Originally Posted by
Realist
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And yet your theory prescribes that we engineer fantastically powerful robots and machines and have these same destructive and dangerous people programme them! Pretty sure that strategy led to the atomic bomb, the slaughter of countless people in Hiroshima and the rapid rise for the need of lots of other countries to build up their own nuclear arsenal and sit with their fingers poised over the buttons just in case.
I too gave up on "religion" as such and the "Church" as such finding them now both somewhat perverted and corrupt systems of conditioning resulting in varying forms of violent extremism or the sapping of the human mind of all desire and ability to think freely.
Nevertheless, when earnestly considering who and what I am, I find myself compelled to acknowledge that a part of me at least, does not sit entirely in the physical world. Rationally I concede that this could be a complete delusion on my part or a misinterpretation of signals from my brain. The onus is on me to explore and seek out whether it is true or not.
Mainstream religion and the Church as a whole do not have the answers imo. However, the efforts and works of many philosophers and sages throughout history provide some insights that can help us. Personally I doubt that any man or woman is capable of providing the answers specific to another person. Rather I suspect that every human is unique and individual and has their own path to walk and their own journey to traverse to arrive at the answers that are relevant to them.
Even so, I suspect others CAN help to equip us with the tools and methods by which we might unlock our minds and understand better who and what we are.
If you have a combination safe that is locked and you want to know what is inside it, then I can not help you given that I do not know the secret combination. However, were I a locksmith or safe cracker I could teach you how a safe works and thereby how to perform the tasks that will allow you to open it.
It's for this reason that my mind is open to the field of Philosophy and esoteric works. There is much to be found in there to help frame ones thoughts and better appraise the world and our experience of it. I will still find my own answers and the journey itself shall doubtless provide one of the most valuable experiences to learn from. Yet had I continued to stumble on through life, yielding to the social programming and conditioning constantly bombarding us, I would never have reached the point where I find myself now. I needed guides and the inputs from works of all kinds to help me set foot on the path that is undoubtedly now before me.
It seems somewhat curious, even illogical, to imagine or expect that humans, who have not yet worked out who and what they are, nor who have tapped and understood the full potential of the brain and mind, could be capable of building a robot that could itself determine those things and become "conscious". It would be rather like drawing a face on a balloon and hoping that one day it might actually talk to you.
Man can not create a living "end-product" for Nature itself does not do this. For example we can not build or make a courgette. That end-product is formed by a cycle of growth beginning from a seed. Nature acts upon it causing the seed to put down roots and grow into a seedling, then to a young plant, then to a mature plant. It then goes into a phase of flowering in order that it can be pollinated and then the cycle turns to the production of the fruit or vegetable and so on.
Man can imitate Nature, even speed her processes up in some cases but he must always work hand-in-hand with Nature because we are bound by her environment and processes, because we are ourselves, a part of that Nature.
Thus I think that we must as humans, continue through the cycles of growth and evolution before us. Making machines seems unlikely to achieve this for us. The caterpillar would gain little if it were capable of picking up tools and building itself a set of mechanical butterfly wings. The caterpillar must itself enter the cocoon stage and become the real butterfly, thereby ridding itself of the things that previously limited its existence. Similarly Man I suspect, must seek out and enter his own spiritual "cocoon" and be transformed into the next part of existence that Nature has in store for him. I suspect that once this is done, we will have very little need for clunky machines and robots !