On May 16, 12:41 pm, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, May 15, 2012 Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> That's exactly what a sore looser would say after he'd been thoroughly > >> beaten by a opponent. > > > > If I were beaten by a human opponent, why would I accuse them of not > > making decisions? What does winning or losing a game against a non-person > > have to do with awareness and subjectivity? If you get run over by a car > > does that mean it's suspicious if you state that the driver was at fault > > and not the car? > > That's a awful lot of questions and they all seem related to figuring out > why I wrote what I did, and yet I don't see how that can possibly be the > case. You think I have this thing you call "free will" and you say that > means I'm not deterministic,
I don't say that means you're not deterministic, I say that means you can make determinations. Sometimes those determinations are influenced more by conditions you perceive as external to yourself, and sometimes it is you who are influencing external conditions. The result is that you are neither 100% deterministic nor 100% indeterministic. > so asking me the reason I wrote that sentence > you don't like makes no sense, if I'm not deterministic then obviously > there is no reason whatsoever I wrote that sentence. I didn't ask you the reason you wrote that sentence, I was giving examples of how the reasoning you used in that sentence applied to another situation doesn't work. I point this out only to present an alternative to you that you can voluntarily choose to reason differently if it makes the same sense to you as it does to me. If you are completely deterministic, then how do you know that the car isn't driving you instead of you driving a car? There are stories about the drug scopolomine being used to turn people into 'zombies' in Columbia...whether there is any truth to those stories or not, the fact that we understand the difference between someone who is able to determine their own actions vs someone who is under the control of another would need to be explained in a deterministic world. What difference could it make who controls you, when everyone is controlled by physical forces? > > And someone might think my sentence cause you to write your list of > questions, that is to say you wouldn't have written what you did if I > didn't first write what I did; but no, you have free will too so you wrote > what you did for no reason just like me and it must have been a coincidence Some of us have been pointing out repeatedly that free will is neither fully deterministic nor random, nor fully not deterministic nor random. Just as Spring is neither fully Summer nor Winter, nor is it completely not Summer or Winter. Subjectivity sets teleological purpose as orthogonal to the objective determinism. If you insist upon arbitrarily reducing the universe to a single dimension of determined vs random, then you cannot understand consciousness as it actually is. > that your list of questions came out right after my sentence. And you > believe that although there was no reason behind your list of questions There were all kinds of reasons behind my listing of questions, but they were mostly my reasons. I created them by reasoning. > it > was not random either, it was caused by nothing and it wasn't caused by > nothing, It was caused by me. I can be described as nothing or not nothing, depending on what kind of thing you are comparing me to. > and that doesn't make the free will noise a logical self > contradiction because,..., because,... because you just don't want it to be > contradictory and if you wish hard enough you can make it so. It's not me that doesn't want it to be a contradiction, it's the universe. Determinism and randomness are ideas within the experience of conscious deliberation. Consciousness itself precedes those categories. It determines and fails to determine. Consciousness is like the mammal and determinism is the like the primate. You are flipping the taxonomy and forcing reality which is far richer and deeper than the intellect into a reduced intellectual framework that has no way to accommodate the reality of awareness, just as you can't draw a graph that explains 'dizzy' or 'sleepy'. > > >> And even I could beat Kasparov at chess if a robot or a surgeon first > >> gave Kasparov a brain lobotomy. > > > But Kasparov would know the difference. Deep Blue never would. > > Machines can detect when they have suffered damage just like people, > otherwise the red warning light on the dashboard of your car would never > come on. The red light doesn't grow out of the dashboard by itself like ours do though. Nothing in the car will know the difference if you remove it. Your car has no way to feel that 'It seems like something is wrong but I'm not sure what'. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
