And I found that it's one of the few things I think about from college constantly, like, really persistently. It's changed how I think about everything, and is close as I really get to spirituality right now. If I obsess over it long enough I start getting little panic attacks questioning what reality even means, and all sorts of other things. It makes me wish I knew people that would want to discuss this with me at a quiet diner.
I always likened the spirit to the state of a cpu, and the brain as the cpu. You could import someone else's spirit into my brain, and their reality would have my body. Someone else's memories are the way my neurons are connected, their current thoughts stored in whatever the registers to my brain are.
All of these states of my spirit can be imported into another brain and I'll be unaware. It could be possible every morning a new body is recreated for me on another planet and my state is imported into it with my memories, and I am oblivious. In fact, I could be created at any discrete instant, even just now, and be unaware.
Someone said that if we ever got technology good enough to emulate reality virtually, then the odds of us being in one are really good. That single concept sort of blew my mind. There's just so many interesting facets to this correlation between the brain, mind, and computers. I know this post isn't particularly focused on a single point but I just find it fascinating and would love to hear other people's ideas.
I don't believe mind and body are so separate. As westerners, we view our brain as the CPU and the body as a mindless robot, constantly awaiting our every instruction. There are cases though where a person receiving an organ transplant would start having dreams of the person she got it from without prior information: http://theophanes.hubpages.com/hub/Cellular-Memories-in-Orga...
Our bodies store memory just like our brain, and our bodies are just as intelligent. Intuition, for instance, comes from your body and it can be one of the most insightful senses. It's something that most of us don't "believe" in because we are so disconnected from it, but with enough training (tai chi, yoga, etc) it's possible to integrate the body's thoughts into your daily life, or rather quiet the constant noise in your head and move your awareness down into your body, which gives you the best of both worlds, IMO.
At this point, it's fairly clear that there is no mind body distinction. The "mind" is an emergent property of 10^11 neurons performing complex processing operations on streams of sensory data. If you take away pieces of this machine, corresponding parts of the "mind" also disappear. I'm not sure why this keeps people up at night.
What really interests me (as a PhD student in Neuroscience at Stanford), is how it works, and how the uncoordinated action of neural networks leads to complex behaviors.
If you're wishing for conversations about these types of questions, you should listen to "The Partially Examined Life" podcast. http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/
Nick Bostrom wrote a paper about living in virtual reality in 2003. At least to me his writing was really interesting. http://www.simulation-argument.com/
I believe the brain is too complex to compare to either an operating system or a CPU. We can perhaps analogize both of those artificial entities to individual functions that a human brain may perform, but they would not be comprehensive of its abilities. As just one additional ability, there's also a memory storage (both short-term and long-term) mechanism existent in the brain, perhaps akin to temporary and permanent memory in a computer. Artificial neural networks mimic the properties of biological neurons. And then there's the concept of intelligence and actually thinking and understanding (which is really much more complicated than mere processing as in terms of a CPU); while machines' abilities are more along the lines of imitation/simulation.
And I found that it's one of the few things I think about from college constantly, like, really persistently. It's changed how I think about everything, and is close as I really get to spirituality right now. If I obsess over it long enough I start getting little panic attacks questioning what reality even means, and all sorts of other things. It makes me wish I knew people that would want to discuss this with me at a quiet diner.
I always likened the spirit to the state of a cpu, and the brain as the cpu. You could import someone else's spirit into my brain, and their reality would have my body. Someone else's memories are the way my neurons are connected, their current thoughts stored in whatever the registers to my brain are.
All of these states of my spirit can be imported into another brain and I'll be unaware. It could be possible every morning a new body is recreated for me on another planet and my state is imported into it with my memories, and I am oblivious. In fact, I could be created at any discrete instant, even just now, and be unaware.
Someone said that if we ever got technology good enough to emulate reality virtually, then the odds of us being in one are really good. That single concept sort of blew my mind. There's just so many interesting facets to this correlation between the brain, mind, and computers. I know this post isn't particularly focused on a single point but I just find it fascinating and would love to hear other people's ideas.