Wednesday, May 25, 2016

NDE comment

so many NDE's around the world are happening each and every day,all say that death doesn't really exist,it's just a passage from one world to another,we are not televisions in which there's a switch off,if from nothing you know exist then everything exists except nothing,

Here's the thing give a conscious person a substance that interferes with the mechanical, the physical, process of memory formation, and they will remain fully conscious talk to you, eat, play,etc. And after that they won't remember anything of what transpired, even though they were alive conscious ,etc. NDE's can only be reported because they exist in memory, creating a memory is a real physical process that is the result of brain function.

For a more drastic example look at people with no hyppocampus, they will forget even what happened minutes ago, though alive conscious and kicking. NDE's are nothing more than the result of abnormal brain function physically recorded by the brain. The brain cannot report things that it physically does not encode in memory, even in moments when the person still exists and is still conscious, as evidenced by drugs that block memory formation and hyppocampal damage.-link

comment on kurzweilai forums

But, if we programmed a robot (or trained a neural net) to feel non-painful pain, would it develop it's own qualia for pain?

more information is needed on how the brain works. Are the conscious portions of the brain conscious as the result of some fundamental physical property of the world or are they the result of some form of either information processing or a kind of information storage or a combination of both(some particular storage solution combined with a specific form of information processing)?
We know that digitally practically any stimuli that can produce vision or audio can be encoded and stored in a computer. Fear, love, smell, taste, etc it's really quite conceivable and likely that such, the patterns on the sensory organs, could be also encoded digitally. Things like the retina follow certain rules, certain algorithms, to process the stimuli, it appears the same happens in the early visual cortex. Does the brain tap into some resource that adds a fundamentally different property to originally digital information that was fed into its sensory organs? Or is it some kind of transformation from a digital state to another digital state?
If it is digital to digital, if it were somehow shown, it would fundamentally shatter morality and ethics. Good and evil would be but fictions of the human mind, like free will nonexistent and nonsensical. It would also in some sense destroy many religions, for without a greater good, the very definition of good attributed to god of some of the top religions would simply disappear.-link