EPTNot going into what we don't know. Maybe there's a deity up there that created a free will box. Maybe the Matrix is based on a true story. Maybe unicorns run the show behind the curtain to your left. Too many possibilities, all impossible to refute.
Is the mind all chemical and electricity? - Page 8
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acker
United States2958 Posts
Not going into what we don't know. Maybe there's a deity up there that created a free will box. Maybe the Matrix is based on a true story. Maybe unicorns run the show behind the curtain to your left. Too many possibilities, all impossible to refute. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On July 01 2013 12:00 farvacola wrote: The experience of colors and the estimated trajectory of a ball are entirely different things. How so? I'm not sure what exactly you mean by this. | ||
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
On July 01 2013 12:01 LegalLord wrote: How so? I'm not sure what exactly you mean by this. The trajectory of a ball is always the same whereas the experience of colors is subjective? | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
On July 01 2013 11:44 Djzapz wrote: Free will is a purely human concept tho, it's not a secret that we're imprisoned in our bodies and all of their constraints, both physical and moral. Free will is terribly defined. Daniel Dennet's explanation of free will is only thing that makes sense to me, which is the compatiblist argument (basically The Third Option between free will and determinism). | ||
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Moa
United States790 Posts
On July 01 2013 11:59 Yoav wrote: You might find it enlightening to read to the end of the play. That's not where the thought ends. Anyway, why can't the mind be both all physical and something reflected elsewhere? Most of us are pretty comfortable with characters in stories "existing" despite being no more than ink on a page. Why should we not have a presence in some other plane, as an emanation of this plane (or the other way around, or both)? Not a provable thing, but certainly not something that can be ruled out lightly. Once the information from the pages is processed by the brain the information manifests itself in a different manner. I would imagine that when someone says a character exists they mean that the idea of the character exists and this existence can be explained and shown through something physical such as a brain-scan of a person thinking of the character. | ||
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HeavenS
Colombia2259 Posts
On July 01 2013 11:58 LegalLord wrote: If you throw a tennis ball, a dog will be able to run to where it lands and catch it before it lands. The trajectory of the ball is modeled by some not-so-simple calculus, but a dog knows well enough where it lands (with margin of error of maybe half a dog's mouth) intuitively. In the same sense, colors are a very useful shortcut that allows us to explain a complicated mess of facts. We take shortcuts because the world is a complicated mess and our processing power can't keep up. Those are natural processes. Poorly understood, but natural nonetheless. yes you are correct, i thought perhaps you were implying our brains to be fully deterministic. as for your other post, i agree on the color part, not so much the dog example. colors are "shortcuts" our brain creates in order to distinguish light of different wavelengths, that is correct. however, for the dog example, just because the trajectory problem can be solved using calculus, does not directly imply that the dog is intuitively performing these calculations. there are more than one way to solve that trajectory problem. the dog does not intuitively know where it will be, it is simply following the instructions of its brain "take note of where ball is, reduce distance between ball and yourself until you catch it." its a different way of solving the same problem. but i get what you were trying to say. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On July 01 2013 12:02 Djzapz wrote: The trajectory of a ball is always the same whereas the experience of colors is subjective? If you knew all the initial conditions about the viewer, I don't think it's that unlikely that you would perfectly predict the reaction. | ||
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Moa
United States790 Posts
On July 01 2013 12:07 LegalLord wrote: If you knew all the initial conditions about the viewer, I don't think it's that unlikely that you would perfectly predict the reaction. If you were omniscient you would be omniscient. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On July 01 2013 12:06 HeavenS wrote: yes you are correct, i thought perhaps you were implying our brains to be fully deterministic. as for your other post, i agree on the color part, not so much the dog example. colors are "shortcuts" our brain creates in order to distinguish light of different wavelengths, that is correct. however, for the dog example, just because the trajectory problem can be solved using calculus, does not directly imply that the dog is intuitively performing these calculations. there are more than one way to solve that trajectory problem. the dog does not intuitively know where it will be, it is simply following the instructions of its brain "take note of where ball is, reduce distance between ball and yourself until you catch it." its a different way of solving the same problem. but i get what you were trying to say. I believe I heard somewhere that human eyesight predicts the trajectory of everything it sees 0.1 seconds or so into the future (that is, you "see into the future" with your eyes). That seems like multistep calculus to me, assuming that dogs do that. Since we're not, eyes are a "good enough" approximation tool. | ||
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farvacola
United States18818 Posts
On July 01 2013 12:01 LegalLord wrote: How so? I'm not sure what exactly you mean by this. The paper I linked explains it in far greater detail. The throwing of a ball and the ability of some animals to estimate its direction and velocity in pursuit of it is a finite picture of stimuli with a definite beginning and end. The animal sees the ball before it leaves, can see the angle at which it is thrown, and has the motion of the throw to initiate movement in anticipation. No amount of previous training or earmark can prepare one for the experience of color; the only way for someone to experience blue is to experience it. Descriptions, physical definitions, and other people's opinions of the color are all insufficient. In fact, there is nothing we can "know" that can prepare one for blue; when one experiences it, something new is "known". It is from that that the physicality of the mind can be brought into question. Again, I've done a poor job of explaining it, so I highly recommend the paper. | ||
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Hilmar
Sweden3 Posts
There are "things" that are real and non-physical, those are called constructs of the mind. Information is "real" in any relevant way of interpreting the word, and is by definition non-physical. The same information can be stored in vastly different medias including mass, energy or both. Thus the physical attributes, of a book for instance, is not in itself the interesting part, but the "meaning" so to say of the information transmitted by the matter and energy. Languages are real non-physical constructs of the mind, as are all social contracts non-physical, like a friendship or a marriage. This isn't a question of an idea of a language stored in some physical part of the brain. The construct is not only not part of the body itself, it is also distinguishable for other people, or minds if you will. | ||
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Nyxisto
Germany6287 Posts
On July 01 2013 11:01 travis wrote: so our experiences don't exist? because mine definitely do. Wanted to grab this post up, because it basically sums up the problem. It's all about how you define existence. I have to agree it's a bit odd that you can actually experience stuff, for example seeing how a color looks, but all you really need to describe its behaviour is its wavelength. So you could argue that all our experiences are only observational and don't really do stuff and that everything that happens can be described by the laws of physics. (which probably is a pretty solid assumption) Which really makes the "existence" of experiences a little bit more problematic. | ||
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LegalLord
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On July 01 2013 12:11 farvacola wrote: No amount of previous training or earmark can prepare one for the experience of color; the only way for someone to experience blue is to experience it. See, I'm not sure this is true. It's certainly not feasible to train someone that way, but you can't assume that it can't be done with absolute certainty. The dog takes shortcuts. It doesn't calculate the influence of the Sun, or Jupiter, or Voyager II. It just makes an estimate akin to Euler's Method. Eyes are a similar shortcut device for understanding color. | ||
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Moa
United States790 Posts
On July 01 2013 12:12 Hilmar wrote: The idea of an exclusively physical universe is an arbritrary philosophical construct. There are "things" that are real and non-physical, those are called constructs of the mind. Information is "real" in any relevant way of interpreting the word, and is by definition non-physical. The same information can be stored in vastly different medias including mass, energy or both. Thus the physical attributes, of a book for instance, is not in itself the interesting part, but the "meaning" so to say of the information transmitted by the matter and energy. Languages are real non-physical constructs of the mind, as are all social contracts non-physical, like a friendship or a marriage. This isn't a question of an idea of a language stored in some physical part of the brain. The construct is not only not part of the body itself, it is also distinguishable for other people, or minds if you will. How is information non-physical. I don't see how these things aren't physical. Maybe the physical attributes of a book are not the interesting part but the way that the words impact the mind or their "meaning" can certainly be explained as something that is physical. We are able to track the way brain activity changes when someone is processing different kinds of information or when people feel different emotions. This suggests that all the things you've listed are physically grounded within the brain. | ||
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Severedevil
United States4830 Posts
In practical terms, a human being cannot accurately model what an experience will be like (in the rich detail they would receive by actually having the experience). Therefore, in practical terms of human knowledge and human experience, you will learn new things about color experiences by having one. | ||
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Marshall_D
United States196 Posts
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Moa
United States790 Posts
On July 01 2013 12:24 Marshall_D wrote: A better question would be why did the brain evolve into the way it did. Forget about finding out how. We are discussing what the mind or brain exactly is. This is a question that seems like it should be answered before we go into why or how. | ||
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HeavenS
Colombia2259 Posts
On July 01 2013 12:18 LegalLord wrote: See, I'm not sure this is true. It's certainly not feasible to train someone that way, but you can't assume that it can't be done with absolute certainty. The dog takes shortcuts. It doesn't calculate the influence of the Sun, or Jupiter, or Voyager II. It just makes an estimate akin to Euler's Formula. Eyes are a similar shortcut device for understanding color. it cannot be done, with absolute certainty. it can't. .2 percent of women have a 4th cone in their eyes, therefore they are able to perceive 100 million colors as opposed to the usual 1 million most of us can perceive with our only 3 cones. can you close your eyes right now, and imagine a different color? one you have never experienced and one that is not a combination of the colors you have experience, just a whole brand new color. try it, i have. and i couldn't come up with shit. now, just because those women have the extra cone doesnt mean our brains are different, in other words i SHOULD be able to at least imagine the color, but i can't, let alone 99 million more. this is why so many colorblind people don't even know theyre color blind. until one day they have an experience that allows them to suddenly understand that, holy shit there are more colors out there i just cant tell them apart. tell them to imagine the colors youre able to see, they can't do it. | ||
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casuistry
56 Posts
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Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
On July 01 2013 12:24 Marshall_D wrote: A better question would be why did the brain evolve into the way it did. Forget about finding out how. What do you mean "why" though? it's like suggesting that it was a conscious decision by someone or something... Why did the pigeon's brain evolve the way it did instead of evolving differently? An absurdly long series of event. | ||
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