________________________________ From: Richard Ruquist <yann...@gmail.com> To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Thursday, September 5, 2013 9:26 AM Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test?
>> I also agree that the notions of free will and qualia are two different >> things. My best example of how qualia relates to consciousness is based on my dreams. I dream in images which I say are very close to uninhibited/unreprocessed consciousness. Very often these images are of people who speak to me. I do not hear words, yet I still get meanings. The wordless meanings conveyed to me in dreams are what I would call qualia. I am using Qualia to signify the subjective or qualitative properties of experiences, which I believe is the most widely accepted definition of this term. Each of us experiences "free will" as filtered by our own subjective experience of it. In fact even "being" we experience in a subjective manner. Inevitably our views on and definitions of the underlying constructs of meaning wrapped up by these symbolic terms -- say: "free will", "self", "being" etc. is shaped by how we experience our own inner life. My understanding of Qualia is that it is the subjective coloration of experience, not the degree of illusory content versus reality based/external to the subject content of the resulting experience Do we all experience inner life in the same way? Or is each of our inner-verses to some degree a unique reality that in fact partly shapes how we ourselves experience our "self" and our sense of having "free will" Note: I am not stating that we in fact have "free will" or even that the "self" exists in the manner in which we perceive ourselves to exist. Who really knows... I know I don't. >> My waking thinking is in words and each of the words has meaning. The words >> label the meanings which are qualia. Free will is associated with my waking consciousness. However, I do not appear to have even the illusion of free will in my dreams except once in a lucid dream. But that's another story. While on one level it's true that words are associated with and mapped to symbolic meaning in each of us, but the resulting experiences, the more or less rich set of feelings, sensations, memories, and emotions that are triggered by hearing some word in some context will vary -- and often quite wildly -- between individuals. The word snake or spider for example for many people will trigger rather unpleasant feelings and may even cause them a vague sense of unease; whilst in other individuals hearing that same word no such inner emotional/memory reactions are triggered.In this sense many words are actually quite conditioned by the subjective experiences of the hearer. So many words are this way in fact -- our understanding of language, of life, of our own selves is conditioned by our subjective experiences and it is hard to extricate subjectivity from a discussion that involves the self examining the self -- IMO. >>In waking consciousness I at least seem to sometimes have a degree of free >>will. My lack of free will can be exemplified by driving on a familiar route where habit is in control. Often I intend to deviate from the usual route but habit prevents me from doing so and I pass right by the turn off. That raises a question of what people intend by free will. Is free will only the internally experienced and quite often internally verbalized sensation of deciding on a course of action? The you are correct habitual behavior is not free will. But what if the mind also works its free will in a pre-conscious manner and the mind decides based on evaluating its choices -- within some the dynamic context or frame -- and this all happens much faster than it would take to actually render the experience for our inner observer. Is it no longer free will. I don't think there exists a hard and fast line between that which we decide or believe at least that we are deciding and that which we do automatically based on habit (e.g. running pre-compiled deterministic programs); rather I think it is many shades of grey and that free will -- the need to make an executive decision, which the mind cannot answer using the automatic mechanisms of instinct and habit -- is something that MAY be going on in our brains even when the ego is unaware that it has gone on. The mind may be exercising our free will without necessarily going through all the trouble of rendering the experience in a manner that the "self" perceives in its rendered reified version of reality. I accept that some will argue that this is not free will at all, which is how they where they choose to set the boundary conditions.. probably based on where they set the boundaries of the self. Is the self just the little homunculus existing in our brains -- or does self also extend into the vast territory of mind that the conscious mind is mostly unaware of at all? I am suggesting that a complete discussion of free will would need to distinguish conscious free will -- the sense of free will that is consciously experienced by the "self" that is doing the experiencing -- and pre-conscious free will, where the mind may in fact still be exercising "free will", but not bothering to do all the paperwork needed in order to report it up to the head office so to speak. >>But I can break the habit by being very conscious and focused on deviating >>from my usual course. I take that to be an exercise of free will. In addition >>I take such action to be an exercise of downward or top-down causation >>whereas the lack of free will or habit is upward or down-up causation. >>Here is something Bruno might appreciate. Often when I smoke weed and then >>drive home, I am lost. That is, the road that I usually drive on is totally >>unfamiliar to me, and I feel like I am lost. So the internal map that I >>usually follow is part of habit and the weed breaks down the habit. That in >>my opinion is why weed is so creative. It allows us to think outside the >>usual constraints and at the same time suggests to us just how constrained we >>usually. Agreed :) >>Yet even when so constrained, when we are faced with more or less equal >>alternatives or choices, we can exercise our free will by thinking about each >>alternative and then making a more or less rational choice. But habit and >>especially addiction can inhibit free choice and free will. Agreed. Sometimes I prefer to look at habit as free will unfolding in four dimensions. In other words before a habit is formed -- before you settle on the best route home for example -- different choices are often explored and the mind settles on a habitual mode of behavior only after it has made the "free will" choice. So looking at it this way is the habit mindless automatic behavior -- yes on one level it is (it did not involve the conscious self), but if you look at it across four dimensions most often -- or at least fairly often -- habits are formed only after the "self" has carefully evaluated its selection of viable alternatives. The habit can then be said to be a shorthand (& useful) encoding of that initial experience of free will so that when represented with a similar problem the mind can avail itself of its past decision making efforts. Cheers, -Chris Richard, On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 10:30 AM, chris peck <chris_peck...@hotmail.com> wrote: 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 >-- >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. >For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. >-- >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 mailto:everything-list%2bunsubscr...@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. >For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- >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 mailto:everything-list%2bunsubscr...@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. >For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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