[marco (OP)]

>>>Marco, you haven't yet answered my question. Have you ever had a pet?

Yes, I have had many pets during my life, and now I have a dog. There is absolutely nothing in their behavior that can prove that animals are conscious or really feel sensations. Science allows us to build machines able to react to external stimulations without feeling anything. This is sufficient to prove that the idea that animals are conscious or feel sensations and emotions is only an arbitrary opinion without any scientific basis.


marco

[Quantumcat]

Marco! Listen! You have emotions because you feel them ... animals have emotions, because they feel them. How does an animal know you have feelings? According to you, to an animal you are nothing but an artificial lego man.

And to the others, you didn't understand what I meant. Think about it for a while, it only seems like we have free will because the reasons for our actions are so complex. When I meant in the same situation, I meant if you went back in time to the same situation, you would do exactly the same thing you did the last time. Right down to the last twitch of your nose. Free will would be determined by being able to do something different in the exact same situation, but we don't, I know I can't prove it because I can't make you go back in time, but we don't. What we 'choose' to do is determined by the connections between neurones in our brain, which are formed by our genetics and our experiences. Think of a computer program, the input goes around its logic gates until it comes out with a solution! Exactly what happens in the brain, our senses give us input and the result is the brain firing down nerves to tell our muscles to act. There is no such thing as free will! Reason can tell you that alone without need for experiements

Am I dead? Am I alive? I'm both!

[qpan]

>>The proof of existence of emotions in other people is more indirect; anyway, the fact other people
>>can discuss with us about consciousness and emotions, proves that they too are conscious and feel
>>emotions.

You say that if people tell each other they have emotions, then they must be emotive? So just because animals can't speak they must not feel emotions? That logic is a bit/very flawed isn't it? Its like saying that speech is the basis for emotions - so do you reckon that the power of speech is not given to us by our brains but by our souls also?

I cannot believe you have a dog. You must be lying. Anyone who has a pet knows that they have feelings - especially dogs - they form very string bonds with their owners.



"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it."
-Edgar Allan Poe

[Quantumcat]

Marco, according to you, chimpanzees must have souls, because they can talk using sign language!! They can definitely express their feelings. Does a deaf, blind, and mute person not have a soul? Because people like that, in general, can't talk. They are human though. They can't tell us their feelings so does that mean they don't have any?

Am I dead? Am I alive? I'm both!

[Ylide]

You REALLY need to take a course in logic and argument, Marco my friend.  Let's see if I can standardize your argument for you:

premise 1: humans act like they have emotions
premise 2: humans can communicate that they have emotions
premise 3: quantum physics shows that conscious thought and emotion are impossible given brain physiology
sub-argument 1: it must be the soul that provides consciousness and emotions to humans

premise 4: animals are inferior to humans
premise 5: we can build machines that react to external stimuli
premise 6: animals react to external stimuli
premise 7: machines don't have souls
subargument 2: animals don't have souls

Your sub-argument falls apart because of a false premise.  In premise 3, you're expounding expert testimony that quantum physics proves that emotion and consciousness are not possible within the framework of the brain.  This is not a commonly accepted nor widely published nor even significantly considered as fact.  Therefore the premise must be accepted as false.  Since your conclusion RELIES on this premise being true, your subargument is false.

In your second subargument, you're falling into a non sequitur.  The fact we can create machines to react to stimuli in the same way animals do in no way leads to animals being like machines.  This is like saying "All causians are white, Winston Churchull is white, I am a caucasian, therefore I am Winston Churchill."  It's pure fallacy.  Secondly, since your second argument relied upon your first being indisputably true, it fails on that as well.

Thanks for playing, though, it's been fun.  




This message brought to you by The Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People

[Quantumcat]

E.W.P. !!!

Am I dead? Am I alive? I'm both!

[marco (OP)]

>>>>Marco, according to you, chimpanzees must have souls, because they can talk using sign language!They can definitely express their feelings.

Come on! This is only your opinion. You have no objective element to prove that animals talk about consciousness, emotions or feelings.

As I have said, the existence of consciousness, emotions, etc. in animals is only a matter of personal opinion. On the contrary, the existence of consciousness in man is directly proved.

marco.

[qpan]

Errr, how is it directly proved? Find a way to directly prove that i feel emotions without me telling you that i do- i don't think you can. Same with animals Marco - they feel emotions but just can't tell you (as in your opinion, there is no way to tell whether anything has emotions without it telling you it has).

And marco, you give me a computer program which can simulate an animal accurately Marco. You might as well not bother finding one- cos there isn't. If animals do not have souls, etc, then their behaviour should be perfectly accurately predicted by a computer according to you.

Your logic is so flawed and yet your mind is so closed to the suggestions of others.



"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it."
-Edgar Allan Poe

[Donnah]

Marco, I think the important question for you here is, why is it so important to you to be right?  There's more to this than meets the eye, I can feel it (yup, have a heyday with that one).

You cannot have bonded with any of your pets.  I had a horse who would dump anyone off if he didn't like (an emotion) them.  Of course I used this to my advantage.[}:)][:p]  This horse would raise his head and whinny when he saw me coming (someone else fed him at that time).  While I was trimming his hooves he would step on my hand just hard enough to hold it down without hurting me, and turn his head to see my reaction.  I swear that was a smile on his face.  I'd have to call a sense of humor an emotion.

[Ylide]

This guy's not listening to a word of reason, and he's ignoring a large amount of scientific research that gives evidence that animals DO indeed experience emotion. (albeit perhaps to a lesser degree)  How did you ever obtain your Ph.D?

Ok, smart-ass, here are some corrections to your wildly inaccurate paper you originally posted:

>>>since in our organism no nuclear reactions occur and gravitational forces are too weak to interfere with molecular processes, every biological process is due uniquely to the laws of quantum electrodynamics.

Wrong.  Gravity DOES interact with MANY processes in the human body.  bone formation, blood flow, digestion, secretions, and probably many others.  

>>>These equations do not explain the existence of consciousness and our capacity to feel. If one hypothesizes that the electromagnetic fields are responsible of our sensations, emotions and thoughts, the only logical conclusion would be that also our television, our washing machine, etc. sometimes would be happy or depressed.  In fact, from a scientific point of view there is no difference between the electromagnetic fields present in our brain and the ones present in those objects.

You're neglecting the fact that atoms composed of protons and electrons do not necessarily BEHAVE as protons and electrons do.  The magnetic field is not the only force in an organism.  It is the collective of all the molecules, their arrangement in relation to each other, and the energy generated by chemical reactions in the body that produce consciousness.  I would argue that the electromagnetic field created by the electrical charge in the body has very little influence on consciousness.  Exposure to electrical or magnetic fields don't have much of an effect on consciousness, you can't alter someone's thoughts or feelings by waving some charged copper wire over their head.  The flow of charge in the brain is certainly important, and that's shaped by the pathways forged from neural cells, much as the processes in a computer are dictated by its circuitry,  but we have the advantage of organic constantly-changing circuitry that can adapt to just about any parameter.  (as do all animals with brains, to some degree...less complex brains are less able to adapt to new situations)

>>>To ascribe to the electrons in our brain the property to generate consciousness, and not to ascribe the same property to the electrons moving in a bulb, is in contradiction with one of the fundamental principle of physics, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, that establishes that all electrons are equal and indistinguishable, that is they have all exactly the same properties.

Bull****.  Just because every electron is alike, does not mean the collective motion and arrangement of said electrons are not important.  Let's say for instance that every brick is alike.  A building constructed of bricks is not the same as a hole with a bunch of bricks dumped in it.  The arrangement in space is important.  

>>>The only possible physical processes are determined by a mathematical operator called "Hamiltonian", that determines also the only possible kind of energy of the physical reality;...In order to have new processes or other kind of energy it is necessary to add some new term to the Hamiltonian

More BS.  No one is saying that consciousness is a "new" kind of energy except for you.  Disproving your own false hypothesis does not constitute valid evidence.


>>>The laws of quantum electrodynamics are confirmed by such a huge number of experimental results that it would be absurd to question their validity in the explanation of molecular systems, and in particular, of biological systems.

Experiments that provide supporting evidence for quantum electrodynamics are generally done in NONLIVING environments.  When you increase to the complexity of an organism, the interactions between all the particles in that organism are far too complex to extrapolate from some experiments run on small numbers of particles.  Also, since this field is really less than 100 years old and constantly evolving, calling it the most confirmed and systematic of scientific laws is incorrect.

>>>I think that it is correct to say that today the existence of the soul and the existence of a transcendent God are scientifically proved.

This may be the most arrogant thing I've ever read.


I skipped over a lot of the material in the middle of this article because it's been refuted above.  Just goes to show that you throw a little scientific knowledge into the hands of the self-righteous and they'll go out of their way to bend it in order to try and confirm their ideals.

This message brought to you by The Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People

[tweener]

Jay,
He's not listening.  He's religious.  That means he can't listen or he might hear something that doesn't agree with the power person he is listening to.  If something doesn't agree, then it must be wrong.  

You'll never convince him, so I would recommend you just drop it and spend your time on something productive.  Like planting dollar bills in the ground to grow money trees. []

----
John - The Eternal Pessimist.

[Ylide]

I just hate seeing someone take a weak grasp of science and twist it into a Gordian knot of piety.



This message brought to you by The Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People

[Quantumcat]

Hey cannabinoid, that was a really really good post. It seems he can't think outside of individual particles and not the way they interact together. Hey, you know, it's EXACTLY (maybe) like saying that because all photons are exactly the same, it's impossible to communicate with optic fibres !!! Obviously that's stupid, because it's the way they are in relation to each other that holds the information, not the photons individually themselves. It's even sort of the essence of communication ... changing the arrangement of similar things communicates information ...

Am I dead? Am I alive? I'm both!

[Ylide]

You know, sometimes I go back and read old posts I made while I was high.  Case in point, 2 posts above...wtf is a Gordian knot of piety?  That's either really clever or really stupid.  

Glad my post made sense, erin...I had a lot of points I was trying to make in that one.



This message brought to you by The Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People

[Quantumcat]

When you were high? You use drugs? O_o

Am I dead? Am I alive? I'm both!

[Ylide]

Where exactly did you think my name came from?  []





This message brought to you by The Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People

[Quantumcat]

Oh ... I didn't really think about that. You're going to ruin your body if you don't quit though, won't you? [xx(]

Am I dead? Am I alive? I'm both!

[Ylide]

Contrary to what government propaganda tells you, occasional responsible use is mostly harmless.  Didn't we cover this in another thread a few months back?

Drugs made me a better person.  []




This message brought to you by The Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People

[chris]

mmm - I'm not so sure. My own feeling is that there are people with a preponderance to develop drug habits, and there are people with a preponderance to develop mental illness. There are also people who are a lethal combination of both categories.

There is evidence of an association between cannabis use and the subsequent development of schizophrenia / psychosis. This person is a classic example :

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/topic.asp?topic_id=637

There is also evidence that even small amounts of cannabis can powerfully affect motivation and memory.

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/html/shows/2002.04.28.htm#1

Therefore on the balance of evidence, I advise avoidance.

Chris

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception"
 - Groucho Marx

[Ylide]

>>>There is also evidence that even small amounts of cannabis can powerfully affect motivation and memory.


I remember things just fine.  I excel in academic work...I carry a 4.0 GPA in a chemistry B.S. program with a double minor.  My motivation for things that are important is just fine.  When you're high, you can do everything you normally do, just as well. You just realize that many things are not worth the effort. There is a difference.

As for schizophrenia and psychosis, correlation does not equal causation.  Many people with mental illnesses will seek out drug use as a way of escaping the torment in their head.  Just because there is a high rate of drug usage in the mentally ill does not mean that is what caused it.  A huge percentage (and I mean very nearly 100%) of recovering alcoholics smoke cigarettes.  Does that mean smoking causes alcoholism?

Of course there are cases of dependency, that happens with any drug, prescription or otherwise.  There are also far more alcohol and cigarette addicts.  Responsible use entails coping with your problems rather than covering them up chemically.  Smoke to relax, not to escape.  Too much of anything is bad for you.  



This message brought to you by The Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People