Quote:Because such a property does not exist. Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles.

(May 19, 2018 08:24 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: Behind all matter is the concealed reality of mathematics (that which governs) and behind that is certain God. Our minds are logic manifest so logic is indeed reality, not merely empirical. Aside from the outward appearance of two sided material existence, where a thing assumes the binary logic form of complementary existence (as in matter) or non-existence (as in void), is supreme reality. Spirit exists at 90 degrees to matter, that is why prayer can become effective at influencing reality via the Global Syntactic Operator or G.O.D. in the event that our psyches form a transtemporal feedback loop with ultimate reality.

Further reading: https://answersingenesis.org/physics/reconciliation-of-physical-matter-and-metaphysical-cognizance/

(May 19, 2018 08:10 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Is life a concept? Stolen from an article: [...] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/why-life-does-not-really-exist/

Why is defining life so frustratingly difficult? Why have scientists and philosophers failed for centuries to find a specific physical property or set of properties that clearly separates the living from the inanimate? Because such a property does not exist. Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.

(May 19, 2018 08:10 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Stolen from an article: 
On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles.

Stephen Wolfram: My children always give me a hard time for this particular quote: "The weather has a mind of its own." Well, that's an animistic type of statement, and it seems like it has no place in modern scientific thinking. But that statement is not as silly as it first seems. What that's representing is, if we think about a brain—what is a brain doing? A brain is taking certain input, it's computing things, it's causing certain actions to happen; it's effectively generating a certain output.

We can think about all sorts of systems as effectively doing computations, whether it's a brain, whether it's a cloud responding to the different thermal environment that it finds itself in. We can ask ourselves, are our brains doing vastly more sophisticated computations than happens in these fluids in the atmosphere?

I had first assumed that the answer to that was, yes, we are carefully evolved, we're doing much more sophisticated stuff than any of these systems in nature. But it turns out that's not the case. It turns out that there's this very broad equivalence between the kinds of computations that different kinds of systems do. That realization makes the question of the human condition a little bit more poignant, because where we might say, "There's one thing we've got—we're special, we've got all this intelligence and all these things which nothing else can have." But that's not true. There are all these different systems of nature that are pretty much equivalent in terms of their computational, or for that matter, intellectual, capabilities.

What makes us different from all these things? What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which gives us our notions of purpose and goals. That's a long way of saying when we have the box on the desk that thinks as well as any brain does, the thing it doesn't have, intrinsically, is the goals and purposes that we have. Those are defined by our particulars—our particular biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history.

The thing we have to think about as we think about the future of these things is the goals. That's what humans contribute, that's what our civilization contributes—execution of those goals; that's what we can increasingly automate. We've been automating it for thousands of years. We will succeed in having very good automation of those goals. I've spent some significant part of my life building technology to essentially go from a human concept of a goal to something that gets done in the world.

[...] Here's one of my scenarios that I'm curious about. Let's say there's a time when human consciousness is readily uploadable into digital form, virtualized and so on, and pretty soon we have a box of a trillion souls. There are a trillion souls in a box, all virtualized. We look at this box. In the box, there will be hopefully nice molecular computing, maybe it'll be derived from biology in some sense, but maybe not, but there will be all kinds of molecules doing things, electrons doing things. The box is doing all kinds of elaborate stuff.

Then we look at the rock sitting next to the box. Inside the rock, there's all kinds of elaborate stuff going on, all kinds of electrons doing all kinds of things. We say, "What's the difference between the rock and the box of a trillion souls?" The answer will be that the box of trillion souls has this long history. The details of what's happening there were derived from the history of civilization and people watching videos made in 2015 or whatever. Whereas the rock came from its geological history, but it's not the particular history of our civilization.

This question of realizing that there isn't this distinction between intelligence and mere computation leads you to imagine the future of civilization ends up being the box of trillion souls, and then what is the purpose of that? From our current point of view, for example, in that scenario, it's like every soul is playing video games basically forever. What's the endpoint of that? --AI & The Future of Civilization