Atmasphere

15/06/2024

Once, Patton’s nephew asked him if he believed in reincarnation. Patton’s response was, "I don’t know about other people, but for myself there has never been any question. I don’t just think it; I know there are places I’ve been before, and not in this life".
During World War II a military aide in 1944 wrote, "Patton earnestly believes in a warrior’s Valhalla [a place where warriors waited to be called for incarnation to serve a mission that would help shape mankind’s destiny for the better]…He honestly thinks it is to the glory of a man to die in the service of his country".

Patton was given to quoting Bhagavad Gita frequently.*

He penned a poem giving hints at some of his experiences in past incarnations**: With Hannibal; as a Roman legionary under Julius Caesar; an English knight during the Hundred Years War; battling the Ottomans in medieval Bohemia; serving as a marshal under Napoleon; a prehistoric mammoth hunter; an ancient Greek citizen soldier fighting the Persians; and a soldier serving Alexander the Great fighting at the siege of Tyre:

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

Through the travail of the ages,
Midst the pomp and toil of war,
Have I fought and strove and perished
Countless times upon this star.

In the form of many people
In all panoplies of time
Have I seen the luring vision
Of the Victory Maid, sublime.

I have battled for fresh mammoth,
I have warred for pastures new,
I have listed to the whispers
When the race trek instinct grew.

I have known the call to battle
In each changeless changing shape
From the high souled voice of conscience
To the beastly lust for r**e.

I have sinned and I have suffered,
Played the hero and the knave;
Fought for belly, shame, or country,
And for each have found a grave.

I cannot name my battles
For the visions are not clear,
Yet, I see the twisted faces
And I feel the rending spear.

Perhaps I stabbed our Savior
In His sacred helpless side.
Yet, I've called His name in blessing
When after times I died.

In the dimness of the shadows
Where we hairy heathens warred,
I can taste in thought the lifeblood;
We used teeth before the sword.

While in later clearer vision
I can sense the coppery sweat,
Feel the pikes grow wet and slippery
When our Phalanx, Cyrus met.

Hear the rattle of the harness
Where the Persian darts bounced clear,
See their chariots wheel in panic
From the Hoplite's leveled spear.

See the goal grow monthly longer,
Reaching for the walls of Tyre.
Hear the crash of tons of granite,
Smell the quenchless eastern fire.

Still more clearly as a Roman,
Can I see the Legion close,
As our third rank moved in forward
And the short sword found our foes.

Once again I feel the anguish
Of that blistering treeless plain
When the Parthian showered death bolts,
And our discipline was in vain.

I remember all the suffering
Of those arrows in my neck.
Yet, I stabbed a grinning savage
As I died upon my back.

Once again I smell the heat sparks
When my flemish plate gave way
And the lance ripped through my entrails
As on Crecy's field I lay.

In the windless, blinding stillness
Of the glittering tropic sea
I can see the bubbles rising
Where we set the captives free.

Midst the spume of half a tempest
I have heard the bulwarks go
When the crashing, point blank round shot
Sent destruction to our foe.

I have fought with gun and cutlass
On the red and slippery deck
With all Hell aflame within me
And a rope around my neck.

And still later as a General
Have I galloped with Murat
When we laughed at death and numbers
Trusting in the Emperor's Star.

Till at last our star faded,
And we shouted to our doom
Where the sunken road of Ohein
Closed us in it's quivering gloom.

So but now with Tanks a'clatter
Have I waddled on the foe
Belching death at twenty paces,
By the star shell's ghastly glow.

So as through a glass, and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names, -- but always me.

And I see not in my blindness
What the objects were I wrought,
But as God rules o'er our bickerings
It was through His will I fought.

So forever in the future,
Shall I battle as of yore,
Dying to be born a fighter,
But to die again, once more

*As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change.

O son of Kuntī, the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, O scion of Bharata, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.

Bhagavad Gita As It Is 2:13-4

Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson wanted to prove past life memories as purely psychological in nature but came to accept in reincarnation. A local news piece on a boy who could remember his life as a WWII pilot and the details only the pilot would have known. A Japanese film crew made a documentary about him as well, and there are other news outlets who’ve done similar stories:

11 year old boy reincarnated FOX 8 News (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWCUjx4nI98)

Ian Pretyman Stevenson was a Canadian-born U.S. psychiatrist. He worked for the University of Virginia School of Medicine for fifty years, as chair of the department of psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and Research Professor of Psychiatry from 2002 until his death.

A cardiologist named David Sabom did many such studies, and Ian Stevenson has done similar work with past live regression (people recalling past lives then having them verified).

https://youtu.be/OWCUjx4nI98

An example is the case of Sukla, the daughter of a Bengali railway worker. When she was very young, she would cradle a pil­low in her arms like a doll and call it by the name Minu. She behaved as if Minu were her daughter, and also spoke of Minu’s father and his two brothers. According to Sukla, they all lived in Bhatpara, and she in­sisted her parents take her there. Sukla’s fa­ther investigated and learned that there had lived in Bhatpara a woman named Mana who had died a few years before, leav­ing behind a baby daughter named Minu. Sukla's father became convinced his daughter had previously lived as Mana. When Sukla was brought by her family to Bhatpara, she led them to the house where Mana had lived. Then, from a group of over thirty strangers, she picked out Mana’s husband, mother•in•law, and brother•in­ law as well as the girl Minu. These details and many others were extensively researched and corroborated.

Stevenson is skeptical of the well-known hypnotic age-regression technique, recog­nizing that the material cannot be properly confirmed and that the mind tends to fabri­cate illusions, especially under hypnosis. He therefore does not generally accept statements made under hypnosis as evi­dence. In some cases, however, the state­ments can be researched and verified, such as the case he titles "A Case of Xenoglossy.” In this instance, an American woman living in Philadelphia was regressed hypnotically and manifested the personality of a Swedish peasant farmer. She spoke fluent Swedish, although she had no prior contact with Swedish in her life: native Swedes confirmed her pro­nunciation to be fluent, even though many Swedish vowel sounds are extremely difficult for Americans to enunciate.

Stevenson’s studies give convincing evidence that the conscious self can travel from one physical body to the next. Clearly, when one body dies, the contents of its brain are destroyed, and there is no known physical process by which they can influence the contents of another brain. The simplest interpretation is that the conscious self must be an entity distinct from the brain.

Near death experiences

Some scientists say consciousness is the result of higher-order processes in the brain, but that leads to “the little man in the brain” problem. ⁣Dr Richard L Thompson explains the evidence and theory of an irreducible element known as consciousness which is never destroyed like electricity; electrons cannot be destroyed. They are fundamental features of reality. Consciousness is like that:

The concept of how the mind interacts with the brain is much like a programmer with his computer. A skeptic might ask if there exists any direct empirical evidence in support of this. There is indeed, although like all empirical evi­dence it is subject to varying interpretation. Examples of findings showing that the mind is independent of the material brain and body are supplied by research into near death experiences (NDEs) and reincarna­tion memories.

NDEs include out-of-body experiences­ in which people report observing their physical body and events relating to it from a perspective outside of the body during severe illness or physical trauma resulting in unconsciousness. A typical case might in­volve a person who is resuscitated from a heart attack and reports that he observed, from a point outside his body, the medical personnel endeavoring to revive him. At such times, according to standard medical opinion, the normal functioning of the brain, as indicated by certain brain waves, is impaired, and the patient should be un­conscious, if indeed consciousness is just a manifestation of the brain.

Although a percentage of the research on NDEs is unreliable, other work has been presented by individuals with impeccable scientific credentials. For example, Dr. Mi­chael B. Sabom, a cardiologist and profes­sor at the Emory University Medical School, was openly skeptical of NDEs but changed his mind after investigating them.

He formed a control group of 25 ‘sea­soned' cardiac patients who had survived heart attacks but who had never had an out-of-body experience. Sabom asked them to describe their resuscitation from heart attacks. Of these, 20 made a major error in their description of in•hospital cardio pul­monary resuscitation (CPR), three gave a limited but correct description, and two claimed to know nothing of CPR.
Another group consisted of 32 patients who had reported out-of-body experiences. Of these, 26 gave visual descriptions of their near-death crises. 6 described details corresponding to the medical re­cords of their particular resuscitation, and one man's account was "extremely accu­rate in portraying the appearance, technique, and sequence of the CPR.”

In the control group, not one person gave a detailed account of the medical proce­dures involved in their resuscitations, whereas in the group with out-of-body ex­periences 6 were able to do so, even though they should have been unconscious at the time. This and other studies led Sabom to accept that the patients' NDE experiences were real. Some physicians who doubt the reality of NDEs have suggested that per­haps the subjects were semiconscious and are therefore able to recall their experi­ences. But Sabom notes that while occasional patients remain semiconscious during surgery, their reports lack visual awareness and tend to be nightmarish in quality, in contrast with the highly visual and pleasant quality of the NDEs.

Others also put forward the possibility that NDEs are the product of a particular cultural or religious background that some­ how induce the patient to imagine an NDE. Examining this possibility, Sabom inter­viewed numerous subjects and found that NDEs occur in 40 percent of randomly in­terviewed near-death survivors, with no correlation to age, s*x, race, area of residence, size of home community, years of ed­ucation, occupation, religious background, church attendance, or prior knowledge of the existence of NDEs.
Dr. Russel Noyes and Dr. Richard Blacher have suggested that NDEs are a psychologi­cal reaction to one's perception of imminent death, an attempt by the ego to preserve itself by taking refuge in a flight of fancy. Sabom shows, however, that NDEs have been reported in cases of unanticipated near•death crises. For example, one man described, “I was walking across the parking lot to get into my car. . . . I passed out. I don't recall hitting the ground. The next thing I do recall was that I was above the cars, floating. I had a real funny sensation, a floating sensation. I was actually looking down on my own body with four or five men running toward me. I could hear and under­ stand what these men were saying."

Based on his extensive research and his thorough analysis of various alternative explanations, Sabom arrived at the following conclusion concerning the mind-brain question: "If the human brain is actually composed of two fundamental elements­-the 'mind' and the 'brain"-then could the near death crisis event somehow trigger a transient splitting of the mind from the brain in many individuals? . . . My own be­liefs on this matter are leaning in this direction. The out•of•body hypothesis simply seems to fit best with the data at hand. . . . Could the mind which splits apart from the physical brain be, in es­sence, the soul, which continues to exist af­ter final bodily death, according to some religious doctrines? As I see it, this is the ultimate question that has been raised by re­ports o f the NDE."

Hare Krishna

The most famous case in Britain was toddler Cameron Macaulay, star of the 2006 documentary: Extraordinary People - The Boy Who Lived Before.

13/11/2023

According to this article, cocoliths (algealike organism) evolved the ability to eat other organisms rather than just rely on photosynthesis, after the alleged asteroid that hit the earth and killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It caused the sun to be blotted out for two years, killing off ocean plankton that generated photosynthesis, the basis of the oceanic (and land) eco-systems. How did the cocoliths suddenly evolve the ability to feed on organisms rather than rely on photosynthesis isn’t explained. They miraculously grew whip-like flagella that let them move and stalk other organisms. I doubt it can be imagined. The change would have had to have been so fast that it’s not imaginable. Not to mention an organelle won’t work without all its pieces assembled at once. Also not possible to imagine how that would happen. A random single mutation would cause it to waste energy and eventually fall back many orders of reproduction so all the normal Algee without the mutation would Croix out the ones wasting energy on useless mutations. Evolution wouldn’t even get off the ground.

Multiple genes would have to change simultaneously to create the digestive tract required for the new diet. It’s a huge gap in the evolutionary hypothesis and very significant. Indeed there doesn’t exist a single model of a sequence gradual beneficial mutations leading to new complex structures.

Claiming something evolved because it was useful isn’t really an explanation as to how an organic structure technically evolved. What were the steps of mutations? It’s Circular reasoning (It begs the question how the process of so-called evolution would know what the end product required is: a useful new complex structure requires many—sometimes thousands—of simultaneous changes in genes to evolve anything useful, hardly likely as even diehard evolutionists like Theodosius Dobzhansky admit, or the odds of evolution happening are zero and would never repeat, also implying intelligent alien life isn’t possible as we know it). It’s a just-so story that has zero explanatory value (why evolution isn’t real science or theory like quantum mechanics or plate tectonics etc).

Evolution hasn’t reached bonafide theory status like physics and quantum mechanics. It’s not proper science.

Philosopher of science Karl Popper, who gave us the concept of falsifiability as a criterion for the validity of a scientific theory, wrote in his autobiography: “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme.”

The primary phenomenon alleged by Darwinism, the transformation of species, one into another, is unobserved. Various categories of evidence are said to be consistent with the unobserved primary phenomenon, but these in no way demonstrate or prove it. Transformation of species is not an observable empirical fact. To insist the opposite is an expression of belief that poses as an act of scientific knowledge.
The question for the empiricist is compounded when vast amounts of physical evidence contradict his Darwinian belief about human origins and antiquity, and when it can be demonstrated that this evidence is excluded from current normal scientific discourse primarily because it contradicts the Darwinian belief.

Evolutionists love to use the dog varieties as an example of evolution but the dog isn’t at all a good example of evolution. They are still essentially wolves. No cytological changes have taken place ie there have been zero genetic changes in their cells. Despite millenia or breeding animals we have never created new novel species with new structures.

If a satisfactory model is ever developed, it might then be possible to develop rigor­ous scientific explanations for the transfor­mation of one species into another. For example, scientists say that by genetic mu­tations, prehistoric fish transformed into amphibians. But if they don't even know how you get the form of the fish from its own genetic material, anything they say about the fish form changing into an amphibian form is bound to be highly speculative­—practically speaking, an imagination.

If we could understand in detail how genetic instructions guide embryonic development, then we might be able to say what genetic changes would be needed to change one species Into another. But in the absence of this knowledge we can only speculate.

Not only is there a startling lack of observational evidence confirming the theory of evolution, but the theory itself is not soundly formulated enough to warrant any attempt at confirmation. A major feature of a valid scientific theory is that it offers accurate predictions: so from the theoretical ba­sis of evolution one should be able to deduce certain things about the observable world. What do the evolutionists predict? The prominent evolutionist Niles Eldredge, in attempting to answer this challenge, came up with two predictions: there should be a hierarchy of biological forms and a se­quence of fossils arranged in an ascending order of development in the strata of the earth.

It’s understandable evolutionists would like
their theory to predict hierarchies of forms, because we all know they exist. But a hypothesis involving design would predict the same thing. For example, in creating an essay, an author often begins by writing an outline of ideas arranged in hierarchical or­der. Hierarchies are a natural product of the mind. In vehicles designed by engineers we can also see a hierarchy of mechanical forms: automobiles of various sorts: trucks, tanks, boats, submarines, airplanes. etc.

But we would be in error to suppose they evolved from one another. Although the machines can be arranged in hierarchies, they are all separately designed and manufactured. So hierarchies of form are not proof that one form evolved from an­other by physical reproductive processes. They could just as well be accepted as proof of a designing intelligence.

To put the theory of evolution on firm ground, mathematical models of how genes translate into physical form are abso­lutely essential. Without such models there are only vague handwaving stories about evolution. These stories can’t provide any firm, testable predictions, and when they are applied after the fact to observations, they are so flexible that they can be adapted to any set of data imaginable. In contrast, a mathematical model gives definite predictions that can be compared with evidence and thus be proved or disproved.

If such models did exist, it might be pos­sible to use sufficiently powerful computers to determine what might happen when a specific set of genetic information is ran­domly modified in concert with certain se­lective rules. If these modifications predicted in the model actually resulted in physical changes that corresponded to ob­served relationships among species, then we could say that evolution had actually been raised to the level of a science.

But this is not the case. As of yet there ex­ist no models making definite predictions about evolution. In fact, the evolutionists are not at all certain about what they would like to predict. Contradictions abound. On one hand the student of evolution can find statements that the outcome of the process of evolution is completely a matter of chance. And on the other hand, there are statements saying the outcome is quite de­termined by physical processes involving natural selection.

When the sun disappeared, tiny coccoliths turned to hunting

10/10/2023

There is a debate as to whether a machine can be conscious or simply mimics consciousness, referred to as “Strong AI” Al and “Weak AI” respectively.

Reductionistic materialists claim Strong AI (artificial intelligence) is possible, that the conscious self is emergent from matter. Yet do they know better than Jerry Fodor, Nobel laureates like Eugene Wigner and John Eccles, or Alan Gavins, Bernard Rensch, Karl Popper, or even Darwin’s own bulldog Thomas Huxley, etc? Simply claiming consciousness is an illusion doesn’t make it so. It just demonstrates their lack of introspection to study the subtle nature of their own being. They try to say they are their thoughts, yet how can you be the thing you’re objectivity aware of or observing (we observe our minds and thoughts like a film reel)? it’s like saying you’re the landscape painting you’re observing. It doesn’t make logical sense. That’s the subtlety these great thinkers are getting at. It’s not something dull atheists like Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Christopher Hitchens can comprehend with all due respect (They do deserve credit for being critical thinkers, they stop at their own bias however).

The statement “complex matter is aware by virtue of constant addition of complexity” is meaningless, or else one of them would be world-famous for solving the consciousness enigma (or so-called). They are making the “little man in the brain” fallacy. It’s a that statement explains nothing. It’s akin to when evolutionists say a feature evolved by the very fact that said feature is useful. Circular reasoning (It begs the question how the process of so-called evolution would know what the end product required is: a useful new complex structure requires many—sometimes thousands—of simultaneous changes in genes to evolve anything useful, hardly likely as even diehard evolutionists like Theodosius Dobzhansky admit, or the odds of evolution happening are zero and would never repeat, also implying intelligent alien life isn’t possible as we know it). It’s a just-so story that has zero explanatory value (why evolution isn’t real science or theory like quantum mechanics or plate tectonics etc).

Claiming consciousness arises due to the complexity of the brain hardware is appealing to the little man in the brain fallacy. One takes shelter in the overwhelming complexity of the brain and claims consciousness is in there somewhere. The computer example is especially apropos: for all its complexity a computer will never achieve consciousness. “Strong AI” is impossible as demonstrated long ago by John Searle and his Chinese room experiment. We aren’t even close to mimicking human consciousness in a machine by the way. Ask yourself: How much information would be required to write down a symbolic description capturing the essential features of human personality? Such a symbolic description would have to define human intelligence, and it would have to explain the faculty of speech and the abilities involved in artistic and musical creativity. In addition, this description would have to represent the basic qualities that characterize interpersonal behavior. The following list of personal attributes may give some idea of what this entails:

Anger, anxiety, apprehension, arrogance, bashfulness, conceit, compassion, courage, determination, doubt, dread, envy, faithfulness, forbearance, forgiveness, gratitude, gravity, greed, guilt, haughtiness, humility, impudence, lamentation, mercy, patience, peacefulness, perseverance, pride, renunciation, respectfulness, tactfulness.

We may obtain some idea of the amount of information needed to define these attributes by considering the great diversity and complexity of human artistic and literary productions. Of course, it is not possible at the present time to distill a precise characterization of personality from this source of raw data. Yet we wonder whether the information content of a full symbolic description of human personality could be as low as our minimum estimate of the information content of a higher cell [This is about 6 x 10 bits, or about 360,000 pages].

But suppose we could mimic human personality. Would such a machine really have conscious awareness as we know it? The short answer is no.

Searle's thought experiment begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in constructing a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that they are talking to another Chinese-speaking human being.

Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient paper, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows, says Searle, that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually.
Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing a behavior which is then interpreted as demonstrating intelligent conversation. However, Searle would not be able to understand the conversation. ("I don't speak a word of Chinese,"he points out.) Therefore, he argues, it follows that the computer would not be able to understand the conversation either.
Searle argues that, without "understanding" (or "intentionality"), we cannot describe what the machine is doing as "thinking" and, since it does not think, it does not have a "mind" in anything like the normal sense of the word. Therefore, he concludes that "strong AI" is false.

So we can understand why a computer will never be conscious. If we spread out and slow down the steps a computer performs to mimic consciousness (we aren’t even close—imagine trying to program all the complex emotions of a person. No one has a clue how to do it yet), will it be conscious still?

Materialists claim conscious awareness somehow corresponds with physical behavior, aka a computer can be conscious if it simulates by calculation the appropriate physical events occurring in a person’s brain.

Yet in a computer’s “memory” unit there is stored a list of numbers encoding simple logical and arithmetical operations, and all a computer is doing at any one time is mechanically (or electronically) is carrying out the instruction corresponding to one of these code numbers. The total behavior of the computer is simply the net result of the ex*****on of many of these instructions, one after another.

Since only a few interactions are happening at any one time, it is hard to see how the computer be conscious. If the computer were slowed down (as is possible) so that each simple step was stretched out over several seconds, the pattern and sequence of the steps would remain the same. Why would executing the instructions at one speed would generate conscious awareness of the thoughts being simulated, while at another speed there would be no consciousness of these thoughts.

Changing the construction of the computer should presumably not affect its consciousness as long as it is programmed to carry out those steps, for this assures that it’s behavior will exhibit the same pattern. Say the computer instructions are used to set up a giant “game” which could be played by a child step by step (in the manner of a Turing machine). As the child carries out those steps, will the same consciousness of the simulated thoughts be manifested there—stretched out, perhaps, over several years? This hardly seems plausible, but otherwise how are we to judge which of many computers with equivalent programs will be conscious and which ones will not?

This suggests consciousness may be a primordial element akin to quarks and photons; A primeval irreducible quanta of consciousness.

Hare Krishna

09/10/2023

There is a debate as to whether a machine can be conscious or simply mimics consciousness, referred to as “Strong AI” Al and “Weak AI” respectively.

Reductionistic materialists claim Strong AI (artificial intelligence) is possible, that the conscious self is emergent from matter. Yet do they know better than Jerry Fodor, Nobel laureates like Eugene Wigner and John Eccles, or Alan Gavins, Bernard Rensch, Karl Popper, or even Darwin’s own bulldog Thomas Huxley, etc? Simply claiming consciousness is an illusion doesn’t make it so. It just demonstrates their lack of introspection to study the subtle nature of their own being. They try to say they are their thoughts, yet how can you be the thing you’re objectivity aware of or observing (we observe our minds and thoughts like a film reel)? it’s like saying you’re the landscape painting you’re observing. It doesn’t make logical sense. That’s the subtlety these great thinkers are getting at. It’s not something dull atheists like Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Christopher Hitchens can comprehend with all due respect (They do deserve credit for being critical thinkers, they stop at their own bias however).

The statement “complex matter is aware by virtue of constant addition of complexity” is meaningless, or else one of them would be world-famous for solving the consciousness enigma (or so-called). They are making the “little man in the brain” fallacy. It’s a that statement explains nothing. It’s akin to when evolutionists say a feature evolved by the very fact that said feature is useful. Circular reasoning (It begs the question how the process of so-called evolution would know what the end product required is: a useful new complex structure requires many—sometimes thousands—of simultaneous changes in genes to evolve anything useful, hardly likely as even diehard evolutionists like Theodosius Dobzhansky admit, or the odds of evolution happening are zero and would never repeat, also implying intelligent alien life isn’t possible as we know it). It’s a just-so story that has zero explanatory value (why evolution isn’t real science or theory like quantum mechanics or plate tectonics etc).

Claiming consciousness arises due to the complexity of the brain hardware is appealing to the little man in the brain fallacy. One takes shelter in the overwhelming complexity of the brain and claims consciousness is in there somewhere. The computer example is especially apropos: for all its complexity a computer will never achieve consciousness. “Strong AI” is impossible as demonstrated long ago by John Searle and his Chinese room experiment. We aren’t even close to mimicking human consciousness in a machine by the way. Ask yourself: How much information would be required to write down a symbolic description capturing the essential features of human personality? Such a symbolic description would have to define human intelligence, and it would have to explain the faculty of speech and the abilities involved in artistic and musical creativity. In addition, this description would have to represent the basic qualities that characterize interpersonal behavior. The following list of personal attributes may give some idea of what this entails:

Anger, anxiety, apprehension, arrogance, bashfulness, conceit, compassion, courage, determination, doubt, dread, envy, faithfulness, forbearance, forgiveness, gratitude, gravity, greed, guilt, haughtiness, humility, impudence, lamentation, mercy, patience, peacefulness, perseverance, pride, renunciation, respectfulness, tactfulness.

We may obtain some idea of the amount of information needed to define these attributes by considering the great diversity and complexity of human artistic and literary productions. Of course, it is not possible at the present time to distill a precise characterization of personality from this source of raw data. Yet we wonder whether the information content of a full symbolic description of human personality could be as low as our minimum estimate of the information content of a higher cell [This is about 6 x 10 bits, or about 360,000 pages].

But suppose we could mimic human personality. Would such a machine really have conscious awareness as we know it? The short answer is no.

Searle's thought experiment begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in constructing a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that they are talking to another Chinese-speaking human being.

Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient paper, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows, says Searle, that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually.
Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing a behavior which is then interpreted as demonstrating intelligent conversation. However, Searle would not be able to understand the conversation. ("I don't speak a word of Chinese,"he points out.) Therefore, he argues, it follows that the computer would not be able to understand the conversation either.
Searle argues that, without "understanding" (or "intentionality"), we cannot describe what the machine is doing as "thinking" and, since it does not think, it does not have a "mind" in anything like the normal sense of the word. Therefore, he concludes that "strong AI" is false.

So we can understand why a computer will never be conscious. If we spread out and slow down the steps a computer performs to mimic consciousness (we aren’t even close—imagine trying to program all the complex emotions of a person. No one has a clue how to do it yet), will it be conscious still?

Materialists claim conscious awareness somehow corresponds with physical behavior, aka a computer can be conscious if it simulates by calculation the appropriate physical events occurring in a person’s brain.

Yet in a computer’s “memory” unit there is stored a list of numbers encoding simple logical and arithmetical operations, and all a computer is doing at any one time is mechanically (or electronically) is carrying out the instruction corresponding to one of these code numbers. The total behavior of the computer is simply the net result of the ex*****on of many of these instructions, one after another.

Since only a few interactions are happening at any one time, it is hard to see how the computer be conscious. If the computer were slowed down (as is possible) so that each simple step was stretched out over several seconds, the pattern and sequence of the steps would remain the same. Why would executing the instructions at one speed would generate conscious awareness of the thoughts being simulated, while at another speed there would be no consciousness of these thoughts.

Changing the construction of the computer should presumably not affect its consciousness as long as it is programmed to carry out those steps, for this assures that it’s behavior will exhibit the same pattern. Say the computer instructions are used to set up a giant “game” which could be played by a child step by step (in the manner of a Turing machine). As the child carries out those steps, will the same consciousness of the simulated thoughts be manifested there—stretched out, perhaps, over several years? This hardly seems plausible, but otherwise how are we to judge which of many computers with equivalent programs will be conscious and which ones will not?

This suggests consciousness may be a primordial element akin to quarks and photons; A primeval irreducible quanta of consciousness.