peas wrote:Faith in science is one of the hardest faiths to shake, because it is predicated on the mental doctrine of infallible recordable proof.
Spirituality and religions are faith-based.
Spiritual folk are not concerned with proving or testing objectively whether consciousness can be simulated in machines. They want you to have blind faith in spiritual teachings - gleaned from subjective experiences.
peas wrote:
The fly in the ointment is that proof is perceived through our limited senses and then recorded and interpreted with our limited brain. Every scientist should really look into that. But chances are most of them won't.
You see, scientists are also humans, and all humans have lots of fear. Basically we are dealing with fear of exploring what science misses. Fear of the unrecordable and potentially fallible mysteries of the universe.
In other words, science for most becomes a type of agoraphobia - instead of fear of vast open spaces, there is a deep fear of vast open mysteries.
Many scientists are dogmatic and unshakable because they have to hold on to certainty and avoid facing their fears.
Science is not limited by biological senses. Science harnesses physical laws & systems independent of purely biological systems to make technological advances. On the other hand, spirituality allows no objective knowledge, it's completely limited to human senses and subjective experiences. It has no hope of solving any mystery.
Unfortunately, you seem like one of the blind followers who just can't see past the standard spiritual doctrine. Opening yourself up to objective science can do you no harm... It will only balance your subjective and objective pools.
Currently scientist are building the next generation of computer which taps into quantum mechanics which will make computer architecture more synaptic like human brains... This will allow machine learning algorithms to answer questions and predict events more profoundly than even humans can.
"We could map the whole Universe — all of the information that has existed since the Big Bang — onto 300 qubits,"
Classical computers aren’t well suited to these types of creative problems. Solving such problems can be imagined as trying to find the lowest point on a surface covered in hills and valleys. Classical computing might use what’s called “gradient descent”: start at a random spot on the surface, look around for a lower spot to walk down to, and repeat until you can’t walk downhill anymore. But all too often that gets you stuck in a “local minimum” -- a valley that isn’t the very lowest point on the surface.
That’s where quantum computing comes in. It lets you cheat a little, giving you some chance to “tunnel” through a ridge to see if there’s a lower valley hidden beyond it. This gives you a much better shot at finding the true lowest point -- the optimal solution.
A quantum computer taps directly into the fundamental fabric of reality – the strange and counterintuitive world of quantum mechanics – to speed computation. Quantum computers are not deterministic (like classical computers), but return probabilistic results. The processor considers all the possibilities simultaneously to determine the lowest energy required to form those relationships. Because a quantum computer is probabilistic rather than deterministic, the computer returns many very good answers in a short amount of time - 10,000 answers in one second. This gives the user not only the optimal solution or a single answer, but also other alternatives to choose from.
All "matter" exists within Awareness.
. But heck, if placebo works to give you a better life, take it. Ultimately, it's all placebo of course, since 'there is nothing really to do' to find your true nature. 
