Richard Robertson

Since I consider humans to be complex and varied meat/electro/chemical computers, I see no issues in recreating emotions such as need “artificially”… whatever that means.

That makes sense, but evolution-wise, the difference is billions of years of genetic tuning vs a hundred or whatever years of one species’ culture (or at least its technic…[Read more]

There are inevitable deficiencies in language around this topic, e.g. especially the assumption that consciousness is an all or nothing kind of attribute. It’s not all or nothing, but it operates on scales of depth. It varies from womb to infancy to adolescence to adulthood to senility. It varies by health, by pathology, by species, and by…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
One way to put it is to say being conscious means having an experience, as a self, of itself and the world. There’s no reason I can think of why it would be impossible to operate as a human in stimulus/response fashion and not be conscious at all in that sense. That we are conscious seems to be a gratuitous accident. Something we go…

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Hey @unseen !  The only reason we are conscious, is to give us something to entertain ourselves with so our DNA can continue to mutate and evolve without interruption.

Zeus used to shag anything that moved, livestock included, and created a host of Demi-god heroes, all with splendid tales of achievement.  The Christian god got ONE chick pregnant, apparently without even having sex, and we still never hear the end of it.

No Zeus???  Way to ruin a good friday!  Give me those old Greek gods anytime.

@Unseen, please whack me headside if I’m going too far off your topic, but I just had the following Conscious Thought. And I wouldn’t mind a philosopher’s correction of my thought process here, or terminology used.

It seems that a lot of our philosophical questions, especially the deeper ones that address how we think of nature, reality and…[Read more]

Monitors for what purpose, Simon?

It’s not a stretch for Christians to say that Jesus was the son of God, Simon, it’s the absolute core basic tenet of their faith. It’s what ‘Christian’ means. It means you believe that Jesus was the Christ who is the son of God.  Literally that.

I’m just trying to get inside the other person’s point of view.

All gods and religion are much easier to fathom when one knows that all gods and religion were invented by human beings. All human good and bad is right there, written by human beings into scriptures, like any other fiction or screenplay ever written.

So I’m with you on trying to und…[Read more]

@simonpaynton There wasn’t any hell until Jesus turned up.

Same as why one would not believe in Mohammed, or the Allah he claims to know about. Evidence for the existence and reports of Jesus don’t even come close to what’s known about Mohammed, yet the range of beliefs around Jesus is truly baffling, and deep. In fact faith of many kinds is even revered by believers in spite of the lack of e…[Read more]