.
I'd see no reason to treat it as magically different from any other person.
See, that's an entirely different discussion. That's how we know.
with all the emotions, concerns, thoughts, and motivations of a person
That's the sticking point. The belief that such a mechanical arrangement could have those properties is what he's questioning. It sounds absurd, which adds a bit of rhetorical punch, and he knows that there is no explanation for how such properties could emerge from an arrangement of gears and springs.
Now, you believe that that tin-man is a perfectly reasonable contrivance, yet you have no reason to believe it other than your own me
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We're not talking about whether you'd *treat* it differently, we're talking about whether it would *be* different.
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Well, if they are adamant, I doubt they can back it up.
Having said that, you might read Eben Alexander, an academic neurosurgeon, who would have also agreed that consciousness is the brain.
But one day he fell ill with a severe case of bacterial meningitis, and whilst in a coma, he had vivid complex hallucinations.
When he woke up, he had a problem. His brain had been ill and could not, as far as he knew as a neurosurgeon, his brain could NOT have allowed him to hallucinate anything. His complex brain was in
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Imagine you build a robot which is as complex as a human, and has software which can respond to its environment and make social interactions and basically be as sophisticated as a human. I think this is quite possible. But here is the issue: it would not need to be sentient. If it is just a machine running a program, why does it need to be sentient? It could do everything, physically process inputs and create outputs, without any need for an observer, someone experiencing the show all the time.
If I built such a machine and it told me that it's sentient and, being capable of social interaction, made a cogent argument for that, who would I be to argue that it isn't?
Why are you sentient? What possible advantage is there to you having an experience of existing? The machine, your body, doesn't need an "experiencer". Why aren't you just a machine responding to the environment, "in the dark" as it were. My camera does not need to be sentient to recognise faces, why do I need to be sentient?
My body needs food. It's very likely that I'd have a hard time convincing an employer to hire me if I wasn't sentient. Dogs seem to be self aware. Maybe people evolved self awareness because it's necessary in order to be higher than dogs on the food chain. Or, rather, we added extra language, memory, and thumbs to our self awareness, whi
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Does a game of chess come from a number of things on a board? nope it comes from the understanding of its meaning.
Consciousness is in the brain, and possibly in the brain only, like a game is in a PC circuitry, but a game is not electrons traveling through circuits, it is an abstraction, electrons traveling are the implementation of the game. If all people forget about the rules of a game, the game does not exist anymore, even if it is running.
Why am I stating these obvious things? because it is pointless t
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Nope, dualism specifically asserts that the thinking goes on in that spirit.
I'm okay with conjecturing any sort of non-interacting component of the universe you want. That's just idle speculation. Dualism, on the other hand, is a strictly invalidated notion.
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Wow, you're confused. Where do you come up with this stuff? The brilliant "philosophers" at JREF?
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Maybe any introduction to philosophy course that actually fucking covers Descartes?
Like even remotely basic inspection of what backers say?
Any sort of summary of the subject [wikipedia.org]?
I'm sorry you can't imagine someone attacking an idea for what it is?
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Maybe any introduction to philosophy course that actually fucking covers Descartes?
Yes, you could certainly use one!
I'm sorry you can't imagine someone attacking an idea for what it is?
Oh, I can image it. In fact, I HAVE to image it, as you're incapable of doing so!
BTW: Try reading that link. Perhaps then you'll understand why I laughed at you.
Fear of death. (Score:2)
Hope for some form of afterlife.
It usually boils down to those two.
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As someone said "How can something as unconscious as matter give rise to something as immaterial as consciousness?"
"How can something as visually dull as impure silicon give us complex moving pictures that responds to input across a network."
Because that's exactly how it works, and glosses over a lot of important sub-processes that make it work for rhetorical reasons.
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By carefully stimulating parts of this television, I can cause it to emit sounds and produce specific distortions to the image. You would therefore conclude that the images and sound are produced entirely within the television set. Sure, we don't understand all the details, but this is proof that nothing external to the set is responsible for its behavior.
See, those details you "gloss over" are pretty important. That fact is, we simply don't understand consciousness.
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We don't know how it could arise. But it is a real phenomenon, and therefore must arise out of physics somehow.
Note a dualist position just pushes the physics off into a different realm, a brain in a vat, or God's eye, or whatever. But there is still a physics there.
Also, since it is a real physical phenomenon, it cannot arise out of the abstract symbol-pushing interpretation of nerve activity. So you can't just replace a brain with an equal computer and expect consciousness (as opposed to intelligence)
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You'll whole argument is predicated on the notion that a never-observed phenomenon could be caused by the never-observed interactions of observed phenomena.
It's a bit like saying "a bunch of metal together makes a car, so couldn't all the cars together make a super-car that can drive to another solar system." It's idle conjecture without evidence and with obvious flaws.
It ignores the actual properties of things and asserts a transitive property we have no reason to believe exists.
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I can't speak for most people, but from my own perspective I don't see a conflict between "dualism" and objective empirical explanations for all human behavior. :)
From the outside, there is no verifiable reason to believe in anything beyond the (philosophical) atoms that make everything up, but Consciousness isn't about externally verifiable phenomenon. It is about subjective experience..., and while a sufficiently complex network of switches could in theory behave in an externally, verifiably, identical way to a person (i.e. essentially a biological robot), I personally have an "internal" perception of experiencing things consciously.
That seems to leave me with three options:
1) Due to unexplainable and unverifiable mystical-magical emergent properties of the organization of matter, I have a bone fide subjective experience from complex combinations of consciousness-free matter.
2) All matter has inherent consciousness properties and thus everything has a spirit (animism)
3) People are special and have a "soul"
Which of these options you choose to believe is your own business. I hope you can speak about it respectfully with others, not try to compel them to comply with your own opinion, and stand up for your beliefs in the presence of someone else trying to compel you of theirs. Cheers!
+1 for the AC
And since I already posted, 2 questions:
It has been well known for a very long time that unexpected temporal relationships between our actions and sensory impressions do weird things to our perception. Like if you turn off the light and by coincidence a sound goes off outside in the exact same moment. How is this new research so unexpected then?
How does the temporal action-result distortion in this experiment explain anything about "ghost" experiences as they are more commonly described, where
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Exactly this, I'm not sure what "ghosts" have to do with this. If I make someone think there's someone behind them, they'll think there's someone behind them.
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Your friend may be sensitive to infrasound. There's a decent entry on wikipedia under "infrasound" that may enlighten.
And I would have gotten away with it, too... (Score:5, Funny)
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~ Ruh-uh! Rhoast rhobots!
~ It's robot ghosts, Scoob.
~ Ruh-uh. Ruh-uh. Rhoast rhobots.
~ Robot ghosts!
~ Rhoast rhobots!
~ Shh! Shut up you potheads, he'll see us!
~ Ruh roh. Rhouns rike Rhemla ron rha rhag rhoday.
~ And you would know, wouldn't ya, Scoob?
~ RHEH HEH HEH HEH HEH!
.
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Huh? (Score:3)
This doesn't make much sense to me. First off, the test subject knows something else is behind them touching their back. They know there IS a "ghost" there (IE something external from themselves) that is touching their back. The test subject knows from experience that even though they are moving their hand, that motion on their back can't be because their hand is actually back there.
When the touches are synchronized, and the motion they make with their finger results in the robot touching their back at the same time, the brain coordinates the events and automatically realizes "I just triggered this touch on my back by doing something" and they don't have that sense that something external is behind them.
When the touch is delayed, the brain does not automatically correlate their action with the sensation on their back, and thus the robot's motions are interpreted as something external (ie a "ghost").
What doesn't make sense to me is the synchronized motion part is really the trick here - that our brain will automatically figure out we're causing a sensation, even though the mechanics don't make sense or it's something we haven't experienced before. The fact that that or subconscious does not automatically assimilate those motions that are no longer synchronized is to be expected. There IS a ghost behind the person touching them, in the form of a robot, and if the actions are not synchronized, then our mind may not correlate those delayed motions as a result of something we did.
As soon as those motions are no longer synchronized it gets silly to make the test subject guess how many people are behind them or whatever. Something is poking them in the back, and they don't notice that it's a delayed result of their own motions - it's quite obvious that a robot or person or something is responsible for that sensation. And so different people will make different guesses about what kind of trickery is going on behind their back based on their mental state or perception or whatever.
Or maybe something about this experiment went WOOSH right over my head.
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It gets interesting later:
To verify the response, the researchers conducted another study in which four researchers stood in the room. Participants were told that while they were blindfolded and operating the machine, some experimenters might approach them without actually touching them. The researchers told participants to estimate the number of people close to them at regular intervals. In reality, no researcher ever approached the participants. Yet people who experienced a delayed touch on their back felt more strongly that other people were close to them, counting up to four people when none existed.
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It gets interesting later:
To verify the response, the researchers conducted another study in which four researchers stood in the room. Participants were told that while they were blindfolded and operating the machine, some experimenters might approach them without actually touching them. The researchers told participants to estimate the number of people close to them at regular intervals. In reality, no researcher ever approached the participants. Yet people who experienced a delayed touch on their back felt more strongly that other people were close to them, counting up to four people when none existed.
Maybe I am blindfolded, but what's interesting about this? Test subjects were blindfolded in a room with people and were told those people would come close to them but not touch them. Then something poked them, which due to desyncronization they could not relate to their actions. So they concluded that someone was poking them. And being in an uncomfortable situation (blindfolded with people in the room, operating a machine of unknown purpose - or did they know it was a poking machine?), being doubtful if th
Re: (Score:3)
What doesn't make sense to me is the synchronized motion part is really the trick here - that our brain will automatically figure out we're causing a sensation, even though the mechanics don't make sense or it's something we haven't experienced before.
I think I understand what they're trying to demonstrate, but the experiment is structured in a way that's not obvious. It starts from the idea that some people who have hallucinations of "ghosts" and other such things have damage in their brain, in an area that coordinates different sensations to determine cause. So it's like, if you were to flick yourself in the leg, you would feel one hand flicking, hear a brief "thud" noise from the impact, and feel an impact on your leg, and there's a part of your bra
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
What doesn't make sense to me is the synchronized motion part is really the trick here - that our brain will automatically figure out we're causing a sensation, even though the mechanics don't make sense or it's something we haven't experienced before. The fact that that or subconscious does not automatically assimilate those motions that are no longer synchronized is to be expected. There IS a ghost behind the person touching them, in the form of a robot
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think this sentence is very important here (emphasis mine):
When the robot finger at the back of a healthy person is in sync with their own finger they can't tell a robot is there, it literaly feels like they're poking themselves directly in the back. Sensation 1 (from their finger) perfectly matched up with sensation 2 (the robot at their
Not paranoid (Score:2)
Just because your brain is tickled, that does not mean there's no ghost behind you.
Gaaahhhduh! (Score:2)
i dont get it (Score:2)
How is that a breakdown of your self cohesion processing? Something you aren't really controlling is just poking you in the back! Sure, you gave the input, but i expect your cohesion times out after a couple millisecond
Completely missing the impact of this finding! (Score:1)
I can't believe discussion on this topic turned into a heated debate on consciousness and metaphysics, ignoring the explosive impact this research will have on the sex toy industry, especially for the fellas.
No longer will man have to rely on his imagination to put life into the can of Pillsbury biscuit dough he's humping (or the silicon equivalent of the same technology). With the new Thrust Delaying harness your Canned Tang, Handee Man, Li'l Tugger, and Bone Cone can take on a spooky life of it's own! Dia
No surprise (Score:2)
I applaud Blanke for conducting this research and perhaps it will generate quantitative data that will eventually help epileptics and schizophrenics, but I'm not clear why any of this would be surprising. If you are in a building where there are low frequency sounds, that you can perceive subconsciously but cannot hear consciously, you may get a feeling that it is haunted. If you see a light in the sky moving so slowly that your brain interprets it as simultaneously stationary and moving, you may feel tha
Ad absurdum. (Score:2)
Correlation is not causation.
How can we be sure that Blanke's original electrical stimulation discovery in 2006 and the later the robot poking experiments didn't actually summon malevolent entities that then caused the spooky sensation (at a distance?) the participants experienced?
On a more serious note, I'd like to see some follow-up interviews with the participants to rate how they felt after the experiment. Subjectively, did they feel like they had more "creepy" experiences following the experiment? I'd
The Electric Chair (Score:1)