From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2013 9:31 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
On 9/5/2013 8:34 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote:
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of chris peck
Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2013 7:30 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
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.
How do you explain the experience of "free will" then?
Our experience of free will, of having executive decisional power within our
own selves is a distinct, high fidelity, consistently reproducible,
experience in us - I *know* through direct experience that I experience this
in my own self, and I bet long odds that, even though you deny it, you also
experience the sensation of having free will in your own everyday life.
>>I agree with Chris Peck. I don't recognize your "drama of unfolding
experience" at all. I cogitate on decisions and make choices. But none of
that entails feeling "free will".
You claim you "cogitate" on decisions and make choices. Some synonyms for
cogitate are: "think about/on/over, contemplate, consider, mull over,
meditate on, muse on/over, ponder, reflect on, deliberate on/over, ruminate
on/over" So in other words you wrestle with choice, you contemplate your
options, and you *choose*... i.e. you exercise your free will or you
experience the illusion of exercising your free will, one or the other. You
can't have your cake and eat it too. Either outcomes are determined or they
are not. if you are cogitating - exercising your executive decision making
power - then you are deciding outcomes. You can say out of one side of your
mouth that you are a deep thinker who cogitates before he chooses then out
of the other say that our inner mental life is a program playing out along
some deterministic path with an outcome that can - a priori - be predicted
based on the inputs. Just like it would be in a deterministic computer
algorithm. Given a set of inputs one can predict the outputs if one can
follow the logical heuristics of the algorithm and wind it forward.
Obviously if you are busy cogitating all the time this is not the process
that is happening in your head. You are admitting that you wrestle with
choices and that you make decisions after much cogitation. How exactly is
that any different than saying you exercise your free will? Other than
employing a synonym to express yourself.
Hundreds. thousands maybe, times a day you (or I, or anyone) are being
presented with choices and experiencing the feeling that we are making
decisions - i.e. exercising free will; we all wrestle with dilemmas in our
lives and mull over decisions. Often in fact the drama of our unfolding
experience of this non-existent free will extends over considerable
durations of time and on occasion can dominate an entire life span.
The experience of free will is not a snap shot, instead it unfolds over
spans of time and is experienced as a clearly ordered series of distinctly
related emotions, thoughts, and deep sensations emerging within our focal
sense of self.
>>That just sounds like obfuscation to me.
Whatever. you are just engaging in an attempt at characterization of what I
described without making any arguments as to why you characterize it that
way. Instead it is a succinct description of the dynamically unfolding and
self-revealing carefully sequenced and highly nuanced dramas that play out
in our minds each and every day of our lives. The experience of free will is
NOT a snap shot! Rather it is an unfolding drama with many parts in it that
each must be ordered correctly and segued properly from one scene to the
next of the internal drama of decision making process as it occurs in our
minds. We do not know how we will decide before we do decide; so if our
decision is predetermined then it must therefore be kept hidden from our
conscious selves until the drama reaches the climax of us "believing" we are
arriving at the decision we made with our "free will".
So either we have free will for real - i.e. we are capable of making
executive choices between competing options and we - i.e. our conscious
minds - decide what our course of action will be; or our brains manufacture
a grand illusion of free will for us for some mysterious (and unexplained)
reason.
You cannot say you meditate on choices and make decisions and then in the
next breath say that we are deterministic. Either we are programs - in which
case given a knowledge of our algorithms our behavior and outcomes should be
predictable based on a knowledge of some input state, and any logical
decisions that are made as inputs are processed by our brains are done based
on predetermined heuristics - or else we really do have free will OR for
some reason (which you cannot explain) our minds produce this carefully
arranged sequence of distinct feelings, impressions and sensations of being
presented with choices; of cogitating on these options and of arriving at a
decision.
These temporally arrayed series of distinct feelings, also include often
prolonged virtual reality drama plays (if free will does not exist) in which
we find ourselves wrestling with difficult choices, followed perhaps by a
clear sensation of converging on a decision, and then an experience of
deciding that feels clear and distinct in our inner self-aware sense of
being.
Such well rendered dramatic movements all carefully arrayed into a highly
orchestrated sequence is what we experience as our free will. These are
subtle experiences and producing them and stacking them into a temporal
sequence and then playing them out in a manner that is so perfectly acted
out inside that it is convincingly real in us - in so far as we experience
it (without getting into whether it is real or not)
I see two basic options here:
A) If free will exists (and also of course that we have it) then we
experience the sensation of having free will because that is our actual
nature (however that happened) and is in the nature of the universe we exist
within.
B) If instead free will does not in fact exist, then explain the dynamic
unfolding drama of our experience of it and do so without providing any sort
of rendering mechanism. The experience is exquisitely and very carefully
synchronized and is so convincing in us that we perceive ourselves as
"really" having it? You must show how it is a zero cost side effect of
something else that can clearly be shown to be vital and would necessarily
be a pre-cursor to experiencing free will - for example consciousness
necessarily must exist in the first place in order for free will to exist.
OR Are you maintain that the experience of free will does not itself exist?
(can you argue that?)
If you concede that the experience of free will does in fact exist in us
then you must concede that something produced that experience, unless you
can quite clearly demonstrate how the experience of free will - an
experience that is so profound in our species and has been a central theme
in so much of our thinking, art, poetry, ideology throughout history - is a
clear side effect of some precedent thing, such as say intelligent
self-awareness.
>>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.
Experience is subjective for the subject! How can a discussion of free will
not involve a subjective view. Our experience colors our perception of
ourselves and of how we experience ourselves; including our experience of
free will, of being presented with choices and arriving at decisions. A
headache may be described objectively in a medical text, but headaches are
experienced subjectively and different people experience them in different
ways. Why should it be different for free will? Is it not still the subject
doing the perceiving? Is not free will something that is inextricably bound
up with the notion of subjectivity? Can you conceive of "free will" without
introducing a subject in which it arises and is experienced?
>>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.
Perhaps you confuse abstractness with absence
Whatever this set of feelings which you denominate a feeling of 'free will',
you have done nothing to show that they (like other feelings) are just how
processing data and making a decision feels. You have not shown that it
requires any additional effort or complexity or energy over and above that
necessary to process the data and make a decision. And so evolution in
providing the means to make decisions favorable to procreation has
necessarily also produced corresponding feelings; just as in providing
imaging of EM waves it has necessarily provided the perception called
"seeing".
>> Seeing is a lot more than just simple signal processing of EM waves.
There are so many decisions of what to render and what to leave out of the
picture we see. Perhaps you are unaware of just how much brain activity
sight involves and just how many decisions are being made by the mind at
many levels and based on many parallel decisional networks that are
operating in the moment of perception. Sight is anything but straightforward
processing of EM inputs; it is like calling the Sistine Chapel a doodle.
-Chris
Brent
>> 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.
I take it you have never wrestled with some difficult decision in your life.
Explain in what way that naturally arises from a deterministic playing out
of a program. The drama that we sometimes experience when faced with the
need to choose and the often quite prolonged inner struggles we go through
do not feel predetermined to me. So if they are the illusion has been
constructed, and very carefully so, in my mind at great cost in terms of the
brain activity required in order to render it. This capacity evolved in us
then, it survived selective pressure. Why? What survival benefit does this
confer?
To argue that it does not exist then fail to provide an explanation for the
sequential ordered dramatic subjective experience of it is unsatisfactory
for me. Either you must show how these tapestries of interwoven experiences
-- call it our "free will" virtual reality drama (soap opera maybe [grin]) -
that is unfolding within our subjective experience *is the result of
something else* that is precedent and necessary and that would *naturally
produce* the nuanced experience of free will within our subjective beings.
>>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.
And instead I am saying that either free will does exist or if not the
temporally stacked sequentially and dynamically unfolding experience of it
(we never know ahead of time how we are going to ultimately decide) needs to
be explained. This experience must either be a carefully produced drama or
it must naturally arise out of something that is vital to our being and
clearly bound up with self-awareness, conscious intelligence etc.
You maintain that no illusion is taking place and that free will does not
exist; then provide the mechanism for the generation of the experience of
it?
Cheers
-Chris
All the best
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