Aradia

Yeah, I know. And?

Clavius

If Consciousness is a process of organization, then how does a process, algorithm(?), become self-referential.

Isn't that what consciousness as a "phenomenon" is describing: a self-referential awareness?

What perception(s) outside of the awareness, can be ordered so, a process, that it can come to define that same awareness?

Is it like lining up a series of blocks with each having an individual letter, blocks being individual perceptions, and "ordering" these blocks to spell out "consciousness" in a row. Thus we can stop there, consciousness has been defined.

This seems kind of platonic in a way, as if "consciousness" is an entity which can emerge through a simple process.(emergence)

Why not just stick to studying consciousness as a phenomenon, while understanding that there are aspects that remain hidden from scientific method, at this time?

This would seem to be the common sense approach

My thoughts,CLAV

yguy

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/...rk-energy.html

"The universe is made mostly of dark matter and dark energy," says Saul Perlmutter, leader of the Supernova Cosmology Project headquartered at Berkeley Lab, "and we don't know what either of them is."

Ahh, sweet irony.

Philosoft

I think this has now meandered into Sci & Skep territory...

SimplyAtheistic

Wait, so now drugs are affecting the soul? This is absurd. The drugs prevent neurotransmitters from passing on impulses and thus disabling thought and affecting consciousness. No I don't have a scientific link but this is frickin common sense.

Heh, what a cop out. So now the soul doesen't control consciousness all the time, just when its convenient eh? And yes, one can observe his thought because he is directly controlling it. Pretty simple.

He is not blocking realization, he is ignoring it.

We have a sense of free will, but ultimately its been decided by physics.

Well, this is pointless as an excuse won't protect him from the courts.

The court system protects society from anything that might infringe upon their rights. This does not equate to evil. Evil is a relative term and has no concrete definition, unlike what the bible would lead you to believe.

Do you lack chemicals that might alter your brain? Because I thought this example would suffice. Again, this is a common sense issue, and has been confirmed by biologists a long time ago.

My age should have no bearing on this discussion, and your age has not helped your argument at all. I thought you were a teenager until just now. Take it for what its worth.

Maybe for you, but to most reasonable people I have.

Your comments imply your acceptance.
Jake

yguy

Again, you have failed to answer the question. As many chances as you've had, it is fair to conclude you can't answer it.

Hey - to some people, it's common sense that humans have souls.

Get real. Most people don't control their thoughts 90% of the time. If they did, psychiatrists would go the way of buggy-whip manufacturers overnight.

Besides that, you've already said that thoughts are ultimately caused by the laws of physics, so if he is "directly controlling it", it appears he is also controlling the laws of physics. Right?

A transparent semantical diversion. The point is that by thinking, he becomes less able to realize.

How is that different from saying free will is a delusion?

Nonsense. All he needs is a lawyer, a judge, and a jury who think like you do, and he's off scot free. It has happened plenty of times. It's why in some states criminals are able to sue homeowners whose houses they break into when they get injured in the act. Criminal defense lawyers like Johnny Cochran make as much money as they do BECAUSE they are the best fabricators of excuses in the business.

That illusion will disappear the first time your rights are significantly infringed upon. Or, this has already happened, but rather than face it the reality, you have relabelled it so as to make it less of a threat to your ideology.

What do you mean by that?

So what? Good doesn't have a concrete definition either, yet it underlies every decision we make every day. We make decisions based on what we think is good for us or others.

Obviously, you are unable to support your viewpoint with anything more than dogmatic assertions backed up by the vaguest of references.

Lobstrosity

To address some points I see raised here (such as justice in a deterministic world, for example), allow me to post an excerpt from something I wrote a while back. The omitted portions consist of asserting that free will is simply an egotistical overextension of human capabilities. It is fairly obvious that what we deem as consciousness arises from complex biological systems. The evidence for this comes in the form of studies on brain damage, effects of hallucinogens, actual manipulations of neurons during brain surgury, and studies on animals. One simple example is the effect of severing the corpus callosum (the bundle of neurons that links the two hemispheres of the brain). If our consciousness were rooted not in biology but instead in some intangible soul, it should still be able to span the two hemispheres. The soul should act as its own bridge across which information could flow. Two results of split-brain studies are the following:

* If a stimulus was presented to only one hemisphere, the person could only recognize it with the modality available to that hemisphere. For example, if an object was presented to the left visual field (right hemisphere), the person could recognize it using the left hand but could not name the object. Conversely, if an object was presented to the right visual field (left hemisphere), the person could name it (Sperry, 1964; Gazzaniga, 1967).

* Trevarthen and Kinsbourne (1974) presented chimeric stimuli to both visual fields. The responses depended on task requested. The left hemisphere choose items that were similar in function and the right hemisphere choose items that were similar in appearance.

I find it very hard to rationalize how something like this could occur if all true consciousness/decision-making were computed in a single intangible processing unit (i.e. the soul).

Now to the excerpt:


So, if free will is a myth, why do so many of us proclaim to possess it? The argument has been made [in omitted parts] that a system comprised of an infinite number of interacting components could in theory exhibit non-deterministic behavior even when operating in a deterministic framework. Of course the “in theory” qualification comes into play because a system with an infinite number of components is actually a singularity that cannot necessarily be expected to exist. A better way to then state things is to say that in the limit as complexity moves towards infinity, behavior tends away from the deterministic. Let us try to understand this by comparing it to results from attempts to simulate intelligence. Computers can be seen as the epitome of absolute determinism. If one writes a computer program, it will run the same way time and time again. The computer is only capable of generating “psuedo-random” numbers, and as such, even a program designed to generate “random” output will behave the same way every time if given the same starting parameters. Because of this inherent inflexibility of computers, their use in tasks that require the ability to generalize has been highly limited. Recently, however, research into the field of artificial intelligence (specifically neural networks) has done a great deal to promote the idea that computers can begin to approach certain levels of human-like cognition. Today, a cluster of artificial neurons encoded in a computer can perform the relatively non-deterministic tasks of handwriting and speech recognition—something that was unheard of not too many years ago due to the high amount of variance in the inputs. The process seems to touch upon what we consider to be cognition, yet it is still wholly deterministic. The determinism is just masked by a system of great complexity. This can be accomplished with neural networks comprised of just hundreds of “neurons.” Imagine the diverse, complex behavior that could be produced by a network of 100 billion neurons, as is found in the human brain. It is this high degree of complexity that approximates from determinism what we view as free will.

What does all this mean, however? Should we now be scared that we have lost that which makes us human? Does determinism absolve us of all personal responsibility? Is life now meaningless? All of these questions are incorrectly answered by proponents of the free will doctrine in the affirmative. Changing our semantics—and essentially this is all we have done, since we are now calling what was free will determinism—in no way affects the quality of life we lead from one day to the next. It can, however, taint our perceptions of this life. I would argue strenuously that (1) we have not lost our humanity, (2) we are not absolved of personal accountability, and (3) life still has meaning. The best argument for point 1 is as follows: if we never had free will to begin with then it was not free will that made us human. Of all species, man has come closest to achieving free will (whatever that really means) by having the most complex brain. Those who need to fuel their superiority complexes can take solace in this. What make us human are our advanced self-awareness and our species-specific genetic structure. Even without Christian free will we still maintain these traits.

Personal accountability is a touchy subject, for even our modern society absolves certain individuals who are deemed to be unable to control their actions. These individuals include minors, the criminally insane, and the mentally incompetent. Does this mean that in a deterministic society, everyone can escape punishment by blaming external causal factors? The answer is no, of course it doesn’t. To see why, let us first note that the common thread amongst the citizens we do absolve of blame is a diminished capacity for reason. A more rigorous definition, however, would by necessity include a definition of "diminished": these citizens have a capacity for reason that falls far below the normal human capacity for reason. There are thus three justifiable reasons why a “competent” man in a deterministic world should be punished for a crime: (I) he poses a danger to society, because whatever aspect of his brain led him to commit the crime could lead to his committing of another; (II) imprisoning him will act as a causal factor in itself that will serve to discourage (or prevent, if we want reduce humans to the level of mindless automatons) others from committing the same crime; and (III) decisions in the human mind are mitigated by so many hidden, internal neurons that the inevitable decision to commit the crime was almost certainly the fault of one of his neurons and not just some bad stimulus (and after all, isn’t that equally the same as saying it was his fault, since haven’t we equated the brain with the mind and the mind with the person?). Life is not so deterministic as to allow us to say a specific input will infallibly cause a human to perform a specific behavior. It is the input coupled with the internal structure and state of that person’s brain that results in the observed behavior. It is for this reason that we may not be so easily absolved of blame. In short, determinism no more absolves us of blame than does the notion that God creates us knowing full well everything we would do in our lives. One might be tempted to blame determinism for our failures (or God, if you see him as your omnipotent creator), but this isn't a luxury we can afford as it is quite clear that society cannot function without law and order. Perhaps accepting determinism simply entails a slight redefinition of what "justice" is. It should not be surprising that "justice" is not a black and white, ideal concept--it's a formulation of humans, who happen to be far from ideal.

As for the question of whether life has meaning, the answer will depend on each person’s own subjective definition of “meaning.” If one requires the existence of an intelligent creator to find meaning in life, then he will find no meaning in my secular portrayal of the world. For most people, however, the lack of meaning in life arises from the seemingly depressing thought that everything one ever experiences in life and everything one ever does in life is due to some random assortment of initial conditions that lead from starting point A to inevitable ending point B. I would argue that the notion that God created each of us knowing a priori the full course our lives would run is no less depressing. In both situations your life is mapped out before you live it; in both situations your fate is inevitable from the perspective of an omnipotent external observer unrestricted by quantum uncertainty. In short, free will is nothing more than an idealized fiction derived from an extremely complicated deterministic system evolved solely to allow us to make rational decisions with respect to our perceived world.

Aradia

Uh-huh. I've already read that. I hope it was supposed to be evidence that we can directly detect dark energy.

Aradia

That's kind of like cutting the spinal cord to prove that there's no brain controlling one's leg.

Wounded King

So you believe the soul can be affected by organic damage?