Kent Stevens

This is the idea that you can view something as a physical chemical entity and as an agent.

You can view a person as a chemical reaction. Someone going about doing this and that as just the result of changes in neural chemistry. One chemical configuration gives rise to another chemical configuration. Normally, we do not consider that chemicals choose or have purpose. Things just happen.

But alternatively we can view people as agents. Agents being entities that think, choose, and have goals. Agents experience joys and sadness.

What is the way out of an apparent contradiction between choice and non-choice, feeling and non-feeling? People may be chemicals but if we examine the behaviour of these chemicals we can see things that we call choices and other things we say are purposes. We can approximately describe the chemicals for love as well as the chemicals that correspond with hate. For the agent viewpoint emerges from simpler configurations of chemicals just as a house may emerge out of simpler configurations of bricks and mortar. The house viewpoint and brick viewpoint are both valid in certain contexts.

For some of our machines we can use either the agent viewpoint or the physical materialist viewpoint. We can describe computers choosing to do certain things without giving them the capability to feel emotion. We can think of traffic lights choosing given certain conditions.

Alternatively, when the traffic lights change we can think that choice did not occur, that things just happen. I tend to believe that things just happen, but this does not prevent me from using the agent viewpoint.

When we talk of someone choosing there is just one chemical reaction that occurs instead of another possible reaction. The choice was unavoidable just as all chemical reactions are. Purpose describes a general pattern of chemical behaviour just as the feeling of love describes another chemical pattern.

A computer can be thought of as a network of switches going off and a human mind can be thought as a network of neurons that go on and off. One computer memory corresponds to each switch pattern and one human memory corresponds to one neural pattern.

Someone gets out of bed, eats something, and goes to work. Now each mundane action of this person can be described as a chemical reaction or as a neural pattern. For materialistic patterns can be linked to every behaviour that we exhibit.

Adrian Selby

Well, I for one have banged on in another thread about the mind brain identity theory, specifically, a biperspectival flavour, which holds that the apparent contradiction stems from ways of talking about the phenomena, and the difference in perspective, i.e. first to third person. In other words, we only think there's a difference when we take the first person account of a set of a set of neurons firing in a working brain, and the third person account which does not have the direct 'intradermal' access to that account, and uses terms relating to the phenomena as perceived externally.

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...5&pagenumber=2

Adrian

Kent Stevens

It could be partly out of habit that we think of people only as being agents. We are so used to having people choose, feeling emotion, and having goals that we forget that we are also a configuration of chemicals. We like to think that we are special and unique from the rest of the material universe. A view of people as elaborate pieces of matter is not consistent with ideas of there being immortal souls.

soulofdarwin

Well, I can dig it. I will reject, however, any notion that these "happenstances" are unintelligent. In fact, I would say that the processes which you have described are the very embodiment of intelligence, the essential ingredient of which is the inevitable course of those processes. In other words, an intelligent process is one that gives a well-defined result, and that pertains regardless of our ability to understand the process or decipher the result.

Keith Russell

Greetings:

If 'hate' is a chemical reaction, does the chemical reaction determine how I feel, or do my feelings cause the appropriate chemical reaction?

K

Ba al

For some of our machines we can use either the agent viewpoint or the physical materialist viewpoint.

Surely this akin to a famous cat, that which is observed is neccesarily influenced by the act of observation.
That we are chemical artifacts is not to assume that by observation we can understand the subatomic nature of chemical interaction.

pi_noir

Both the agent and material views are correct depending on what you are refering to. Our emotions (chemical reactions) cause us to do something and thaen that causes new emotions. We might not always be ware of the different levels-like i'm not aware of all my chemical reactions. So everything is both a cause and effect, the confusion is just a result of what aspect you are talking about.

Kent Stevens

There is a correlation between material chemical and the agent. When you experience an emotion it can be found to correspond to a pattern of chemical reactions at a lower level of description. Changes in the chemical adrenaline correspond with changes in how I feel. If I feel exhilarated then this means there must have been a corresponding change in the underlying chemistry as well.

A change in hormones would typically be said to cause a later change in mood. But a change in mood may later result in changes in certain hormones. When we say that A causes B, we can talk of A and B at different levels of complexity to each other without causing contradiction.

BurgDE

Dear Keith,

Perhaps an animal model will give some insight into your question. At the University of Kentucky, rats are conditioned to respond to a certain type of tone. I.e., a certain tone is always followed by a shock while a different tone is never acompanied by a shock. After a learning period, the positive tone leads to a measurable burst of nerve traffic (or electrical activity). This electrical activity leads to a measurable increase in blood pressure.

In application to you, some external agent may have conditioned a hate respone in you. You see or think of the person. Your central nervous system then alters your physiological state and you feel hate.

don burgess

Nowhere357

And the decisions we make can affect our mood. An example is to decide to deep breath in order to relax our anger.

Thus it is NOT the case that "The choice was unavoidable just as all chemical reactions are".

Clearly you have book knowledge - but do you have body knowledge? Have you experimented with meditation, for example?