From: ben (ben@machinegod.org)
Date: Tue Jan 29 2002 - 15:56:37 MST
[Hermit 2*] A reasonable assumption is that if we cannot detect them, they
do not exist.
[ben 3] Would the same have been true 100 years ago? Of course not. <snip> So why
should it be true now?
[Hermit 3.1] I might have more accurately said that, if we cannot detect
them, we cannot create useful hypothesis about them.
[ben 4] Granted.
[Hermit 3]But at a more fundamental level, my answer was accurate. We are pretty certain that we do
understand the fundamental forces and particles of the Universe and we
understand which few of these the brain is able to interact with and
manipulate. The limitation is a limitation of energy levels and mechanisms.
A 120W device created from low conductivity soft tissue is simply unable to
manipulate GeV particles. Those particles and forces that the brain can
interact with, we can easily detect, at least in bulk, even using
non-invasive techniques. So it is not arrogance to say that we [b]know[/b]
that the brain does not have undetectable communications, but a simple
matter of well-understood physics.
[ben 4] As far as I am aware, no studies have been conducted about the changes in human brain behaviour [em]at the moment of death[/em]. Imagine that death provokes a 'powersurge' capable of augmenting that wattage, for example. Hence my statement about not discarding that which has yet to be proven false below.
[ben 3.1] No theory should be predicated on the existence of that which
cannot be proven - we all agree on that, I think. However the flipside of
this is that we also should not completely dismiss that which cannot be
proven false.
[Hermit 3] No hypothesis can be founded without an observation of some sort
and must be testable in such a way as to be able to be falsified. Else it is
purely non-useful speculation.
[ben 4] Which is admittedly what my side of this aspect of the conversation has been largely based on. I got into the discussion purely as an interesting mental excercise, and have noticed that it has turned into an attempt to justify my geek fantasies about someday 'uploading' myself - not at all as useful of an excercise, and therefore after replying to this latest round I will excuse myself back out of it.
[Hermit 3] PS love the topic modification, though the joke is probably lost on many
here without an explanation :-)
[ben 4] Thanks :) For those who may be curious, 'tstpd' is an imaginary unix program that would handle the "Telepathic Soul Transfer Protocol" - the 'd' at the end signifies that it is a daemon, or a process that runs non-interactively (from a local user perspective) in the background. For example, FTP sessions are handled by a program called 'ftpd', which listens for incoming requests to either serve, list or accept files. 'kill -HUP' tells a process to exit and then reloads it using the inital parameters. It is often a last-ditch attempt to fix a malfunctioning service by restarting it with the same assumptions that were made last time. The joke being that I am trying to keep alive the idea of a soul tranfer possibility, but have no new information with which to reinforce that possibility.
-ben
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