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[author=dlorde link=topic=52526.msg445841#msg445841 date=1417654761]Quote from: DonQuichotte on 03/12/2014 20:29:41dlorde : Volitional effort is effort of attention.Attention and volition are the effects of activity in particular (executive) areas of the brain.
dlorde : Volitional effort is effort of attention.
QuoteEffort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will : Therefore will is neural activity. You, as a conscious aware individual, are the activity of your brain. That's what the evidence tells us.
Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will :
QuoteMy take on the free will issue can be inferred from the above , in the sense that we do choose from all those existing infinite possibilities...That's a reasonable interpretation. Ironically, like quantum mechanics, free will is a matter of interpretation. Consider why you make a particular choice - you have some reason or preference. Such reasons and preferences are the unique result of the person you are at the time you make the choice; and the person you are is the unique result of a lifetime of experiences, perceptions, memories; filtered and assimilated, having their dynamic influence on the development and organisation of your brain.
My take on the free will issue can be inferred from the above , in the sense that we do choose from all those existing infinite possibilities...
If, by accident or design, relevant parts of your brain are damaged, stimulated or suppressed, your choices can change. Your preferences may change, your reasons may change, your personality may change, your morals and ethics may change (this kind of damage has been observed and these experiments have been done).
Whether the results of all this complex neural activity can be considered deterministic is dubious - a certain degree of reliability and repeatability is necessary for effective function, but QM apart, the brain uses noise in its processing which can introduce a degree of randomness. It's certainly inherently unpredictable (despite the surprisingly high general predictability of human activity) due to the complexity of the system and its multiple feedbacks (and a degree of chaotic activity).
author=dlorde link=topic=52526.msg445839#msg445839 date=1417652153]Quote from: DonQuichotte on 03/12/2014 17:28:11Well, then read my above posted evidence to the contrary of what you were saying here above , to see for yourself : prepare yourself for a surprise, big time : Your baseless and blind confidence in all that related materialistic non-sense on the subject will be shaken, big time : It has been proved ,via many experiments mentioned here above and more , that the mind can alter the structure or anatomy and physiology of the brain through the effort of volition via the effort of attention or focus : that's called self-directed neuroplasticity .All those studies are quite consistent with what I posted already. The areas of the brain controlling attention, focus, and volition have been identified and some of the mechanisms and pathways by which they effect their influence on other areas of the brain have been identified and, in some cases, traced. As already mentioned, the research was originally prompted by the observation of specific deficits of those functions by damage to the areas concerned or to their connectivity.
Well, then read my above posted evidence to the contrary of what you were saying here above , to see for yourself : prepare yourself for a surprise, big time : Your baseless and blind confidence in all that related materialistic non-sense on the subject will be shaken, big time : It has been proved ,via many experiments mentioned here above and more , that the mind can alter the structure or anatomy and physiology of the brain through the effort of volition via the effort of attention or focus : that's called self-directed neuroplasticity .
That you are unable to conceive that your will and volition is neural activity in those executive areas of your brain is something we can't help you with. It is a counter-intuitive realisation on a par with that of the strangeness of quantum mechanics, but in both cases we must follow the evidence rather than intuition.
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 03/12/2014 20:57:25Cheryl, You were just repeating the refuted materialistic stuff on the subject ,and that before reading my posted evidence also . You haven't read about all those mentioned experiments here above yet , so, how can you tell then ?Those experiments just prove the causal efficacy of the effort of mindful and active volition through the effort of focus or attention in changing the neuronal correlates accordingly (The mind can change the brain , can have causal effects on the brain ...) , a fact that has been denied as such by the intrinsic reductionistic epiphenomalism of materialism , in the sense that the mind cannot have any causal effects on the physical brain , let alone on the rest of the physical reality .The evidence for which you were asking all along is there above : you can either deliberately choose to check it out while paying the necessary effort of attention to it through your mindful effort of volition , or not .That's entirely up to you then . I know it takes quite some time to read all that , but it's worth it . You are implying that I am rejecting a claim without adequately looking at your evidence, or not reading "carefully" enough, but what you don't seem to understand is that I am not rejecting the evidence itself. I am not rejecting the author's assertion that volitional acts can alter how information is perceived, or saying that the events observed in the experiments did not occur. I am objecting to the axiomatic assumption that volition requires the immaterial. As with Stapp, it's just assumed, not explained.And oddly so, since their findings keep indicating that volition requires specific intact brain structures to effect any changes in neuroplasticity which are also required to create other changes in the expression of will.
Cheryl, You were just repeating the refuted materialistic stuff on the subject ,and that before reading my posted evidence also . You haven't read about all those mentioned experiments here above yet , so, how can you tell then ?Those experiments just prove the causal efficacy of the effort of mindful and active volition through the effort of focus or attention in changing the neuronal correlates accordingly (The mind can change the brain , can have causal effects on the brain ...) , a fact that has been denied as such by the intrinsic reductionistic epiphenomalism of materialism , in the sense that the mind cannot have any causal effects on the physical brain , let alone on the rest of the physical reality .The evidence for which you were asking all along is there above : you can either deliberately choose to check it out while paying the necessary effort of attention to it through your mindful effort of volition , or not .That's entirely up to you then . I know it takes quite some time to read all that , but it's worth it .
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 02/12/2014 20:43:57.....James was scrupulously fair in giving equal time to the view that attention is a fully determined result of brain function rather than a causally efficacious force. As he notes, it is entirely plausible that attention may be “fatally predetermined” by purely material laws. In this view, the amount of attention we pay a stimulus, be it one from the world outside or an internally generated thought or image, is determined solely by the properties of that stimulus and their interaction with our brain’s circuits. If the words you hear or the images you see are associated with a poignant memory, for instance, then they trigger—automatically and without any active effort by you —more attention than stimuli that lack such associations. In this case, “attention only fixes and retains what the ordinary laws of association bring ‘before the footlights’ of consciousness,” as James put it.That is, the stimuli themselves provoke neural mechanisms that cause them to be attended to and fixed on. This is the attention-as-effect school of thinking.But James did not think that attention was always and only a fully determined effect of the stimuli that are its object...." Same source .This paragraph would seem to illustrate the difference in interpretation quite well. Anti-materialists falsely attribute to neuroscience the view that the brain is a uniform, unvarying, unmodifiable structure, that should respond to the exact same stimulus the exact same way every time. It falsely assumes a materialist model of the brain that should only respond to the strongest stimuli without determining the significance or relevance of stimuli, based on prior knowledge or experience. It ignores prior knowledge and new information from the outside world which is updated continuously. It ignores the influence of transient emotional states on perception, or makes one response more likely than another. When actually, neuroscience does not posit this static model at all, as I've already explained earlier. Topdown flow of information is as important as feed-forward pathways in the brain.
.....James was scrupulously fair in giving equal time to the view that attention is a fully determined result of brain function rather than a causally efficacious force. As he notes, it is entirely plausible that attention may be “fatally predetermined” by purely material laws. In this view, the amount of attention we pay a stimulus, be it one from the world outside or an internally generated thought or image, is determined solely by the properties of that stimulus and their interaction with our brain’s circuits. If the words you hear or the images you see are associated with a poignant memory, for instance, then they trigger—automatically and without any active effort by you —more attention than stimuli that lack such associations. In this case, “attention only fixes and retains what the ordinary laws of association bring ‘before the footlights’ of consciousness,” as James put it.That is, the stimuli themselves provoke neural mechanisms that cause them to be attended to and fixed on. This is the attention-as-effect school of thinking.But James did not think that attention was always and only a fully determined effect of the stimuli that are its object...." Same source .
Quote from: cheryl j on 03/12/2014 21:54:23Quote from: DonQuichotte on 03/12/2014 20:57:25Cheryl, You were just repeating the refuted materialistic stuff on the subject ,and that before reading my posted evidence also . You haven't read about all those mentioned experiments here above yet , so, how can you tell then ?Those experiments just prove the causal efficacy of the effort of mindful and active volition through the effort of focus or attention in changing the neuronal correlates accordingly (The mind can change the brain , can have causal effects on the brain ...) , a fact that has been denied as such by the intrinsic reductionistic epiphenomalism of materialism , in the sense that the mind cannot have any causal effects on the physical brain , let alone on the rest of the physical reality .The evidence for which you were asking all along is there above : you can either deliberately choose to check it out while paying the necessary effort of attention to it through your mindful effort of volition , or not .That's entirely up to you then . I know it takes quite some time to read all that , but it's worth it . You are implying that I am rejecting a claim without adequately looking at your evidence, or not reading "carefully" enough, but what you don't seem to understand is that I am not rejecting the evidence itself. I am not rejecting the author's assertion that volitional acts can alter how information is perceived, or saying that the events observed in the experiments did not occur. I am objecting to the axiomatic assumption that volition requires the immaterial. As with Stapp, it's just assumed, not explained.And oddly so, since their findings keep indicating that volition requires specific intact brain structures to effect any changes in neuroplasticity which are also required to create other changes in the expression of will.You just don't understand what they were saying , i guess .Since the mind and consciousness cannot be the products of the brain or brain activity.....
author=cheryl j link=topic=52526.msg445885#msg445885 date=1417727089]But that wasn't what their experiments demonstrated. They leap frog over the causes or correlates of volition itself, and just demonstrate that volition, what ever "it" is, regardless of how or why it happens, can change other types of brain activity. I'm not disputing that at all, and I agree that neuroplasticity is a very interesting and useful topic.
Cheryl : OCD Faulty but well established circuitry : In the case of OCD patients , the brain sends deceptive messages to the mind that takes them for granted as real and acts upon them (The origin of those deceptive messages can be traced back to childhood or later history of OCD patients) .OCD patients can then learn how to make the necessary effort to ignore those intrusive compulsory thoughts by trying to refocus away from them, relabel them , revalue them for what they are ( Brain faulty circuitry without any real power or reality ), through Schwartz' four -steps therapy : Quote : "...A major question now arises. How does the OCD patient focus attention away from the false messages transmitted by the faulty but well-established OCD circuit (“Count the cans in the pantry again!”) and toward the barely whispered “true” messages (“No, go feed the roses instead”) that are being transmitted by the still-frail circuits that therapy is coaxing into existence? Later on, once the “true” messages have been attended to and acted on for several weeks, they will probably have affected the gating of messages through the caudate and be ever-easier to act on. But early in therapy this process is weak, even nonexistent. It is not at all obvious how a patient heeds the healthy signal, which is just taking shape in his cortex and beginning to forge a new neural pathway through his caudate, and ignores the much more insistent one being generated incessantly by his firmly entrenched and blazingly hyperactive orbital frontal cortex–basal ganglia “error message” circuitry. And once appropriate attention has been paid, how does he activate the motor circuitry that will take him away from the pantry and toward the rose garden? This last is an especially high hurdle, given that movement toward the pantry followed by obsessive counting has been the patient’s habitual response to the OCD urge for years. As a result, the maladaptive motor response has its own very well established brain circuitry in the basal ganglia." End quote.
I am talking here about the effort of attention that's the essence of volition .You have to make the difference between passive determined attention and the volitional one through effort thus .
I am talking here about the effort of attention that's the essence of volition .
author=cheryl j link=topic=52526.msg445893#msg445893 date=1417731350]Well, I question the assumption that the compulsive thoughts are generated by the brain, but the desire not to act on them is not. Based on what evidence, when his fMRIs show that both events are accompanied by activity in certain areas of the brain?
There is nothing more material or immaterial about either type of thought, or at least he hasn't shown how they differ. One could also interpret his findings as the frontal cortex recognizing that the action is unnecessary or possibly even harmful and suppressing another area, and it likely gets easier with practice.
If I eat before going to the grocery store because I know I shop more sensibly when I am not hungry, is that necessarily "my immaterial will" or is it the result of learned past experience? How does one prove that my thoughts about eating healthy or saving money are more immaterial than my thoughts that a chocolate cake might be great for desert tonight? Or is it my prefrontal cortex recognizing that in order to accomplish a long term goal, I have to sacrifice a short term one, and I am better able to do that if I can reduce other brain activity (but I'm hungry!And that looks good!) that might override my prefrontal cortex's instructions while in the grocery store?
Mathematician John Nash said in later years that he refused to let himself think about politics or religion, because those topics seemed to lead to delusional or paranoid ideas. Even if the initial thought about those subjects seemed reasonable and benign, he just wouldn't "go there" and would distract himself with another topic. I'm sure non-schizophrenics use the same technique with memories that are emotionally traumatic or depressing.
Individuals have mixed emotions or conflicting views about many things, even topics that do not involve compulsions or urges. Which are the "true" thoughts or the immaterial ones? How does Schwartz know? And what, as he asks, determines the winners?
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 04/12/2014 20:31:00I am talking here about the effort of attention that's the essence of volition .You have to make the difference between passive determined attention and the volitional one through effort thus .Define effort, and explain why effort is somehow equivalent with immaterial.
Well, the brain usually sends messages to the mind from both the outside physical world as well as from the inner biological one,and gets feedbacks from the mind in return ,or not .