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" It has become appalingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity… MORALITY is of the highest importance, but for us, not for God. If we are good only because we fear punishment and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."

Albert Einstein

" Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power; we have guided missiles and misguided men…; if we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values: that all reality hinges on MORAL foundations and that all reality has spiritual control…The Moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice."

" MORALITY is the basis of all things and
Truth is the substance of all morality."

Mahatma Gandhi

I really don't think we can manufacture consciousness.

I don't consider our consciousness to be our ability to recognize ourselves and our needs. Most animals can do that (maybe not recognize themselves, 'cause they've never seen a mirror, only water-reflections, but neither could humans w/o being raised with mirrors).

I did get a more mechanichal view on animals by watching it tho'. I just read the book "The Human Animan", and I figure some of the lower forms of life behave fully as they are pre-programmed to (e.g. different reactions for different stimuli). This is proved by the fact that you can make some animals attempt to mate with something as long as it has the same colour as the females of that species do, even tho' it is clearly not one, and their vision is highly enough developed to see that.
Some higher forms of life have abandonded many of the inate abilities for the benefits of being able to adapt better to the circumstances they are born into.

My vision on consciousness is the ability to ponder. To invent. To consider philosophic questions. Everything you can do without any sensory input. I think that if you bereft an animal of all sensory input, it would simply lie there, because there were no stimuli (maybe the lack of certain senses would trigger some defense actions, but you know what I mean) to trigger its actions. I believe all animals without consciousness are highly developed machines, pre-programmed to react to different stimuli, and that they have no awareness whatsoever. Whether or not the highest developed animals except ourselves have consciousness is beyond me.

I'm consider myself an atheist, except maybe that I can't see that the consciousness works in such a mechanical way. I'm not saying there's something supernatural about it, but it's something we don't understand, and never will.

Like Jostein Gaarder said: "If our brain was simple enough for us to understand it, we'd be too stupid too understand it anyway."
When the human race has envolved further, then they might be able to understand our, their ancestors', brain, but they will not completely understand their own. Computers only do what they are programmed to, they can't "understand", so they're no help there.

Thanks for a warm welcome guys!

Welcome back!

Hmm…for those that liked the movie "The Matrix", this would be a good documentary to watch.

yes tell them my child

On to the future baby!

This documentary series was interesting up to the third clearly deluded part.

(I won't read the wikipedia article, as I've seen how easy it is to manipulate/abuse it. I'm boycotting).

I don't buy the part about us only reacting with predetermined reactions to different stimuli. 99,99% of our actions might be of that kind, but not absolutely all.

Do this for me, then tell me that you did it because it was predetermined; Hold your hand out in front of you. Don't move it. Now concentrate with your mind that you want to bend one of your fingers. "Tell" your body to bend that finger, and follow it intently with your consciousness while performing the action. There was no stimuli to trigger that action (except from me telling you to, of course). You can't say that you don't have free will, when you can do that (think of your own thing to do to make it more effective).

We go through most of our lives without actually being conscious of our movement (we couldn't do much if we had to focus on doing it). It takes a lot to control your body, to not make movement you hadn't intended with your consciousness, but when you do it, when you only do what you decide to with your mind, then YOU take control and override the predetermined path.

If it wasn't for this consciousness, we (given enough knowledge about quantum physics and the brain) would be able to predict how everything would evolve, no matter who and what was involved. Because we have this way of interrupting, that is not possible.

One day someone might discover how the human brain works (in depth, not just the superfluous about movement and emotions), and if we (the human race) are still alive then, we might find out what consciousness is.

Scientists are arrogant to draw conclusions about our mind, when they actually know next to nothing about it.

Had a brief look at it now. I couldn't read it even if I wanted to. Too many words I don't know (I'm Norwegian, and I don't speak English fluently) mixed with something that is already hard to comprehend at 2am doesn't go down too easily.

I agree that neither side can win this argument as of yet (and when one can, we'll probably have evolved to something even harder to account for).

I just have this very strong sensation of free will, especially when I decide to do something irrational just to piss off whoever it is that might be controling me most of the time (be that myself (soul), my brain (chemical reactions), God (meh…), the one who's imagination I exist in (yeah, I read Sophie's World), or something else).

I would like to partake in scientific experiments on the brain; to see what physically happens when I focus on a thought, compared to when I perform it; to see if there's any difference if I focus stongly on a movement with the intention of actually performing it, vs. focusing on it knowing that I won't.

very informative docu.
thank you very much
i love this page!

This is a really fascinating film, pretty wild ideas. I am repeatedly frustrated though, given the language of the film is English (understanding that the filmmaker is Belgian) but whenever there is a french speaker, there is little or no translation, which for a non-french speaker like me, leaves me with a hole in the film. I hate missing pieces! argh!

We will one day achieve an artificial state of intelligence.. The operative term being ‘we’.

The sophistication of our technology was/is developed by, a myriad, of scientists and engineers. This process of integrating technological development creates the emergence of the next interactive system of knowledge, mechanics and inceptive entity that can and is more complicated than this documentary leads you all to believe.

Yes the very characteristics that many assume to be uniquely human are really a matter of effects and affects from our biology and subsequently, if you replicate and adapt the mechanisms, the transhuman being is highly plausible.

What scares me the most about this hypotesis is that if it would true we wouldn’t ever see it coming. Artificial intelligence would become awareness, in what would probably look to us, immediatly.