On July 08 2013 02:21 Reason wrote: Very well my good man, I shall do so.
Free will The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
The key here is that free will means at one's own discretion. You do what you want, because you want to do it. Your choices are your own.
The reason you want to do things is entirely dependent upon what your brain tells you that you want. If you alter the brain, so desire is also altered. Yes, our decision making process is more than tied to the physiology of the brain, it's absolutely governed by it.
Free will doesn't mean anything apart from free will. On moral responsibility, what you're saying there is "people that murder are simply acting on their natural impulses and so therefore should not be punished".
We exercise free will the same way we always have, just because we are subject to the laws of the universe doesn't change anything.
In most discussions of free will, it's hard to get everyone agreeing on an exact definition. What you're saying is one (compatibilist) definition, but not all philosophers agree with the idea that free will is compatible with determinism. They'd argue that determinism violates the first part of your definition ("the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate"), and that basically in order to truly have "the ability to act at one's own discretion," the functioning of one's mind cannot come down to the laws of physics. There must be an additional component where you choose A or B, and that regardless of the physical state of your mind right before the decision, you must actually be able to choose A (and all the neurological consequences that implies) or choose B (and all the different neurological consequences that implies). Determinism, some argue, makes it so that only one of A or B is a choice you are physically capable of making.
You still choose A because you "want to" in the sense that your internal narrative and your preference function says that that is what you want, which fits the compatibilist definition of free will. But it doesn't really fit the libertarian definition.
your post is insightful. I guess my main objection with the combatibilist definition is: what we like (Schopenhauer's "will") and the entire mechanism of decision making we use are neither controllable nor metaphysical (so that they would defy the rules of physics). There simply is no room to claim responsibility... I read this article: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2010/04/06/scientists-say-free-will-probably-doesnt-exist-but-urge-dont-stop-believing/ that puts forth the proposition that "simple" people are not ready for a world without free will. I am not really convinced of this.
I always find these sorts of exhortations to be a little befuddling. If free will doesn't exist then urging people to do anything is pointless; they either will or they won't by determined necessity. Similarly, I'm always confused when people like Sam Harris say that free will doesn't exist (not even in the compatibilist sense) and then go on to write pages and pages about why we should do choice X over choice Y. If free will doesn't exist, then choice X or Y don't even exist because they're not choices.
They aren't choices, really. If someone reads Sam Harris' pages and pages and is influenced to change their mind from X to Y, is that really their choice? The set of circumstances which would cause a person to read the pages and pages are mostly out of their control in the first place. Then, after reading, what causes the person to accept his proposition or not? It entirely depends on whether his reasons are compatible with your previous experience, logical framework, intuition, etc, all of which are ultimately out of your control as well. I fail to see where there is any room for a choice here.
False.
That presumes you had no choices before in shaping your own experiences. You also make a conscious decision to accept or reject the ideas you've just been introduced to, based on whether you think your previous experiences were wrong, or whether you think what you have just read conforms to what you already think.
This is basically like saying someone who reads a book about something, then agrees with it and commits a crime based on what he agreed with had no choice in committing the crime because the set of circumstances that led him to read the book were out of his control to begin with. That's a whole lot of assumptions you've just made with no basis for any of them, with a conclusion that doesn't fit empirical evidence.
e: and of course, if he had no choice in all of that, then is he to be held responsible?
According to you, or anyone who would say he had no choice in the matter, the answer, I presume, would be no. Which is honestly ludicrous.
But really, "unreliable" is not the correct word. Logic is not how the brain functions. The brain is much more Bayesian than that, and relies almost entirely on previous information. The brain also is evolutionarily adapted for social behavior, rather than logic, which is why humans are prone to things like the conjunction fallacy, which mistakes plausibility for probability.
While I mostly agree with what you're saying, I just wanted to point out that the initial experiments done on the conjunction fallacy are rather dubious because of the way the questions were posed/worded.
The question about the Soviet Union, for example, may imply that the U.S. breaking relations with the Soviet Union over an invasion is different from the U.S. breaking relations for no reason.
The debiased experiment tends to frame the question more clearly and far fewer people fail that one.
On July 08 2013 02:29 lebowskiguy wrote:
On July 08 2013 02:14 wherebugsgo wrote:
On July 08 2013 02:11 lebowskiguy wrote:
On July 08 2013 02:04 Reason wrote:
On July 08 2013 02:00 lebowskiguy wrote: to all those who support the existence of free will: How do you explain the fact that people with brain damage or people who develop tumors in the area of the brain change their decision process drastically? Many of them develop new violent or psychopathic urges and a different completely character overall. Doesn't this mean that our decision making process is tied to the physiology of our brain?
To those who might suggest that this doesn't count because these brains are altered or impaired: doesn't this mean that for free will to have a meaning or for moral responsibility to meaningfully come into play we should all have the same type of brain with no alterations? (this is of course never the case as there are not even 2 people with the same brain)
How do we exercise free will if our decision making process is irrefutably tied to the physiology of our brain and therefore the laws of the universe? (these questions are probably relevant only for the people who have a naturalistic view of the world)
The answer is very simple and has no doubt already been given in this thread.
Everything you've said has absolutely nothing to do with the concept of free will.
unless you have your own definition of free will ( do share) everything I have said is relevant to the concept of free will. Try to honor your name and reason with me.
He's right though, your conclusion doesn't logically follow from anything you've said so far, and what you've said is not really relevant to free will at all.
I assume free will has to do with decision making or else what is it good for? Free will is (google): the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. Everything I have said in that post is 100% relevant. The alterations of your brain change your decision making process, they prove that your decision making process follows material laws; these laws are either probabilistic or deterministic or a combination of both. Now it is you that has to find room for your "free will" concept, because I sure can't
No, it isn't. A change in the physiology of your brain is not due to a constraint of necessity or fate. You still act at your own discretion, unless you are suggesting that no one has free will to begin with.
of course I am suggesting that there is no free will to begin with. The fact that you used your phrasing in what appears as a dismissive manner did probably reveals that you are somewhat ignorant of a heated philosophical debate that has lasted centuries. Also idk what you are saying with the constraint of necessity or fate line. Are we to be held morally responsible for our personality changing brain tumors too?
That's mostly because I am not concerned with discussing philosophy, because there is no actual basis or evidence for either side-if your claim is that free will doesn't exist, and my claim is that it does, then...well, there's nothing more to argue until we know more about how the fundamentals of the universe work. I'm a physicist and computer scientist-I'd rather deal with things I can actually substantiate.
The "constraint of necessity or fate" is in the definition of free will, at least the one I'm using. Generally people are held responsible for their actions, yes, regardless of whether or not they are impaired due to a disability or otherwise. The punishment or consequence generally varies depending on the severity of the action and the severity of the injury/disability-this is, of course, in the realms of law and medicine. Some consequences for the mentally impaired involve therapy or assignment to a treatment center-different, obviously, than prison, but society still imposes consequences upon them if their actions are immoral.
Think about what you are suggesting for a minute. If you say we have no free will, and those who are impaired should not be held morally responsible for their actions, then people can do anything they want, and if they can show they were impaired when the action happened, they're not responsible! If I drink until I black out and then go murder someone, are you saying that I should not be held responsible because I don't have free will, and the alcohol impaired my decision-making process? (or rather, I didn't have a decision-making process to begin with, so I guess it didn't even matter that I was drunk!)
What if I drink so much that I get permanent brain damage and become a raging, pyschopathic serial killer? Should I be held responsible for someone's death by my hands in that case?
Your argument really doesn't make much sense at all.
what if I told you that the reasons people started putting other people in jail (or cutting their hands off etc) were pragmatic and not moralistic? The fear of being caught does prevent people from deciding to do whatever they want, it is meant to be one of the variables that affect the decision of the potential law breaker.
What does this have to do with free will? You just completely dodged my question.
Are you or are you not suggesting that someone who commits murder while impaired by alcohol is morally responsible for his or her actions?
It is true that without free will it would be impossible to hold people morally responsible I wasn't dodging the question, it seemed to me somewhat obvious. That doesn't mean prisons would have to close.
On July 08 2013 02:21 Reason wrote: Very well my good man, I shall do so.
Free will The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
The key here is that free will means at one's own discretion. You do what you want, because you want to do it. Your choices are your own.
The reason you want to do things is entirely dependent upon what your brain tells you that you want. If you alter the brain, so desire is also altered. Yes, our decision making process is more than tied to the physiology of the brain, it's absolutely governed by it.
Free will doesn't mean anything apart from free will. On moral responsibility, what you're saying there is "people that murder are simply acting on their natural impulses and so therefore should not be punished".
We exercise free will the same way we always have, just because we are subject to the laws of the universe doesn't change anything.
In most discussions of free will, it's hard to get everyone agreeing on an exact definition. What you're saying is one (compatibilist) definition, but not all philosophers agree with the idea that free will is compatible with determinism. They'd argue that determinism violates the first part of your definition ("the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate"), and that basically in order to truly have "the ability to act at one's own discretion," the functioning of one's mind cannot come down to the laws of physics. There must be an additional component where you choose A or B, and that regardless of the physical state of your mind right before the decision, you must actually be able to choose A (and all the neurological consequences that implies) or choose B (and all the different neurological consequences that implies). Determinism, some argue, makes it so that only one of A or B is a choice you are physically capable of making.
You still choose A because you "want to" in the sense that your internal narrative and your preference function says that that is what you want, which fits the compatibilist definition of free will. But it doesn't really fit the libertarian definition.
your post is insightful. I guess my main objection with the combatibilist definition is: what we like (Schopenhauer's "will") and the entire mechanism of decision making we use are neither controllable nor metaphysical (so that they would defy the rules of physics). There simply is no room to claim responsibility... I read this article: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2010/04/06/scientists-say-free-will-probably-doesnt-exist-but-urge-dont-stop-believing/ that puts forth the proposition that "simple" people are not ready for a world without free will. I am not really convinced of this.
I always find these sorts of exhortations to be a little befuddling. If free will doesn't exist then urging people to do anything is pointless; they either will or they won't by determined necessity. Similarly, I'm always confused when people like Sam Harris say that free will doesn't exist (not even in the compatibilist sense) and then go on to write pages and pages about why we should do choice X over choice Y. If free will doesn't exist, then choice X or Y don't even exist because they're not choices.
He writes/says the things that he does, maybe I'll read them and it will affect my thought process or not; I don't really see the problem relevant video
sums up everything I want to argue with compatibilists in this thread perfectly
The problem is that he wrote a book called The Moral Landscape which makes absolutely no sense if free will doesn't exist because making moral choices requires the ability to actually make choices to start with.
To clarify I don't agree with everything Sam Harris says, just everything he said in that video. You are right with your objections on his view of morality
You still haven't explained what you meant by the poem...
The poem is a typical specimen of the English Romantic movement, in which the rustic and untutored (unsoiled by the artificialities of urbane civilisation) are held to come closest to an intense experience of reality. Open curiosity is the mental state most conductive to flexible and direct experiences of novel phenomena, and children possess a natural mental superiority to adults, due to their very credulity. In a state of infancy, children even in modern civilisation have not yet learned to achieve what Jung called the "withdrawal" of projections, the loss by modern civilisation of the ancient ability to displace the psychic contents of a person's mind into the external world. In a child's mind, incorporeal objects are given the attributes of the human psyche, and there occurs an idealisation of the external universe. The modern tendency to withdraw into an extroverted orientation means that as we grow up, a counter-projection occurs, whereby the properties of the external world are imposed upon the mind. The consequence is the denial by modern men of magic, fairies and spirits. However, if Jung's Weltanschauung is to be believed, we have not lost the magic, we have merely changed their names. This entire thread is dotted by fairies and gods and spirits, seen, yet unrecognised.
As much as I used to, and would still love to, I don't believe in magic, fairies or spirits
But really, "unreliable" is not the correct word. Logic is not how the brain functions. The brain is much more Bayesian than that, and relies almost entirely on previous information. The brain also is evolutionarily adapted for social behavior, rather than logic, which is why humans are prone to things like the conjunction fallacy, which mistakes plausibility for probability.
While I mostly agree with what you're saying, I just wanted to point out that the initial experiments done on the conjunction fallacy are rather dubious because of the way the questions were posed/worded.
The question about the Soviet Union, for example, may imply that the U.S. breaking relations with the Soviet Union over an invasion is different from the U.S. breaking relations for no reason.
The debiased experiment tends to frame the question more clearly and far fewer people fail that one.
On July 08 2013 02:29 lebowskiguy wrote:
On July 08 2013 02:14 wherebugsgo wrote:
On July 08 2013 02:11 lebowskiguy wrote:
On July 08 2013 02:04 Reason wrote: [quote] The answer is very simple and has no doubt already been given in this thread.
Everything you've said has absolutely nothing to do with the concept of free will.
unless you have your own definition of free will ( do share) everything I have said is relevant to the concept of free will. Try to honor your name and reason with me.
He's right though, your conclusion doesn't logically follow from anything you've said so far, and what you've said is not really relevant to free will at all.
I assume free will has to do with decision making or else what is it good for? Free will is (google): the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. Everything I have said in that post is 100% relevant. The alterations of your brain change your decision making process, they prove that your decision making process follows material laws; these laws are either probabilistic or deterministic or a combination of both. Now it is you that has to find room for your "free will" concept, because I sure can't
No, it isn't. A change in the physiology of your brain is not due to a constraint of necessity or fate. You still act at your own discretion, unless you are suggesting that no one has free will to begin with.
of course I am suggesting that there is no free will to begin with. The fact that you used your phrasing in what appears as a dismissive manner did probably reveals that you are somewhat ignorant of a heated philosophical debate that has lasted centuries. Also idk what you are saying with the constraint of necessity or fate line. Are we to be held morally responsible for our personality changing brain tumors too?
That's mostly because I am not concerned with discussing philosophy, because there is no actual basis or evidence for either side-if your claim is that free will doesn't exist, and my claim is that it does, then...well, there's nothing more to argue until we know more about how the fundamentals of the universe work. I'm a physicist and computer scientist-I'd rather deal with things I can actually substantiate.
The "constraint of necessity or fate" is in the definition of free will, at least the one I'm using. Generally people are held responsible for their actions, yes, regardless of whether or not they are impaired due to a disability or otherwise. The punishment or consequence generally varies depending on the severity of the action and the severity of the injury/disability-this is, of course, in the realms of law and medicine. Some consequences for the mentally impaired involve therapy or assignment to a treatment center-different, obviously, than prison, but society still imposes consequences upon them if their actions are immoral.
Think about what you are suggesting for a minute. If you say we have no free will, and those who are impaired should not be held morally responsible for their actions, then people can do anything they want, and if they can show they were impaired when the action happened, they're not responsible! If I drink until I black out and then go murder someone, are you saying that I should not be held responsible because I don't have free will, and the alcohol impaired my decision-making process? (or rather, I didn't have a decision-making process to begin with, so I guess it didn't even matter that I was drunk!)
What if I drink so much that I get permanent brain damage and become a raging, pyschopathic serial killer? Should I be held responsible for someone's death by my hands in that case?
Your argument really doesn't make much sense at all.
what if I told you that the reasons people started putting other people in jail (or cutting their hands off etc) were pragmatic and not moralistic? The fear of being caught does prevent people from deciding to do whatever they want, it is meant to be one of the variables that affect the decision of the potential law breaker.
What does this have to do with free will? You just completely dodged my question.
Are you or are you not suggesting that someone who commits murder while impaired by alcohol is morally responsible for his or her actions?
It is true that without free will it would be impossible to hold people morally responsible I wasn't dodging the question, it seemed to me somewhat obvious. That doesn't mean prisons would have to close.
So...you think free will doesn't exist...but people should be held responsible for their actions?
You do realize the glaring contradiction here? You can't have it both ways. Your first example involved a brain tumour or whatever-according to your example, alcohol impairment or drug impairment is not much different, only in that the impairment is purposely induced. But then, without free will you wouldn't have the choice to impair yourself, now would you? It would be out of your control regardless, and so impairment itself doesn't matter-you could be fully aware of what you are doing, and since you argue that free will doesn't exist, any criminal should not be held morally responsible.
Authority and Hearsay are pretty friggin' different. I wouldn't characterize them as the same at all.
Either way, the whole point of science is to reduce the problem of Argument by Authority. This is why you have to make sure your tests are Repeatable, so that anyone with the proper tools can do them. The whole point of Empiricism and science is that we don't have to rely on just "hearsay" or "personal experience." We can collectively do multiple separate fields of research and have them all culminate in scientific theories and bodies of research.
The kind of scientific culture dominant today is not really empirical, but neo-Platonic, it subordinates observations to idealised structures and models. A cardinally empirical science would produce a composition of reality closer to Impressionism than Realism. It would not require "scientific theories." Poetic forms of thought are closer to pure empiricism than the symbolisation of reality via mathematical models. Direct empiricism reduces argument by authority, but what are you arguing for is not for more empiricism, but indirect empiricism, that is, accepting the conclusions of other empiricists, which again, is reliance on authority. Therefore I yet await to see the essential difference between your belief in anything, and my belief in fairies.
I am also astonished by your assertion that we can reduce argument by authority by appealing to experimental repetition. I look forward to watching you prove by such a means what you saw at noon yesterday.
Wow, that's fancy-schmancy words you got there. Is this really a serious post? It is obvious that you are spewing bullshit wrapped in big words to obfuscate the fact that you're bullshitting. That first half is blatant nonsense.
Yes, I understand that it's reliance on authority. I didn't say it wasn't. I said that the purpose of repeatability reduces that reliance on authority. Which it does. I don't have to do things myself, I can just read and learn about the repeatable experiments that others have done. Or I learn third-hand from there. Again, this is a pragmatic answer so that humans go all do different fields of research and culminate in big theories and such.
Your belief in fairies is adorable, silly, and hopeless. We actually do have evidence against fairies. It's called the Theory of Evolution. Fairies would not be able to be evolved from evolution. That's the thing about Scientific Theories: they're falsifiable. They only explain a finite number of things. They cannot explain everything. Evolution does not predict fairies. If you find a fairy, I highly recommend showing it to some scientists, because you would win a nobel prize for debunking the most important discovery of biology.
Gaining information should limit the possibilities of the universe. If you can explain anything, then you have zero information.
I don't know what you mean by "prove what I saw at noon yesterday." You can't prove things with absolute certainty. As I said, it's Bayesian. Belief is a measure of certainty. And the repeatability thing obviously is talking about Science, which uses repeatable experiments. I don't know what you're trying to get from me.
But we already know the mind is unreliable. I don't even understand this argument. People think things that are not true all the time. We've thought false things since the beginning of time. You would have to think that thinking something makes it more likely to be true, which is absurd to the point of making me cross-eyed.
Exactly. You've graduated to premise B. Now all you have to do to approach the logical (or, rather, counter-logical conclusion issued therefrom.)
What? No you aren't. I have no idea what you're talking about. Saying that there is an objective reality does not mean that there aren't different perspectives on the same thing. Hell, how would I explain different camera angles???? You're being silly.
"Illusion" and "interpretation" imply different sorts of relationships between mental images and their external correlates. The one implies a subordinate relationship, the other implies either a superordinate or a co-ordinate relationship. For physicalism to be both true and meaningful, the subordinate relationship must be established.
No. Illusion and interpretation have completely different connotations. I'm not interested in word games. Illusion refers to something which is not there at all, like seeing a mouse where there is a sock. Or seeing a fairy.
Having a color camera and having a b/w camera generate different interpretations of the same landscape. It's not like the landscape changes, or that the b/w camera is generating an illusion. It's just that one has the capacity for color and the other doesn't.
On July 08 2013 02:21 Reason wrote: Very well my good man, I shall do so.
Free will The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
The key here is that free will means at one's own discretion. You do what you want, because you want to do it. Your choices are your own.
The reason you want to do things is entirely dependent upon what your brain tells you that you want. If you alter the brain, so desire is also altered. Yes, our decision making process is more than tied to the physiology of the brain, it's absolutely governed by it.
Free will doesn't mean anything apart from free will. On moral responsibility, what you're saying there is "people that murder are simply acting on their natural impulses and so therefore should not be punished".
We exercise free will the same way we always have, just because we are subject to the laws of the universe doesn't change anything.
In most discussions of free will, it's hard to get everyone agreeing on an exact definition. What you're saying is one (compatibilist) definition, but not all philosophers agree with the idea that free will is compatible with determinism. They'd argue that determinism violates the first part of your definition ("the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate"), and that basically in order to truly have "the ability to act at one's own discretion," the functioning of one's mind cannot come down to the laws of physics. There must be an additional component where you choose A or B, and that regardless of the physical state of your mind right before the decision, you must actually be able to choose A (and all the neurological consequences that implies) or choose B (and all the different neurological consequences that implies). Determinism, some argue, makes it so that only one of A or B is a choice you are physically capable of making.
You still choose A because you "want to" in the sense that your internal narrative and your preference function says that that is what you want, which fits the compatibilist definition of free will. But it doesn't really fit the libertarian definition.
your post is insightful. I guess my main objection with the combatibilist definition is: what we like (Schopenhauer's "will") and the entire mechanism of decision making we use are neither controllable nor metaphysical (so that they would defy the rules of physics). There simply is no room to claim responsibility... I read this article: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2010/04/06/scientists-say-free-will-probably-doesnt-exist-but-urge-dont-stop-believing/ that puts forth the proposition that "simple" people are not ready for a world without free will. I am not really convinced of this.
I always find these sorts of exhortations to be a little befuddling. If free will doesn't exist then urging people to do anything is pointless; they either will or they won't by determined necessity. Similarly, I'm always confused when people like Sam Harris say that free will doesn't exist (not even in the compatibilist sense) and then go on to write pages and pages about why we should do choice X over choice Y. If free will doesn't exist, then choice X or Y don't even exist because they're not choices.
They aren't choices, really. If someone reads Sam Harris' pages and pages and is influenced to change their mind from X to Y, is that really their choice? The set of circumstances which would cause a person to read the pages and pages are mostly out of their control in the first place. Then, after reading, what causes the person to accept his proposition or not? It entirely depends on whether his reasons are compatible with your previous experience, logical framework, intuition, etc, all of which are ultimately out of your control as well. I fail to see where there is any room for a choice here.
False.
That presumes you had no choices before in shaping your own experiences. You also make a conscious decision to accept or reject the ideas you've just been introduced to, based on whether you think your previous experiences were wrong, or whether you think what you have just read conforms to what you already think.
This is basically like saying someone who reads a book about something, then agrees with it and commits a crime based on what he agreed with had no choice in committing the crime because the set of circumstances that led him to read the book were out of his control to begin with. That's a whole lot of assumptions you've just made with no basis for any of them, with a conclusion that doesn't fit empirical evidence.
e: and of course, if he had no choice in all of that, then is he to be held responsible?
According to you, or anyone who would say he had no choice in the matter, the answer, I presume, would be no. Which is honestly ludicrous.
OK, we're a little off base here. Let's look at it in a different way. Say, upon reading, it's guaranteed that you'd accept his proposals and change your mind, and now choose X instead of Y. Let's also say that you only happened to read the essay based on a recommendation from a friend. Without this recommendation, you'd never read the essay and go your entire life choosing Y. So ultimately, your choice between X and Y is completely and utterly decided by the actions of your friend, with no input from you. Do you still have the free will to choose between X and Y?
You still haven't explained what you meant by the poem...
The poem is a typical specimen of the English Romantic movement, in which the rustic and untutored (unsoiled by the artificialities of urbane civilisation) are held to come closest to an intense experience of reality. Open curiosity is the mental state most conductive to flexible and direct experiences of novel phenomena, and children possess a natural mental superiority to adults, due to their very credulity. In a state of infancy, children even in modern civilisation have not yet learned to achieve what Jung called the "withdrawal" of projections, the loss by modern civilisation of the ancient ability to displace the psychic contents of a person's mind into the external world. In a child's mind, incorporeal objects are given the attributes of the human psyche, and there occurs an idealisation of the external universe. The modern tendency to withdraw into an extroverted orientation means that as we grow up, a counter-projection occurs, whereby the properties of the external world are imposed upon the mind. The consequence is the denial by modern men of magic, fairies and spirits. However, if Jung's Weltanschauung is to be believed, we have not lost the magic, we have merely changed their names. This entire thread is dotted by fairies and gods and spirits, seen, yet unrecognised.
As much as I used to, and would still love to, I don't believe in magic, fairies or spirits
Many old Gods ascend from their graves...take the form of impersonal forces.
But really, "unreliable" is not the correct word. Logic is not how the brain functions. The brain is much more Bayesian than that, and relies almost entirely on previous information. The brain also is evolutionarily adapted for social behavior, rather than logic, which is why humans are prone to things like the conjunction fallacy, which mistakes plausibility for probability.
While I mostly agree with what you're saying, I just wanted to point out that the initial experiments done on the conjunction fallacy are rather dubious because of the way the questions were posed/worded.
The question about the Soviet Union, for example, may imply that the U.S. breaking relations with the Soviet Union over an invasion is different from the U.S. breaking relations for no reason.
The debiased experiment tends to frame the question more clearly and far fewer people fail that one.
On July 08 2013 02:29 lebowskiguy wrote:
On July 08 2013 02:14 wherebugsgo wrote:
On July 08 2013 02:11 lebowskiguy wrote: [quote] unless you have your own definition of free will ( do share) everything I have said is relevant to the concept of free will. Try to honor your name and reason with me.
He's right though, your conclusion doesn't logically follow from anything you've said so far, and what you've said is not really relevant to free will at all.
I assume free will has to do with decision making or else what is it good for? Free will is (google): the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. Everything I have said in that post is 100% relevant. The alterations of your brain change your decision making process, they prove that your decision making process follows material laws; these laws are either probabilistic or deterministic or a combination of both. Now it is you that has to find room for your "free will" concept, because I sure can't
No, it isn't. A change in the physiology of your brain is not due to a constraint of necessity or fate. You still act at your own discretion, unless you are suggesting that no one has free will to begin with.
of course I am suggesting that there is no free will to begin with. The fact that you used your phrasing in what appears as a dismissive manner did probably reveals that you are somewhat ignorant of a heated philosophical debate that has lasted centuries. Also idk what you are saying with the constraint of necessity or fate line. Are we to be held morally responsible for our personality changing brain tumors too?
That's mostly because I am not concerned with discussing philosophy, because there is no actual basis or evidence for either side-if your claim is that free will doesn't exist, and my claim is that it does, then...well, there's nothing more to argue until we know more about how the fundamentals of the universe work. I'm a physicist and computer scientist-I'd rather deal with things I can actually substantiate.
The "constraint of necessity or fate" is in the definition of free will, at least the one I'm using. Generally people are held responsible for their actions, yes, regardless of whether or not they are impaired due to a disability or otherwise. The punishment or consequence generally varies depending on the severity of the action and the severity of the injury/disability-this is, of course, in the realms of law and medicine. Some consequences for the mentally impaired involve therapy or assignment to a treatment center-different, obviously, than prison, but society still imposes consequences upon them if their actions are immoral.
Think about what you are suggesting for a minute. If you say we have no free will, and those who are impaired should not be held morally responsible for their actions, then people can do anything they want, and if they can show they were impaired when the action happened, they're not responsible! If I drink until I black out and then go murder someone, are you saying that I should not be held responsible because I don't have free will, and the alcohol impaired my decision-making process? (or rather, I didn't have a decision-making process to begin with, so I guess it didn't even matter that I was drunk!)
What if I drink so much that I get permanent brain damage and become a raging, pyschopathic serial killer? Should I be held responsible for someone's death by my hands in that case?
Your argument really doesn't make much sense at all.
what if I told you that the reasons people started putting other people in jail (or cutting their hands off etc) were pragmatic and not moralistic? The fear of being caught does prevent people from deciding to do whatever they want, it is meant to be one of the variables that affect the decision of the potential law breaker.
What does this have to do with free will? You just completely dodged my question.
Are you or are you not suggesting that someone who commits murder while impaired by alcohol is morally responsible for his or her actions?
It is true that without free will it would be impossible to hold people morally responsible I wasn't dodging the question, it seemed to me somewhat obvious. That doesn't mean prisons would have to close.
So...you think free will doesn't exist...but people should be held responsible for their actions?
You do realize the glaring contradiction here? You can't have it both ways. Your first example involved a brain tumour or whatever-according to your example, alcohol impairment or drug impairment is not much different, only in that the impairment is purposely induced. But then, without free will you wouldn't have the choice to impair yourself, now would you? It would be out of your control regardless, and so impairment itself doesn't matter-you could be fully aware of what you are doing, and since you argue that free will doesn't exist, any criminal should not be held morally responsible.
Again, whatever is causing the criminal to "choose" to commit a crime, is also causing people to "hold" them morally responsible. If the mind comes from determinism, then the mind comes from determinism. It's not like there's a special case where people can choose to change their beliefs only as they relate to free will, but everything else is deterministic.
In the case of drugs/alcohol, disregarding free will you can make the case that a person's actions while they are not under drug influences is truly representative of their personal utility function. While, under the influence of drugs, their behavior is modified so that it does not represent their utility function. In the first case, the person needs to be either locked up or somehow their behavior needs to be modified, according to the concerns of the people whose utilities are diminished by the criminal activity. Whereas if the person did something that negatively impacted others while under the influence, it may be possible to rectify this situation (according to the utility functions of the people in charge of the legal system, or ultimately the voters who elect them) by simply curing the drug addiction or whatever.
That said, many people (self included to a large extent) DO hold people morally accountable for the actions they perform after choosing to abuse behavior-altering substances. eg drinking and driving is seen as gravely unacceptable, even though the person may not be explicitly choosing to drive dangerously.
On July 08 2013 02:21 Reason wrote: Very well my good man, I shall do so.
Free will The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
The key here is that free will means at one's own discretion. You do what you want, because you want to do it. Your choices are your own.
The reason you want to do things is entirely dependent upon what your brain tells you that you want. If you alter the brain, so desire is also altered. Yes, our decision making process is more than tied to the physiology of the brain, it's absolutely governed by it.
Free will doesn't mean anything apart from free will. On moral responsibility, what you're saying there is "people that murder are simply acting on their natural impulses and so therefore should not be punished".
We exercise free will the same way we always have, just because we are subject to the laws of the universe doesn't change anything.
In most discussions of free will, it's hard to get everyone agreeing on an exact definition. What you're saying is one (compatibilist) definition, but not all philosophers agree with the idea that free will is compatible with determinism. They'd argue that determinism violates the first part of your definition ("the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate"), and that basically in order to truly have "the ability to act at one's own discretion," the functioning of one's mind cannot come down to the laws of physics. There must be an additional component where you choose A or B, and that regardless of the physical state of your mind right before the decision, you must actually be able to choose A (and all the neurological consequences that implies) or choose B (and all the different neurological consequences that implies). Determinism, some argue, makes it so that only one of A or B is a choice you are physically capable of making.
You still choose A because you "want to" in the sense that your internal narrative and your preference function says that that is what you want, which fits the compatibilist definition of free will. But it doesn't really fit the libertarian definition.
your post is insightful. I guess my main objection with the combatibilist definition is: what we like (Schopenhauer's "will") and the entire mechanism of decision making we use are neither controllable nor metaphysical (so that they would defy the rules of physics). There simply is no room to claim responsibility... I read this article: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2010/04/06/scientists-say-free-will-probably-doesnt-exist-but-urge-dont-stop-believing/ that puts forth the proposition that "simple" people are not ready for a world without free will. I am not really convinced of this.
I always find these sorts of exhortations to be a little befuddling. If free will doesn't exist then urging people to do anything is pointless; they either will or they won't by determined necessity. Similarly, I'm always confused when people like Sam Harris say that free will doesn't exist (not even in the compatibilist sense) and then go on to write pages and pages about why we should do choice X over choice Y. If free will doesn't exist, then choice X or Y don't even exist because they're not choices.
They aren't choices, really. If someone reads Sam Harris' pages and pages and is influenced to change their mind from X to Y, is that really their choice? The set of circumstances which would cause a person to read the pages and pages are mostly out of their control in the first place. Then, after reading, what causes the person to accept his proposition or not? It entirely depends on whether his reasons are compatible with your previous experience, logical framework, intuition, etc, all of which are ultimately out of your control as well. I fail to see where there is any room for a choice here.
False.
That presumes you had no choices before in shaping your own experiences. You also make a conscious decision to accept or reject the ideas you've just been introduced to, based on whether you think your previous experiences were wrong, or whether you think what you have just read conforms to what you already think.
This is basically like saying someone who reads a book about something, then agrees with it and commits a crime based on what he agreed with had no choice in committing the crime because the set of circumstances that led him to read the book were out of his control to begin with. That's a whole lot of assumptions you've just made with no basis for any of them, with a conclusion that doesn't fit empirical evidence.
e: and of course, if he had no choice in all of that, then is he to be held responsible?
According to you, or anyone who would say he had no choice in the matter, the answer, I presume, would be no. Which is honestly ludicrous.
OK, we're a little off base here. Let's look at it in a different way. Say, upon reading, it's guaranteed that you'd accept his proposals and change your mind, and now choose X instead of Y. Let's also say that you only happened to read the essay based on a recommendation from a friend. Without this recommendation, you'd never read the essay and go your entire life choosing Y. So ultimately, your choice between X and Y is completely and utterly decided by the actions of your friend, with no input from you. Do you still have the free will to choose between X and Y?
This first assumption is unfounded.
The rest of your post doesn't matter. Even if your first assumption can be shown to be true, you could extend the causal chain as far back as you find convenient given the assumption you just pulled. It's completely arbitrary. You, for whatever reason, extend the chain back to when your friend gave you that essay-you could have gone further (or not, even). You could say the universe began, therefore you have chosen everything you have chosen, which may be true, but is an utterly worthless conclusion.
But really, "unreliable" is not the correct word. Logic is not how the brain functions. The brain is much more Bayesian than that, and relies almost entirely on previous information. The brain also is evolutionarily adapted for social behavior, rather than logic, which is why humans are prone to things like the conjunction fallacy, which mistakes plausibility for probability.
While I mostly agree with what you're saying, I just wanted to point out that the initial experiments done on the conjunction fallacy are rather dubious because of the way the questions were posed/worded.
The question about the Soviet Union, for example, may imply that the U.S. breaking relations with the Soviet Union over an invasion is different from the U.S. breaking relations for no reason.
The debiased experiment tends to frame the question more clearly and far fewer people fail that one.
On July 08 2013 02:29 lebowskiguy wrote:
On July 08 2013 02:14 wherebugsgo wrote: [quote]
He's right though, your conclusion doesn't logically follow from anything you've said so far, and what you've said is not really relevant to free will at all.
I assume free will has to do with decision making or else what is it good for? Free will is (google): the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. Everything I have said in that post is 100% relevant. The alterations of your brain change your decision making process, they prove that your decision making process follows material laws; these laws are either probabilistic or deterministic or a combination of both. Now it is you that has to find room for your "free will" concept, because I sure can't
No, it isn't. A change in the physiology of your brain is not due to a constraint of necessity or fate. You still act at your own discretion, unless you are suggesting that no one has free will to begin with.
of course I am suggesting that there is no free will to begin with. The fact that you used your phrasing in what appears as a dismissive manner did probably reveals that you are somewhat ignorant of a heated philosophical debate that has lasted centuries. Also idk what you are saying with the constraint of necessity or fate line. Are we to be held morally responsible for our personality changing brain tumors too?
That's mostly because I am not concerned with discussing philosophy, because there is no actual basis or evidence for either side-if your claim is that free will doesn't exist, and my claim is that it does, then...well, there's nothing more to argue until we know more about how the fundamentals of the universe work. I'm a physicist and computer scientist-I'd rather deal with things I can actually substantiate.
The "constraint of necessity or fate" is in the definition of free will, at least the one I'm using. Generally people are held responsible for their actions, yes, regardless of whether or not they are impaired due to a disability or otherwise. The punishment or consequence generally varies depending on the severity of the action and the severity of the injury/disability-this is, of course, in the realms of law and medicine. Some consequences for the mentally impaired involve therapy or assignment to a treatment center-different, obviously, than prison, but society still imposes consequences upon them if their actions are immoral.
Think about what you are suggesting for a minute. If you say we have no free will, and those who are impaired should not be held morally responsible for their actions, then people can do anything they want, and if they can show they were impaired when the action happened, they're not responsible! If I drink until I black out and then go murder someone, are you saying that I should not be held responsible because I don't have free will, and the alcohol impaired my decision-making process? (or rather, I didn't have a decision-making process to begin with, so I guess it didn't even matter that I was drunk!)
What if I drink so much that I get permanent brain damage and become a raging, pyschopathic serial killer? Should I be held responsible for someone's death by my hands in that case?
Your argument really doesn't make much sense at all.
what if I told you that the reasons people started putting other people in jail (or cutting their hands off etc) were pragmatic and not moralistic? The fear of being caught does prevent people from deciding to do whatever they want, it is meant to be one of the variables that affect the decision of the potential law breaker.
What does this have to do with free will? You just completely dodged my question.
Are you or are you not suggesting that someone who commits murder while impaired by alcohol is morally responsible for his or her actions?
It is true that without free will it would be impossible to hold people morally responsible I wasn't dodging the question, it seemed to me somewhat obvious. That doesn't mean prisons would have to close.
So...you think free will doesn't exist...but people should be held responsible for their actions?
You do realize the glaring contradiction here? You can't have it both ways. Your first example involved a brain tumour or whatever-according to your example, alcohol impairment or drug impairment is not much different, only in that the impairment is purposely induced. But then, without free will you wouldn't have the choice to impair yourself, now would you? It would be out of your control regardless, and so impairment itself doesn't matter-you could be fully aware of what you are doing, and since you argue that free will doesn't exist, any criminal should not be held morally responsible.
Again, whatever is causing the criminal to "choose" to commit a crime, is also causing people to "hold" them morally responsible. If the mind comes from determinism, then the mind comes from determinism. It's not like there's a special case where people can choose to change their beliefs only as they relate to free will, but everything else is deterministic.
In the case of drugs/alcohol, disregarding free will you can make the case that a person's actions while they are not under drug influences is truly representative of their personal utility function. While, under the influence of drugs, their behavior is modified so that it does not represent their utility function. In the first case, the person needs to be either locked up or somehow their behavior needs to be modified, according to the concerns of the people whose utilities are diminished by the criminal activity. Whereas if the person did something that negatively impacted others while under the influence, it may be possible to rectify this situation (according to the utility functions of the people in charge of the legal system, or ultimately the voters who elect them) by simply curing the drug addiction or whatever.
That said, many people (self included to a large extent) DO hold people morally accountable for the actions they perform after choosing to abuse behavior-altering substances. eg drinking and driving is seen as gravely unacceptable, even though the person may not be explicitly choosing to drive dangerously.
Determinism and free will are not mutually exclusive.
Or did we not have this same conversation twenty pages ago?
On July 08 2013 02:21 Reason wrote: Very well my good man, I shall do so.
Free will The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
The key here is that free will means at one's own discretion. You do what you want, because you want to do it. Your choices are your own.
The reason you want to do things is entirely dependent upon what your brain tells you that you want. If you alter the brain, so desire is also altered. Yes, our decision making process is more than tied to the physiology of the brain, it's absolutely governed by it.
Free will doesn't mean anything apart from free will. On moral responsibility, what you're saying there is "people that murder are simply acting on their natural impulses and so therefore should not be punished".
We exercise free will the same way we always have, just because we are subject to the laws of the universe doesn't change anything.
In most discussions of free will, it's hard to get everyone agreeing on an exact definition. What you're saying is one (compatibilist) definition, but not all philosophers agree with the idea that free will is compatible with determinism. They'd argue that determinism violates the first part of your definition ("the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate"), and that basically in order to truly have "the ability to act at one's own discretion," the functioning of one's mind cannot come down to the laws of physics. There must be an additional component where you choose A or B, and that regardless of the physical state of your mind right before the decision, you must actually be able to choose A (and all the neurological consequences that implies) or choose B (and all the different neurological consequences that implies). Determinism, some argue, makes it so that only one of A or B is a choice you are physically capable of making.
You still choose A because you "want to" in the sense that your internal narrative and your preference function says that that is what you want, which fits the compatibilist definition of free will. But it doesn't really fit the libertarian definition.
your post is insightful. I guess my main objection with the combatibilist definition is: what we like (Schopenhauer's "will") and the entire mechanism of decision making we use are neither controllable nor metaphysical (so that they would defy the rules of physics). There simply is no room to claim responsibility... I read this article: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2010/04/06/scientists-say-free-will-probably-doesnt-exist-but-urge-dont-stop-believing/ that puts forth the proposition that "simple" people are not ready for a world without free will. I am not really convinced of this.
I always find these sorts of exhortations to be a little befuddling. If free will doesn't exist then urging people to do anything is pointless; they either will or they won't by determined necessity. Similarly, I'm always confused when people like Sam Harris say that free will doesn't exist (not even in the compatibilist sense) and then go on to write pages and pages about why we should do choice X over choice Y. If free will doesn't exist, then choice X or Y don't even exist because they're not choices.
They aren't choices, really. If someone reads Sam Harris' pages and pages and is influenced to change their mind from X to Y, is that really their choice? The set of circumstances which would cause a person to read the pages and pages are mostly out of their control in the first place. Then, after reading, what causes the person to accept his proposition or not? It entirely depends on whether his reasons are compatible with your previous experience, logical framework, intuition, etc, all of which are ultimately out of your control as well. I fail to see where there is any room for a choice here.
False.
That presumes you had no choices before in shaping your own experiences. You also make a conscious decision to accept or reject the ideas you've just been introduced to, based on whether you think your previous experiences were wrong, or whether you think what you have just read conforms to what you already think.
This is basically like saying someone who reads a book about something, then agrees with it and commits a crime based on what he agreed with had no choice in committing the crime because the set of circumstances that led him to read the book were out of his control to begin with. That's a whole lot of assumptions you've just made with no basis for any of them, with a conclusion that doesn't fit empirical evidence.
e: and of course, if he had no choice in all of that, then is he to be held responsible?
According to you, or anyone who would say he had no choice in the matter, the answer, I presume, would be no. Which is honestly ludicrous.
OK, we're a little off base here. Let's look at it in a different way. Say, upon reading, it's guaranteed that you'd accept his proposals and change your mind, and now choose X instead of Y. Let's also say that you only happened to read the essay based on a recommendation from a friend. Without this recommendation, you'd never read the essay and go your entire life choosing Y. So ultimately, your choice between X and Y is completely and utterly decided by the actions of your friend, with no input from you. Do you still have the free will to choose between X and Y?
This first assumption is unfounded.
The rest of your post doesn't matter. Even if your first assumption can be shown to be true, you could extend the causal chain as far back as you find convenient given the assumption you just pulled. It's completely arbitrary. You, for whatever reason, extend the chain back to when your friend gave you that essay-you could have gone further (or not, even). You could say the universe began, therefore you have chosen everything you have chosen, which may be true, but is an utterly worthless conclusion.
That was kinda the point I was getting at. You can extend the causal chain infinitely far back. Ultimately, your actions are the result of your genetics, which you have no control over, and your upbringing and experiences, which you also have no control over. These things are also true for your ancestors and the ancestors of everyone you come into contact with.
Just because you find the conclusion uncomfortable or "worthless", doesn't make it any less true. You've pretty much admitted that you hold the position you do based purely on emotion rather than reason, so I guess we're done here.
On July 08 2013 02:21 Reason wrote: Very well my good man, I shall do so.
Free will The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
The key here is that free will means at one's own discretion. You do what you want, because you want to do it. Your choices are your own.
The reason you want to do things is entirely dependent upon what your brain tells you that you want. If you alter the brain, so desire is also altered. Yes, our decision making process is more than tied to the physiology of the brain, it's absolutely governed by it.
Free will doesn't mean anything apart from free will. On moral responsibility, what you're saying there is "people that murder are simply acting on their natural impulses and so therefore should not be punished".
We exercise free will the same way we always have, just because we are subject to the laws of the universe doesn't change anything.
In most discussions of free will, it's hard to get everyone agreeing on an exact definition. What you're saying is one (compatibilist) definition, but not all philosophers agree with the idea that free will is compatible with determinism. They'd argue that determinism violates the first part of your definition ("the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate"), and that basically in order to truly have "the ability to act at one's own discretion," the functioning of one's mind cannot come down to the laws of physics. There must be an additional component where you choose A or B, and that regardless of the physical state of your mind right before the decision, you must actually be able to choose A (and all the neurological consequences that implies) or choose B (and all the different neurological consequences that implies). Determinism, some argue, makes it so that only one of A or B is a choice you are physically capable of making.
You still choose A because you "want to" in the sense that your internal narrative and your preference function says that that is what you want, which fits the compatibilist definition of free will. But it doesn't really fit the libertarian definition.
your post is insightful. I guess my main objection with the combatibilist definition is: what we like (Schopenhauer's "will") and the entire mechanism of decision making we use are neither controllable nor metaphysical (so that they would defy the rules of physics). There simply is no room to claim responsibility... I read this article: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2010/04/06/scientists-say-free-will-probably-doesnt-exist-but-urge-dont-stop-believing/ that puts forth the proposition that "simple" people are not ready for a world without free will. I am not really convinced of this.
I always find these sorts of exhortations to be a little befuddling. If free will doesn't exist then urging people to do anything is pointless; they either will or they won't by determined necessity. Similarly, I'm always confused when people like Sam Harris say that free will doesn't exist (not even in the compatibilist sense) and then go on to write pages and pages about why we should do choice X over choice Y. If free will doesn't exist, then choice X or Y don't even exist because they're not choices.
They aren't choices, really. If someone reads Sam Harris' pages and pages and is influenced to change their mind from X to Y, is that really their choice? The set of circumstances which would cause a person to read the pages and pages are mostly out of their control in the first place. Then, after reading, what causes the person to accept his proposition or not? It entirely depends on whether his reasons are compatible with your previous experience, logical framework, intuition, etc, all of which are ultimately out of your control as well. I fail to see where there is any room for a choice here.
False.
That presumes you had no choices before in shaping your own experiences. You also make a conscious decision to accept or reject the ideas you've just been introduced to, based on whether you think your previous experiences were wrong, or whether you think what you have just read conforms to what you already think.
This is basically like saying someone who reads a book about something, then agrees with it and commits a crime based on what he agreed with had no choice in committing the crime because the set of circumstances that led him to read the book were out of his control to begin with. That's a whole lot of assumptions you've just made with no basis for any of them, with a conclusion that doesn't fit empirical evidence.
e: and of course, if he had no choice in all of that, then is he to be held responsible?
According to you, or anyone who would say he had no choice in the matter, the answer, I presume, would be no. Which is honestly ludicrous.
OK, we're a little off base here. Let's look at it in a different way. Say, upon reading, it's guaranteed that you'd accept his proposals and change your mind, and now choose X instead of Y. Let's also say that you only happened to read the essay based on a recommendation from a friend. Without this recommendation, you'd never read the essay and go your entire life choosing Y. So ultimately, your choice between X and Y is completely and utterly decided by the actions of your friend, with no input from you. Do you still have the free will to choose between X and Y?
This first assumption is unfounded.
The rest of your post doesn't matter. Even if your first assumption can be shown to be true, you could extend the causal chain as far back as you find convenient given the assumption you just pulled. It's completely arbitrary. You, for whatever reason, extend the chain back to when your friend gave you that essay-you could have gone further (or not, even). You could say the universe began, therefore you have chosen everything you have chosen, which may be true, but is an utterly worthless conclusion.
That was kinda the point I was getting at. You can extend the causal chain infinitely far back. Ultimately, your actions are the result of your genetics, which you have no control over, and your upbringing and experiences, which you also have no control over. These things are also true for your ancestors and the ancestors of everyone you come into contact with.
Just because you find the conclusion uncomfortable or "worthless", doesn't make it any less true. You've pretty much admitted that you hold the position you do based purely on emotion rather than reason, so I guess we're done here.
No, because in order for it to work the first assumption has to be true.
There is no evidence that something is predetermined to happen.
It only works in reverse when you already KNOW that something has happened. This is precisely why your assumption is bad, because there is no guarantee that I will accept/reject something. I have a choice.
I see your point but I don't really like the weather analogy. We suck at predicting the weather before it happens, but it's nothing as complicated as the human brain. We can very easily go back and see what happened to cause a weather event to occur. We can't however go back and figure out what prompted a human decision in any way. (Purely from a physical/matter standpoint)
A seemingly random shift in the jet stream happens that a forecast didn't account for which changes the weather, we see this and say "well that's why it ended up sunny today!" If only understanding brain activity were as simple as shifts in a jet stream.
The Weather / brain analogy is a good one. You're saying that it is not because one is more complicated than the other, how do you know that ? Complexity is something very tricky. Maybe we will be able to create perfect human AI and read mind with 100% accuracy before we can predict the weather. Complexity is not a good argument.
We know how a game of starcraft work, but we will probably never (ok maybe someday, never is a long time) be able to predict the perfect way to play (like we can do with games like checkers or tic tac toe), the complexity is simply way too high. Does this mean we don't understand how the game is done ? Or that there is something mystical about starcraft ? We just know for a fact that we don't have the technology to do that.
Also, don't underestimate what we know about the brain, unlike everything you might hear (scientists are modest people !), the field of neurology is extremely advanced.
The problem of consciousness is not about complexity. You're completely missing the mark. There are many things about what we ordinarily call consciousness or consider part of it that aren't subject to controversy. Aspects of memory for example are likely explainable with physical language alone. The real problem is why im actually experiencing something when I think of a particularly good moment in my life. There is currently no one who can explain or even give something close to a coherent explanaition of how the qualitative aspects of consciousness (qualia) can exist in a purely physical world. In the end we either end up with a physical world we no longer can make sense of, or we pretend there's no ghost in the machine when there clearly is (eliminativists do this). The problem is there is a ghost, that we cannot doubt, but for all we know there really shouldn't be.
The appeal to qualia is so misguided; I don't get why this is still a thing. Why can't there be unique states of a system based upon unique inputs? The universe will never be in the same state twice, nor will you or I, first of all because we're different and second for the same reason the universe won't. You make a philosophical hypothetical proposition that qualia could be identified because they could be in principle, and then go on to say that physicalism doesn't handle this. You're right! Why would an impossible hypothetical be manifest in reality? This is no kind of argument against physicalism.
1. How does that have any bearing on the issue at hand? 2. I dont have to make any hypothetical proposition regarding subjective experience, its quite evident to all of us I'd say. To quote Sam Harris, "it's the one thing that cannot be an illusion". There are various reasons for why non-physical explanations of consciousness fail to deliver, but physicalism is just slightly less nonsensical.
To refer to qualia is to inject subjectivity into your ontology, and I don't see any grounds for doing this, but more importantly it's just a claim, not an argument. With regard to 2, I agree consciousness doesn't make obvious sense. It need not be intuitive, though?
Subjectivity is the one thing any ontology of the world can't do without. To try and circumvent the one truly obvious thing to each and every self-conscious being is just bad science and bad metaphysics. It reminds me of how Moore responds to the skeptic: "This is a hand". Well here the skeptics position is being held by the eliminativist who claims that somehow the very thing that cant be an illusion actually is! I may be mistaken about the unicorn I saw in the forest, I may be mistaken about there being a forest, but its impossible for me to be mistaken about there being the experience of seeing a forest. Indeed few neuroscientists and philosophers of mind hold the elminativist position, among the few are the Churchlands and in some sense Dan Dennett (though it is somewhat unclear to me if he truly is a hardcore elminativist or more of a soft one, I lean towards the latter). More often we find reductionists, but I have yet to see an example of anyone actually making sense of the idea that the actual taste of ice-cream, while not an illusion in the eliminativist sense, is simply neurological activity. That is not to say that epiphenomenalists or property-dualists are in a better place, in my opinion its an even bigger mess in a lot of ways.
ps. Some types of epiphenomenalism may be in a similar spot as reductive physicalism with "only" one big issue. Jaegwon Kim holds the position that only intrinsic properties of qualia are epiphenomenal for example, and that qualia as relational properties are reducible. I don't think that position makes any sense whatsoever though.
It's not impossible for you to be mistaken about there being experiences, it's impossible for you to NOT be mistaken. Consider that a p zombie (brain without consciousness) would have no way of realizing it wasn't conscious. Assuming that our brains are somehow impervious to the same physical phenomenon that cause beliefs to arise within a theoretical metaphysically 'conscious' person, is to assume to existence of metaphysics from the start.
First of all, the possibility of zombies is a pretty hot potato. Not that many would agree that theyre even possible. Secondly, I have no idea what you're saying there. What is a "theoretical metaphysically 'conscious' person" exactly? Why would one assume that "our brains are impervious to the physical phenomenon that cause beliefs to arise", when that is clearly not the case as beliefs, excluding the phenomenal parts, are quite clearly caused by our brains.
At the end of the day, assuming zombies are possible, the zombie is still in the same boat as a computer. Or a rock. There is nothing mystical going on when a zombie is "mistaken", and indeed talking about being "mistaken" about having experiences is like talking about a computer being "mistaken". its nonsense. The zombie isn't phenomenally conscious in the first place and its beliefs are thus analogous to the "beliefs" of a computer. I on the other hand cannot be sure about others having experiences, but I cannot doubt my very own phenomenal experiences at this moment.
That's what I'm trying to get at, you literally cannot doubt it, whether it's true or not. The conundrum being discussed is why people feel like they are conscious rather than not feel like they are conscious. My point is how do you rule out the latter possibility? You can't, because the evidence for the former is exactly the same as for the latter: in either case, your brain would believe itself to be conscious, due to its chemical/electrical state being identical in both cases.
First of all this is only true if phenomenal consciousness is an epiphenomenon, and epiphenomenalism is a metaphysical dead-end in my opinion (and not all epiphenomenalists would accept the possibility of zombies). Second, its only true in a trivial sense. It is similar to the old beetle in the box problem by wittgenstein. The zombie would say he has a beetle in the box even if there is no beetle in the box, but the fact remains: In the zombies case, there IS no beetle in the box. Similarly, the zombie would say he is conscious, but he would not be. If we exchange the zombie for a computer who has beliefs in the same sense a zombie would have beliefs, ie not at all in what we normally call conscious beliefs as they have myriads of phenomenal qualities attatched to them, then what youre saying is more or less that a computer programmed to answer "yes" when asked "are you conscious" somehow shows how we cannot doubt our own consciousness "even if its not there". The whole problem arises because language is sloppy and "belief" has no strict definition. If it had we would have to use different words for "zombie-belief" and our own belief as the zombie-belief is no more than how a computer "beliefs". The computer does not feel pain, even if it "believes" it does.
To me there is no issue of not being able to rule out being a zombie, because the one thing that is self-evident to me (and presumably all self-conscious beings) is that im conscious. If I truly was a zombie then I would still "believe" that in a sense, but only in a trivial sense and as a result of the vagueness of natural language.
Wow, that's fancy-schmancy words you got there. Is this really a serious post? It is obvious that you are spewing bullshit wrapped in big words to obfuscate the fact that you're bullshitting. That first half is blatant nonsense.
I plagiarised most of its ideas from Heisenberg's Tradition in der Wissenschaft, who, apart from his scientific distinctions, was a distinguished classicist. You are welcome to read his thoughts on the subject for yourself, if you find my interpretation too "obfuscating."
Yes, I understand that it's reliance on authority. I didn't say it wasn't. I said that the purpose of repeatability reduces that reliance on authority. Which it does. I don't have to do things myself, I can just read and learn about the repeatable experiments that others have done. Or I learn third-hand from there. Again, this is a pragmatic answer so that humans go all do different fields of research and culminate in big theories and such.
Since you dismissed the first train of my thinking as "fancy-schmancy" words, any response I have to issue is going to be ineffective. Would you generally agree, however, that if theory is inferred from empirical custom (that is, predictable repetition), the adherence of single phenomena to those laws cannot be the sole criterion of verifiability? Would you agree with the old Aristotelian adage that "there is no science of the individual"? Would you agree that individuality exists in all phenomena? Given all that, would you agree that "We actually do have evidence against fairies. It's called the Theory of Evolution. Fairies would not be able to be evolved from evolution." is therefore an argument from circular logic?
I don't know what you mean by "prove what I saw at noon yesterday." You can't prove things with absolute certainty. As I said, it's Bayesian. Belief is a measure of certainty. And the repeatability thing obviously is talking about Science, which uses repeatable experiments. I don't know what you're trying to get from me.
The point is it is a conceptual error to shift the framing of an assertion, by the use of simile, to go from the immaterial, to fairies, to the non-existent. In metaphysics, attributes are traditionally classified in two parts: the measurable and the immeasurable. One is the frequency of light, the other is the human sensation of the colour blue. One avails itself easily to theoretical inference, the other less so. The task is to merely establish the non-equivalence of the immeasurable and the unreal.
I disagree with premise A.
So do I, in case you have not noticed.
No. Illusion and interpretation have completely different connotations. Illusion refers to something which is not there at all, like seeing a mouse where there is a sock. Or seeing a fairy.
Having a color camera and having a b/w camera generate different interpretations of the same landscape. It's not like the landscape changes, or that the b/w camera is generating an illusion. It's just that one has the capacity for color and the other doesn't.
All photography is illusory. There is always some aesthetic attribute missing which avails itself by direct contact and movement. A photo is a misrepresentation of the person. An illusion may be broadly defined as projecting a mental attribute unto the external sphere, or some conditional handicap which distracts one from an ordinary perspective. In that sense, illusions may apply to specific attributes, or, more broadly, misinterpretations of reality. The American Dream in the Great Gatsby was illusory, and Milton's invocation of the nine days of Satan's Fall Paradise Lost was an artistic illusion, conflating accounts from the Bible and Hesoid. Illusions are implicitly measured against an external reality, an interpretation is the mental act of co-creating that reality in the mind's eye.
No, because in order for it to work the first assumption has to be true.
There is no evidence that something is predetermined to happen.
I was replying in context to your statement of "determination and free will are not mutually exclusive"
It only works in reverse when you already KNOW that something has happened. This is precisely why your assumption is bad, because there is no guarantee that I will accept/reject something. I have a choice.
So you have a choice because you have a choice. This is circular reasoning.
Since you dismissed the first train of my thinking as "fancy-schmancy" words, any response I have to issue is going to be ineffective. Would you generally agree, however, that if theory is inferred from empirical custom (that is, predictable repetition), the adherence of single phenomena to those laws cannot be the sole criterion of verifiability? Would you agree with the old Aristotelian adage that "there is no science of the individual"? Would you agree that individuality exists in all phenomena? Given all that, would you agree that "We actually do have evidence against fairies. It's called the Theory of Evolution. Fairies would not be able to be evolved from evolution." is therefore an argument from circular logic?
What? Stop with obfuscation. Speak simply. This sounds like you are literally arguing against all empiricism. That F =/= MA. That gravity may or may not exist. Are you a solipsist?
No it is not circular. Once again, theories, belief, and certainty are based on Bayesian Reasoning. You have prior information and consistently new information about how things work. You base your beliefs on all this information. The theory of evolution has been correct again and again and again, and attempts to falsify it have been consistently been debunked. This means that the likelihood of it being true is absurdly high. And therefore the likelihood of fairies is extremely low. It's not circular.
Certain evidence is stronger and weaker than other evidence. Etc. etc.
The point is it is a conceptual error to shift the framing of an assertion, by the use of simile, to go from the immaterial, to fairies, to the non-existent. In metaphysics, attributes are traditionally classified in two parts: the measurable and the immeasurable. One is the frequency of light, the other is the human sensation of the colour blue. One avails itself easily to theoretical inference, the other less so. The task is to merely establish the non-equivalence of the immeasurable and the unreal.
Come on, that first sentence is blatantly difficult to parse. I can't be the only one who sees this.
What makes you think that the human sensation of the color blue is not measurable? I don't understand where you got this from.
All photography is illusory. There is always some aesthetic attribute missing which avails itself by direct contact and movement. A photo is a misrepresentation of the person. An illusion may be broadly defined as projecting a mental attribute unto the external sphere. In that sense, illusions may apply to specific attributes, or, more broadly, misinterpretations of reality. The American Dream in the Great Gatsby was illusory, and Milton's invocation of the nine days of Satan's Fall Paradise Lost was an artistic illusion, conflating accounts from the Bible and Hesoid. Illusions are implicitly measured against an external reality, an interpretation is the mental act of co-creating that reality in the mind's eye.
If this is your point of view, then I don't see the big deal of your premises. They seem like they're making a point when they're really not:
Proposition A: The products of consciousness are physically-induced illusions. Proposition B: My consciousness has produced proposition A Therefore Proposition A is a physically-induced illusion.
If your definition of illusion is just sensory perception, then who cares? You cannot switch definitions between these, remember. So if you're just saying that my brain is physically processing products of conciousness, then okeedokee. I see no issue here.
On July 08 2013 03:17 Shiori wrote: Yudkowsky, for instance, thinks that Bayesian probability contradicts the scientific method and therefore the latter should be rejected (roughly). Not my cup of tea.
I've only read a small amount of his essays. My general understanding is that the scientific method and Bayesian hypothesis-updating are almost always compatible, and that the scientific method generally gives you very very strong Bayesian evidence. The kind that would cause a Bayesian rationalist to change his beliefs unless he had very very strong priors.
This essay: http://lesswrong.com/lw/qa/the_dilemma_science_or_bayes/ seems to come down to a very specific case -- what happens when two theories are equally supported by evidence, and one theory was proposed first but the other theory is "simpler" (from an information-theoretic perspective)? The scientific method says the first theory remains accepted until proven otherwise, Bayes says the second.
That's incredibly rare. The example EY gives - wavefunction collapse vs Everett many-worlds interpretation -- is probably one of the few that even exists. This doesn't seem to me like rejecting the scientific method. More like saying that it works 99.999% of the time (as does Bayes which comes to the same conclusions), and there's this small fraction of the time when it might make more sense to use Bayes instead.
But yeah I'm not really a LWer, just have read some of the essays... has he said anything more strongly against the scientific method than what I linked? I'm mostly just curious for curiosity's sake, thanks
EPT
