Comment by xvxvx
1 day ago
The man has wasted his precious time on earth trying to explain the meaning of life without accepting the existence of the soul. It makes total sense that he can be fooled by AI nonsense.
To be 85 and lack basic wisdom is quite an astonishing achievement.
What is a soul, and how does one go about proving it’s existence?
It doesn’t seem obvious to me.
Neither existence nor nonexistence is obvious. Ergo, differences of opinion. Militants on both sides are problematic. I strongly dislike Dawkins, in the same way as I do people knocking on my door trying to convert me to any other religion.
At least the zealots who knockon my door. I've had a few good conversations.
Ditto for LLM sentience. We have no evidence either way.
I think a coherent framing is to imagine that the soul is a perceptual construct built into the hardware layer of human perception.
Sort of like how the collection of particles you see as a tree doesn’t look like that without being passed through a bunch of brain hardware. If we want to be pedantic we can accurately say that trees don’t exist, but given that physical object and tree are constructs in the human brain it’s pretty convenient to just treat them as “real”, while at the same time understanding that at some granular level they aren’t truly “real” (and at some further granularity we actually have no clue what’s real).
Op said "accepting," not proving.
And the older I get, this does make sense to me. Belief in a soul doesn't really require proof for me. I understand that this may not be satisfying in an academic way for some, but "humans have souls and machines probably don't" strikes me as the wisest default position until we have some other very strong proof otherwise.
If humans have souls, do other organisms have them too? Is this a trait unique to Homo sapiens? Did Neanderthals, for example, have souls?
And if the theory of evolution is true, at what point did “humans” begin to possess souls?
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What evidence is there for humans having souls to support your "wisest default"? What would constitute "strong proof otherwise" in the case of machines?
Wouldn't the wise position be that since there is no evidence of souls at all that the default should be that both humans and machines do not contain a soul until proven otherwise?
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Are you suggesting 85 year olds typically have more wisdom and are less easily fooled by things?
Wasted?
I think so, personally. I wouldn't bank a lot on "the soul" per se, but Dawkins is absolutely one of those "smart but not wise" people.
I imagine people don't dig it because it can be woo and vibey, but the older I get the more I understand the value of the "imprecise" metaphysical/religious/etc whatever you want to call it.
Someone in this space who handles this very well, unlike Dawkins, is Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Wise man Nassim Taleb who voted for Trump to help Palestinians and now Gaza and 10% increasing of the country he was born in is rubble.
Maybe the lesson is that all those public intellectuals are not that wise and we should follow people more that stay in their lane.
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