Naked Science Forum
On the Lighter Side => New Theories => Topic started by: DonQuichotte on 09/11/2013 19:34:26
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Is The Free Will Just an Elaborate ...Illusion ?
Hi, folks :
Do tell me about it,please .
See the following on the subject :
Thanks , appreciate indeed.
Cheers
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Is The Free Will Just an Elaborate ...Illusion ?
Hi, folks :
Do tell me about it,please .
People with obsessive compulsive disorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive%E2%80%93compulsive_disorder) certainly do not have free will.
This topic has been covered previously in this forum on numerous occasions.
If you want the opinion of the members of this forum on this topic try using the search facility ...
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?action=search [ some results attached ]
However given your behaviour in the other thread you started on a similar topic (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=48746.0) it appears you have no interest in other people's opinions and are simply trolling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29) this forum, ( anyone considering contributing to this thread should bear that in mind ).
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This topic has been covered previously in this forum on numerous occasions.
If you want the opinion of the members of this forum on this topic try using the search facility ...
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?action=search [ some results attached ]
However given your behaviour in the other thread you started on a similar topic (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=48746.0) it appears you have no interest in other people's opinions and are simply trolling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29) this forum, ( anyone considering contributing to this thread should bear that in mind )
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(Prior note :
This thread was just inspired by dlorde's relative explanations of the maths of chaos to me ,that's all .
So, i just wanted to hear his own opinion on the subject of free will ,since he said that free will can exist even within a deterministic universe .
Stuff like that .)
So, just have the decency and intelligence to just speak for yourself only ,instead of patronizing , instead of reporting people on this forum , and instead of demonizing the ones who do happen to disagree with you such as myself thus :
Do not under-estimate the capacity of judgement of these forum members .
They do have minds of their own, remember .
Who said i am trolling ?
Yeah , right , just because i do happen not to agree with you , that's all .
You're the one who just likes to listen to his own music only , rather than consider what people have to say ,even in the face of counter -arguments or of counter-evidence : self-projections thus , i see .
P.S.: If the mind is in the brain , if reality as a whole is just material or physical ,then , there is no free will in fact .
But , fact is : the materialist "scientific world view " is false , a fact you can neither understand, grasp ,handle , let alone acknowledge as such , i guess.
Isn't that what all this is about , that's no question, obviously .
Grow up, i suggest thus .
Cheers .
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Speak for yourself :
Do not under-estimate the capacity of judgement of these forum members .
They do have minds of their own, remember .
Other members may not be aware of your other thread (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=48746.0) and that you are simply wasting their time.
You have your own fixed anti-science ideas which you obsessively regurgitate on a science forum.
[ Personally I wish someone had tipped me off that you were just trolling before I contributed to your thread ].
Who said i am trolling ?
I do. If anyone doubts me have a look at DonQ's consciousness thread (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=48746.0) where there are 33 pages of evidence to support me.
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If anyone has something new to say about free will that might show it to be possible, it would be worth starting a new thread for it so that people can join in without having to trawl all the way through an old one before they feel they are allowed to join in. I don't think it'll have the legs to get very far though, because ultimately all we ever do is attempt to do whatever we calculate to be the best thing out of the available options, although there can be instinctive overrides which make us do certain things without stopping to think or which prevent us from stopping to think, as when a parent puts him or herself in great danger to try to rescue his/her child - this kind of instinctive behaviour can be selected for by evolution simply by being successful more often than not. Whatever the case though, the process is either going to be deterministic or random, so there is no free will involved at all.
On the trolling issue, at least if a troll is tied up here where no one is reading his posts other than a few psychologists who have an interest in trolls, that is not a bad thing for the world.
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Speak for yourself :
Do not under-estimate the capacity of judgement of these forum members .
They do have minds of their own, remember .
Other members may not be aware of your other thread (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=48746.0) and that you are simply wasting their time.
You have your own fixed anti-science ideas which you obsessively regurgitate on a science forum.
[ Personally I wish someone had tipped me off that you were just trolling before I contributed to your thread ]
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Speak for yourself ,once again :
Fact is : you cannot neither tolerate nor handle the fact tha people might disagree with your set of beliefs or opinions you do take for granted as the 'scientific world view " .
Get a life , i must add.
All this nonsense of yours won't make the fact go away that i am so pro-science proper that i would love to see it delivered from its false materialist mainstream "scientific world view " ,as Sheldrake, Thomas Nagel , anti-reductionists and others do by the way
Who said i am trolling ?
I do. If anyone doubts me have a look at DonQ's consciousness thread (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=48746.0) where there are 33 pages of evidence to support me.
Who cares whether you do think i am a troll or not ? I am not : who the hell do you think you are to try to dictate to people what they should think ?
Passionate discussions can get out of hand sometimes , that's just a human , all too human side of human nature .
Ach...
You will not get any response from me from now on , you do deserve none .
I think you should try to consider a career as some sort of a snitch , working for some sort of materialist inquisitions , or for some sort of materialist thought police: you are perfectly cut for the job .
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If anyone has something new to say about free will that might show it to be possible, it would be worth starting a new thread for it so that people can join in without having to trawl all the way through an old one before they feel they are allowed to join in. I don't think it'll have the legs to get very far though, because ultimately all we ever do is attempt to do whatever we calculate to be the best thing out of the available options, although there can be instinctive overrides which make us do certain things without stopping to think or which prevent us from stopping to think, as when a parent puts him or herself in great danger to try to rescue his/her child - this kind of instinctive behaviour can be selected for by evolution simply by being successful more often than not. Whatever the case though, the process is either going to be deterministic or random, so there is no free will involved at all.
Please do try to elaborate on that , thanks , appreciate indeed .
That free will might be just an illusion does make no sense to me whatsoever in fact .
On the trolling issue, at least if a troll is tied up here where no one is reading his posts other than a few psychologists who have an interest in trolls, that is not a bad thing for the world.
Haha indeed .
So, what's that lunatic been making such a fuss about indeed .
If i am a troll , i might be usefull food for psychologists or for others haha ,and i am not on tv all the time as lunatic fanatics such as Dawkins are : so, i am not hurting anyone.
If i am not , and i think i can say i am not , then , at least , we can try to learn from each other , from the few ones who do participate to these threads of mine at least .
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Grow up
Get a life
Who else but trolls post infantile phrases like that.
… who the hell do you think you are …
The classic line of those who cannot defend their position: an admission of defeat if ever I heard one.
You will not get any response from me from now on , you do deserve none .
boo hoo [:-'(]
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In discussions about free will, I sometimes wonder, "Free from what?"
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In discussions about free will, I sometimes wonder, "Free from what?"
Relatively free from cultural psychological social biological ideological,sub-conscious ,environmental , nurtural ....factors that do shape our thought , and hence our behavior , relatively speaking
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Is the free will just an illusion ?
Is there a way (s) to track back our decision-making process all the way down to its ultimate roots ? .The latter that might turn out to be not always deterministic .
That's the question , i guess .
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Please do try to elaborate on that , thanks , appreciate indeed .
That free will might be just an illusion does make no sense to me whatsoever in fact .
I don't see the need to elaborate. It's your job to provide an example of how you express your free will. Any example you provide, I will then deconstruct it for you and show that it is not free will at all.
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Please do try to elaborate on that , thanks , appreciate indeed .
That free will might be just an illusion does make no sense to me whatsoever in fact .
I don't see the need to elaborate. It's your job to provide an example of how you express your free will. Any example you provide, I will then deconstruct it for you and show that it is not free will at all.
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Ok, let's start with the obvious at hand , as follows :
I am answering this post of yours , as we speak :
Am i not doing just that via my own free will or free choice ?
Thanks, appreciate indeed.
Cheers and nice week-end by the way : have fun indeed .
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Ok, let's start with the obvious at hand , as follows :
I am answering this post of yours , as we speak :
Am i not doing just that via my own free will or free choice ?
You're answering it because you're compelled to go on posting here no matter what. Of course, you could deliberately stop posting in a futile attempt to demonstrate your free will, but that would be dictated by your desire to show that you have free will. You are trapped spending your life posting stuff which is for the most part of very little value (due to an astronomical amount of repetition) to a forum precisely because you don't have free will.
[Edited to add the missing word "value".]
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In discussions about free will, I sometimes wonder, "Free from what?"
Relatively free from cultural psychological social biological ideological,sub-conscious ,environmental , nurtural ....factors that do shape our thought , and hence our behavior , relatively speaking
I'm not sure what you mean by relatively. Do you mean completely free, free in certain situations, free if you put conscious effort into changing old habits or ignoring urges? Are you either free, or not free, or can you be sort of free?
To be free of the influence of things you listed above would imply starting from scratch in every situation, not learning from experience, or from teachers or family or society, not being able to remove your hand as quickly from a hot stove in a reflex arc, and having to relearn how to play the piano, that is, having to "think" about which keys to hit every time you sat down to play.
Humans and other animals seem to have an innate resistance to being either restrained or forced to do something by someone or something else. That is, I think, an evolutionary trait, since that someone or something may be a predator or someone wanting to force their DNA on you. What's odd is when we turn this desire to not be controlled on some aspect of our selves as if it were some outside influence.
A friend of mine said he didn't like thinking about the subconscious because he didn't like the idea of some part of his brain that he wasn't aware of controlling him. I said "Ever wonder if the feeling is mutual? Maybe some part of your subconscious is talking to another part and saying 'You'll never believe what that idiot did today. We have millions of years of evolutionary wisdom, but does he listen to us? No, because of some brilliant idea he came up with this morning. I think I'll go all anxiety on his ass. Maybe a nice panic attack would smarten him up, or I'll make him depressed for no discernible reason. He can just sit in his room tomorrow and weep inconsolably, and think about his behavior lately!' "
That may seem like a ridiculous scenario, but that is how people seem to view things like the subconscious or genetic traits when they discuss freewill, as if they were somehow alien influences on their true self.
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I'll only post once on this thread, that being done of my own free will. Any further time spent here would be an Elaborate ...Illusion of a worthwhile enterprise!
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Human free will is as real as we are, basta .
But , if one would believe that the mainstream materialist "scientific world view " is "true " = reality as a whole is just material or physical , then there is no free will indeed .
Reality as a whole is not just material or physical , and hence the 'scientific world view " is ...false , obviously , thus.
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Human free will is as real as we are, basta .
But , if one would believe that the mainstream materialist "scientific world view " is "true " = reality as a whole is just material or physical , then there is no free will indeed .
Reality as a whole is not just material or physical , and hence the 'scientific world view " is ...false , obviously , thus.
Maybe so, but if one were genuinely interested in when or where free will occurs, science would be still be a useful tool for narrowing down the possibilities, chasing it into a corner, so to speak. Although, if materialistic findings or methods are always "false", then nothing can be ruled out, and no evidence is reliable in any experiment, and it's back to the futility of "we'll never know."
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Human free will is as real as we are, basta .
But , if one would believe that the mainstream materialist "scientific world view " is "true " = reality as a whole is just material or physical , then there is no free will indeed .
Reality as a whole is not just material or physical , and hence the 'scientific world view " is ...false , obviously , thus.
Maybe so, but if one were genuinely interested in when or where free will occurs, science would be still be a useful tool for narrowing down the possibilities, chasing it into a corner, so to speak. Although, if materialistic findings or methods are always "false", then nothing can be ruled out, and no evidence is reliable in any experiment, and it's back to the futility of "we'll never know."
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There are no such things such as "materialistic " findings ,as there are no such things such as the materialistic "methods ", simply because materialism is just a false conception of nature , an ideology , a world view ...that should not be confused with science or with scientific results , let alone with the scientific results regarding the material side of reality , the latter that has been taken by science for granted as the whole real thing for so long now , thanks to materialism thus .
Science must thus stop assuming that reality as a whole is just material or physical , the latter assumption that's just a materialist core belief assumption regarding the nature of reality thus , no empirical fact .
So, reality as a whole should not be reduced to just the material or to the physical by science , including consciounsess, free will and the rest thus .
Free will that's more of a matter of the ...mind thus that's not irreducible to the physical .
Therefore , when scientists do think that the mind is just in the brain, the mind as just a biological process thus ,thanks to materialism thus that does reduce everything , including the mind thus , to just material, physical or biological processes , those scientists cannot but study the mind , and therefore the issue of free will, for example , as just a matter of the physical brain's activity :
I am well aware of those scientific experiments regarding when patients' brains get scanned ,while those patients are asked to perfom or think about a decision , like raising one of their arms : scientists think they can predict the specific decision -making of those patients many seconds allegedly before the latter would be aware of his/ her presumed decision-making in question , when scientists see that the raising of the arm precedes the firing of those corresponding brain regions involved in that process : those scientists do not realise the fact that they do take the image of that process for its cause thus, by assuming that the firing of those specific corresponding brain regions is the actual decision -making process in question, while the firing of those corresponding brain regions in question are just the image of that process in fact , the image of the process that does occur always afterwards thus , after the actual cause of the process that precedes it , logically :
When you do see lightening happening in the sky , you do not and should not assume that that in fact actual image of that process of lightening is its cause , do you or should you ?.
Consciousness as a sort of a transmitter might be the one sending its "data " somehow to the physical brain to raise the patient's arm, prior thus to the firing of those brain corresponding regions thus :those scientific experiemnts do prove this fact in fact ., which does prove the fact that those scientific experiments are a matter of ...interpretation thus .
The brain is just the image of the process of the mind thus , not its cause , that's why the arm gets raised before the brain fires : it is in fact the mind thus that causes the arm to be raised , and then afterwards the brain just reflects the image of that mind process of raising the arm .
Scientists cannot thus but misinterpret those scientific experiements ...materialistically , in the sense that the brain causes the mind , not otherwise = a false materialistic belief assumption , no empirical one thus .
Another example :
When i do hear some bad news on the phone i do get moved by to the point where i can feel tears flowing through my eyes as a result : it is not neurophysiology that causes my feeling of sadness and therefore the flowing of tears from my eyes , the mind does , and that feeling of sadness provoked by hearing those bad news on the phone thus , via my ear to my brain , that feeling of sadness generated by my mind thus when informed by it through my senses to my brain , is the one that triggers tears in my eyes via some sort of a command prompt to my brain ,not the other way around thus , prior to the actual firing of those corresponding brain regions that do trigger physiologically tears in my eyes, i guess .
The physical brain thus is just the image of the process of the mind , the latter that's the one causing the physical raising of my arm, that's causing the feeling of sadness and therefore the flowing of tears through my eyes .
In short :
The brain does thus not do much in fact , so to speak , the mind is the one doing almost everything , the brain merely generates the data it receives from our senses to be sent to our consciousness somehow thus , and then afterwards , the brain just receives back the corresponding process of the mind via reflecting its image , an image most scientists take for the cause of the process , thanks to materialism thus .
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Is The Free Will Just an Elaborate ...Illusion ?
More of a pointless philosophical abstraction than an illusion.
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Is The Free Will Just an Elaborate ...Illusion ?
More of a pointless philosophical abstraction than an illusion.
Free will is as real as we are .
Scientific experiments 's right interpretation is enough evidence for just that fact .
See above thus .
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The brain does thus not do much in fact , so to speak , the mind is the one doing almost everything , the brain merely generates the data it receives from our senses to be sent to our consciousness somehow thus , and then afterwards , the brain just receives back the corresponding process of the mind via reflecting its image , an image most scientists take for the cause of the process , thanks to materialism thus .
Which is why brain damage has no impact on the capability of the mind, and it's also why a fly can think every bit as well as a human, because its mind is not constrained by its tiny brain.
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There are no such things such as "materialistic " findings ,as there are no such things such as the materialistic "methods ", simply because materialism is just a false conception of nature , an ideology , a world view ..
Okay then, if you don't like the term I used, then replace it with "methods and experiments involving the physical processes of chemistry and physics, cells etc". Again, just because some scientists choose to study those aspects, it doesn't prevent anyone else from investigating "the rest of reality as a whole." No one is tying their hands.
Unless you see the hand of God or some immaterial force in every single physical interaction, there is no reason why experiments involving just chemistry and physics or cells should necessarily be "false." My point earlier, was that I would think those experiments and findings would still be useful, even for someone who believes in free will, in ruling out where it is not.
Mystics, however aren't fond of any constraints or boundaries, so they don't find them helpful. Basically, their view is "anything can happen, any way, any time" as illustrated by Sheldrake's quote: “Morphic resonance is non-energetic, and morphogenetic fields themselves are neither a type of mass nor energy. Therefore there seems to be no a priori reason why it should obey the laws that have been found to apply to the movement of bodies, particles and waves. In particular, it need not be attenuated by either spatial or temporal separation between similar systems, it could be just as effective over 10,000 kilometres as over a centimetre, and over a century as an hour."
There may be things beyond what physics understands, but I don't see how one makes use of that premise, without having any idea what, specifically, those things are, and without having any evidence for them. Being open minded is one thing, but believing "anything can happen because of things we don't know about" is paralyzing, not helpful.
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I am well aware of those scientific experiments regarding when patients' brains get scanned ,while those patients are asked to perfom or think about a decision , like raising one of their arms : scientists think they can predict the specific decision -making of those patients many seconds allegedly before the latter would be aware of his/ her presumed decision-making in question , when scientists see that the raising of the arm precedes the firing of those corresponding brain regions involved in that process : those scientists do not realise the fact that they do take the image of that process for its cause thus, by assuming that the firing of those specific corresponding brain regions is the actual decision -making process in question, while the firing of those corresponding brain regions in question are just the image of that process in fact , the image of the process that does occur always afterwards thus , after the actual cause of the process that precedes it , logically....
.....Consciousness as a sort of a transmitter might be the one sending its "data " somehow to the physical brain to raise the patient's arm, prior thus to the firing of those brain corresponding regions thus :those scientific experiemnts do prove this fact in fact ., which does prove the fact that those scientific experiments are a matter of ...interpretation thus .
The brain is just the image of the process of the mind thus , not its cause , that's why the arm gets raised before the brain fires : it is in fact the mind thus that causes the arm to be raised , and then afterwards the brain just reflects the image of that mind process of raising the arm .
You've misread something in those experiments, whether you agree with them or not. The arm does not get moved before neurons fire. Neurons in the brain fire before the patient experiences the conscious decision to move his hand. They are saying brain activity precedes the conscious experience, which makes it harder to argue that brain states are just a reflection of consciousness, or that the brain is the just middle-man between consciousness and the body. The only way your interpretation works is if you were to claim that there is some part of the immaterial consciousness process that occurs before you are conscious of it, but that really messes up your concept of free will. Quite a sticky wickett, isn't it.
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The brain does thus not do much in fact , so to speak , the mind is the one doing almost everything , the brain merely generates the data it receives from our senses to be sent to our consciousness somehow thus , and then afterwards , the brain just receives back the corresponding process of the mind via reflecting its image , an image most scientists take for the cause of the process , thanks to materialism thus .
Which is why brain damage has no impact on the capability of the mind, and it's also why a fly can think every bit as well as a human, because its mind is not constrained by its tiny brain.
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Brain damage just disconnects the specific brain damaged areas from their corresponding aspects of consciousness , it does not make the latter go away .
The physical brain is just the image of the process of consciousness, not its cause .
The physical brain as both a generator ( via our senses thus ) and a receiver of consciousness, the latter as some sort of a transmitter , i guess .
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There are no such things such as "materialistic " findings ,as there are no such things such as the materialistic "methods ", simply because materialism is just a false conception of nature , an ideology , a world view ..
Okay then, if you don't like the term I used, then replace it with "methods and experiments involving the physical processes of chemistry and physics, cells etc". Again, just because some scientists choose to study those aspects, it doesn't prevent anyone else from investigating "the rest of reality as a whole." No one is tying their hands.
What you do not seem to be getting so far is that science has been assuming that reality as a whole is just material or physical ,including consciousness or the mind , free will, life , memory , feelings , emotions, evolution and the rest , thanks to materialism : that's the mainstream "scientific world view " that's , obviously false .
Even when the most physical of all sciences , modern physics , tries to study the physical laws ,atoms , sub-atoms , the universe ...or the physical side of reality even modern physics , biology , and the rest of all the other sciences do take for granted as the whole real thing or as the whole reality thus , when all sciences do just that , they just give us a distored and one sided version of reality by assuming that physics and chemistry are all what there is to reality as a whole , and by reducing reality as a whole thus to just physics and chemistry , by excluding the existence of the mental or non-physical side of reality they do reduce to the physical , while the mental or non-physical is irreducible to the physical .
In other words :
When science assumes that reality as a whole is just a matter of physics and chemistry as all sciences for that matter have been doing for so long now , thanks to materialism, they cannot but try to come up with a theory of everything = a theory of nothing , that presumably pretends to explain everything just in terms of physics and chemistry .
When scientists just study one part of reality , the physical or material one , they have been taking for granted as the whole reality , they cannot but give us thus a distorted version of reality as a whole , logically .
But , fact is : reality as a whole is not just a matter of physics and chemistry, not just material or physical .
It's perfectly ok that scientists thus do study the material or physical side of reality , nobody is against just that , on the contrary ,but, scientists should not take the latter side of reality for granted as the whole real thing , as the 'scientific world view" .
Scientists should thus stop trying to explain everything just in terms of physics and chemistry + just in terms of the extensions of the latter .
All sciences should thus reject that false "scientific world view " , by rejecting materialism , and therefore by including the missing mental or non-physical part of reality, or just the parts of the latter with which they can deal empirically .
In short :
Physics and chemistry are not all what there is to reality as a whole, are not all what there is to life , its evolution emergence and origins ... .
The mainstream false "scientific world view " has been thus assuming that physics and chemistry are all what there is to reality as a whole, unfortunately enough .
All that gotta change , simply because reality as a whole is not just material or physical , so, any attempts of all sciences to try to describe , explain and therefore make us understand reality just in terms of physics and chemistry , all those attempts do just give us a distorted version of reality as whole , simply because they miss the mental or non-physical side of reality without which any approach of reality as a whole is , per definition, reductionist and therefore incomplete+ fundamentally false .
Unless you see the hand of God or some immaterial force in every single physical interaction, there is no reason why experiments involving just chemistry and physics or cells should necessarily be "false." My point earlier, was that I would think those experiments and findings would still be useful, even for someone who believes in free will, in ruling out where it is not.
There are no such things such as just physics and chemistry: nothing is just physics and chemistry , not even at the level of scientific experiments involving just physics and chemistry : the latter are just a part of the whole picture , otherwise , try to explain to anyone for that matter how just physics and chemistry can account for the intrinsic relative self-organization of living organisms, for example .
To say that we are just hardware programmed by DNA software is just a mechanist teleological absurd notion and analogy that cannot explain really how the self-organization of living organisms , how DNA ....do what they do : to try to explain that in evolutionary terms does also fail in addressing that issue and more :
For example : how can DNA , physics and chemistry , let alone the materialist version of evolution explain how certain migrating birds do know exactly when how and where they should be migrating ?
Mystics, however aren't fond of any constraints or boundaries, so they don't find them helpful. Basically, their view is "anything can happen, any way, any time" as illustrated by Sheldrake's quote: “Morphic resonance is non-energetic, and morphogenetic fields themselves are neither a type of mass nor energy. Therefore there seems to be no a priori reason why it should obey the laws that have been found to apply to the movement of bodies, particles and waves. In particular, it need not be attenuated by either spatial or temporal separation between similar systems, it could be just as effective over 10,000 kilometres as over a centimetre, and over a century as an hour."
That has nothing to do with mysticism .
The laws of physics do occur only at the material or physical side of reality , they can therefore only partly explain what does occur at the material or physical side of reality , the latter that has been taken for granted as the whole reality as such .
But when one would try to take the fact into consideration that reality as a whole is not just material or physical, then , the whole pic changes radically as to suggest that the laws of physics themselves or the physical conventional causation are not all what there is to reality as a whole , a fact which does imply that there might be some more fundamental forms of causation that might be underlying even the laws of physics themselves = other totally unknown and totally different forms of causation, totally different from the laws of physics thus .
There may be things beyond what physics understands, but I don't see how one makes use of that premise, without having any idea what, specifically, those things are, and without having any evidence for them. Being open minded is one thing, but believing "anything can happen because of things we don't know about" is paralyzing, not helpful.
Physics and chemistry , or rather the material or physical side of reality as a whole is just one part of the whole pic , so, to assume that that single part of the pic is the whole pic , as all sciences have been assuming it to be so far , to assume just that thus is a false premise , or rather a false conception of nature in science , that has been taken for granted as the 'scientific world view " , a false 'scientific world view " in all sciences that has serious implications for how all sciences " see " reality as a whole , for how they try to explain it , describe it ,and therefore that has serious implications also for how all sciences have been trying to make us understand reality , and therefore for our understanding of what reality might be through science , the latter that gives us thus just a distortion of reality as a result.
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I am well aware of those scientific experiments regarding when patients' brains get scanned ,while those patients are asked to perfom or think about a decision , like raising one of their arms : scientists think they can predict the specific decision -making of those patients many seconds allegedly before the latter would be aware of his/ her presumed decision-making in question , when scientists see that the raising of the arm precedes the firing of those corresponding brain regions involved in that process : those scientists do not realise the fact that they do take the image of that process for its cause thus, by assuming that the firing of those specific corresponding brain regions is the actual decision -making process in question, while the firing of those corresponding brain regions in question are just the image of that process in fact , the image of the process that does occur always afterwards thus , after the actual cause of the process that precedes it , logically....
.....Consciousness as a sort of a transmitter might be the one sending its "data " somehow to the physical brain to raise the patient's arm, prior thus to the firing of those brain corresponding regions thus :those scientific experiemnts do prove this fact in fact ., which does prove the fact that those scientific experiments are a matter of ...interpretation thus .
The brain is just the image of the process of the mind thus , not its cause , that's why the arm gets raised before the brain fires : it is in fact the mind thus that causes the arm to be raised , and then afterwards the brain just reflects the image of that mind process of raising the arm .
You've misread something in those experiments, whether you agree with them or not. The arm does not get moved before neurons fire. Neurons in the brain fire before the patient experiences the conscious decision to move his hand. They are saying brain activity precedes the conscious experience, which makes it harder to argue that brain states are just a reflection of consciousness, or that the brain is the just middle-man between consciousness and the body. The only way your interpretation works is if you were to claim that there is some part of the immaterial consciousness process that occurs before you are conscious of it, but that really messes up your concept of free will. Quite a sticky wickett, isn't it.
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I thought i misread those experiments indeed , afterwards .
But , that does not change anything regarding my point of view on the subject .
Consciousness is not caused by the brain's activity , that's the core issue here :
That's by the way the biggest error ever made in science : the image of the process of consciousness gets mistaken for its cause :
The Biggest Error Ever Made in the Name of Science :
The mind is not in the brain , so, when one would assume that it is , as the mainstream materialist "scientific world view " has been doing , then, it' s pretty logical to assume that the conscious feeling of raising the arm gets experienced after the firing of neurons : those scientific experiments are a matter of interpretation thus , and the latter depends largely on how one perceives reality as a whole to be , including the nature of consciousness or the mind thus .
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The physical brain as both a generator ( via our senses thus ) and a receiver of consciousness, the latter as some sort of a transmitter ...
Current understanding, (that the mind is entirely within your skull), is sufficient to explain all observed psychological phenomena, [ telepathy/souls/afterlife have never been proven to occur ].
So there is no need for your thin-client (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client) model of consciousness, and no evidence for it.
You’d need to provide some evidence to overturn current understanding, e.g. demonstrate the existence of the servers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_%28computing%29) for these thin-clients, (where are they ?) , and evidence of transmission of data from to/from the server , ( if someone wears a tin-foil balaclava (http://www.flickr.com/photos/robnwatkins/397488557/) will they be unable to retrieve archived data , (aka remember), because the connection to the sever has been blocked ? )
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The physical brain is just the image of the process of consciousness, not its cause .
The physical brain as both a generator ( via our senses thus ) and a receiver of consciousness, the latter as some sort of a transmitter ...
Current understanding, (that the mind is entirely within your skull), is sufficient to explain all observed psychological phenomena, [ telepathy/souls/afterlife have never been proven to occur ].
So there is no need for your thin-client (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client) model of consciousness, and no evidence for it.
You’d need to provide some evidence to overturn current understanding, e.g. demonstrate the existence of the servers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_%28computing%29) for these thin-clients, (where are they ?) , and evidence of transmission of data from to/from the server , ( if someone wears a tin-foil balaclava (http://www.flickr.com/photos/robnwatkins/397488557/) will they be unable to retrieve archived data , (aka remember), because the connection to the sever has been blocked ? )
The only people who wear foil-hats, but not in jest, (or wallpaper their home with it), are psychiatrically ill, trying to block the voices in their head which they misinterpret as remote mind-control via radio-waves.
[/quote]
Any anti-reductionism theories , either the dualist or idealist ones, regarding either the nature of consciousness , its function, its origins , its emergence or its evolution , or regarding the communication of consciousnss or the mind somehow with the physical brain ,and vice versa , have never pretended to have all answers on the subject , on the contrary , unlike the reductionist materialism in science on the same subject of mind and body .
It all comes down to the following then :
Just tell me then why and how did you come to believe in the materialis "fact " , or rather in the materialist core belief assumption that reality as a whole is just material or physical , incuding the mental the mind or the non-physical ?
Has science ever proved the materialist "fact ", or rather the materialist core belief assumption to be "true " regarding the nature of reality as a whole , ever ? Obviously ...not , never, ever, obviously .
In short :
To believe that consciousness or the mind are caused by the physical brain's activity , or that the mind is in the brain ,are just logical extensions of the materialist core belief assumptions regarding the nature of reality as a whole , no empirical facts .
You're therefore just a secular materialist believer who has been taking his own materialist belief for granted as the 'scientific world view "
Congratulations : you have not only been believing in a big materialist lie , make -believe , but you have been also taking that big lie for granted as the 'scientific world view " .
Way to go , genius .
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... have never pretended to have all answers on the subject
I never asked for "all answers", just that you would have to produce some hard evidence to demonstrate your hypothesis is what is occurring in reality. I gave you two suggestions in my previous post (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=49531.msg424145#msg424145), [ just occurred to me a water-tight submarine with thick steel walls would be a better example than a metal-foil balaclava ]. If you can find something which blocks the alleged transmission of data to/from brain to/from the alleged external storage device, that would be very strong evidence to support your case.
Just tell me then why and how did you come to believe ...
Belief is a matter of evidence. There is no hard evidence to support your hypothesis.
Come up with an experiment which anyone can replicate which demonstrates the orthodox "materialist" view is wrong and your "belief" is correct, then people will believe you are correct, (and give you a Nobel Prize (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Award_money) , there are other prizes too (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal)).
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For example : how can DNA , physics and chemistry , let alone the materialist version of evolution explain how certain migrating birds do know exactly when how and where they should be migrating ?
A lot of birds follow simple programs to migrate. Experiments have shown that if you put them in the right kind of circular container, they may flutter against the side for hours, then move to another part and flutter there for hours more. Had they actually flown rather than being trapped in a container, the directions they fluttered in and the durations of those flutters would have taken them directly along their programmed migration route. These programs are subject to random mutations which result in different birds ending up in different places, with some going thousands of miles off course, the result often being death in an ocean or other unsuitable habitat, but sometimes they survive and establish the genetics for new migration routes which make the species more robust.
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Brain damage just disconnects the specific brain damaged areas from their corresponding aspects of consciousness , it does not make the latter go away .
The physical brain is just the image of the process of consciousness, not its cause .
The physical brain as both a generator ( via our senses thus ) and a receiver of consciousness, the latter as some sort of a transmitter , i guess .
Why do you imagine that every little bit of functionality of consciousness relies on a piece of hardware in the brain which carries out the same function? When you damage part of the brain, you directly damage the function there and not merely a linkage to identical function elsewhere. The brain provides the functionality directly.
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What you do not seem to be getting so far is that science has been assuming that reality as a whole is just material or physical ,including consciousness or the mind , free will, life , memory , feelings , emotions, evolution and the rest , thanks to materialism : that's the mainstream "scientific world view " that's , obviously false .
And what you don't get is the idea of relevancy. It doesn't matter what science assumes or doesn't assume about other parts of reality if those parts aren't relevant to what an individual scientist is examining. If a botanist fails to include string theory or magnetism or Lorentz contractions or angels or plate tectonics in his plant experiment, he isn't going to generate false conclusions unless those things actually have some effect on the plant mechanism he is studying. And you need evidence to show that they might be relevant. Otherwise one is stuck with never being able to draw any conclusions at all if one believes anything can happen in any way because of things we don't know about. And that is mysticism or simply being irrational.
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For example : how can DNA , physics and chemistry , let alone the materialist version of evolution explain how certain migrating birds do know exactly when how and where they should be migrating ?
A lot of birds follow simple programs to migrate. Experiments have shown that if you put them in the right kind of circular container, they may flutter against the side for hours, then move to another part and flutter there for hours more. Had they actually flown rather than being trapped in a container, the directions they fluttered in and the durations of those flutters would have taken them directly along their programmed migration route. These programs are subject to random mutations which result in different birds ending up in different places, with some going thousands of miles off course, the result often being death in an ocean or other unsuitable habitat, but sometimes they survive and establish the genetics for new migration routes which make the species more robust.
[/quote]
You did not answer my core questions : you were just migrating somehereelse instead :
How can physics and chemistry alone account for such sophisticated innate or intrinsic migration 'programs " of those birds ?
Did phsyics and chemistry "create " some sort of sophisticated gps or radar for those specific migrating birds to follow somehow and how exactly ? and how does that process looks like ? Can you describe it to me ? in some specific clear form or another ?
How do phsyics and chemistry alone show those migrating birds the way they should take back and forth , let alone precisely 'dictate " to them when they should migrate , how and where exactly they should migrate , without almost ever being lost ?
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What you do not seem to be getting so far is that science has been assuming that reality as a whole is just material or physical ,including consciousness or the mind , free will, life , memory , feelings , emotions, evolution and the rest , thanks to materialism : that's the mainstream "scientific world view " that's , obviously false .
And what you don't get is the idea of relevancy. It doesn't matter what science assumes or doesn't assume about other parts of reality if those parts aren't relevant to what an individual scientist is examining. If a botanist fails to include string theory or magnetism or Lorentz contractions or angels or plate tectonics in his plant experiment, he isn't going to generate false conclusions unless those things actually have some effect on the plant mechanism he is studying. And you need evidence to show that they might be relevant. Otherwise one is stuck with never being able to draw any conclusions at all if one believes anything can happen in any way because of things we don't know about. And that is mysticism or simply being irrational.
[/quote]
No, you do not get it yet , despite your irrelevant empty rhetorics or false analogies :
Let me instead try to draw you a pic of some sort :
As a painter yourself , when you do assume, via some false belief of yours on the subject you might have been taking for granted as the mainstream artistic "true" holistic version of nature , when you do assume thus that a certain part of a given painting is all what there is to that specific painting as a whole , while assuming that the other part of that same painting does not exist as such or at least that you cannot see it somehow , does that mean that the whole pic of that painting is just that specific part of the pic only, you have been assuming that 's what all there is to that pic as a whole ?
That's exactly what all sciences have been doing in relation to the universe as a whole , via that materialist false mainstream 'scientific world view ", ironically unbelievably incredibly paradoxically absurdly ...crazy enough .
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The mind is not in the brain , so, when one would assume that it is , as the mainstream materialist "scientific world view " has been doing , then, it' s pretty logical to assume that the conscious feeling of raising the arm gets experienced after the firing of neurons : those scientific experiments are a matter of interpretation thus , and the latter depends largely on how one perceives reality as a whole to be , including the nature of consciousness or the mind thus .
No, it's not a question of interpretation at all. You can claim the experiments were improperly done or fraudulent if you want, but there is really only one interpretation, unless, as I said, you decide there is some part of the immaterial process of consciousness that occurs before you are conscious of it, which contradicts its definition. Or I suppose you could claim consciousness' effects can go backwards in time.
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Brain damage just disconnects the specific brain damaged areas from their corresponding aspects of consciousness , it does not make the latter go away .
The physical brain is just the image of the process of consciousness, not its cause .
The physical brain as both a generator ( via our senses thus ) and a receiver of consciousness, the latter as some sort of a transmitter , i guess .
Why do you imagine that every little bit of functionality of consciousness relies on a piece of hardware in the brain which carries out the same function? When you damage part of the brain, you directly damage the function there and not merely a linkage to identical function elsewhere. The brain provides the functionality directly.
[/quote]
Should i try to go back to my dusty attic or closets to try to find my old tv set or radio analogies , in order to try to find out about where exactly should i look inside of my old and still functioning tv to see whether Obama or CNN are still living in there inside of that old tv of mine or not ?
Should i try to try to reverse-engineer my old and still functioning radio to see whether the programs it used to broadcast or would broadcast , to see whether they are still living inside of my radio or not ?
Not to mention that i , maybe , should destroy both my tv set and radio just to see if those respectively received images ,and programs were/are 'created " by respectively my tv set and radio ?
Come on, be serious .
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... have never pretended to have all answers on the subject
I never asked for "all answers", just that you would have to produce some hard evidence to demonstrate your hypothesis is what is occurring in reality. I gave you two suggestions in my previous post (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=49531.msg424145#msg424145), [ just occurred to me a water-tight submarine with thick steel walls would be a better example than a metal-foil balaclava ]. If you can find something which blocks the alleged transmission of data to/from brain to/from the alleged external storage device, that would be very strong evidence to support your case.
Just tell me then why and how did you come to believe ...
Belief is a matter of evidence. There is no hard evidence to support your hypothesis.
Come up with an experiment which anyone can replicate which demonstrates the orthodox "materialist" view is wrong and your "belief" is correct, then people will believe you are correct, (and give you a Nobel Prize (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Award_money) , there are other prizes too (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal)).
[/quote]
(Just try to answer this core seemingly easy question instead of sending the ball back to me :
Where is then the extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claims of materialism ,and hence for those of the 'scientific world view " regarding the nature of reality ?
Can you or will you just try to deliver just that then , for a change ? Can you or will you do just that then ?
Oh, boy , you will most certainly be making such a fool of yourself as a result , to the point that you will turn out to be such an entertaining guy after all , despite your complete lack of humor, tact and imagination so far , the latter you can never be able to compensate or hide behind your silly arrogant insulting and condescendent phony , just kidding , boomerang attitude , a boomerang that failed to hit its intended targets , and hence comes back to hit you right in your bullie = weak ...mask of a face .
Take off that mask , i must add , be a man , and just try to deliver the extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary materialist "scientific world view " claims .Deal ? )
Try to answer my questions ,first , instead of migrating somewhereelse via some inexplicable magical performances tricks , thanks to physics and chemistry alone "travel guide program " that allegedly has been created in you via the magical astronomical mutations powers of the materialist version of evolution goddess.
Deal ?
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Try to answer my questions ,first , instead of migrating somewhereelse via some inexplicable magical performances tricks
You’re the only one here proposing “inexplicable magical (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology#Criticism_and_controversy) performances tricks” like telepathy,
which are either tricks (fraud) or claims of a deluded person.
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Try to answer my questions ,first , instead of migrating somewhereelse via some inexplicable magical performances tricks
You’re the only one here proposing “inexplicable magical performances tricks” like telepathy,
which are either tricks (fraud) or claims of a deluded person.
[/quote]
Oh, come on : just be a big boy , and answer my questions , please ?
Deal ?
Come on, you can do it ...yes, you can ...
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Let me instead try to draw you a pic of some sort :
As a painter yourself , when you do assume, via some false belief of yours on the subject you might have been taking for granted as the mainstream artistic "true" holistic version of nature , when you do assume thus that a certain part of a given painting is all what there is to that specific painting as a whole , while assuming that the other part of that same painting does not exist as such or at least that you cannot see it somehow , does that mean that the whole pic of that painting is just that specific part of the pic only, you have been assuming that 's what all there is to that pic as a whole ?
That's exactly what all sciences have been doing in relation to the universe as a whole , via that materialist false mainstream 'scientific world view ", ironically unbelievably incredibly paradoxically absurdly ...crazy enough .
I don't know if painting is a very good analogy for what we have been talking about, but yes, you are right, unless you were doing paint-by-numbers, it would be hard to construct a painting looking only at one tiny area, not knowing, or forgetting, about the other areas. On the other hand, the artist includes in the big picture, what is relevant or connected in some way, and cannot include "everything." A painting of a teacup is not a bad representation of teacup because it is not a monkey. Your criteria for judging something has to be relevant to the objective.
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For example : how can DNA , physics and chemistry , let alone the materialist version of evolution explain how certain migrating birds do know exactly when how and where they should be migrating ?
A lot of birds follow simple programs to migrate. Experiments have shown that if you put them in the right kind of circular container, they may flutter against the side for hours, then move to another part and flutter there for hours more. Had they actually flown rather than being trapped in a container, the directions they fluttered in and the durations of those flutters would have taken them directly along their programmed migration route. These programs are subject to random mutations which result in different birds ending up in different places, with some going thousands of miles off course, the result often being death in an ocean or other unsuitable habitat, but sometimes they survive and establish the genetics for new migration routes which make the species more robust.
You did not answer my core questions : you were just migrating somehereelse instead :
How can physics and chemistry alone account for such sophisticated innate or intrinsic migration 'programs " of those birds ?
Did phsyics and chemistry "create " some sort of sophisticated gps or radar for those specific migrating birds to follow somehow and how exactly ? and how does that process looks like ? Can you describe it to me ? in some specific clear form or another ?
How do phsyics and chemistry alone show those migrating birds the way they should take back and forth , let alone precisely 'dictate " to them when they should migrate , how and where exactly they should migrate , without almost ever being lost ?
It's a simple program that a five-year-old could write in Logo.
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How can physics and chemistry alone account for such sophisticated innate or intrinsic migration 'programs " of those birds ?
Did phsyics and chemistry "create " some sort of sophisticated gps or radar for those specific migrating birds to follow somehow and how exactly ? and how does that process looks like ? Can you describe it to me ? in some specific clear form or another ?
In part birds use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate ...
The avian magnetic compass has been well characterized in behavioral tests: it is an “inclination compass” based on the inclination of the field lines rather than on the polarity, and its operation requires short-wavelength light.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2718301/
In addition some learn star-patterns ( their magnetic sense requires light so it won't work at night ) ... http://www.birds.cornell.edu/allaboutbirds/studying/migration/navigation
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Should i try to go back to my dusty attic or closets to try to find my old tv set or radio analogies , in order to try to find out about where exactly should i look inside of my old and still functioning tv to see whether Obama or CNN are still living in there inside of that old tv of mine or not ?
Should i try to try to reverse-engineer my old and still functioning radio to see whether the programs it used to broadcast or would broadcast , to see whether they are still living inside of my radio or not ?
Not to mention that i , maybe , should destroy both my tv set and radio just to see if those respectively received images ,and programs were/are 'created " by respectively my tv set and radio ?
Come on, be serious .
Well, if you are going to drag the dusty tv set analogy out again, I have a question about it. What's a hallucination?
You can blame your broken tv set for not showing Obama or CNN when it's supposed to, but a broken tv set cannot create on its own programs or music, (as you've pointed out multiple times) You can't blame hallucinations on the brain as a faulty receiver of sensory information, because there is no sensory information being received that is creating the hallucination. Where is it coming from? I can explain hallucinations if the qualia of consciousness is generated by the brain itself - for example, the hallucinations that result from temporal lobe seizures. But how would the immaterial consciousness create a hallucination and at the same time mistake it for reality? Again, you can't blame it on the brain as a faulty receiver, because according to you, conscious experience isn't generated or experienced in the brain.
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Well, if you are going to drag the dusty tv set analogy out again, I have a question about it. What's a hallucination?
Don could put a modern twist on the ancient theory that hallucinations, aka visions, are a message from his network-controller, aka God (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=49377.msg424027#msg424027), ( a theory still popular amongst the mentally unwell (https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=hallucinations%20message%20from%20god) ). But without any evidence for the existence of his proposed thin-client (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client) network , an in-brain origin is a better explanation.
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Should i try to go back to my dusty attic or closets to try to find my old tv set or radio analogies , in order to try to find out about where exactly should i look inside of my old and still functioning tv to see whether Obama or CNN are still living in there inside of that old tv of mine or not ?
Should i try to try to reverse-engineer my old and still functioning radio to see whether the programs it used to broadcast or would broadcast , to see whether they are still living inside of my radio or not ?
Not to mention that i , maybe , should destroy both my tv set and radio just to see if those respectively received images ,and programs were/are 'created " by respectively my tv set and radio ?
Come on, be serious .
Well, if you are going to drag the dusty tv set analogy out again, I have a question about it. What's a hallucination?
You can blame your broken tv set for not showing Obama or CNN when it's supposed to, but a broken tv set cannot create on its own programs or music, (as you've pointed out multiple times) You can't blame hallucinations on the brain as a faulty receiver of sensory information, because there is no sensory information being received that is creating the hallucination. Where is it coming from? I can explain hallucinations if the qualia of consciousness is generated by the brain itself - for example, the hallucinations that result from temporal lobe seizures. But how would the immaterial consciousness create a hallucination and at the same time mistake it for reality? Again, you can't blame it on the brain as a faulty receiver, because according to you, conscious experience isn't generated or experienced in the brain.
[/quote]
I took LSD once , just once , and oh , girl , i would not like to take it again, no way .
You do know what LSD does to the brain and mind .
I did also experiment with other drugs , soft and hard , but LSD was way out of my league haha : very unpleasant experience was that , i do not wish to experience again .
Mind and body do affect each other , how ? : beat me , that does not mean that the mind is in the brain, or that the brain creates the mind , come on, the same goes for hallucinations .
"The mind is in the brain " is just a logical extension of the materialist false conception of nature, in the sense that everything is just material or physical , including the mind thus : that's no empirical fact , not even remotely close thus : the materialist mainstream false "scientific world view " just makes the available scientific data to date fit into its materialist world view , not the other way around thus .
Get that ?
"The mind is in the brain" absurd surreal ... materialist bullshit implies that the whole "universe within and without " is inside of the physical brain , come on, be serious .
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Get that ?
What's there to get, Don?? All you said was you once took LSD, "beats me," and restated your opinion that materialism is false.
What do you mean exactly by "the same goes for hallucinations"?
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Get that ?
What's there to get, Don?? All you said was you once took LSD, "beats me," and restated your opinion that materialism is false.
What do you mean exactly by "the same goes for hallucinations"?
[/quote]
We don't speak the same English or rather the same language haha ,metaphorically speaking then, you and i , i see :
You just want me to try to explain hallucinations also ,within just the false materialist mainstream "scientific world view " in fact , i guess , while i am anti-reductionism , and hence i do reject that false "scientific world view " that's no science , just a false materialist conception of nature .
You just want me to talk science , in the materialist "scientific world view " sense .
Hallucinations can be explained in the same fashion the effects of brain damage ,the effects of drugs , of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia ........can be : within the old -new -eternal mind -body issue :
You do stick to your absurd surreal materialist "mind is in the brain " belief assumption ,concerning mind and body ,or mind and brain , i do stick to mine that's dualist ,so, in the sense that hallucinations are the "products " of mind-body , or brain-mind mutual effects on one another : how brain-mind affect each other as to "produce " hallucinations ,due to drugs use , mental illness, brain disorder , brain damage ....= beat me .
It all comes down to how we pic reality as a whole , depends thus on our own conceptions of nature , and hence on our position regarding mind and body or brain and mind issue thus , regarding the nature and origins of consciousness .
The materialist mainstream dominating false 'scientific world view " = reality as a whole is just material or physical can only logically assume therefore that the "mind is in the brain ", and hence can only logically try to explain hallucinations and the rest concerning mind and brain or mind and body just in those material physical biological terms .
So, we are not talking science here , just conceptions of nature .
That's all .
Take care .
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We don't speak the same English or rather the same language haha ,metaphorically speaking then, you and i , i see :
You just want me to try to explain hallucinations also ,within just the false materialist mainstream "scientific world view " in fact , i guess , while i am anti-reductionism , and hence i do reject that false "scientific world view " that's no science , just a false materialist conception of nature .
You just want me to talk science , in the materialist "scientific world view " sense .
No, that's exactly the opposite of what I was trying to do. I am asking you to explain hallucinations with your view of the immaterial consciousness. I was not refuting or denying anything you said, just asking how it works.
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We don't speak the same English or rather the same language haha ,metaphorically speaking then, you and i , i see :
You just want me to try to explain hallucinations also ,within just the false materialist mainstream "scientific world view " in fact , i guess , while i am anti-reductionism , and hence i do reject that false "scientific world view " that's no science , just a false materialist conception of nature .
You just want me to talk science , in the materialist "scientific world view " sense .
No, that's exactly the opposite of what I was trying to do. I am asking you to explain hallucinations with your view of the immaterial consciousness. I was not refuting or denying anything you said, just asking how it works.
[/quote]
I don't know , i just don't buy the materialist "explanation " of hallucinations ,that's no science, simply because the false mainstream materialist "scientific world view " can only assume that the brain creates the mind , or that the mind is in the brain , and hence it fails to address the issue of mind and body , including hallucinations, it fails to address them scientifically .
I said many times that the mind and body or brain and mind do affect each other , in ways we do not know nothing about ,so .
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I think a good idea is to try to say how you would design an electronic system to have free will. Such words and phrases as "intelligence" and "make a choice" would be disallowed. You'd have to describe the blocks that do this and explain how they do it in terms that an electronics engineer and/or a programmer could understand. Apart form a whole lot of data about what's going on in the environment of the machine, ie the data being fed to it, he'd need a system of heirarchy for the various levels of importance which various facts can have, so that some form of automatic gating takes place to place the new facts (data) higher or lower on the list. Everything would have to be conditional on a number of other things so that when they change so could the importance levels. This is only to give a rough idea of what I'm proposing. To cater for all this the machine would need a lot of space and be very fast working. How would you describe such a machine? I would say that something like it goes on in our heads. The neurones have inside them quantum processes which involve the whole brain. These are housed inside micro tubules which contain virginal water for keeping the wave functions isolated until they are required. The final resolution of the U processes is not fully understood in quantum physics and all that happens is that as the wave function collapses we brutally replace U with an R process, which somehow misses the point. There is far more to the collapsing than we take into account and all the jumbo spoken about intelligence on this forum will be replaced by a new set of facts about how macro effects arise from quantum effects and intelligence occurs.
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I think a good idea is to try to say how you would design an electronic system to have free will. Such words and phrases as "intelligence" and "make a choice" would be disallowed. You'd have to describe the blocks that do this and explain how they do it in terms that an electronics engineer and/or a programmer could understand. Apart form a whole lot of data about what's going on in the environment of the machine, ie the data being fed to it, he'd need a system of heirarchy for the various levels of importance which various facts can have, so that some form of automatic gating takes place to place the new facts (data) higher or lower on the list. Everything would have to be conditional on a number of other things so that when they change so could the importance levels. This is only to give a rough idea of what I'm proposing. To cater for all this the machine would need a lot of space and be very fast working. How would you describe such a machine?
[/quote]
You do sound like our David Cooper .
We're no machines or computers ,silly , no living organism for that matter is , and no man-made machine can ever be sentient or living , let alone that it can ever possess any degree of free will , the latter that's a matter of the ...mind or consciousness mainly , even though sub-consciousness does play a role in our decision-making process ...
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Is The Free Will Just an Elaborate ...Illusion ?
Hi, folks :
Do tell me about it,please .
See the following on the subject :
Thanks , appreciate indeed.
Cheers
As you can see, there are many points of view and no one can prove their one is correct. As I said, what I would do in order to answer the question is consider how you would design a machine which has free will. For example it could have a heirarchy of various priorities and agendas and its "decisions" about every issue that comes along could be determined according to how it fits in with this heirarchy. Whether you would call its decisions free or not depends on how you define free. I know we are regarded as being other than machines but to say that "no machine can ever have free will" is pedantic and unproveable.
I've read what was said about causative formation and it seems to ignore the fact that in quantum physics there is a mystery surrounding how quantum resolution takes place. In this the so called U-process is incomplete and the wave function mysteriously becomes the R-process. If this was understood better we would understand how morphic resonance and many other macroscopic effects occur. As I keep saying, inside the neurones there are probably quantum calculations going on and wave functions collapsing and giving rise to effects such as we haven't understood before, effects such as morphic resonance and intelligence and awareness. You all on this forum fail to get the point sometimes :)
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Is The Free Will Just an Elaborate ...Illusion ?
Hi, folks :
Do tell me about it,please .
See the following on the subject :
Thanks , appreciate indeed.
Cheers
As you can see, there are many points of view and no one can prove their one is correct. As I said, what I would do in order to answer the question is consider how you would design a machine which has free will. For example it could have a heirarchy of various agendas and its "decisions" about every issue that comes along could be determined according to how it fits in with this heirarchy. Whether you would call its decisions free or not depends on how you define free. I know we are regarded as being other than machines but to say that "no machine can ever have free will" is pedantic and unproveable.
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Free will is mainly a matter of consciousness, even though sub-consciousness does play a role in just that :
Can anyone make sentient machines ?
Give me a break .
See above .
Ciao .
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The brain does thus not do much in fact , so to speak , the mind is the one doing almost everything , the brain merely generates the data it receives from our senses to be sent to our consciousness somehow thus , and then afterwards , the brain just receives back the corresponding process of the mind via reflecting its image , an image most scientists take for the cause of the process , thanks to materialism thus .
Which is why brain damage has no impact on the capability of the mind, and it's also why a fly can think every bit as well as a human, because its mind is not constrained by its tiny brain.
Brain damage just disconnects the specific brain damaged areas from their corresponding aspects of consciousness , it does not make the latter go away .
The physical brain is just the image of the process of consciousness, not its cause .
The physical brain as both a generator ( via our senses thus ) and a receiver of consciousness, the latter as some sort of a transmitter , i guess .
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You seem to know a lot about the human brain. Do you consider that the system of neurons is all there is (apart from its support systems such as blood, lymph, cooling etc)? Have you read about the possibility of quantum entanglement that occurs between electrons inside the micro tubules inside the neurons? Perhaps these form a quantum computer? Ref. "Shadows of the mind" by Professor Sir Roger Penrose? Maybe this is where the free will comes from?
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Okay, okay, let's say that everyone around the world, scientists included, accept the existence of the immaterial. What happens next, DonQuichotte?
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Okay, okay, let's say that everyone around the world, scientists included, accept the existence of the immaterial. What happens next, DonQuichotte?
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Ok, k, k : they will have to , they have no other choice but to do just that ,if they wanna deserve fully to be called true scientists at least,if all sciences for that matter wanna deserve fully to be called sciences at least .
They can't just try to explain the whole pic , just via its physical or material side ,while assuming that that single side is all what there is to reality as a whole no way , obviously .
Use your imagination then : all sciences will have to change radically : they will have to undergo no less than a revolutionary and radical shift of meta-paradigm , not just a paradigm shift : you will have to throw a lots of your presumed "scientific " knowledge out of the window , to start with , that has been just materialist crap, just materialist belief assumptions ...
Congratulations ...and condolences .
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http://www.amazon.com/Morphic-Resonance-Nature-Formative-Causation/dp/1594773173
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Can you be more specific? What precisely will have to be modified about science? How will it affect our day-to-day lives? Will it help us be a better society? How will it change our behavior? If so, how?
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Can you be more specific? What precisely will have to be modified about science? How will it affect our day-to-day lives? Will it help us be a better society? How will it change our behavior? If so, how?
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Time up, sorry : later ,then .
Check out your pm .
Take care .
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Okay, okay, let's say that everyone around the world, scientists included, accept the existence of the immaterial. What happens next, DonQuichotte?
Use your imagination
hahahaa. great answer.
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http://www.amazon.com/Morphic-Resonance-Nature-Formative-Causation/dp/1594773173
[Rupert Sheldrake] put forward the hypothesis of formative causation (the theory of morphic resonance), which proposes that phenomena — particularly biological ones — become more probable the more often they occur, and therefore that biological growth and behaviour become guided into patterns laid down by previous similar events.
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
The existence of minority groups like left-handers shows Rupert’s positive-feedback “morphic resonance” hypothesis does not correspond with reality : the momentum of all the right-handed “morphic resonance” should make everyone right-handed .
With positive-feedback once more than half the population had become right or left handed it would just a matter of time before everyone was born with the same handedness.
Similarly if Rupert was correct he , a white person , should not exist, as dark-skinned “morphic resonance” should make everyone on the planet dark-skinned.
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http://www.amazon.com/Morphic-Resonance-Nature-Formative-Causation/dp/1594773173
[Rupert Sheldrake] put forward the hypothesis of formative causation (the theory of morphic resonance), which proposes that phenomena — particularly biological ones — become more probable the more often they occur, and therefore that biological growth and behaviour become guided into patterns laid down by previous similar events.
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
The existence of minority groups like left-handers shows Rupert’s positive-feedback “morphic resonance” hypothesis does not correspond with reality : the momentum of all the right-handed “morphic resonance” should make everyone right-handed .
With positive-feedback once more than half the population had become right or left handed it would just a matter of time before everyone was born with the same handedness.
Similarly if Rupert was correct he , a white person , should not exist, as dark-skinned “morphic resonance” should make everyone on the planet dark-skinned.
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What interests me most in that fascinating book of Sheldrake is what science is ...not .
Physics and chemistry alone cannot account for life ,let alone for its origins emergence or evolution that cannot be just material or physical , the same goes for human language , morphogenesis,and the rest ....+consciousness ,including matter itself that cannot be just material or physical (see quantum physics ,regarding the latter ) , including evolution itself that cannot be just ...biological ...
Use your imagination then : Cheryl seems to find this latter so hilarious ,that's why i repeat it, just to please her : use your imagination then : i am serious haha.
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Physics and chemistry alone cannot account for life ,let alone for its origins emergence or evolution that cannot be just material or physical , the same goes for human language , morphogenesis ...
Chemistry has got morphogenesis covered ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_chemical_basis_of_morphogenesis
In recent times, reaction–diffusion systems have attracted much interest as a prototype model for pattern formation. The above-mentioned patterns (fronts, spirals, targets, hexagons, stripes and dissipative solitons) can be found in various types of reaction-diffusion systems in spite of large discrepancies e.g. in the local reaction terms. It has also been argued that reaction-diffusion processes are an essential basis for processes connected to morphogenesis in biology and may even be related to animal coats and skin pigmentation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction%E2%80%93diffusion_system#Applications_and_universality
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Physics and chemistry alone cannot account for life ,let alone for its origins emergence or evolution that cannot be just material or physical ,
not proven
the same goes for human language , morphogenesis,and the rest ....+consciousness ,
not proven
including matter itself that cannot be just material or physical (see quantum physics ,regarding the latter ) ,
not proven
including evolution itself that cannot be just ...biological ...
not proven
Use your imagination then : Cheryl seems to find this latter so hilarious ,that's why i repeat it, just to please her : use your imagination then : i am serious haha.
What's hilarious about the "use your imagination" comment is that it illustrates so well that you yourself have no idea what the immaterial is or is not, and cannot say how science should incorporate the immaterial into experiments, or verify findings related to immaterial, you just claim over and over that it should do so.
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We seem to think that what the neurones do cannot explain intelligence. Why ever not? How they do it is the mystery. Inside them are quantum processes which couple with the whole brain. When the wave functions collapse the R process does not explain everything. Once we understand this effect in quantum theory we will understand how quantum process affects macro events. Until then we don't. So we don't understand how intelligence occurs.
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If society as a whole accepted the existence of the immaterial, that would seem problematic. By your own admission, science cannot test for the immaterial and therefore can make no discovery in regards to it. That means our conclusions about the nature of the immaterial would have to be philosophical and based soley upon our own reasoning and/or personal experience. The question then becomes, how can we ever know anything definitive about the immaterial if we cannot come to any agreement upon its nature? Surely different people will have different opinions about it. You can't even use science to figure out who is right. I have a hard time figuring out how society could be benefited by this. If it can't help us, should we even bother trying to prove it?
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If society as a whole accepted the existence of the immaterial, that would seem problematic. By your own admission, science cannot test for the immaterial and therefore can make no discovery in regards to it. That means our conclusions about the nature of the immaterial would have to be philosophical and based soley upon our own reasoning and/or personal experience. The question then becomes, how can we ever know anything definitive about the immaterial if we cannot come to any agreement upon its nature? Surely different people will have different opinions about it. You can't even use science to figure out who is right. I have a hard time figuring out how society could be benefited by this. If it can't help us, should we even bother trying to prove it?
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Who said that ? Opinions do change , you know : they are not static,nothing is in fact : see this on the subject : only idiots fools or materialists can't change their minds ,not even in the face of counter-evidence :
7 Experiments that could change the world :
P.S.: Who said humanity or society cannot benefit from rejecting materialism in science ? : the benefits will be huge : more huge than we can ever imagine .
I do think that the next and much more important level of human evolution will be occuring at the very level of ...consciousness , the latter that's THE key to revealing most of the mysteries within and without : we can only try to imagine what that might deliver in the future ,for humanity as a whole : that's beyond our imagination even ,at this point of history at least .
See this as well on the subject , while you are at it :
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the benefits will be huge : more huge than we can ever imagine .
Give us some examples.
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Personally, I must take the position that, until I find a self-consistent definition of "free will" I'll have to doubt its existence.
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Personally, I must take the position that, until I find a self-consistent definition of "free will" I'll have to doubt its existence.
I'm not exactly sure I know what you mean by self consistent, but its a puzzling concept, regardless. I like Patricia Churchlands description of it:
"A rigid philosophical tradition claims that no choice is free unless it is uncaused;that is, unless the"will" is exercised independently of all causal influences - in a causal vacuum."
This problem doesn't have a lot to do with materialism or anti-materialism. Religious sects like Calvinism believed in predestination for reasons that had nothing to do with brains. If God is omniscient, then He knows what you are going to do before you do it. If you "change your mind" and take a different path, it's only because He decided that that is what should happen. If its preordained, then there's no way out, there's no way things could have been any different from the way things turned out, regardless of the reason.
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I have abstained from this argument so far, on the grounds that we have no agreed definition of free will, which makes the exercise as pointless as a discussion of consciousness.
But I think we can agree that complete freedom of action is not possible. Even in the absence of societal restraints, we are still bound by the laws of physics.
So whilst there might be no limits on your imagination, we cannot demonstrate, or even verbalise, every imaginable action.
Hence free will is not demonstrable, so its existence cannot be proved.
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Free will is indeed something that puzzles me. Every time we make a decision, presumably there is a reason behind it. Ultimately, that reason will come from something beyond ourselves. If I decide to eat a cookie, it is at least partially because my brain has a reward system set up that activates when sugar is consumed. I could decide to avoid eating the cookie on the grounds that I am on a diet, but that too is ultimately based on outside influences (a desire to be healthier or to fit a public image of attractiveness). If we were to make a decision that isn't based on any reasoning at all, then isn't the decision pretty much random? If a decision is completely random, can it be said that we actually had any part in making it in the first place? For me to say that "I can't imagine how free will could exist, therefore it does not" would be the argument from incredulity, so I cannot say that free will is impossible. However, it would be nice to see some sound argument in support of its existence.
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The only way I can make sense of the idea is to think of it more in terms of flexibility, the number of possible choices or outcomes per one input or stimulus. A lizard might only have one response to a stimulus, and that stimulus has reach a certain threshold. A dog, a chimp, a human, has many possible responses, and a lot more stumuli are evaluated and compared in determining a response. The difference between less conscious animals and more conscious animals, is that humans or chimps go back and evaluate the outcome of their responses (in the words of Dr. Phil "hows that working for you?") and they incorporate that information in determining what they do next time. A lizard has a lot less flexibility in that respect and probably just runs the exact same program over and over.
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Folks :
I do suggest that we all should move back ,or restrict ourselves to the consciousness thread , in order to discuss these highly fascinating issues ,simply because almost all of these issues and more can be be brought back to the hard problem of consciousness ,the latter that's THE key to understanding ourselves and this universe within and without, instead of "fragmenting " our energies and time on multiple threads .
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I do agree that we need to consolidate this whole immaterial argument into one thread. Having it spread out over several different ones is just sloppy. Heck, I'm considering giving up on the whole thing because nobody is making any real progress in any direction despite the massive number of responses that we've thrown at each other.
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I do agree that we need to consolidate this whole immaterial argument into one thread. Having it spread out over several different ones is just sloppy. Heck, I'm considering giving up on the whole thing because nobody is making any real progress in any direction despite the massive number of responses that we've thrown at each other.
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Right : we are not pretending to try though to solve these big issues ,we are just exchanging thoughts about them : i did get learn a lot from the insights of people here that did lead me to unexpected sources and ideas,you have no idea .
Just try to do the same then ,also by checking my displayed sources and material all over these threads , especially on the consciousness thread .
So, all these discussions are just supposed to be a starting point in one's own research on the matter .
Good luck with your own re-search and journey .
Thanks, appreciate indeed .
Take care .
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The difference between less conscious animals and more conscious animals, is that humans or chimps go back and evaluate the outcome of their responses ..... A lizard has a lot less flexibility in that respect and probably just runs the exact same program over and over.
I think the underlying suggestion that cold-blooded animals are less able to reflect, learn or solve problems, lacks evidence, though you may have some. There is considerable evidence of the ability of octopi to solve problems and to learn from the actions of humans, and ants on the march seem at least as intelligent as human crowds.
You need to map the idea of learning, reflection, or whatever, into the space of the physical capability of the animal you are studying. Hence you can't dismiss dogs as "intellectually unable to use tools" because they simply don't have the anatomical ability to manipulate a prosthetic device, nor any need to count beyond about six - though their understanding of differential calculus is way beyond that of most humans. So I guess your lizard is a bit restricted in its range of potential responses and prior life experiences from which to draw analogies that you might recognise. But he might consider growing a new tail or walking on the ceiling as experiences and responses which are way beyond your ken or ability!
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I think the underlying suggestion that cold-blooded animals are less able to reflect, learn or solve problems, lacks evidence, though you may have some. There is considerable evidence of the ability of octopi to solve problems and to learn from the actions of humans, and ants on the march seem at least as intelligent as human crowds.
You need to map the idea of learning, reflection, or whatever, into the space of the physical capability of the animal you are studying. Hence you can't dismiss dogs as "intellectually unable to use tools" because they simply don't have the anatomical ability to manipulate a prosthetic device, nor any need to count beyond about six - though their understanding of differential calculus is way beyond that of most humans. So I guess your lizard is a bit restricted in its range of potential responses and prior life experiences from which to draw analogies that you might recognise. But he might consider growing a new tail or walking on the ceiling as experiences and responses which are way beyond your ken or ability!
I would agree with that. And it seems unlikely that learning or problem solving just popped into existence with homo sapiens.
I once watched an ant circle a dead bug on a picnic table, and push it off the edge. It made the long trek down to where the dead bug landed and hauled it away. Maybe they do that all the time, I don't know, but it seemed rather clever.
This month's issue of Scientific American has an article about face recognition by wasps. (Wasps can recognize faces. They didn't write an article about face recognition.) Anyway, it says that paper wasps "can perceive and memorize one anothers unique facial markings and are able to use information to distinguish individuals during subsequent interactions, much as humans navigate their social environment by learning and remembering the faces of family, friends and colleagues" and "can at times even learn to tell human faces apart." The article also says wasps don't respond to facial features separately, but perceive and process the face as whole.
"The occurrence of face specialization in both humans and wasps suggests that this mechanism could be more wide spread in the animal kingdom than previously thought."
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Personally, I must take the position that, until I find a self-consistent definition of "free will" I'll have to doubt its existence.
I'm not exactly sure I know what you mean by self consistent, but its a puzzling concept, regardless. I like Patricia Churchlands description of it:
"A rigid philosophical tradition claims that no choice is free unless it is uncaused;that is, unless the"will" is exercised independently of all causal influences - in a causal vacuum."
Churchland's description perfectly sets up my problem with "free will" definitions. How does one make a free choice?
The choice must be based on the the nature of the individual. Where does that nature come from? It comes from inheritance, environment, and random chance; all of which are outside factors.
If choice is causal then it must be dependent upon factors that predate, or at least are external to, the individual. If choice is not causal then it's outside of the individual's control.
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...(Prior note :
This thread was just inspired by dlorde's relative explanations of the maths of chaos to me ,that's all .
So, i just wanted to hear his own opinion on the subject of free will ,since he said that free will can exist even within a deterministic universe .
Stuff like that .)
Uh-huh. Usually when people want my opinion on something they ask me. If they create a thread for the purpose, they let me know. Just sayin'.
But as you derailed your own thread to bang on about materialism in science, I wonder whether you're still interested.
If you are still interested, we need to define what we're talking about. I have yet to hear a coherent non-compatibilist definition for free will, so please give a clear and unambiguous definition or explanation of precisely what you mean by 'free will', and I'll give a detailed response.
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I do agree that we need to consolidate this whole immaterial argument into one thread. Having it spread out over several different ones is just sloppy. Heck, I'm considering giving up on the whole thing because nobody is making any real progress in any direction despite the massive number of responses that we've thrown at each other.
And the reason for that dilemma revolves around the eminent fact that the subject matter in these threads is more about philosophy, and or faith, than it is about science. I suggest we offer a philosophy category at NSF and move these threads to that location.
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There are many intriguing scientific aspects to free will and consciousness, and we could discuss them, if certain individuals didn't derail every thread they enter to bloviate about their personal obsessions...
It seems to me that only firm moderation can manage that kind of thing.
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There are many intriguing scientific aspects to free will and consciousness, and we could discuss them, if certain individuals didn't derail every thread they enter to bloviate about their personal obsessions...
It seems to me that only firm moderation can manage that kind of thing.
Agreed...................we patiently wait!!!!!!!!!!
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Some neurologists say that the big questions or the hard problem of consciousness or free will may be solved by answering the easy ones, and when I see articles like this, I tend to agree. If it doesn't explain free will, it does seem to explain why we feel as though we have it. It also demonstrates top-down control, something that critics of reductionist neuroscience say is missing.
Pinpointing the brain's arbitrator: Reliability weighed before brain centers given control
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140205133254.htm
"With the results from those tests in hand, the researchers were able to compare the fMRI data and choices made by the subjects against several computational models they constructed to account for behavior. The model that most accurately matched the experimental data involved the two brain systems making separate predictions about which action to take in a given situation. Receiving signals from those systems, the arbitrator kept track of the reliability of the predictions by measuring the difference between the predicted and actual outcomes for each system. It then used those reliability estimates to determine how much control each system should exert over the individual's behavior. In this model, the arbitrator ensures that the system making the most reliable predictions at any moment exerts the greatest degree of control over behavior.
'What we're showing is the existence of higher-level control in the human brain,' says Sang Wan Lee, lead author of the new study and a postdoctoral scholar in neuroscience at Caltech. 'The arbitrator is basically making decisions about decisions.'"
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'What we're showing is the existence of higher-level control in the human brain,' says Sang Wan Lee, lead author of the new study and a postdoctoral scholar in neuroscience at Caltech. 'The arbitrator is basically making decisions about decisions.'"[/size]
What I found very interesting was the observation that habitual behavior was more or less the default mode for this decision making. And only when more goal directed behavior was recognized as necessary was the arbitrator given authority over this default mode. Curious what complex beings we humans are......................?
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It seems to me that we tend to become consciously aware of the decision-making process (rather than just its results) when such arbitration is necessary. When the options are very closely matched in estimated suitability, or neither appears sufficiently reliable to enable a good choice, additional resources must be recruited to supply additional information to weigh on either side, or to increase the apparent reliability of an option. The more additional resources are needed, or the wider the mental net is cast for more information, the more widespread the neural activation and the more consciously aware we become of it.
I find this most noticeable when there is a trivial choice to be made, about which I have no preference, or where my preference is balanced by some other (often social) constraint, and yet there is pressure (often social) to make a definite choice (e.g. "Chocolate or strawberry?" or "Would you like the last biscuit?"). In these situations, instead of becoming aware of responding with an obvious answer (e.g. "No" to, "Do you take sugar?"), I become aware of casting around for some new data to enable an acceptable choice, and thinking, "this ought to be really easy - but it's not..."
An interesting take on free will I heard recently:
"If you do what you do because of the way you are, then to change what you do you must change the way you are, but to change the way you are you must change what you do, and you do what you do because of the way you are..."
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I find this most noticeable when there is a trivial choice to be made, about which I have no preference, or where my preference is balanced by some other (often social) constraint, and yet there is pressure (often social) to make a definite choice (e.g. "Chocolate or strawberry?"
This is the conflict of choice we all face isn't it, to abide by the social norm or to make our decision based upon individual preference. Causes one to consider the difference between the personal aim and the hive mentality. Are we as a society evolving toward a hive structure when social aims become dominant in our thought processes? And if so, will we ultimately grow into a social structure similar to a very advanced bee hive or ant colony? Will the individual cease to exist as we move closer to the domination of the hive?
An interesting take on free will I heard recently:
"If you do what you do because of the way you are, then to change what you do you must change the way you are, but to change the way you are you must change what you do, and you do what you do because of the way you are..."
Indeed, sounds very deterministic to me and quite logical IMO.
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... Are we as a society evolving toward a hive structure when social aims become dominant in our thought processes? And if so, will we ultimately grow into a social structure similar to a very advanced bee hive or ant colony? Will the individual cease to exist as we move closer to the domination of the hive?
I don't think so - we have too great a variation in individual traits and abilities, and a strong (and sometimes labile) drive towards multiple group affiliation at multiple levels (family, friends, team, interests, beliefs, age group, town, county, country, etc).
An interesting take on free will I heard recently:
"If you do what you do because of the way you are, then to change what you do you must change the way you are, but to change the way you are you must change what you do, and you do what you do because of the way you are..."
Indeed, sounds very deterministic to me and quite logical IMO.
It becomes tricky if the way you are means you can change what you do, i.e. you're the sort of person who can change the way you are - including a (one-time) change to being the sort of person who can't change the way you are.
This exposes a flaw in that kind of thinking about the problem - that there is a self-referential complication; for example, there are the many traits and behaviours that make up the sort of person you are, which may or may not be changeable, and there are also the traits that (may) make you the sort of person who can change those many traits and behaviours (or not).