On 13 Mar 2010, at 23:15, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 3/13/2010 10:55 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Hi William,
OK I found it on the net:
http://www.socialbehavior.uzh.ch/teaching/semsocialneurosciencespring09/Haynes_NatNeurosci_2008_ext.pdf
But my comment will consist in repeating what I am always saying
about free will or free decision.
The existence of free acts has nothing to do with the fact that
such acts are determined, in advance or not.
The article, relatively to what I try to convey preaches the chore.
Given that free will is a high level self-referential ability, it
would be astonishing that the brain has not a lot of work to do,
and this including the transformation of the will into act.
Given that mechanism is my working hypothesis, the will cannot, in
no direct ways, influence any of my parts, say, at my substitution
level. "I" am emerging from billions of amoebas (neuronal cells)
which got the cables (axon), and without using drugs, I cannot
interfere deliberately on this or that specific neurons.
Also, I don't know if you have read my papers, but I do not attach
consciousness to a working brain, only to an abstract person, which
lives really in Platonia, and uses "only" its local brain to
manifest itself relatively to me with some high probability. But
the consciousness itself is attached to infinities of computations
(existing through elementary arithmetic, or combinators, etc.).
Could you explain that last. What does "attached to" mean? And is
the infinity related to quantum infinities, e.g. the infinite number
of paths in a Feynman path integral computation? or is it just the
potential aleph0 infinity of successive possible classical states?
I could have said "associated" or "attributed" instead of "attached".
To say that a brain is conscious is a category error. My brain is not
conscious (no more than a rock). The person who has that brain can be
said to be conscious.
The same consciousness will be associated to that person in all
computational histories going through the relevant brain's
computational state. Now the relative measure is put on the histories
(not the finite number of states), which makes a continuum of
histories 2^aleph_0 in the limit space of histories. We have to take
that limit space, because the first person is unaware of the delays
in the UD-time-step.
The border of the Mandelbrot set is a good illustration of what such a
limit space, when made compact, can look like.
I may say more on this in my reply to Marty.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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