Hi Chris
>> I
also do not “KNOW” whether or not I really do have “free will”.
But if I do not have “free will” evolution has seen fit to evolve
a very expensive – in evolutionary terms – illusion of “free
will... To argue that “free will”, “self-awareness” etc. are
just noise, of no real value or consequence goes against evolution.
Evolution doesn’t work like that. Unless it can be clearly shown
that these qualia are inevitable by-products of some other
evolutionarily vital brain function”
You
haven't really addressed the ideas raised in my post. I'm not arguing
that the illusion of free will has no consequence I'm arguing that
there is no illusion of free will. And if there is no illusion of
free will then there is no reason to drum up some evolutionary story
to justify it.
Since
you talk about qualia I take it that you have something other than
the concept of free will in mind. Its an important distinction
because the concept, however incoherent, clearly does exist. But
being an idea has
a history describable by semiotics or memetics, which ever floats
your boat.
But
as for a qualitative feel of 'freeness' that goes hand in hand with
the decisions I make; these qualia are conspicuous by their absence. For
sure, when I make day to day decisions I don't feel under external
duress, but that feeling
is
understandable because I am not under external duress. I am also
aware that there were alternatives available to me other than the one
I in fact choose, and
in a sense there were, but
when asked to explain my choice the lexicon of determinism comes to
the fore. I talk about the reasons and causes of my choice. I
choose salad over steak because I am worried about being fat. I am
worried about being fat because culture places value upon being slim.
Eating steak will make me fat because my metabolism is slow. My
metabolism is slow because of the genetic hand I was dealt.
Nature and nurture, neither of which I have control over,
conspire to drive my decisions.
Others
on this list have been arguing that we are complex systems that
nevertheless lack the ability to home in on the neural mechanics of
our own decision making and therefore are unable to witness the
choices being determined. Thus we don't have a feeling of being
determined. I disagree with them. Our choices feel determined, rather
than free, in precisely the way a determinist would recognise.
In
other words, there is no illusion of freewill to
explain and in fact when
people
talk
about their
behavior they
use
language which reflects the determinist's perspective.
All
the best
From: cdemorse...@yahoo.com
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 17:36:17 -0700
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2013 4:41 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test? On 9/4/2013 2:55 PM,
Chris de Morsella wrote:Our brain's are supplying us with our reality and two
people immersed in the same environment will often come away with different
descriptions of that environment and will experience different realities when
immersed in that environmental stream of sense data. Even though the raw sense
stream is the same in both cases; the inner mental experience that is "lived"
can be very different indeed.
But the interesting point is that we can, given enough data, agree on an
intersubjective reality. Whether we feel threatened by a big black guy on a
lonely street is subjective. But whether said figure actually is a big black
guy we can find out. The latter is part of reality, because that's how
"reality" is defined - intersubjective agreement. But feeling threatened is a
subjective reaction.
Yes, I agree that to some extent we can carefully reconstruct a shared
perceptive experience and in a process of conscious re-examination and
comparison of each subjects perceptive experience remove the layers of
subjective coloration we have overlaid over it – but this is assuming our brain
did not suppress the perception entirely, but rather characterized it in some
subjective manner. The person who failed to “see” the man in the gorilla suit
walking across their field of view – perhaps because they were mentally focused
on a near field complex visual task – will never get to “see” that perception,
in fact they will never even know that they missed seeing it in their mind’s
eye – for clearly at some level the brain sees the man in the gorilla suit
walking across the field – unless they are shown a video of their field of view
or are otherwise convinced that they somehow failed to see the outrageous image
of a man in a gorilla suit walking across their field of view. -Chris
Brent--
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