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Saechiis
Netherlands4989 Posts
Does the cursor choose to await my input? Would programming beyond human grasp make the cursor have a choice? Or would we just not be able to understand how its behavior was already written? Is the idea of choice a byproduct of not knowing how our brain makes decisions?    | ||
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Pangpootata
1838 Posts
+ Show Spoiler + No cartesian dualism, that's cheap | ||
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NeThZOR
South Africa7387 Posts
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Slayer91
Ireland23335 Posts
so yeah, everything that is going to happen is going to happen, but believing you have free choice on what you do (which you technically do, but theres lot of warring parts in your brain obviously making most of them very difficult) is probably a better way to live. I mean basically this whole thought process is nonsense its essentially trivial. You know there is going to be SOME kind of future and that future is technically GOING to be determined (but perhaps not predetermined because we of the randomness of quantum effects we can't know 100% for sure) but theres no way you can use this information and it is intuitively obvious to everyone. if you are introspective enough it should be easy to see how your brain makes most of its decisions, at least the major ones, so I think you're making this seem way more "mystic" then it really is. your brain is basically a self programmable machine and consciousness lets you program it intelligently. The fact that you are self conscious enough to realize this should be enough to know your brain is powerful enough to work through decisions enough that you can claim you have free choice. as for the last statement "Is the idea of choice a byproduct of not knowing how your brain makes decisions" I would say its incomplete knowledge+not knowing every single factor around every person and how they will interact. It's quite enormously complex, like chaos theory on steroids. small deviations can lead to massive amounts of different thought processes etcetc | ||
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
Either way, you make choices that feel like choices but are inherently limited by your physical boundaries, but at the most basic level. It's just a more fundamental limiting factor, like your physical limits in terms of strength or your cognitive limits. But even "simpler" than that. Cheers. | ||
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
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Slayer91
Ireland23335 Posts
That fact that the future tells you that you picked Path A, doesn't mean you had no choice, its just that your brain leads you to make the choice of path A based on all the "programming" it's received so far. Because if you have lots of people they will take different paths so its reasonable to say that they had a free choice. Trying to somehow separate the decisions YOU make and the decisions your brain made is kinda silly, because in the end you are your consciousness and that is created by your brain so there you go. I mean if Path B had a potential to have lions in it, and 99.99% of people take path B, you could still say you had free choice, its just only 1 badass had the balls to fight the lions and everyone elses risk analysis told them to go the safe way. I mean if you took 1000 self learning programs and they all decided to do different things you'd say those programs "chose" to do what they did based off all the random environmental factors changed their code. | ||
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
The following thought experiment can be done: Imagine a scientist has been put in a purely black&white laboratory since his birth,and has never seen any colours. He has all the data about light, the wavelength, the amplitude and whatnot, and can predict every physical question that may come up. But the scientist doesn't know everything about light, as soon has he leaves his lab for the first time he'll experience how colours look, and gain new information. Now even if you can argue that the extra 'dimension' of experience doesn't do anything and isn't necessary to describe what will happen, it still seems to be there and is indeed a very odd thing. | ||
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Slayer91
Ireland23335 Posts
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
On January 16 2014 04:54 Slayer91 wrote: however colours are just an interpretation of different wavelengths of light from the human eye so it's not new information its just biological interpretation of preexisting physical phenomena I'm not sure what you mean with 'biological interpretation', but the important part is that you could travel through your brain for a thousand years, yet you would never find a red lamp somewhere. Experience, like 'how' a colour looks, is outside of the physical realm. You could never proof that red light looks the same for me like it does for you. Schrödinger put it like this:"The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so." | ||
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Slayer91
Ireland23335 Posts
biological interpretation is exactly this, how our brain interprets the wavelength of light, we can't be sure we both see red in the same way, but we can be pretty damn sure that our brains aren't THAT different We can't explain consciousness, YET. We couldn't explain the photoelectric effect 100 years ago. | ||
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macaronij
Argentina67 Posts
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
On January 16 2014 04:04 Slayer91 wrote: A) Choice itself isn't an illusion though. Having freedom of choice isn't really an illusion either. B) Trying to somehow separate the decisions YOU make and the decisions your brain made is kinda silly, because in the end you are your consciousness and that is created by your brain so there you go. C) I mean if Path B had a potential to have lions in it, and 99.99% of people take path B, you could still say you had free choice, its just only 1 badass had the balls to fight the lions and everyone elses risk analysis told them to go the safe way. A) You made the choice to post here as a reaction to the content of the blog, which contests the beliefs you've acquired over your lifetime. You really had no choice in the matter because everything in your life dictates that you would react to this thread with the above response. The same goes for me. I mean, I could stop in the middle of this post just to prove a point, but that would be the result of a personality trait I've developed, and I know it. B) Nobody separated "brain" from "consciousness". You can only make the decisions that your brains allows you to make. C) There is a huge difference between odds-making and actual probabilities. There is a 100% chance that someone will fight the lions, because no matter how low the probability is that this would happen, over time, the probability would eventually reach 100%. This, however, is not related to predestination, because you're trying to make an analogy that says, once in a great while, there will be a spontaneous anomaly with no explanation. This actually happens, though, but only at the sub-atomic level, and it is not known how much this would effect even a single neuron in the brain, or if it will occur in the brain at an exact correct time to create even the most mediocre change in an individual's behavior. This, however, will happen eventually, but it will be a consequence of probability and not a conscious decision. I expect, however, most people to instinctively disagree because giraffes | ||
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Slayer91
Ireland23335 Posts
On January 16 2014 09:04 ninazerg wrote: A) You made the choice to post here as a reaction to the content of the blog, which contests the beliefs you've acquired over your lifetime. You really had no choice in the matter because everything in your life dictates that you would react to this thread with the above response. The same goes for me. I mean, I could stop in the middle of this post just to prove a point, but that would be the result of a personality trait I've developed, and I know it. B) Nobody separated "brain" from "consciousness". You can only make the decisions that your brains allows you to make. C) There is a huge difference between odds-making and actual probabilities. There is a 100% chance that someone will fight the lions, because no matter how low the probability is that this would happen, over time, the probability would eventually reach 100%. This, however, is not related to predestination, because you're trying to make an analogy that says, once in a great while, there will be a spontaneous anomaly with no explanation. This actually happens, though, but only at the sub-atomic level, and it is not known how much this would effect even a single neuron in the brain, or if it will occur in the brain at an exact correct time to create even the most mediocre change in an individual's behavior. This, however, will happen eventually, but it will be a consequence of probability and not a conscious decision. I expect, however, most people to instinctively disagree because giraffes A) Bunch of previous choices, indicates strong tendency to make choice of responding. C) If there was a 0% chance that someone would pick the path to fight lions, it would be 0%. Current brain state from previous interactions/life/choices etc largely affects the way you behave but presumably this is the result of your thought processes and reasoning in general and you generally agree with the choice so you would make the same one nearly every time (unless you're tired etcetcetc) I mean "I would choose the same thing every time" is not that same as "I had no choice". But someone else can't necessarily accurately predict what I would do even if there is one set of things I will eventually end up doing. That means its fair to call it a choice. To not call it things choices is like saying a monkey who presses buttons at random is not doing it randomly at all, he's going to do it in the exact order he does it because brain. I mean if you got a bunch of monkies and they all did the same thing sure, but if you can't predict it at all its fair to call it a choice. So I guess what I'm saying is, unless you can find some concrete way of figuring out exactly what it's going to do or at least have a very accurate prediction, its fair to call it a choice. I guess the best way to look at it is to have 10 similar clones of yourself and how much you'd have to change the clones to make them do different things, but then again I don't think that matters. Doing the same thing over and over when presented with the same situation is not the same as lack of choice, because if someone offers you 10 bucks to do the opposite, you can. I think choosing the same thing over and over and lack of choice are completely different. I mean if nobody including you can predict accurately all the choices you will make then whats the point of saying "oh he didnt have a choice lulz his brain made him do it". Because his brain makes him do everything. I guess what you're saying is if you run the EXACT same simulation of real life 10 times in a row you'd probably get the exact same results but that really isn't useful in any way whatsoever unless you're some kind of hippie nihilist stoner who thinks its some profound shit. | ||
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
Like, I know you won't run out into traffic randomly right now for no reason, and you're probably going to buy your favorite shampoo, unless your reaction to this sort of stimuli is to do the exact opposite of what you read, in which case you would buy an off-brand of shampoo and then almost get hit by a truck. | ||
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Slayer91
Ireland23335 Posts
2nd paragraph is just human behaviour, dolan (derren) brown can guess what cards ppl are going to choose pretty accurately because ppl are somewhat predictable when trying to be random | ||
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
On January 16 2014 19:16 Slayer91 wrote: or just use parallel universes On January 16 2014 09:20 Slayer91 wrote: Current brain state from previous interactions/life/choices We can't have a decent discussion if you're gonna start talking about previous lives and parallel universes, then reference to Derren Brown, whose job it is to trick people for the purpose of debunking illogical shit. | ||
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Slayer91
Ireland23335 Posts
if you prefer, the length of time from conception to present DURREN BURRWN da bes | ||
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enord
France258 Posts
there is nothing proving determinism, there is every reason to doubt that things happen and can only happen one way blablabla people like this idea that they are not responsible for their acts? It is comfortable/reassuring one should take responsibility for one's choices.. our limbs and brain shake atoms so easily that we forget it, we are sentient beings and we are free choice is something that people actualy are frightened by, because it is usualy the choice to "change" (in the very fundamental definition of the word: get/do something new unknown possibly scary and (most scarry) the tingling sensation/premonition that this change is one from which you can never truly come back from Why do you think teen agers are always the one's that want and do change the world? because they 1/ still believe they can change the world 2/ are inexperienced and therefore uncorrupted by the determinism rooted in adults | ||
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Saechiis
Netherlands4989 Posts
On January 17 2014 04:23 enord wrote: has there ever been a less responsible positioning from people than determinism? there is nothing proving determinism, there is every reason to doubt that things happen and can only happen one way blablabla people like this idea that they are not responsible for their acts? It is comfortable/reassuring one should take responsibility for one's choices.. our limbs and brain shake atoms so easily that we forget it, we are sentient beings and we are free choice is something that people actualy are frightened by, because it is usualy the choice to "change" (in the very fundamental definition of the word: get/do something new unknown possibly scary and (most scarry) the tingling sensation/premonition that this change is one from which you can never truly come back from Why do you think teen agers are always the one's that want and do change the world? because they 1/ still believe they can change the world 2/ are inexperienced and therefore uncorrupted by the determinism rooted in adults I don't see any compelling reason to doubt that things happen and can only happen one way from your argument. The fact that people tend to take the easiest route would indeed make determinism a convenient thing to believe in. This doesn't however disprove the idea itself, who believes what is irrelevant. | ||
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