CavemanUg

But somewhere along the line there was a first thought. Where did the first fucking one come from? That is a frustrating question. I think it has adapted with the human mind itself. I think that your survial of the fittest is basicly survival of the smartest (fittest). There where a few people with the ability per tribe every once in a great while that advanced it(the tribe) all of a sudden. The wheel, fire, farming, writing, these have been something that somebody had to think of. Where did it come from? Are those thoughts random, or are they created by their suroundings, just a more advanced version of reacting to pain? All emotions are just nural signals, emotions are human made. So there are reasons as far as survial goes, or, did we just one day wake up with it. I think that we just have a much more complicted and abstract way of reacting to our enviroment. Even now this still holds true. Smart people make more money and will probably keep their genes in the human breeeding pool for longer. And I think to to say something has freewill you have to discribe what freewill is. Freewill (in my opinion) is the abilty to act outside of your stimuli. But, is it possible for humans? We have ability and potential but, freewill, no. If you put somebody in a lab and give them a certian stimlus they react a certian way using statistics on their IQ, their income, their ethnicity, essenially their life expeiance as statistics says it should be. And they get a lot of positive results. Is this free will, not at all? The only way we could have free will is if that first thought just appeared. It really does depend on the probibilty of randomness in nature. It really is like space mountain, a predetrminded path. Everybody will go where they go based on their stimuli. You also go an your path, thats just happen to intersect. But it is all in the dark which makes it so interesting... But I am just babbling nonsense... so feel free to improve on it.

Kip

Once again the doctrine of epiphenomenalism is important here. Am I typing these words because I feel a desire to do so? Wouldn't the laws of physics dictate that my body type these words no matter how I feel? In that case, the fact that I feel pleasure at what I do is a happy coincidence, and I could just as well type these words and feel misery. Feelings seem to correlate with action rather than cause action.

I am not denying that "he felt a desire to commit X, therefore he did commit X" is a valid explanation. There are multiple levels of explanation. The question is which level has priority?

Again, there are multiple levels of explanation. The phenomenon we are discussing here is "reducibility". Stephen Wolfram discusses this idea in his new controversial book. Consider a law of cellular automata that is a function of every other cell on the board, but which always produces the same result of straight lines. Such a law can be reduced, or replaced, with the more convenient law to simply draw straight lines without regard to the other cells on the board.

Certainly the laws of planetary motion are valid. The laws that apply to quarks and electrons, however, are also valid, and presumably are not a function of planetary size. So which mode of explanation has priority? The laws of planetary motion appear to be a reduction of the laws that apply to particles. These fundamental laws produce phenoma that can be explained more conveniently by the laws of planetary motion.

I mentioned the continuum to illustrate the similarity, not the difference, between mechanical systems such as clocks and clouds and more complex, intelligent mechanical systems such as human beings. You may wish to appeal to differences along the continuum to account for human freedom. Again, that "freedom of action" is fluid, and forces you to speak of freedom coming and going, according to external restraint, and of possessing more or less freedom, instead of possessing the inherent property of being free.

Now, instead of sensations or intelligence, you imply that determines undermines knowledge of truth. Again, you do not provide any strong argument, that I see, that this must be the case. Knowledge, at least knowledge relative to the observer's world, is perfectly compatible with determinism. Mechanical systems can have senses and memories which record and organize information about the world around them. The only sense in which we cannot "trust" this knowledge is the sense in which we are vulnerable to a cosmic conspiracy and sensory deception, not determinism. In that case I do not see how indeterminism would help you any.

The adverse consequence does not follow from the possibility of manipulation by an omniscient observer. Indeed, I am sorry that I even mentioned that possibility. I entirely agree that no such being exists or will exist. The adverse consequence follows from the acknowledgement of our limitations as mechanical systems, the threat of predestination, and feelings of being a subject of fate. The omniscient observer is one idea that illustrates these consequences but is not necessary for emphasizing this point.

No, I would rather say that the continuum refers to human notions of responsibility and that the "perfectly rational" and "autonomous" or indifferent end of the spectrum is a human fiction. Any mechanical system is going to have limitations.

Our dispute, if any, is mostly a consequence of poorly defined terms, but that is the fun of discussing this controversy!

King's Indian

Hello, Kip!

This post is claiming ownership of my following poorly-defined term, and adds an attempt at clarity: As you’ll recall, this followed on directly from my thought about “technological” and “biological” “brains” and the differences of understanding them by way of explanatory mechanisms. My point following wasn’t that determinism undermines knowledge; it was an afterthought on such differences that needs elaboration. At the back of the mind I had the following:
If scientists and technicians eventually produce a mechanical system that shows an analogous degree of self-awareness to our case (which seems to me to necessarily include accurate information about the world, as its actions in dealing with that world would be doomed to a failure we seem to avoid, on the whole), and in lieu of a definite answer to our condition, we know exactly how our deterministic “mechanical consciousness” operates, and to which degree of freedom; what may we draw from the fact of such a consciousness arriving at a consistent theory of “Determinism”? (There are interesting ramifications, such as whether it based this idea by questioning its own “free will”, but not germane to my point).

I assume our scientists did nothing so crude as to programme such a thought-process directly. But when we understand how it came by such a thought, as we must, we will have advanced understanding of our own situation only when we can reliably map our own processes onto our creation (or vice versa); and so therefore to fully understand how a "deterministic brain"explains “determinism” as a theory our (perhaps no less deterministic) brains have developed.
If not, the question as to how people came by, and rigorously developed, the idea cannot be solved by interpreting our brains in terms of our mechanical model. If there is something missing in our correlation, we cannot judge the extent of its importance. The danger here being that “determinism”, along with “free will”, may both be approximations of the truth, which our brains may never grasp due to their being simply unable to formulate the appropriate approach.

To push the idea still further, I have to add that even if we do manage to map one brain onto the other, we may still be barred from full understanding of the phenomenon of the idea of “determinism”, because our brains do not “operate on that wavelength”.

This is a different approach to what interests me about such ideas: once one applies doubt to “free will”, an idea which we can apply unconsciously with some success, it succumbs: Absolute freedom cannot be held as a position. If one applies it to self-consciousness as a biological system constrained and at the same time generated by entity/environment interaction, one feels a little more uncomfortable. Even if we accept constraints, it does seem that we are not forced into patterns of behaviour and thought completely beyond our control. However, this might be vanity. So if we are forced into accepting that such patterns of behaviour are fully explained only by the most basic physical interactions, over which we have no control, we seem to have “touched bottom”.

However, all three concepts of the degree of control in our lives are mental products; no one of them may be absolutely privileged as the truth, as all three come from nowhere else but physical (under the aegis of biology) processes. They will have validity when approaching different perspectives of self-consciousness; but I wonder if we are biologically unfit to find an approach that answers to all cases, in the same way we are not built to touch our left elbow with our left hand.

I offer the above as the most complete expression of my position, and I hope one can see where our ideas agree, such as appropriateness of levels.

Can you believe that what really sparked off my imagination was your mention of “reducibility”? This was supposed to be mopping-up. Feel free to point out any further problems of definition you see above. I’ll let this stand as the best I can do, and I’ll follow up with a post that treats the idea of determinism without mentioning the conceptual difficulties I find, in order to concentrate on more interesting matters.
Take care,
KI.

PS. I have never opposed an unrestrained free will, or even "indeterminism" to your position. My point has been, "given determinism, what does this mean when..."

Kip

This is basically the same question that my robot thought experiment poses. I used that experiment to show that there is an essential similarity between humans and robots, but my arguments are not final.

I agree that scientists will not be able to "programme such a thought-process" directly and the history of AI disappointments supports this. Raymond Kurzweil, the AI expert, inventor, and businessmen (spelling?), argues that AI will be created, not by these crude methods, but rather by reverse engineering the brain and mimicking those processes in a computational system or neural network. I am not sure if I share the same degree of optimism with Kurzweil, but this path to AI is, in my opinion, the most probable.

You've lost me. Determinism is perfectly understandable (although some philosophers would contest this and cite all the various, contradictory definitions). Determinism is simply the idea that everything has a cause, that things do not spontaneously or randomly happen. Understanding the brain will not help understand determinism but will help us to understand how this physically determined system, the brain, produces intelligence.

I am only responding to the parts with which I disagreed. The rest of which I either agreed or did not understand (quite a lot). I suspect that English might not be your first language?

Kip

DRFseven

Are you sure this is what you meant to say?

Kip

Yes. What is the problem?

the_cave

But surely the mind can do its processing without memories; all it needs are some inputs, which it can get from immediate experience. And for all we know, the mind can think merely by sensing itself.

And even if we didn't have words, it appears that langauge may be a part of the mind's actual structure. Few think that the mind is a blank slate at birth anymore.

But memories could contribute to thought, without absolutely determining it; there could be some input from memories, and some from random events. (Furthermore, the random events could be outside inputs from the world; if there's a random event that affects a mind, even if the mind is a determined system, the result would still be unpredictable--because you couldn't predict the input.)

Now my defense of "free will" does (so far) hypothesize at least random events within the mind itself. But they could still be willed--they could be random desires that the mind has.

King's Indian

Hello, Kip!
Est-ce que vous voulez-dire, mes reponses n’en ont pas assez de distinction? Dommage.*
…but enough light-hearted banter. (It is “businessman”, by the way. Spellcheck, eh? Never useful when you really need it. I sympathize.)

I’ll just raise a few points. I feel compelled somehow.

The reason of your misunderstanding might just be that you refer to my main point, but do not address it.… the intelligence that some brains use to critique the ideas of “free will” and come up with the idea of “determinism”.
What ultimate privilege does this idea have over the contrasting one of “free will” (let alone “limited, but existing, self-awareness”), if they are all ideas that our brain has produced, using its intelligence?
“Determinism” is understandable, granted, but one can also understand the idea of “free will”, even if only to see where its problems lie. One can certainly understand the idea of “determinism”, to the extent that one can see that such expressions such as “ulterior motive”, “suspicion”, “illusion”** (all employed by you on this thread), have no place in a deterministic description of judgment. A more appropriate approach would be to qualify each of these terms by “so-called”, or the like. As they stand, these terms imply judgment, and deterministic systems as we understand them cannot “judge” in the full sense that we use. This is because “judgment” in that fullest sense needs freedom to judge. If we say that a thermostat judges (or decides etc.) the appropriate time to turn on the heating, we do not seriously apply it in the same sense that a chap judges that the time is ripe to nail his secretary. “Determinism” will have to account for the differences in application of the term "judgment", and do more than just state baldly that these differences amount to the same thing. I suppose if there is something unclear in the idea that our theory of determinism must ultimately explain how we ourselves can arrive at such a theory, and furthermore to do this without the need to define ourselves as more than very sophisticated thermostats, then this point will still remain cloudy to you.
By the by, do you know anyone who seriously does not think “that everything has a cause, that things do not spontaneously or randomly happen”? You still have some way to go, though, before you link that statement to”[…] subjective consciousness is a purely subjective window through which the agent experiences the world. I maintain that this purely passive quality is irrelevant to the question of freedom of the will”. I mean, you'd have to rule out the idea that physical processes could not produce an animal like us that has the power to choose its own actions (and again, whoever thought we were perfectly rational? Most of the moral philosophy I read seems well-acquainted with the idea that we are very capable of deciding on self-destructive courses, which is not how I think of "perfect rationality").
Mentioning morality reminds me: I was struck by something you said a while back on the March 19th post: I didn’t want to address your points about morality, but I was curious about this.You don’t think that deterrents are instructive, then?
For some reason, I’ve decided to stop. How strange.
Take care,
KI.
* Life’s too short for accents and circumflexes.
** Let alone such usages as “fondness”, or “insecurity”.
[Edited to change a ";" t o a "," and to swap a majiscule for a miniscule: anal-retentive doesn't come close]

John Page

Hi tiddly eye KI!
I believe that we cannot know things that do not have a cause. This view can be used to posit an uncaused or completely random portion of the universe that we can never know because it is undifferentiated or undifferentiatable.
Acutely so! Nes't pas grave!

Egeshegedreg, John

DRFseven

Nothing; sorry. I reread it a few times and now I understand what you mean. At first I thought you were saying that understanding the brain would not help in understanding determinism, but that it would help in understanding the brain.

I think that understanding the brain does help in understanding psychological determinism, but that an understanding of Determinism is not necessary to understand the lack of "free will" in our behavior. It ought to be apparent to anyone who thinks about it that everything we think is based on other things we think, as well as on new incoming information. The idea that we are "free" to decide things is nonsensical. All our opinions are based and not "free-floating".