On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 6:56:58 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: > > On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 10:50 PM, Craig Weinberg > <whats...@gmail.com<javascript:>> > wrote: > > >> And it would be easy to show that physics was incomplete by > >> demonstrating biological systems operate contrary to physics. > > > > > > If I pickup a basketball and throw it up in the air, that result is not > > contrary to physics, but neither is it expected by physics. Physics is > > incomplete to describe how high I will decide to throw the ball. > > But physics does describe how high you will decide to throw the ball, > since physics describes the movement of the ball and the movement of > the matter in your body. If you don't accept this then you believe > that your body will behave CONTRARY TO PHYSICS.
If you claim that you can use physics to decide exactly how high I will decide to throw the ball, then how exactly would you do it? How far in advance of my throwing the ball do you claim that you can know what I decide? Since I can decide right now approximately how far I will throw it 30 days from now, you would have to be able to predict my decision before this conversation. This is not contrary to physics, but your expectation is CONTRARY TO REALITY. There is no physical sign in my brain of how hard I will try to throw the ball. I could change it at the last minute also. What you have not considered is that your assumptions about the universe could be based on jumping to the wrong conclusions about matter and consciousness. The physical system which is actually determining how high I will throw the basketball is not what you would see under a microscope with your body - billions of cells interacting in a microbiotic environment, or smaller still, quadrillions of molecules interacting in a nanoscale environment... the basketball doesn't exist there. What is physically determining the force on the ball is the part of me that knows about basketballs and throwing, and control of my body's actions in a world not of biochemistry but of people and real objects. These are the differences that matter - this is what the universe is made of; perceptual relativism. Top down, bottom up, center out, periphery in... all contribute, all make their own sense and motives. Your view is a toy model of bottom up behaviorism that has nothing to do with reality at all. Because of the plasticity of sense, the universe ensures that there will always be enough evidence for you to feel justified in pursuing and believing your view, just as it will ensure every view reflects enough of the whole truth that it can seem true enough. You think that the universe is a machine, but it is you who wants the universe to be a machine. > That is what contrary > to physics means! It would be easy to show that something funny was > going on in a laboratory. I don't think that it is possible for you to understand what I am talking about. I understand what you mean completely though. > You could take a neuron and measure the > transmembrane potential which will indicate according to our knowledge > of physics that the neuron will not fire, but then observe that - > CONTRARY TO PHYSICS - the neuron does fire. The whole point is that the transmembrane potential can and does change at any time. That's how neurons fire normally. You act as if everything that happens in the brain is a pinball machine where each neuron can only fire if another one tells it to fire. That is not at all how it is. Every neuron is an independent living organism which contributes directly to the chemical and electric environment of the brain... then there's the glial cells. How do you explain how they improve mouse brain performance without any electrical signalling? > If this never happens, if > each and every interaction in your body is IN ACCORDANCE WITH PHYSICS, > then the body as a whole will behave IN ACCORDANCE WITH PHYSICS. Except for voluntary action. I decide how high to throw the basketball - me - for my reasons. Physics does not know or care what those are. > And > insofar as physics is mechanistic - deterministic or probabilistic - > the behaviour of the body will be mechanistic. > That is your theory. I predict that it will be increasingly difficult for you to hold on to it in the face of a non-stop cascade of information which casts doubt on determinism, mechanism, and probabilistic assumptions. The future belongs to sense, perceptual relativism, and intentional interaction. > > >> But according to the public view biological systems follow mechanistic > >> rules. That means that everything you do is consistent with these > >> mechanistic rules. > > > > > > The extent to which they seem to be following mechanistic rules is > > proportional to the distance from our native scale of description. If > you > > look at cells, it's somewhat less mechanistic than if you look at > molecules. > > If you look at the brain as a whole, it is less mechanistic than cells. > Our > > consciousness is associated with our entire nervous system throughout a > > lifetime, so looking at any phenomenon smaller than that is only looking > at > > a snapshot cross-section. That kind of a partial map can't refer to > human > > consciousness, but only to sub-personal consciousness which we aren't > > directly aware of. On the level of cells and molecules, we don't exist. > > But how could this possibly happen? It's like saying that every part > of the computer behaves mechanistically, but the computer as a whole > does not. > That is exactly what it is. The general makes a decision personally, and the army follows mechanically. Why is that so hard? The computer as a whole is not a computer at all, it is an animal, a being. In reality, it only looks like a computer on the lower levels because it is too distant from our personal experience to relate to personally. It's not a matter of how it could possibly happen, it is a matter of how could anyone think that it isn't happening. You experience it yourself directly in every moment. > > >> But you don't believe that everything you do is > >> consistent with mechanistic rules. So where is the experimental > >> evidence showing that these rules break down? > > > > > > Where is the evidence that shows that the content of a TV show breaks > the > > rules of pixel illumination on the TV screen? Until you can conceive of > the > > relation between subjective experience and objective bodies properly, > you > > are going to continue to insist that for TV programs to be real, there > must > > be some pixels which are not produced by the TV screen which are > injecting > > the plot of the show into the other pixels. You are swallowing your > naive > > view of the universe as bodies in space completely. What I propose is > that > > we accept the natural partitioning that we experience personally, and > extend > > that to the rest of nature on every level and description. Our mind is > not > > composed of our body, but of sub-minds, just as our body is not composed > of > > our mind but of sub-bodies (cells and then molecules). Each side appears > > utterly different - opposite to the other, but that is only the effect > of > > consciousness itself. From the absolute perspective, there is only > > experience presented and experience re-presented (bodies). > > Consider only the publicly observable behaviour of any system in the > universe. Can the mechanistic rules broken? In what part of the system > exactly? > The mechanistic rules begin at charge. Will is the changing of the charge from the top down. Charge has emergent properties in biological systems. Or if it isn't charge, it's quantum entanglement... it doesn't matter, ultimately every force and field is intentional on some level of perceptual description, just not one which is available to us as human beings. What forces and fields are particularly responsible for our more human qualities of articulated will doesn't really matter to me. What's the difference? Any or all is the same with respect to the mind-matter relation. Regardless there is top-down and bottom-up interaction within an unbroken continuum of private and public (to us) events. Craig > > > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
