Nowhere357

There is a lot of truth here. It is a little bit loaded to say science 'makes up' forces, but really the scientific method doesn't need defended by the likes of me.

This reminds me of my current view of free will: looked at one way and it's entirely deterministic, looked at another way and indeed people actually do make choices, and are responsible for their decisions.
I suppose I need to study complexity theory. <sigh>

Well, that's how I see it also.

Yeah I understand. My current view is that the tendancy of matter to form life, is a basic property of reality.

Harumi

I concur with Marlowe.

Humans may have created many things, but they have mainly affected just us as a species. It doesn't have nearly the consequences that other species create. For crying out loud, even dinosaurs did more than we did (oil).

Such as it is, I find humans becoming intelligent in the first place to be very mysterious. After all, chimpanzees and Bonabo monkeys aren't nearly close to our intelligence after all.

Marlowe

Or me, but I'm finding the book fascinating because it questions many of the cherished assumptions of science-philes like myself and points out that we are constantly teasing out new threads in a theoretical framework and confusing the framework with reality.

Now that sounds interesting - care to elaborate?

Stuart Kauffman's "At Home in the Universe" - great book, though it's quite technical in parts - explains how there are scientists discovering just that. It's good stuff, if you dig that sort of thing. What still gets my head buzzing though is - what is this tendency? Where does it come from? What are the implications of such a tendency being a basic property of reality?

Amen, people mistake destroying our own habitat with destroying the planet. Earth is going to be fine. Humanity - well, we'll see. Wouldn't it be funny if intelligence turned out to be a trait that was wildly successful in the short term but in longer evolutionary periods created its own extinction?

Nowhere357

Okay, I'll read Kauffman. I think his POV, like mine, is that in biology, the whole is more than the sum of it's parts.

Concerning the idea that free will and determinism are not incompatible.

First, please back up a step, to the more basic concept or quality of "pain". (Or any other, I guess, immediate mental experience.)
It's fair to say that pysically, that mental state "pain" is associated with deterministic biology, (neurons and chemicals).

I claim that mental state "pain" is ALSO associated with the experience of pain. The whole is more than the parts. In addition to the deterministic biology, there exists a subjective mental experience.

I also claim that any given mental experience, happens only to the one that experienced it.

These two claims lead me to the idea that the existense of subjective mental experiences must be at least considered, when investigating life and mind.

Free will, IMO reflects an active quality associated with subjective mental experiences. When I introspect, I have the experience that ultimately I have the ABILITY to move and focus my attention, as I please.

SO determinism and subjective experience exist simultaneously. If a creature exhibits signs of pain, there REALLY IS a mental experience, being experienced. The suffering is real.

THEN determinism and the subjective experience of "exercising will" can exist simultaneously. We really can attend to and control our thoughts and decisions.

I think the experience of free will is not as immediate as the experience of something like pain, although it is very close. Maybe all our choices actually are deterministic only?

To support the idea that the experience of free will validates its existence, is the idea that without an active quality, the passive experience of mental states serves no purpose - has no survival value.

There are many mental states. Just passively experiencing anything at all, is the most basic state I am aware of. IMO also basic is the active experience of control.

From matter arises life.
From life arises mind.
The mind has the objective deterministic bio-physical assosiations with if.
The mind ALSO has the subjective qualities of passive awareness and active will.

Harumi

Yes, that would. Sad though, but I'd still have a good laugh over it.

I've always believed that it's better to laugh at atrocities than cry over it.

emotional

We don't know yet. That's for neuroscience and brain research to find out in the following years.



Natural is what follows the evolutionary principle of gene survival. Birds' nests follow this principle. Humans reading books or composing music or writing holy scriptures aren't.

Before hominids evolved that supernatural brain of theirs, they were fully wedded to the universal principle of gene survival. They did nothing that wasn't necessary for survival. They ate, drank and had sex, and nothing more. It is only when that brain evolved that humans began to do things that are not conducive to the propagation of their selfish genes. That's what separates humanity from nature.

Marlowe

Fascinating. I like your argument. I love anything that sums up a good (and true) paradox.

I think you're confusing a theoretical framework with reality. Darwinism and natural selection does not fully describe all that we see in nature. Every single action of every single animal is not carried out purely for its gene survival advantages.

Actually, birds' nests don't always. It has been experimentally shown that birds in the wild will demonstrate individual preferences for colored string going into their nests. Red string provides no more survival advantage than blue string, yet birds will make choices - even expend energy to go get different colors - passing over blue string to fly futher and pick up red string for example. Not doing their genes one tiny bit of good, because this is not a trait evolved to show sex characteristics like bower birds and their fancy nests. The birds in the experiment had never seen colored string before. Birds of the opposite sex were no more likely to mate with a bird using red string or a bird using blue string. So, what is the qualitative difference between birds choosing colors and humans making art? (Although now that I think about it, there's certainly a case to be made that making art can up your genetic advantage - ask Picasso and his four wives.)

Have you been hanging out with some australopithecus? How about just some Bonobo chimpanzees, which are very closely related to us genetically but lack our big brains? These chimps engage in a variety of behaviors for extended periods of time that cannot possibly give them better genetic advantages, largely because what they engage in is homosexual sex, female to female and male to male.

So, basically I'm still not following how it is humans are any less natural than birds, chimps or plants.

Nowhere357

I have watched a bird tease my cat. In a tree, it waits until the cat carefully crawls onto the branch, then it would buzz the cat (almost knocking it down) and alight on a nearby branch. Repeated several times, until the cat gave up. The bird was not nesting in the tree. After the cat left, the bird flew away. It was clear to me that the bird was engaging in recreational activity.

IMO birds have awareness, self-awareness, and some measure of will. They also have attitude. Same as any animal with an advanced central nervous system.

Harumi

Now that is a sweet bird. Reminds me of my baby brother.

Which reminds me of that monkey experiment with the wire mom/food and the soft cuddly mom. The monkey preferred the soft cuddly one, and that is hardly advantageous to survival. Doesn't seem like monkeys are very natural either, based on that argument.