PhilosophyWIMB: How omnipotent is your deity?

[Ash]

I've no idea what self-awareness has to do with anything. You really think humans have self-awareness and, say, a woodlouse doesn't?

Neither of us know what it is like to be a woodlouse. Although you will in your next life, obv. :guffaw:

I don't believe they experience consciousness as we do. Ours is tied up with our symbolic and abstract thought, I expect.

Presumably you believe that your phone has consciousness. Why not, by your reckoning?

[Monty92]

Neither of us know what it is like to be a woodlouse. Although you will in your next life, obv. :guffaw:

I don't believe they experience consciousness as we do. Ours is tied up with our symbolic and abstract thought, I expect.

Presumably you believe that your phone has consciousness. Why not, by your reckoning?

I don't believe that AI (or my phone) has consciousness. I believe it has the capacity to develop consciousness. All that the phenomenon of consciousness requires is a self-organising system like the brain’s physical structure. Current machines come up short, but there's no reason at all to think they always will.

[World's End Stella]

I'm not imaginative enough to be so gullible as to believe that, for example, The Prophet ascended to heaven on a flying horse or some such and that's why Islam should own Jerusalem?

Shame on me for being so unimaginative as to swallow any old utter crap.

Ah but you've moved the goalposts there, Ash. Belief in a deity is one thing, adherence to particular form of organized religion and its set of beliefs is quite another.

[Monty92]

Ah but you've moved the goalposts there, Ash. Belief in a deity is one thing, adherence to particular form of organized religion and its set of beliefs is quite another.

I don't think that's really true at all.

The distinction is between belief that there's stuff we don't know or understand and belief in a deity.

[World's End Stella]

I don't think that's really true at all.

The distinction is between belief that there's stuff we don't know or understand and belief in a deity.

That is another distinction - it does not preclude the distinction between those who believe in a deity but who refuse to acknowledge a particular organized religion and those who see the two as going hand in hand.