On 07 Apr 2012, at 08:22, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
Craig,
You may like this paper as well
Klemm, W. (2010). Free will debates: Simple experiments are not so
simple, Advances in Cognitive Psychology
http://versita.metapress.com/content/l820g65u22883625/fulltext.pdf
I have not yet read the whole paper, but I agree with his main critics
against the idea that free will is an illusion.
It is almost like saying that consciousness is an illusion.
I refute only the conception that free-will is opposed to determinism,
or that free will has no mechanical justification.
But as I define it, (free will is the ability to make a voluntary
conscious choice in situation with partial information), free will is
real, and it gives the main role to consciousness as a speeding up
factor, and often as building a simplified conception of the local
reality around us.
Free-will is a generalization of responsibility, and attempts to
defend the idea that free-will does not exist can lead to an
elimination of the role of consciousness and conscience.
That attitude is doubly dangerous socially, I think, in time where
(white collar) bandits develop tools for diluting responsibility in
all sort of economical and health affair.
In fact I think that the idea that free will is an illusion is one of
the many defect brought by Aristotle naturalistic philosophy, and the
idea that we can separate science from religion. This can only
transform science into a pseudo-religion, and indeed into the worst
possible religion, where humans become the tools of the environment
and others. It leads to confusion of means and goals. It kill
spiritual values.
The fake political use of religion, which lasts since a long time in
occident, can only be promoted by the rejection of free-will and
conscience.
Basically, I suspect some 1/3 confusion in any attempt to reject free
will. It is like confusing a third person account of your behavior,
which exists and does not use free will, with the first person account
which can use it. it is just impossible for a machine to identify
those accounts. Such abstract appeal to the view from outside is a
form of lie, quite compatible to the use of God as argument per
authority.
Free-will is based on a form of necessary self-ignorance, and it can
be said not existing, in some absolute sense which can not make sense
in the first person vision.
It is an illusion, but only in a third person sense which is simply
NOT available to the subject: so it cannot be an illusion from the
first person perspective: the ignorance is real, and we have to take
into account in our local real concrete decisions.
That is why, also, consciousness can be real, and do have an important
role in evolution and life. Those things are unreal only from a point
of view which is not accessible to us.
The fact that God, or some omniscient being or equation can predict my
behavior does not prevent it to be free. I defend the compatibilist
approach to free will, if that was not clear.
With comp, a similar error would be to derive the non existence of
matter from the non existence of primitive matter. I can, in some
conversation conceded that free will is an illusion, but then it is a
"real illusion", like matter and everything.
This illustrates also that mechanism + materialism can lead to
nihilism, of sense, conscience, and in fine of humanity. Free-will is
necessary for keeping the vigilance against the pressure against your
universal nature. It is necessary to fight for having more freedom,
and for avoiding being swallowed and became a particular tool of your
neighborhood. Those arguing against free will can only help those
wanting to manipulate you for their special interests.
Bruno
I have seen it on a Russian cite:
http://nature-wonder.livejournal.com/189090.html
Evgenii
On 06.04.2012 14:17 Craig Weinberg said the following:
Two more reasons to suspect that consciousness is received through
the
brain directly as primitive sense rather than decoded as complex
information.
"The data from the seven participants were unambiguous. Paying
attention to the target consistently and strongly increased the fMRI
activity, regardless of whether the subject saw the target or not.
This result was expected because many previous studies had shown that
attending to a signal reinforces its representation in the cortex.
Much more intriguing, though, was that whether or not the stimulus
was
consciously perceived made no difference to signal strength.
Visibility didn’t matter to V1; what did was whether or not selective
visual attention focused on the grating. Indeed, the experimentalists
could not decode from the signal whether or not the subject saw the
stimulus."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=consciousness-does-not-reside-here
"We expected to see the outer bits of brain, the cerebral cortex
(often thought to be the seat of higher human consciousness), would
turn back on when consciousness was restored following anesthesia.
Surprisingly, that is not what the images showed us. In fact, the
central core structures of the more primitive brain structures
including the thalamus and parts of the limbic system appeared to
become functional first, suggesting that a foundational primitive
conscious state must be restored before higher order conscious
activity can occur"
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/aof-sst040412.php
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
