DRFseven

I don't necessarily think you're nitpicking. I know some "heavy players" say the same thing (like the Churchlands, Crick & Koch), and I agree that a lot of terms we use for mental behavior are bandied about as if we are all talking real things and that we're talking apples and apples.For instance, we also use the term "I know" all the time and most people imagine that if we are later shown to be wrong that it turned out we didn't "really know", after all. Yet, what goes on in the brain when we know something is the same whether it later turns out to be true or not; knowing has nothing to do with truth.

For now, though, I don't know what terms we should use, and if I did, I wouldn't be able to use them in conversations very often, I think. What do you have in mind as an alternative or as a way to rectify the problem?

DRFseven

ManM, I forgot to answer part of ;your response: Yes; certainly people are capable of conceiving of multiple alternative solutions at the same time. Just what are these "alternative solutions" before they get to the point of any implementation? They are stories (which we're so good at) that we construct in order to play out scenarios and see how they stack up against future goals. This is where the valance tagging (assigning positive and negative values) comes in.

OK, so you think of several ways by which all the cookies could have gotten eaten, when the only people in the house are you and your kid, and you know YOU didn't eat them. You trust your memory that you didn't do it, you don't think elves did it; all the scenarios add up to pretty much impugn the kid's avowals that he didn't eat them. Now. How does that choice get made (or how WAS it already made before it was signaled to your verbal consciousness?). It was the dopamine; the dopamine that everybody always totally ignores! The dopamine that your system delivers in payment for delivering up an appropriate story (by use of memory) that doesn't exceed the "truth threshhold". The dopamine that makes you go, "Aha!". Suddenly you find that you have chosen, but you couldn't have chosen any other way, because you were moved by your own machinations to make the choice.

In a case such as this, the choice wouldn't come so quickly and easily if there were mitigating factors. Suppose you knew from experience that your kid was a very honest kid who never lied? What if you, in your wildest dreams, could not imagine your kid eating the cookies and lying about it? Well, then, if you really also didn't think you could have done it yourself, and you didn't think anyone else had been there, you'd be between a rock and a hard place. If you were severely depressed you might collapse in a heap and cry about it. The point is, you wouldn't get to consciously direct the choice, you would be moved by your whole decision-making mechanism, and then you'd find out what you decided.

excreationist

ManM:
We don't consider the results of one natural process to be any more true than another. A lightning strike is not truer than an earthquake, right? Is your declaration of 2+2=4 somehow more than the result of a natural process? If not, then on what grounds do you say it is any more true than other results of natural processes?

2+2=4 is a statement... which is a kind of object. That object has a property called "truth value" which can be either true, false or indetermine.

Let's compare that to an earthquake. Its properties might include its duration, its richter scale rating, and maybe how many people it killed and the amount of damage it did, measured in dollars. This doesn't meant that those properties are appropriate for other things, such as statements.

And for a lightning strike, some of the properties might include the brightness of the lightning, and the number of volts that was involved. Those properties doesn't necessarily apply to statements like 2+2=4 either.

You can't really say that something is "truer" than something else if one of the things isn't capable of having a truth value. It is like saying an apple is more nutritional than the number 2... well that is true I suppose.

Is it because we are intelligent? How is that any different from saying that it just the result of a really complex natural process? Are complex natural processes more true than simpler ones?
No, things only have a truth value if a representational system is involved... if it is consistent with the rules of the representational system, then it's true (or correct), otherwise it is false (or incorrect).
Things like apples, even if they were very complex, don't represent anything other than themselves - they simply exist. But statements like 2+2=4 on the other hand are used by us to communicate information... and if this information is incorrect we say it is false, otherwise it is true.
Do you understand what I'm getting at? I'm saying it doesn't make sense to say that an apple is correct (true) or incorrect (not true).

You have basically asserted that value judgments are meaningful. When I ask why, you re-assert in some trivial way that value judgments are meaningful. I am well aware they are meaningful. That is why I can't believe they are just the results of some external natural process.
As I said earlier, I call the world that the body interacts with "external" and the body and brain "internal", with the brain being more internal than the rest of the body (speaking from a psychological point of view).
So I believe that internal processes in our brain are involved - since I am saying that the brain is internal. I guess you think that the brain is external, and the soul or something is internal...
I gave an example of chess computers and how different values for different pieces and positions are hard-coded in. They use these weightings to determine their decisions.
The values they use are meaningful - if a queen is programmed in as having a high value, the chess computer will make decision that reflect this. If the queen was given the lowest value, the chess computer will play differently (e.g. not bother to defend its queen) - so its values are important....

ManM

Oops... Wrong topic...

[ August 06, 2002: Message edited by: ManM ]</p>

excreationist

joedad:
What do you think about what I wrote to you near the bottom of page 4?

SUTG asked the question, "Why don't you believe in God?" Personally, I'd rather be asked, "Do you think gods are real?" I think the latter question more accurately reflects how I think, and of course, the answer is "No." It nicely avoids the whole question of what a person might mean by "believe" or "believe in." And I know I'm nitpicking a bit.

Well I'd say that what people "think" and what they "believe" are the same things...

I honestly think we all function via our observations, not our beliefs. But because we're so quick to move from observation to conclusion, or maybe don't dwell on observation at all, we have the impression that there is this realm called "beliefs." I'm radically proposing that it just isn't there, same as an ether for light.

DRF7 would say that what we conclude is the same as what we believe... (see the bottom of page 4)... and you say that we have conclusions - which DRF7 says are what beliefs are... and conclusions can be mistaken... they aren't "knowledge"... so I'd say they are beliefs based on assumptions including the observations being accurate and that things will behave in the same way they have previously.

In a way, I'm stating that our brains no more have beliefs than a computer memory has beliefs. I think that concluding we have "beliefs" only reinforces a mystical leaning.
If you study AI, you'd learn about things called <a href="http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Artificial_Intelligence/Belief_Networks/" target="_blank">belief networks</a>. Basically it involves reasoning where the assumptions may later be found to be incorrect... that's all beliefs are about.

BTW, in my post near the bottom of page 4, I gave an example of an apple falling towards the ground. Let's say you told someone "don't let it hit the ground!" and when it is falling from a great height they try and catch it, but the invisible nylon stops it hitting the ground... so why did the person try and catch the apple when it wasn't going to hit the ground anyway? Was it an "observation"? I'd say it was a belief, *based* on the observation that falling things usually continue to fall until they hit something. But the person hadn't observed that this particular apple will hit the ground - they just imagined or *believed* or concluded that it would.

joedad

Good question.

Language is notoriously ambiguous, and therefore incapable by itself. But overall, it does permit largescale communication, and communication over time with relative ease. However, it takes a common experience between two parties to make this form of communication or any communication work. Maybe the communication itself becomes that first common experience. If that's so, then we ought to strive to do it well and accurately, whatever the medium. It seems that the muse has only learned to write.

But I don't know if the language itself needs to change. Everything has limitations. Perhaps a common acceptance that perfection is as literally unreal as are gods would go a long way to keeping someone engaged in the observation, without trying to quickly tie that observation to some preconditioned response.

Beyond that, I don't know, except that perhaps our perceptions of the future, actual and desired, have a lot to do with how we are going to interpret events. I think there's a tremendous amount of conditioning there, which could certainly be called "beliefs."

Let's put your question in this thread into the context of SUTG's question. I think it would go, "Why do you choose to believe that gods are not real?" versus "Why don't you believe in God?" There's just a heck of a difference between those two questions imho. I think if you can answer the first one then the second one is easy, maybe even unneccessary.

joe

joedad

Sure, we can call it a belief, a conditioned response, a reaction, or a lot of other things. I think whaterver we call it is going to depend upon our individual experiences. No big surprise there.

But that person certainly has every reason to expect that the apple will hit the ground, and that that might be a bad thing, and so the reaction. Really, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between a belief and a conditioned response.

We all have a genome, that under the proper conditions builds a human being. I think it would be a stretch to say that our genes "believe" it is time to build a human being. But maybe not. After all, there is a lot of information encoded into our genes, an awful lot.

I also checked out the link you posted. It reminded me very much of an interlocking mechanical/electrical system where one function is prohibited unless several conditions are met, in the form of open or closed contacts. I can easily close the contacts or open them depending upon their type, and fool the system into thinking it is okay to proceed, where in reality the situation is quite different. Makes me feel like a god! And there's no escaping such fatal flaws. I can assemble contacts to contacts to contacts. In my uninformed opinion, this seems to mimic the brain quite well. But I also must admit that much of it is over my head.

As for that apple again, Yes, we're talking about semantics. If one person wants to accept that they have beliefs which elicit behavior, and another person wants to accept the view that behavior is only preconditioned response, that's fine with me. It hasn't really changed anything. I'm giving myself a lot of room to back up on that one though.

When I get out into the backcountry where things are very direct and immediate in terms of their potential danger to me personally, I tend to be very deliberate and precise in my reckonings. If there's a rattler on the trail that won't scram, I give it lots of room because I'm far from medical help. Is that evidence for belief? Well, it is what it is, and we can observe it and discuss it. But I tend to think that I am only applying past experience and "knowledge." Does that mean that I "believe in" the application of past experience and knowledge. Sure. I'm just calling the same thing by a different word or group of words it seems. I've only given an event a different name. That's not so very unusual as humans go.

joe

ManM

DRFseven,
I would initially say reason, but for the sake of the argument: dopamine. How is it that you claim my dopamine is incorrect? Now do you see my point?

One cannot say that all truth is relative without contradicting himself. I'm simply drawing a parallel between that and determinism. You cannot say that I am wrong for believing in free will without contradicting yourself. On what grounds would you say I am wrong? Again, am I experiencing a dopamine malfunction? But that malfunction is perfectly natural and determined, right? So a hard determinist can never assert that he is right without contradicting himself. Or more elegantly stated, if I am determined then I have no reason to believe I am determined. That is why I find it to be nonsense.

Let's compare this to something I wrote back on page 4. "It boils down to the question, 'Could I have chosen other than I did?' In response I think that we are not free from self-determination." Doesn't this sound similar to what you wrote above? However, the necessary conclusion is that we really have self-determination, for how could we be subject to something we didn't have? Yes, I am a slave to my own thinking, but that is my thinking. You know, I can always choose not to think (meditation).

I'm an electrical engineer, not a researching biologist. I do not have the information necessary to formulate theories about how the brain physically operates. I won't even pretend to be intelligent enough to pursue that line of work. Since determinism logically contradicts itself I could care less what the latest scientific fad teaches. It is like someone telling me a scientific theory which proves I don't exist. Of course I'm not going to be convinced.

excreationist,
You did it again. I'm well aware what a value judgment is. I'm well aware how we use frameworks to assign truth. We differentiate between natural processes as if we stand aloof from them. The landscape changes when we consider ourselves to be nothing more than natural processes.

Synaesthesia

ManM,
You are making a venerable and very famous philosophical mistake. It is one thing to expain how we have knowledge, the neural mechanisms and structures by which we can aquire and use information. It is a seperate question, albeit fundamentally connected, to ask, "how do I know this statement is true?".

It has been known for a long time that free will, is perfectly compatible with determinism. I can choose a course of action that I like, I can choose a self-destructive course of action. I can predict my own thoughts, be suprised by my thoughts.

In short, it is quite obvious that my will is free insofar as my thoughts and actions can be conformed to my desires an expectations.

The physical world permits my mind to be predictable, permits my power to conform my actions and thoughts to my desire. I can be free in the physical world. Certainly I'm not free in some irrelevant supernatural sense, but who wants that when we can be free in every way that counts.

As a matter of fact, I think I'm going to excercise my free will and not complete thi

[ August 06, 2002: Message edited by: Synaesthesia ]</p>

excreationist

ManM:
You did it again. I'm well aware what a value judgment is. I'm well aware how we use frameworks to assign truth. We differentiate between natural processes as if we stand aloof from them. The landscape changes when we consider ourselves to be nothing more than natural processes.

I think you were saying that in general, natural processes can't be "true" or "false"... somehow showing that logical statements can't be any more "true" or "false" than other physical processes.

A similar example would be castles with windows made out of ice. One of its properties might be the shape of its windows. In a way it is nothing more than water, but it also is a solid castle sculpture... water in general isn't solid with windows - but it can...

So specific instances of a class (like a tree) can have properties (like the colour of its leaves) that don't necessarily apply to the generalized superclass (like physical systems in general).

"We differentiate between natural processes as if we stand aloof from them."

I think that there are some properties that distinguish humans from non-living objects... BTW do you think that life (like animal cells and plant cells) is nothing more than physical matter? I mean, do you believe in a "life force"?

[ August 06, 2002: Message edited by: excreationist ]</p>