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On August 30 2013 09:34 kwizach wrote:
@HardlyNever: I 100% agree that the brain and its processes are entirely physical (as is the rest of the universe). Yet I still believe in the existence of free will, but defined differently than the conception of free will you are disputing. To me, free will implies that it is the physical mechanisms inside us, possibly in their interaction with our external environment, which result in a choice being made. If I start to cross the street in order to get to the other side and get hit by a speeding car instead, my death will not be the result of my free will. If I choose to step in front of a speeding car to commit suicide, my death will be the result of my free will.
Of course, every single one of the choices I make will be the only possible choice that can physically be made when it happens, because the physical contents of my body, my brain, and the environment around me, determine the choice that is being made. Yet the choice still originates in the physical mechanisms that happen inside my body, thus it is my choice.
This isn't sufficient, though - saying that the choices which are the result of the workings of the physical contents of one's own body (by the way, I say "physical contents" even though "contents" would be sufficient since everything is physical anyway, but I add the word to stress my position) correspond to the exercise of free will would for example imply that computers have free will (which isn't a problem in itself, but would not make for a very interesting definition of free will). Indeed, a computer makes tons of choices based on the contents of its own physical envelope. So I would add to my definition something along the lines of the choices necessitating to be made consciously by the entity who makes them to correspond to the exercise of free will.
Ok, it's late and I'm tired, so I've probably expressed this terribly, but I hope it sheds some light on my particular compatibilist stance (I haven't look much into this school of thought, so I don't know to what extent my position is shared among it).
A agree with the first part, but I don't get why you have to adjust your definition in order to make it work with computers. If we are only physical, shouldn't a computer be "allowed" to have free will ? After all, we are nothing more than a biological computer and everything leads to believe that the logical process of our brain could be replicate by a computer.
That's why I don't like "free will", it's so black and white. The truth is, it's all about being able to make logical decisions based on information.
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Well, mostly because I personally see the exercise of free will to be linked to the agent knowing that he is making a choice. Machines don't know that they are making a choice the way humans (& animals) do, which is why I feel adding what I mentioned does provide for a more interesting definition (which however probably also has its shortcomings, including blurry limits). I can perfectly accept and work with other definitions, though.
edit: too tired, I'm off to bed. I might re-work some of what I just said tomorrow if I find I disagree with/need to change some of it in the morning :p
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so no definition of reflexivity and an account of how that solves problems? Sorry I seem to have gotten your goat my friend I am just a gadfly who doesn't know anything and wants it to be explained to him 
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
your 'problem' seems like a folk version of the hard problem, which isnt all that hard or a genuine problem about how consciousness works. it's about how to understand consciousness from the outside, by those very same conscious thinkers. at this point you are just playing a childish game of refusing to engage with people, who understand your problem just fine.
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what's so not hard about it? I'm giving the folk version because this is teamliquid. I think if you can't tackle folk phil problems you are no philosopher at all.
you can't answer it, you can just insult me for asking it. Is that how you learned to do philosophy?
I'm not refusing to engage. I really honestly believe that all these replies are question begging. What do you want me to say?
edit: I know I said I wouldn't argue on phone but I have no free will I can't help myself
edit: and obviously this carries no weight in a disputation, but if you had known me several years ago I would have been saying exactly what doublereed has been saying. I have since decided that this view is unsatisfactory and incomplete. So there's that.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
i've answered it already, albeit incomplete and messy. what gets this conversation stuck is your refusal to follow others' arguments and pinpoint more precisely where the departure occurs. you don't go "oh but you don't understand me" as the only response to everything and expect productive discussions.
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how do you guys not see that your responses have been question begging? I'm really mystified. You are just claiming that you believe a solution exists (i agree!). But you do not say anything about what it is. I just want people to appreciate how mysterious the whole thing is.
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I agree that it has something to do with emergence and the difference between seeing something from inside vs outside. All that is totally obvious. But it solves NOTHING just to say it. It's just a gesture at what a potential solution MIGHT look like. That's what I want people to acknowledge.. That it's deeply fucking mysterious and we really have no clue about it, although we might have some vague ideas about what clues might look like if we found them
edit: oh and hold on just a mfing second. You accuse me of refusing to engage. I asked doublereed for an account of reflixivity which he has not supplied. I asked you for an example of a representational modality that was not already about consciousness which you have not supplied. You just both keep insisting that you have answered my question, which I assure you you have not.
edit: all you have to say is 'i don't know' and I will be satisfied. I don't know either!
edit: when I got here this thread was doublereed beating up on some poor kid in over his head trying to make points about the clinamen and stuff. Doublereed was going [robot voice]: 'nothing to see here. There is no problem. Everything is understood. The authorities have matters well under control. There is absolutely nothing deeply mysterious about the mind-body problem. I am a compatibilist. There are some molecules and they bump into each other. Ask a chemist.' I thought that was just scandalous.
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people won't take you seriously if you demand an answer to "the whys?". most of them find the whys childish, impractical obstacles on the road of empiricism.
no one cares why, they just see that it does, measure it, then call it.
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Isn't the thread already answered by now?
To be more exact - is the mind, in all its complexity, physical, the is, the chemical and electric networks in the brain? What about morality, love, ideas, empathy, compassion, imagination? Are these mere byproducts of physiological processes that are in a way similar to the chemical and electrical impulses experienced by other animals?
Yes. The processes are all "byproducts of physiological processes" at the brain. What goes on within the mind, or temporal activations of elaborate neuronal ensembles, e.g. "morality, love, ideas", is a matter of philosophical discussion, regardless of the fact that physical processes are responsible for their existence
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Have any of you read Hofstadter's book, _I am a Strange Loop_?
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no but I read GEB, it's fine and he has some good concepts but it still isnt the answer
xm(z your post just says you don't like philosophy. Fine. Go away :p
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I'm not claiming anyone has answers. It's not an answer, but I think it's an interesting idea and offers some explanatory power, which is more than none.
I just read David Gelernter's book _Muse in the Machine_ wherein he basically says the body is required for consciousness because the body is required for emotions, which are a key element of thought, as a kind of index for memories. So the mind would really be a nexus between the brain and the body, which rules out simply transplanting your brain into a computer/other body.
One thought experiment is to wonder whether you would be you if your brain were transplanted into another body. Gerlenter argues no, because the new body doesn't have the same corresponding emotional correlates that your real body had, so your brain wouldn't be able to access the memories locked within it, which are tied to those correlates.
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yeah I think hofstader is great especially if you are not familiar with stuff about turing machines and godel and lewis carroll and things like that. I think the answer definitely has something to do with the stuff he is talking about
idk about these emotional correlates, where does he think they are located if not in the brain. Certainly your body produces hormones which regulate brain function... I don't really see how increasing the amount of body you are considering really does anything for the mind body problem
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The correlates are located in the brain, obviously, but require a body to be fully actualized, or "felt". The short of it is that an emotion requires a body to be felt, and that the memory of that emotion, associated with a particular subjectively perceived "scene" is tied to the physiological sensation, in that it constitutes a major part of that memory.
Memory is obviously an important part of thought and his claim is that thinking thoughts occurs on a spectrum from high focus to low focus. At high focus, your thoughts are rational, logical, and problem-solving oriented. This kind of thought is traditionally considered the sine qua non of conscious thought. Thoughts at high focus are composed of stacking memories and abstracting out single components in a kind of network overlay to find similarities and make analogies.
Low focus thought is linked to creativity and, at extremely low focus, dream states or hallucinatory states. It is largely self-driven, that is, at high focus you feel distinctly in control of your thought pattern, whereas at low focus, your thoughts lead themselves in some sense. Thought is not driven by abstract, conceptual linking at this level, but by affect linking, wherein the emotional content of a memory is the important attribute of the memory and links it through analogy to other memories, such that memories with similar emotional content will be linked, rather than memories with similar symbolic or abstract content such as "blue" or "tall" or whatever. This affect linking, Gelernter argues, is primarily responsible for metaphor, which is often based on a link between the emotional content or feeling of an idea/memory rather than the literal, or abstract properties of an idea/memory.
My point being that a computer without a body, and no way to experience emotion, would never achieve true consciousness according to Gelernter. It would merely be computation, the extreme end of high focus thought.
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On August 30 2013 12:12 sam!zdat wrote:
I agree that it has something to do with emergence and the difference between seeing something from inside vs outside. All that is totally obvious. But it solves NOTHING just to say it. It's just a gesture at what a potential solution MIGHT look like. That's what I want people to acknowledge.. That it's deeply fucking mysterious and we really have no clue about it, although we might have some vague ideas about what clues might look like if we found them.
We do have some clues about the emergence of consciousness. Do you deny that we have a better understanding of the brain now than we did a few centuries ago? Well, having this better understanding of the brain means we have a better understanding of the arrangement from which consciousness emerges. Does this mean we've solved how consciousness emerges? No. Is this still better than having "no clue whatsoever"? Yes.
On August 30 2013 12:12 sam!zdat wrote:
I asked doublereed for an account of reflixivity which he has not supplied.
No, you asked me, as part of an interrogation that had been going on for a few posts, and that I told you I wasn't interested in being a part of. Next time you want to engage in a conversation with someone, don't start interrogating them like they're a small child. In addition, you're still misrepresenting my words since I never said it "solved all problems". In fact, I never said anything even remotely close to that.
On August 30 2013 12:12 sam!zdat wrote:
edit: all you have to say is 'i don't know' and I will be satisfied. I don't know either!
You have repeatedly been told that we do not yet have a satisfying answer with regards to the emergence of consciousness. Repeatedly. And not having a satisfying answer is not the same as not having any clue whatsoever.
On August 30 2013 12:12 sam!zdat wrote:
edit: when I got here this thread was doublereed beating up on some poor kid in over his head trying to make points about the clinamen and stuff. [...] I thought that was just scandalous.
No, when you "got here", there was an exchange between grassHAT and me going on, with grassHAT (who would probably take offense with you calling him a "poor kid", but I guess you have a thing for patronizing people) claiming that "irrational atom movement" could not possibly produce rationality, and me explaining to him that it could.
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On August 30 2013 08:49 koreasilver wrote:
Altering an environment with a certain goal in mind implies that there is a will at work that makes particular choices. I don't understand how in the world you could say such a thing in the context of your post without severe conceptual dissonance.
No definatly not.
It can also be (and probably is) that having a goal is an ilusion
The earth atracts all material things,You can say it is altering its environment with the goal to get all material as close as possible, yet it definatly has no free will and the earth having this goal is an ilusion. just because something happens does not mean that it is a goal.
The brain could work in a similar way, with a goal created as an ilusion for ourselves,to justify our actions and make them understandable.
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understanding a few things about how the brain works is a completely seaparate issue from making progress on the mind body problem
edit: all I want if for you to admit that it's deeply myterious. Now you're backpedaling because you know this 'reflexivity' stuff was just a bluff, but you still won't admit that the problem is a deep enigma because it threatens your worldview
edit: the point is not to say that nothing has been learned. The point is to make you realize and admit the seriousness of the problem and the tautological question begging nature of the answers you have been giving. If you're willing to admit now that nobody has any explanation, why not just go the next step and admit the truth, which is that nobody has any clue
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It's not "completely separate" at all, considering consciousness exists only because of the physical arrangements in our brains. And it's not "a few things" either.
Where am I supposed to be backpedaling? I've said the exact same thing since my first posts, a snippet of which I've repeated to you several times already:
If your question is "what are the exact detailed physical workings of the emergence of consciousness", then we do not have a definitive and exhaustive answer, even though we're way beyond having no idea, as tokinho mentioned
I mentioned reflexivity in a response to you about experiencing reality. I'm not sure how it's supposed to be a bluff, and why I would be "bluffing" in the first place. Do you somehow picture yourself to be in a fight against the world? Does me giving you an answer mean that I'm out to "get you"?
edit following your edit: there was nothing tautological about my answers, like I've already explained to you. Also, not knowing the definitive answer for something is not the same as not having any clue.
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edit: when I got here this thread was doublereed beating up on some poor kid in over his head trying to make points about the clinamen and stuff. Doublereed was going [robot voice]: 'nothing to see here. There is no problem. Everything is understood. The authorities have matters well under control. There is absolutely nothing deeply mysterious about the mind-body problem. I am a compatibilist. There are some molecules and they bump into each other. Ask a chemist.' I thought that was just scandalous.
Something isn't mysterious just because you don't know about it. I don't think the technology of solid-state hard drives is "mysterious" just because I don't know the answer. Evolution wasn't mysterious in 1800. Stop treating lack of knowledge as mysterious.
Nothing is "mysterious." You just don't know the answer. The mind-body problem is no exception.
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EPT
