subject:"Re\: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis"



On 17 Mar 2013, at 17:02, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Sunday, March 17, 2013 10:47:05 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 17 Mar 2013, at 03:47, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Saturday, March 16, 2013 3:15:43 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 15 Mar 2013, at 20:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:
No, I think that you haven't understood it,

That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What  
is it that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is  
that if you have many molecular systems working together  
mechanically, you will naturally get emergent properties that  
could be mistaken for teleological entities. You can't tell the  
difference between a brain change that seems meaningful to you and  
a meaningful experience which causes a brain change. Just because  
you feel like you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just  
a narrative fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.


All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our  
universe however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose  
for consciousness or narrative fictions. The existence of the  
feeling that you can control your body makes no sense in universe  
where control is impersonal and involuntary. There is no  
possibility for teleology to even be conceived in a universe of  
endless meaningless chain reactions - no basis for proprietary  
attachment of any kind. It's circular to imagine that it could be  
important for an epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal.  
Important how? It's like adding a steering wheel to a mountain.


due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your  
theory - a theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and  
predicts nothing.


No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable,  
because falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far  
as prediction goes, one of the things it predicts that people who  
are bound to the extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be  
intolerant and misrepresent other perspectives. They will cling  
pathologically to unreal abstractions while flatly denying  
ordinary experience.


Materialism + computationalism can lead to nihilism. But  
computationalism, per se,  does not deny ordinary experiences. It  
starts from that, as it is a principle of invariance of  
consciousness for a digital substitution made at some level.


It may not deny ordinary experiences, but it doesn't support them  
rationally either.


It supports them as much as possible. It supports some irrationalism  
like non communicable truth on the par of the machine.


Being non-communicable is a property of experience but non- 
communicability itself doesn't imply experience at all.


You are right. But knowledge of a non communicable truth has to be  
experienced, may be.





Experience can imply  a use for computation, as a method of  
distributing access to experiential qualities, but computation  
cannot imply a use for experience.


That contradicts what machines already say when looking inward. It is  
not the computation which is thinking, but the person supported by one  
(and then an infinity of one).
You deny the existence of that person, and I don't see why. Bringing  
matter, time or indeterminacy does not help.






As someone brought up on another conversation on FB, the  
construction of neural networks coincides with the end of conscious  
involvement


If you decide so, it might as well lead to that. But this idea is  
based on a confusion between syntax and semantics. Simple programs can  
have complex semantics. Enough complex to be cautious about  
attribution or non attribution of consciousness.





- the disappearance of personal attention into automatism. Learning  
makes consciousness redundant. Repetition allows awareness to  
withdraw from the act, which becomes robotic.


No worry. Our environment should be enough rich to remind us that our  
lives should not be taken for granted.










What is a reason why computation would be processed as an ordinary  
experience, when we clearly can be accomplished through a- 
signifying mechanical activities?



You lost me here.

We see that generic mechanical activities can be used to imitate  
experiences without actually embodying them.



We can see that, but that's is only a partial view of truth. Even for  
machine, we know that the syntactical description of the behavior of  
its components does only give a pârtial description of what the  
machine is able to know, without any external observer capable of  
guessing that truth. You continue to treat the machines in a pre- 
Turing-Gödel way. You defend a reductionist conception of machine,  
which does not fit what we already know about them.




Illuminated pixels can stimulate our consciousness to experience  
characters and scenes which are not literally present in the pixels.  
The pixel arrangements do

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Monday, March 18, 2013 6:01:18 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 17 Mar 2013, at 17:02, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Sunday, March 17, 2013 10:47:05 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 17 Mar 2013, at 03:47, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Saturday, March 16, 2013 3:15:43 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 15 Mar 2013, at 20:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:

 No, I think that you haven't understood it, 


 That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is it 
 that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that if you have 
 many molecular systems working together mechanically, you will naturally 
 get emergent properties that could be mistaken for teleological entities. 
 You can't tell the difference between a brain change that seems meaningful 
 to you and a meaningful experience which causes a brain change. Just 
 because you feel like you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just 
 a narrative fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.

 All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our universe 
 however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose for consciousness 
 or narrative fictions. The existence of the feeling that you can control 
 your body makes no sense in universe where control is impersonal and 
 involuntary. There is no possibility for teleology to even be conceived in 
 a universe of endless meaningless chain reactions - no basis for 
 proprietary attachment of any kind. It's circular to imagine that it could 
 be important for an epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal. 
 Important how? It's like adding a steering wheel to a mountain.
  

 due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your theory - 
 a theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and predicts nothing.


 No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable, because 
 falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as prediction 
 goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are bound to the 
 extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be intolerant and misrepresent 
 other perspectives. They will cling pathologically to unreal abstractions 
 while flatly denying ordinary experience.


 Materialism + computationalism can lead to nihilism. But 
 computationalism, per se,  does not deny ordinary experiences. It starts 
 from that, as it is a principle of invariance of consciousness for a 
 digital substitution made at some level.


 It may not deny ordinary experiences, but it doesn't support them 
 rationally either. 


 It supports them as much as possible. It supports some irrationalism like 
 non communicable truth on the par of the machine.


 Being non-communicable is a property of experience but non-communicability 
 itself doesn't imply experience at all. 


 You are right. But knowledge of a non communicable truth has to be 
 experienced, may be. 


In reality, I agree, because I think that is the symmetry: Phenomena are 
extended publicly on the outside, and intended privately on the inside - 
but that is multisense realism physics, not arithmetic. Arithmetic would 
have to provide a way to get to that quality theoretically. Why, as far as 
numbers are concerned, does privacy equate to experience? 





 Experience can imply  a use for computation, as a method of distributing 
 access to experiential qualities, but computation cannot imply a use for 
 experience. 


 That contradicts what machines already say when looking inward. It is not 
 the computation which is thinking, but the person supported by one (and 
 then an infinity of one).
 You deny the existence of that person, and I don't see why. Bringing 
 matter, time or indeterminacy does not help.


If machines all can be made to say the same thing when looking inward, then 
I don't think that they are having an experience. 






 As someone brought up on another conversation on FB, the construction of 
 neural networks coincides with the end of conscious involvement 


 If you decide so, it might as well lead to that. But this idea is based on 
 a confusion between syntax and semantics. Simple programs can have complex 
 semantics. Enough complex to be cautious about attribution or non 
 attribution of consciousness. 


I don't think it is a decision based on syntax and semantics at all, it is 
an observation about learning and memory. When we learn, we lose the 
necessity of conscious awareness of what we have learned, and at the same 
time, we observe that connections in our neural network or strengthened or 
extended.
 





 - the disappearance of personal attention into automatism. Learning makes 
 consciousness redundant. Repetition allows awareness to withdraw from the 
 act, which becomes robotic.


 No worry. Our environment should be enough rich to remind us that our 
 lives should not be taken for granted. 


Only because we are conscious to begin with, and

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On 15 Mar 2013, at 18:22, meekerdb wrote:


On 3/15/2013 7:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead.  
You know of advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you  
arn't sure if you will go right or left, you haven't finished the  
calculation yet, you haven't decided yet. Once you get to the fork  
you find yourself on the left path and retroactively conclude that  
you must have decided to go left.


Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking. Except that  
I decided consciously before acting. If not, it is like randomness,  
or unconscious decision, and that is not free will. Free-will is  
when I want to go the left, and decide accordingly to go to the  
left, and nobody coerce me to not go to the left. It is not much  
different than will + freedom.


That seems to me just and explanation of a certain *feeling* of a  
feeling of freedom and of will.  If you find yourself on the left  
path without having consciously thought I'll take the left. then  
you miss the feeling of will.  But it may just be that your  
conscious thoughts are lagging a little.


?
I agree but that makes free-will independent of the feeling. With my  
definition of free will, it is real,even if not felt, as the machine  
have the real possibility to hesitate between subgoals and make choice  
hesitantly, knowing partially the consequences.




When you're playing a game, say tennis, and you hit the ball to the  
left you may have done so without conscious consideration yet it was  
just the right shot and so was what you willed to win which you  
realize on reflection.


OK. Although I think that free-will is more typical for decision  
taking more time, and more self-controversial, like the decision to  
drink some beer before driving a plane with passengers ...





You have a feeling of freedom so long as you are not coerced or  
limited by something you can consciously consider; that's  
essentially all the feeling of freedom is, not being able to think  
of anything that is restricting or coercing you from taking an  
action.  Since you can't be directly aware of deterministic or  
random processes in your brain, whether they are random or  
deterministic has no bearing on the freedom+will feeling.


I agree. But I think that free-will is more than a feeling. It is a  
real possibility of reflected choice. Indeed it has nothing to so with  
determinacy or randomness.


Bruno




Brent

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On 15 Mar 2013, at 18:07, meekerdb wrote:

Craig thinks his theory mind is perfectly compatible with physics  
because he thinks physics is different from what all those stupid  
physicists think it is.  They just don't know about his top-down  
physics, which no one has observed but which he *directly  
experiences* and therefore *just knows he's right*.  Give it up  
John, Stathis.  There's no point arguing with cranks and mystics.


There is no point discussing with a crank, but it is hard to be sure  
someone is a crank, or there is some hope to make someone a bit less  
crank ...


Now, there is no point to discuss with a mystic, but for an entirely  
different reason. He will remain silent. Mystics are not crank. Only  
chatting mystics are cranks.

To be short.

Bruno





Brent
There are those who claim that magic is like the tide; that it
swells and fades over the surface of the earth, collecting in
concentrated pools here and there, almost disappearing from other
spots, leaving them parched for wonder. There are also those who
believe that if you stick your fingers up your nose and blow, it
will increase your intelligence.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VII


On 3/15/2013 6:07 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:



On Friday, March 15, 2013 6:59:42 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:
On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:48 PM, Craig Weinberg  
whats...@gmail.com wrote:


 I didn't say that. I said When five billion of them jump to  
attention at
 once, it  is **often** because of something that the person is  
experiencing
 intentionally,. Biochemistry, among other things, can cause  
billions of
 neurons to react, but also intentional thought can do that with  
no external

 force.

 You need to find
 some experimental evidence for this, and astound the scientific  
world.



 Straw man cabaret continues..

You claim that I don't understand you and perhaps I don't. I'm not
deliberately constructing straw man arguments.

Then stop saying that my view must have something to do with  
violating physics.



The scientific conception of neurons is that *nothing* in them  
happens

without a physical reason, ever.

Which is why we those scientists have no idea what consciousness  
is. Physical is a meaningless term. Whatever happens is physical,  
whether it is smiling at a neighbor or welding a trashcan shut. The  
only good use for physical in my view is to discern relative  
presentations from representations. The letter A is not physical,  
but any particular instantiation of experience of object that we  
read as A is physical.


When a person decides to do
something, this corresponds to certain changes in his brain, and  
these

changes all follow absolutely rigidly from the physical laws
describing electrochemical reactions.

No, not all changes in the brain cannot be predicted at all from  
electrochemical reactions. If I decide to go on vacation next week,  
there is no electrochemical chain reaction which can explain why my  
body will drive to work today but not in a week. The explanation is  
only realized in the semantic content of the mind. This is why  
there is a clear and important different in our awareness between  
voluntary and involuntary reactions. To be addicted, coerced,  
enslaved, trapped, etc, are among the most dire conditions which  
humans confront, yet they have no chemical correlate at all.  
Whether someone is picking up trash on a prison chain gang or they  
are picking up trash on the grounds of their vast estate, there is  
no functional basis for either option being chemically preferable.


This applies to every molecule
in the brains in those fMRI pictures you have referenced.

There were mostly spontaneous changes of large groups of molecules  
and neurons in those images. That's why I included them, because it  
is so obvious that this is not some kind of rippling, ricocheting,  
cymatic pattern which could conceivably propagate from bottom up  
chemistry.


You may not
be able to predict exactly what the brain will do but you can't
predict much simpler systems such as where a billiard ball will end  
up
after bouncing off several cushions either, and that does not lead  
you

to doubt that it is mechanistic.

Prediction is not the test. We know for a fact that we experience  
direct participation in our lives. That cannot be explained by  
chemistry as it is currently assumed to be. The model is  
incomplete, not the validity of our own experience.



In the standard scientific view,

which is wrong.

spontaneously excitable cells are
just a special subtype of excitable cells and still follow absolutely
rigidly the physical laws describing electrochemical reactions.  
Google

excitable cells and you can read about it. If I understand your
view, you think that spontaneous means there is neuronal activity
not explained by these rigid physical laws.

Nothing is explained by any physical laws which cannot conceive of  
top-down voluntary control of muscle tissue, cells, and

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On 17 Mar 2013, at 18:40, John Clark wrote:




On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be  
wrote:
 So all free will means is that sometimes we can make correct  
predictions about what we will do before we do it, and sometimes we  
cannot, and in general beforehand there is no way to tell which  
ones we can make good predictions for and which ones we can't. And  
even when we make a correct prediction about what we will do (I  
will never do X for example) sometimes we'll have to wait literally  
forever to know it was the correct prediction.

A pretty useless definition don't you think?


It is useful to decide if some one must be send in a jail or in an  
hospital


That has nothing to do with the free will noise. If you determine  
beyond a reasonable doubt that the murderer's mind can be repaired  
and his murderous inclination eliminated then you send him to a  
hospital,


If you fix the problem, you make it free. Please.




if you determine he cannot be repaired with existing technology then  
you warehouse him in a jail unless you judge him to be so dangerous  
that would be too cruel to the other residence of the warehouse, in  
which case you give him a nice little dirt nap.
 You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far  
ahead. You know of advantages and disadvantages to both paths so  
you aren't sure if you will go right or left, you haven't finished  
the calculation yet, you haven't decided yet. Once you get to the  
fork you find yourself on the left path and retroactively conclude  
that you must have decided to go left.


 Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking.

 And a powerful demon could be able to look into your head and  
quickly deduce that you would eventually choose to go to the left.  
Meanwhile you, whose mind works much more slowly than the demon's,  
hasn't completed the thought process yet. You might be saying to  
yourself I haven't decided yet, I'll have to think about it, I'm  
free to go either way but the demon already knows for a fact that  
despite your present uncertainty by the time you reach the fork you  
will decide to go to the left.



 No problem with that, unless the daemon interfere, but I am remain  
free to contradict him, if he decides to talk


In my example the demon did not tell you of his prediction, but now  
lets pretend he did. Suppose also that you are of an argumentative  
nature and was determined to do the exact opposite of what the demon  
predicted. Now our poor demon would be in a familiar predicament.  
Because the demon's decision now influences your actions the demon  
must forecast his own behavior, but he will have no better luck in  
this regard than you did and for the same reason. What we would need  
in a situation like this is a mega-demon able to look into the  
demon's head. Now the mega-demon would have the problem unless he  
did not tell you or the demon what his prediction was and instead  
wrote it down and put it into a sealed envelope.



That's all good and show, when made precise (Popper did this, but see  
also conscience et mécanisme) that the notion of free will make  
sense, even in a deterministic reality.
You need the second recursion theorem of Kleene to handle the self- 
reference correctly.


Bruno






  John K Clark






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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On 18 Mar 2013, at 14:26, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Monday, March 18, 2013 6:01:18 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 17 Mar 2013, at 17:02, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Sunday, March 17, 2013 10:47:05 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 17 Mar 2013, at 03:47, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Saturday, March 16, 2013 3:15:43 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 15 Mar 2013, at 20:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:
No, I think that you haven't understood it,

That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What  
is it that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is  
that if you have many molecular systems working together  
mechanically, you will naturally get emergent properties that  
could be mistaken for teleological entities. You can't tell the  
difference between a brain change that seems meaningful to you  
and a meaningful experience which causes a brain change. Just  
because you feel like you are moving your arm doesn't mean that  
isn't just a narrative fiction that serves a valuable  
evolutionary purpose.


All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our  
universe however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose  
for consciousness or narrative fictions. The existence of the  
feeling that you can control your body makes no sense in universe  
where control is impersonal and involuntary. There is no  
possibility for teleology to even be conceived in a universe of  
endless meaningless chain reactions - no basis for proprietary  
attachment of any kind. It's circular to imagine that it could be  
important for an epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal.  
Important how? It's like adding a steering wheel to a mountain.


due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your  
theory - a theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and  
predicts nothing.


No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable,  
because falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far  
as prediction goes, one of the things it predicts that people who  
are bound to the extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be  
intolerant and misrepresent other perspectives. They will cling  
pathologically to unreal abstractions while flatly denying  
ordinary experience.


Materialism + computationalism can lead to nihilism. But  
computationalism, per se,  does not deny ordinary experiences. It  
starts from that, as it is a principle of invariance of  
consciousness for a digital substitution made at some level.


It may not deny ordinary experiences, but it doesn't support them  
rationally either.


It supports them as much as possible. It supports some  
irrationalism like non communicable truth on the par of the machine.


Being non-communicable is a property of experience but non- 
communicability itself doesn't imply experience at all.


You are right. But knowledge of a non communicable truth has to be  
experienced, may be.


In reality, I agree, because I think that is the symmetry: Phenomena  
are extended publicly on the outside, and intended privately on the  
inside -



That is still Aristotelian philosophy. Mind is identified to matter,  
or -matter. But comp leads to the Plato view, where matter is more  
like the border of the universal mind. It is bigger than the physical.








but that is multisense realism physics, not arithmetic.



That's not a reason.




Arithmetic would have to provide a way to get to that quality  
theoretically.



But it has. Worst! We can't avoid them, and that can be show by  
accepting the simplest known theory of knowledge (S4), and the  
simplest definition of (correct belief, the axiom of PA, say).
And you get terrestrial qualities, but also divine qualities as well,  
in a sense which makes basically all theology, from Theaetetus to  
Proclus, a sequence of theorem in computer science, and in arithmetic.






Why, as far as numbers are concerned, does privacy equate to  
experience?


Nobody equated it. But machine can relay private experience.










Experience can imply  a use for computation, as a method of  
distributing access to experiential qualities, but computation  
cannot imply a use for experience.


That contradicts what machines already say when looking inward. It  
is not the computation which is thinking, but the person supported  
by one (and then an infinity of one).
You deny the existence of that person, and I don't see why. Bringing  
matter, time or indeterminacy does not help.


If machines all can be made to say the same thing when looking  
inward, then I don't think that they are having an experience.



This does not follow. All human have a quite similar experience if  
they put their hand in a fire, and that does not make them not having  
experience.
Looking inward leads to the same experience, because it leads to a  
Goddess, and there is only one Goddess. To be short.













As

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Monday, March 18, 2013 12:25:47 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 15 Mar 2013, at 18:22, meekerdb wrote:

  On 3/15/2013 7:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
  
  You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead. You 
 know of advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you arn't sure if you 
 will go right or left, you haven't finished the calculation yet, you 
 haven't decided yet. Once you get to the fork you find yourself on the left 
 path and retroactively conclude that you must have decided to go left.


1. Why would there be any such conclusion? Why would an incomplete 
computation invite some kind of experience of having 'decided' something?

2. The example is a straw man of free will. Try this. You're walking down a 
road and spot a fork in the road far ahead. You trudge off the road instead 
to see what's going on in another direction. 

   
  Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking. Except that I 
 decided consciously before acting. If not, it is like randomness, or 
 unconscious decision, and that is not free will. Free-will is when I want 
 to go the left, and decide accordingly to go to the left, and nobody coerce 
 me to not go to the left. It is not much different than will + freedom.


 That seems to me just and explanation of a certain *feeling* of a feeling 
 of freedom and of will.  If you find yourself on the left path without 
 having consciously thought I'll take the left. then you miss the feeling 
 of will.  But it may just be that your conscious thoughts are lagging a 
 little. 


 ?
 I agree but that makes free-will independent of the feeling. With my 
 definition of free will, it is real,even if not felt, as the machine have 
 the real possibility to hesitate between subgoals and make choice 
 hesitantly, knowing partially the consequences.


Free will can only mean that you use your feelings to determine your 
actions. They are part of the action. If you feel strongly about something, 
that feeling translates directly into the intensity if not the 
effectiveness of the action. There is no computation which translates the 
degree of clarity of a logical decision into any kind of visceral power to 
enforce that decision. Computations have no killer instinct, no emotional 
intention.
 




 When you're playing a game, say tennis, and you hit the ball to the left 
 you may have done so without conscious consideration yet it was just the 
 right shot and so was what you willed to win which you realize on 
 reflection. 


 OK. Although I think that free-will is more typical for decision taking 
 more time, and more self-controversial, like the decision to drink some 
 beer before driving a plane with passengers ...


The tennis is a more complex example. You are talking about subconscious 
responses to entrained activity. You are acting on instinct on the personal 
level but there is presumably still free will on the sub-personal level.
 





 You have a feeling of freedom so long as you are not coerced or limited by 
 something you can consciously consider; that's essentially all the feeling 
 of freedom is, not being able to think of anything that is restricting or 
 coercing you from taking an action.  Since you can't be directly aware of 
 deterministic or random processes in your brain, whether they are random or 
 deterministic has no bearing on the freedom+will feeling.


 I agree. But I think that free-will is more than a feeling. It is a real 
 possibility of reflected choice. Indeed it has nothing to so with 
 determinacy or randomness.


I'll take that. I would go further than 'choice' as that still assumes a 
passive stance. Free will is not only reactive, but creative.

Craig
 


 Bruno



 Brent
  
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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-18 Thread John Mikes

friends:
don't put so much brain-grease into Free Will, please!
It is the religious mambo-jumbo put into the mind of the poor-believers in
ancient times to make them responsible for deeds the powerful disliked -
and consequently: make them punishable. Then it became a 'human treasure':
*We are FREE to Will! *(like a god) and now even smart, reasonable people
like us spend centuries to discuss it.
A decision is right when it goes smoothly with the given and continuing
circumstances it has to fit into (Think of the mis - construed 'evolution':
if it does not 'fit' the mutant perishes).
We may (or may not) know about the given circumstances and for sure may
have only desultory and unsafe notions about the 'coming' ones. Our
evaluation (call it computing?)  results in a decision (conscious or not)
for our activity - OR just way of thinking. Reasonably we try to abide by
those circumstances we know of and formulate (consciously, or not) our
decision according to our best belief (maybe this is contrary to our
interest?). Hence emerges FREE WILL.
I am not faithful enough to believe in MY free will and go to hell by force
of this misconception. I may make mistakes.
I am not deterministically forced to comply with all facets of the infinite
complexity - known,  or unknown. I can revolt. Meaning: I can knowingly
choose the wrong decision.
Is that free will? Maybe. That's a matter of definition.

Regards
John Mikes


On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:


 On 15 Mar 2013, at 18:22, meekerdb wrote:

  On 3/15/2013 7:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

  You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead. You
 know of advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you arn't sure if you
 will go right or left, you haven't finished the calculation yet, you
 haven't decided yet. Once you get to the fork you find yourself on the left
 path and retroactively conclude that you must have decided to go left.


  Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking. Except that I
 decided consciously before acting. If not, it is like randomness, or
 unconscious decision, and that is not free will. Free-will is when I want
 to go the left, and decide accordingly to go to the left, and nobody coerce
 me to not go to the left. It is not much different than will + freedom.


 That seems to me just and explanation of a certain *feeling* of a feeling
 of freedom and of will.  If you find yourself on the left path without
 having consciously thought I'll take the left. then you miss the feeling
 of will.  But it may just be that your conscious thoughts are lagging a
 little.


 ?
 I agree but that makes free-will independent of the feeling. With my
 definition of free will, it is real,even if not felt, as the machine have
 the real possibility to hesitate between subgoals and make choice
 hesitantly, knowing partially the consequences.



 When you're playing a game, say tennis, and you hit the ball to the left
 you may have done so without conscious consideration yet it was just the
 right shot and so was what you willed to win which you realize on
 reflection.


 OK. Although I think that free-will is more typical for decision taking
 more time, and more self-controversial, like the decision to drink some
 beer before driving a plane with passengers ...




 You have a feeling of freedom so long as you are not coerced or limited by
 something you can consciously consider; that's essentially all the feeling
 of freedom is, not being able to think of anything that is restricting or
 coercing you from taking an action.  Since you can't be directly aware of
 deterministic or random processes in your brain, whether they are random or
 deterministic has no bearing on the freedom+will feeling.


 I agree. But I think that free-will is more than a feeling. It is a real
 possibility of reflected choice. Indeed it has nothing to so with
 determinacy or randomness.

 Bruno



 Brent

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Monday, March 18, 2013 4:02:51 PM UTC-4, JohnM wrote:


 friends:
 don't put so much brain-grease into Free Will, please! 
 It is the religious mambo-jumbo put into the mind of the poor-believers in 
 ancient times to make them responsible for deeds the powerful disliked - 
 and consequently: make them punishable. Then it became a 'human treasure': 
 *We are FREE to Will! *(like a god) and now even smart, reasonable 
 people like us spend centuries to discuss it. 
 A decision is right when it goes smoothly with the given and continuing 
 circumstances it has to fit into (Think of the mis - construed 'evolution': 
 if it does not 'fit' the mutant perishes). 
 We may (or may not) know about the given circumstances and for sure may 
 have only desultory and unsafe notions about the 'coming' ones. Our 
 evaluation (call it computing?)  results in a decision (conscious or not) 
 for our activity - OR just way of thinking. Reasonably we try to abide by 
 those circumstances we know of and formulate (consciously, or not) our 
 decision according to our best belief (maybe this is contrary to our 
 interest?). Hence emerges FREE WILL. 
 I am not faithful enough to believe in MY free will and go to hell by 
 force of this misconception. I may make mistakes.
 I am not deterministically forced to comply with all facets of the 
 infinite complexity - known,  or unknown. I can revolt. Meaning: I can 
 knowingly choose the wrong decision. 
 Is that free will? Maybe. That's a matter of definition.


Even the possibility of conceiving of 'revolt' is free will. The idea that 
anything can be a 'matter of definition' is free will. Preferences.. 
departures from expectations. Can a computation revolt? Can the solution to 
a function be a matter of definition?

Craig

Regards 
 John Mikes
  

 On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.bejavascript:
  wrote:


 On 15 Mar 2013, at 18:22, meekerdb wrote:

  On 3/15/2013 7:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
  
   You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead. You 
 know of advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you arn't sure if you 
 will go right or left, you haven't finished the calculation yet, you 
 haven't decided yet. Once you get to the fork you find yourself on the left 
 path and retroactively conclude that you must have decided to go left.
  

  Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking. Except that I 
 decided consciously before acting. If not, it is like randomness, or 
 unconscious decision, and that is not free will. Free-will is when I want 
 to go the left, and decide accordingly to go to the left, and nobody coerce 
 me to not go to the left. It is not much different than will + freedom.


 That seems to me just and explanation of a certain *feeling* of a feeling 
 of freedom and of will.  If you find yourself on the left path without 
 having consciously thought I'll take the left. then you miss the feeling 
 of will.  But it may just be that your conscious thoughts are lagging a 
 little. 


 ?
 I agree but that makes free-will independent of the feeling. With my 
 definition of free will, it is real,even if not felt, as the machine have 
 the real possibility to hesitate between subgoals and make choice 
 hesitantly, knowing partially the consequences.



 When you're playing a game, say tennis, and you hit the ball to the left 
 you may have done so without conscious consideration yet it was just the 
 right shot and so was what you willed to win which you realize on 
 reflection. 


 OK. Although I think that free-will is more typical for decision taking 
 more time, and more self-controversial, like the decision to drink some 
 beer before driving a plane with passengers ...




 You have a feeling of freedom so long as you are not coerced or limited 
 by something you can consciously consider; that's essentially all the 
 feeling of freedom is, not being able to think of anything that is 
 restricting or coercing you from taking an action.  Since you can't be 
 directly aware of deterministic or random processes in your brain, whether 
 they are random or deterministic has no bearing on the freedom+will feeling.


 I agree. But I think that free-will is more than a feeling. It is a real 
 possibility of reflected choice. Indeed it has nothing to so with 
 determinacy or randomness.

 Bruno



 Brent
  
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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-18 Thread meekerdb


On 3/18/2013 1:02 PM, John Mikes wrote:


friends:
don't put so much brain-grease into Free Will, please!


I'm not.  That's why I was careful to distinguish freedom and the feeling of freedom from 
will and the feeling of resolve.  We can have them together, but that doesn't make them 
into one thing.


It is the religious mambo-jumbo put into the mind of the poor-believers in ancient times 
to make them responsible for deeds the powerful disliked - and consequently: make them 
punishable.


I don't think that's right.  The idea of responsibility was taken for granted.  It was 
only after the development of Newtonian mechanics that the idea that human actions might 
be deterministic was conceived.  Then free will became the reactionary idea to preserve 
the traditional ideas of resposibility.


Brent


Then it became a 'human treasure':
*We are FREE to Will! *(like a god) and now even smart, reasonable people like us 
spend centuries to discuss it.
A decision is right when it goes smoothly with the given and continuing circumstances it 
has to fit into (Think of the mis - construed 'evolution': if it does not 'fit' the 
mutant perishes).
We may (or may not) know about the given circumstances and for sure may have only 
desultory and unsafe notions about the 'coming' ones. Our evaluation (call it 
computing?)  results in a decision (conscious or not) for our activity - OR just way of 
thinking. Reasonably we try to abide by those circumstances we know of and formulate 
(consciously, or not) our decision according to our best belief (maybe this is contrary 
to our interest?). Hence emerges FREE WILL.
I am not faithful enough to believe in MY free will and go to hell by force of this 
misconception. I may make mistakes.
I am not deterministically forced to comply with all facets of the infinite complexity - 
known,  or unknown. I can revolt. Meaning: I can knowingly choose the wrong decision.

Is that free will? Maybe. That's a matter of definition.

Regards
John Mikes


On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be 
mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:



On 15 Mar 2013, at 18:22, meekerdb wrote:


On 3/15/2013 7:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead. You know 
of
advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you arn't sure if you will go 
right
or left, you haven't finished the calculation yet, you haven't decided yet. 
Once
you get to the fork you find yourself on the left path and retroactively 
conclude
that you must have decided to go left.


Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking. Except that I 
decided
consciously before acting. If not, it is like randomness, or unconscious 
decision,
and that is not free will. Free-will is when I want to go the left, and 
decide
accordingly to go to the left, and nobody coerce me to not go to the left. 
It is
not much different than will + freedom.


That seems to me just and explanation of a certain *feeling* of a feeling of
freedom and of will.  If you find yourself on the left path without having
consciously thought I'll take the left. then you miss the feeling of 
will.  But
it may just be that your conscious thoughts are lagging a little.


?
I agree but that makes free-will independent of the feeling. With my 
definition of
free will, it is real,even if not felt, as the machine have the real 
possibility to
hesitate between subgoals and make choice hesitantly, knowing partially the
consequences.




When you're playing a game, say tennis, and you hit the ball to the left 
you may
have done so without conscious consideration yet it was just the right shot 
and so
was what you willed to win which you realize on reflection.


OK. Although I think that free-will is more typical for decision taking 
more time,
and more self-controversial, like the decision to drink some beer before 
driving a
plane with passengers ...





You have a feeling of freedom so long as you are not coerced or limited by
something you can consciously consider; that's essentially all the feeling 
of
freedom is, not being able to think of anything that is restricting or 
coercing you
from taking an action.  Since you can't be directly aware of deterministic 
or
random processes in your brain, whether they are random or deterministic 
has no
bearing on the freedom+will feeling.


I agree. But I think that free-will is more than a feeling. It is a real 
possibility
of reflected choice. Indeed it has nothing to so with determinacy or 
randomness.

Bruno




Brent



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Monday, March 18, 2013 7:57:06 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

  On 3/18/2013 1:02 PM, John Mikes wrote:
  

  friends: 
 don't put so much brain-grease into Free Will, please! 
  

 I'm not.  That's why I was careful to distinguish freedom and the feeling 
 of freedom from will and the feeling of resolve.  We can have them 
 together, but that doesn't make them into one thing.

  It is the religious mambo-jumbo put into the mind of the poor-believers 
 in ancient times to make them responsible for deeds the powerful disliked - 
 and consequently: make them punishable. 


 I don't think that's right.  The idea of responsibility was taken for 
 granted.  It was only after the development of Newtonian mechanics that the 
 idea that human actions might be deterministic was conceived.  Then free 
 will became the reactionary idea to preserve the traditional ideas of 
 resposibility.


The early Greek atomists such as Democritus (c.460-370 BCE) and Leucippus 
(c. 5th cent. BCE) were the first to see the universe as being purely 
mechanicalistic. The one surviving quote from Leucippus's work asserts a 
universal determinism: Nothing happens at random, but everything from 
rational principle and of necessity.- 
http://www.scandalon.co.uk/philosophy/determinism.htm


Craig


 Brent

  

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-17 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 16 Mar 2013, at 23:48, Stephen P. King wrote:


On 3/16/2013 3:15 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 15 Mar 2013, at 20:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:
No, I think that you haven't understood it,

That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What  
is it
that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that if  
you

have many molecular systems working together mechanically, you will
naturally get emergent properties that could be mistaken for
teleological entities. You can't tell the difference between a brain
change that seems meaningful to you and a meaningful experience  
which
causes a brain change. Just because you feel like you are moving  
your

arm doesn't mean that isn't just a narrative fiction that serves a
valuable evolutionary purpose.

All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our
universe however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose  
for
consciousness or narrative fictions. The existence of the feeling  
that
you can control your body makes no sense in universe where control  
is

impersonal and involuntary. There is no possibility for teleology to
even be conceived in a universe of endless meaningless chain  
reactions

- no basis for proprietary attachment of any kind. It's circular to
imagine that it could be important for an epiphenomenal self to
believe it is phenomenal. Important how? It's like adding a steering
wheel to a mountain.

due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your  
theory -
a theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and predicts  
nothing.


No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable,  
because
falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as  
prediction

goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are bound to the
extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be intolerant and
misrepresent other perspectives. They will cling pathologically to
unreal abstractions while flatly denying ordinary experience.


Materialism + computationalism can lead to nihilism. But
computationalism, per se,  does not deny ordinary experiences. It  
starts

from that, as it is a principle of invariance of consciousness for a
digital substitution made at some level.




Dear Bruno,

Could you elaborate on what you mean by 'nihilism' here?


Person eliminativism, like the Churchland and almost Dennett, as it  
seems.


It comes from comp + physicalism.

But comp alone does not. It leads only to the body problem, that is  
the very natural idea that the laws of physics have a non physical  
(arithmetical) reason.


Bruno





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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-17 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 17 Mar 2013, at 03:47, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Saturday, March 16, 2013 3:15:43 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 15 Mar 2013, at 20:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:
No, I think that you haven't understood it,

That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is  
it that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that  
if you have many molecular systems working together mechanically,  
you will naturally get emergent properties that could be mistaken  
for teleological entities. You can't tell the difference between a  
brain change that seems meaningful to you and a meaningful  
experience which causes a brain change. Just because you feel like  
you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just a narrative  
fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.


All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our  
universe however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose  
for consciousness or narrative fictions. The existence of the  
feeling that you can control your body makes no sense in universe  
where control is impersonal and involuntary. There is no  
possibility for teleology to even be conceived in a universe of  
endless meaningless chain reactions - no basis for proprietary  
attachment of any kind. It's circular to imagine that it could be  
important for an epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal.  
Important how? It's like adding a steering wheel to a mountain.


due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your  
theory - a theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and  
predicts nothing.


No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable,  
because falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as  
prediction goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are  
bound to the extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be  
intolerant and misrepresent other perspectives. They will cling  
pathologically to unreal abstractions while flatly denying ordinary  
experience.


Materialism + computationalism can lead to nihilism. But  
computationalism, per se,  does not deny ordinary experiences. It  
starts from that, as it is a principle of invariance of  
consciousness for a digital substitution made at some level.


It may not deny ordinary experiences, but it doesn't support them  
rationally either.


It supports them as much as possible. It supports some irrationalism  
like non communicable truth on the par of the machine.




What is a reason why computation would be processed as an ordinary  
experience, when we clearly can be accomplished through a-signifying  
mechanical activities?



You lost me here.

Bruno





Craig


Bruno





Craig





On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Craig Weinberg  
whats...@gmail.com wrote:



On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:55:26 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:



On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg  
whats...@gmail.com wrote:


Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of  
those ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on  
one fixed idea of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing  
any other, even if they themselves are sitting on top of it.



The irony in that statement is staggering. I couldn't satirize you  
any better if I tried.


Why, do you think that I have never considered the bottom up model  
of causation?



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-17 Thread Craig Weinberg



On Sunday, March 17, 2013 10:47:05 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 17 Mar 2013, at 03:47, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Saturday, March 16, 2013 3:15:43 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 15 Mar 2013, at 20:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:

 No, I think that you haven't understood it, 


 That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is it 
 that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that if you have 
 many molecular systems working together mechanically, you will naturally 
 get emergent properties that could be mistaken for teleological entities. 
 You can't tell the difference between a brain change that seems meaningful 
 to you and a meaningful experience which causes a brain change. Just 
 because you feel like you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just 
 a narrative fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.

 All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our universe 
 however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose for consciousness 
 or narrative fictions. The existence of the feeling that you can control 
 your body makes no sense in universe where control is impersonal and 
 involuntary. There is no possibility for teleology to even be conceived in 
 a universe of endless meaningless chain reactions - no basis for 
 proprietary attachment of any kind. It's circular to imagine that it could 
 be important for an epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal. 
 Important how? It's like adding a steering wheel to a mountain.
  

 due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your theory - a 
 theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and predicts nothing.


 No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable, because 
 falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as prediction 
 goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are bound to the 
 extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be intolerant and misrepresent 
 other perspectives. They will cling pathologically to unreal abstractions 
 while flatly denying ordinary experience.


 Materialism + computationalism can lead to nihilism. But 
 computationalism, per se,  does not deny ordinary experiences. It starts 
 from that, as it is a principle of invariance of consciousness for a 
 digital substitution made at some level.


 It may not deny ordinary experiences, but it doesn't support them 
 rationally either. 


 It supports them as much as possible. It supports some irrationalism like 
 non communicable truth on the par of the machine.


Being non-communicable is a property of experience but non-communicability 
itself doesn't imply experience at all. Experience can imply  a use for 
computation, as a method of distributing access to experiential qualities, 
but computation cannot imply a use for experience. As someone brought up on 
another conversation on FB, the construction of neural networks coincides 
with the end of conscious involvement - the disappearance of personal 
attention into automatism. Learning makes consciousness redundant. 
Repetition allows awareness to withdraw from the act, which becomes robotic.
 




 What is a reason why computation would be processed as an ordinary 
 experience, when we clearly can be accomplished through a-signifying 
 mechanical activities?



 You lost me here. 


We see that generic mechanical activities can be used to imitate 
experiences without actually embodying them. Illuminated pixels can 
stimulate our consciousness to experience characters and scenes which are 
not literally present in the pixels. The pixel arrangements do not 
literally become people and places.

Craig
 


 Bruno




 Craig
  


 Bruno




 Craig

  




 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:55:26 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:




 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:


 Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of 
 those ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on one 
 fixed 
 idea of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing any other, even 
 if 
 they themselves are sitting on top of it.


 The irony in that statement is staggering. I couldn't satirize you any 
 better if I tried. 


 Why, do you think that I have never considered the bottom up model of 
 causation?


 -- 
 You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google 
 Groups Everything List group.
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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-17 Thread John Clark

On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:

  So all free will means is that sometimes we can make correct
 predictions about what we will do before we do it, and sometimes we cannot,
 and in general beforehand there is no way to tell which ones we can make
 good predictions for and which ones we can't. And even when we make a
 correct prediction about what we will do (I will never do X for example)
 sometimes we'll have to wait literally forever to know it was the correct
 prediction.
 A pretty useless definition don't you think?

 It is useful to decide if some one must be send in a jail or in an
 hospital


That has nothing to do with the free will noise. If you determine beyond a
reasonable doubt that the murderer's mind can be repaired and his murderous
inclination eliminated then you send him to a hospital, if you determine he
cannot be repaired with existing technology then you warehouse him in a
jail unless you judge him to be so dangerous that would be too cruel to the
other residence of the warehouse, in which case you give him a nice little
dirt nap.

  You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead. You
 know of advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you aren't sure if
 you will go right or left, you haven't finished the calculation yet, you
 haven't decided yet. Once you get to the fork you find yourself on the left
 path and retroactively conclude that you must have decided to go left.


  Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking.


  And a powerful demon could be able to look into your head and quickly
 deduce that you would eventually choose to go to the left. Meanwhile you,
 whose mind works much more slowly than the demon's, hasn't completed the
 thought process yet. You might be saying to yourself I haven't decided
 yet, I'll have to think about it, I'm free to go either way but the demon
 already knows for a fact that despite your present uncertainty by the time
 you reach the fork you will decide to go to the left.



  No problem with that, unless the daemon interfere, but I am remain free
 to contradict him, if he decides to talk


In my example the demon did not tell you of his prediction, but now lets
pretend he did. Suppose also that you are of an argumentative nature and
was determined to do the exact opposite of what the demon predicted. Now
our poor demon would be in a familiar predicament. Because the demon's
decision now influences your actions the demon must forecast his own
behavior, but he will have no better luck in this regard than you did and
for the same reason. What we would need in a situation like this is a
mega-demon able to look into the demon's head. Now the mega-demon would
have the problem unless he did not tell you or the demon what his
prediction was and instead wrote it down and put it into a sealed envelope.

  John K Clark

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-17 Thread John Mikes

John: you answered YES on questions not drawing it:
(see your post copied below)

1st YES: can you (yes) or can you not (yes?) see?

2nd YES: can you NOT control? Yes, I can, Yes I cannot.

I was glad not to see a third YES.
YES
John A Mikes

On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 12:22 PM, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 , Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 If someone sells you into slavery, or brainwashes you in a cult, can you
 not see that you have lost something?


 Yes.


  Can you not 'control' your lungs to a greater extent than you can
 control your heartbeat?


 Yes

  How do you define this difference in your worldview?


 The only logical conclusion to make is that not everything the brain does
 has something to do with consciousness, there must be more than one
 subsystem in operation inside that bone box resting on your shoulders.
 Sigmund Freud figured that out a long time ago.

  John K Clark

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-16 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 12:07 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 The scientific conception of neurons is that *nothing* in them happens
 without a physical reason, ever.


 Which is why we those scientists have no idea what consciousness is.
 Physical is a meaningless term. Whatever happens is physical, whether it is
 smiling at a neighbor or welding a trashcan shut. The only good use for
 physical in my view is to discern relative presentations from
 representations. The letter A is not physical, but any particular
 instantiation of experience of object that we read as A is physical.

Can we stick to physical as something that can be observed and
measured? Smiling at a neighbour has a component that can be observed
and measured, the objective component, and a component that can't, the
subjective component. The scientific conception of neurons is that
nothing in them that can be observed and measured happens without a
physical reason that can be observed and measured.

So you could say his desire to move caused him to get up, which
would be true at one level, but at the microscopic level it will be
ionic fluxes, electrostatic forces between molecules, and so on that
caused him to get up. The desire to move cannot in itself be observed
and measured, so if it directly caused depolarisation of cell
membranes that would appear as miraculous to a scientist. Membrane
depolarisation is something that can be observed and measured so it
cannot happen without a physical reason that can itself be observed
and measured.

Now, do you think that the desire to move can cause membrane
depolarisation without any physical reason? Do you agree that, given
that scientists define physical reason as above, it would appear
miraculous to them if this happened?

 When a person decides to do
 something, this corresponds to certain changes in his brain, and these
 changes all follow absolutely rigidly from the physical laws
 describing electrochemical reactions.


 No, not all changes in the brain cannot be predicted at all from
 electrochemical reactions. If I decide to go on vacation next week, there is
 no electrochemical chain reaction which can explain why my body will drive
 to work today but not in a week. The explanation is only realized in the
 semantic content of the mind. This is why there is a clear and important
 different in our awareness between voluntary and involuntary reactions. To
 be addicted, coerced, enslaved, trapped, etc, are among the most dire
 conditions which humans confront, yet they have no chemical correlate at
 all. Whether someone is picking up trash on a prison chain gang or they are
 picking up trash on the grounds of their vast estate, there is no functional
 basis for either option being chemically preferable.

For every mental change there is a corresponding physical change. The
reverse is not the case. If it were possible to have a mental change
without a physical change then that would indicate that the mind had
an existence independent from the body - an immaterial soul, in
effect.

 This applies to every molecule
 in the brains in those fMRI pictures you have referenced.


 There were mostly spontaneous changes of large groups of molecules and
 neurons in those images. That's why I included them, because it is so
 obvious that this is not some kind of rippling, ricocheting, cymatic pattern
 which could conceivably propagate from bottom up chemistry.

If you show a video of an avalanche would it be reasonable to suppose
that it happened spontaneously in your sense or would it be
reasonable to suppose that even though the physical cause is not
obvious, it must be there somewhere?

 You may not
 be able to predict exactly what the brain will do but you can't
 predict much simpler systems such as where a billiard ball will end up
 after bouncing off several cushions either, and that does not lead you
 to doubt that it is mechanistic.


 Prediction is not the test. We know for a fact that we experience direct
 participation in our lives. That cannot be explained by chemistry as it is
 currently assumed to be. The model is incomplete, not the validity of our
 own experience.

Even if you are right about that chemistry can *completely* explain
the observable behaviour of any biological system.

 In the standard scientific view,


 which is wrong.


 spontaneously excitable cells are
 just a special subtype of excitable cells and still follow absolutely
 rigidly the physical laws describing electrochemical reactions. Google
 excitable cells and you can read about it. If I understand your
 view, you think that spontaneous means there is neuronal activity
 not explained by these rigid physical laws.


 Nothing is explained by any physical laws which cannot conceive of top-down
 voluntary control of muscle tissue, cells, and molecules. Excitable doesn't
 exhaustively determine what it is excited by. In some cases they are excited
 by surrounding conditions, in some cases they generate

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Saturday, March 16, 2013 12:26:24 AM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:

 This has to be my last response on this for a while. I will just say, 
 about consciousness arising from other premises: It is not the material 
 itself that is important, but the organization of it. 


I understand that premise completely, and as I have tried to clarify 
several times, my model of reality was that the universe was simply that - 
organization or 'pattern'. The big breakthrough however was more recently 
in the realization that pattern supervenes on pattern recognition and 
intention/projection (motive). The pattern/organization itself is an empty 
vehicle. If it were true that organization was the principle responsible 
for consciousness then we would expect anything this was organized in the 
same way would have the dame consciousness. An emoticon that looks like it 
is winking and smiling would literally have to at least be more winking and 
smiling than the same characters in a different arrangement. Common sense 
should tell us that cannot be true, and that this sequence of characters 
;-) is not symbolic in its own right and relies entirely on human 
expectations to define it as smiling. There are countless examples of where 
'the map is not the territory', and the 'menu is not the meal' which should 
help us understand that this 'pretending' or 'seeming like' is in the eye 
of the beholder and the sender (to some extent), not in the function of the 
form. There is a such thing as 'acting like' and that is all that a form or 
function can do.

 

 Consciousness *might* be what happens when certain kinds of organization 
 arise. 


I used to think that also. It's no less magical or religious than any other 
explanation though. Hand waving. Circumstantial evidence.
 

 The human brain might represent one particular kind of organization that 
 is conscious. 


I don't think that an organization can represent anything except within the 
presentation of some sensory experience.
 

 I am interested in theories of consciousness that describe that 
 organization, and what kinds of organization support consciousness and what 
 kinds don't.


Well, since the organization of someone who has just died no longer 
supports consciousness, I would focus on that difference. What is the 
difference in the way that a dead person's brain is organized?
 

 Note that when we take the emphasis off material and put it on 
 organization, it means that there many different kinds of structures that 
 could support consciousness, including virtual structures, structures made 
 out of networks of people, and so on.  I'm not saying this is right. But I 
 am saying that it is conceivable. 


It is conceivable in the sense that a square circle is conceivable. Yes, 
the idea that organization, function, or pattern could generate 
consciousness is an idea that is understandable, but does it really make 
sense beyond that? Does it make more sense than the idea of vitalism or 
materialism or idealism?
 

 You seem utterly closed to that possibility, and I don't understand why, 


Because I already have explored that possibility thoroughly, but with a 
clearer understanding of semiotics I began to see precisely why it is 
unworkable. Once you do, it all makes sense that what we see is neither 
what is 'real' nor is it unreal in every way at once, but rather all 
experience is filtered through various sense modalities, including the 
logical, cognitive, arithmetic, material, etc... all are senses and nothing 
more or less.
 

 except that you appear to be locked into your own beliefs, unwilling to 
 even set them aside for the sake of argument. 


You have to first assume that my ideas are true, and then try to disprove 
them. If you don't accept the premise, then you are still looking at my 
ideas through the filter of your own expectations and that of the legacy 
worldview. 


 Feynman's quote might make more sense if you realize that he was also 
 talking about himself. Obviously, he was one of the experts he warns about 
 in that quote.


Eh, not so much. I have seen Feynman humble, maybe, but mostly he was an 
*extremely* confident person, especially when it comes to clever insights - 
and for good reason. That quote refers specifically to his distrust of 
authority and intellectual elites and the recognition of that distrust as a 
key factor in thinking for yourself. He is not saying 'never trust 
yourself', but rather 'don't let someone's credentials make you doubt your 
own understanding'.

Craig


 Terren


 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 5:42 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript:
  wrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 5:14:16 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:


 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 4:11:32 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:


 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-16 Thread John Clark

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 , Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

If someone sells you into slavery, or brainwashes you in a cult, can you
 not see that you have lost something?


Yes.


  Can you not 'control' your lungs to a greater extent than you can
 control your heartbeat?


Yes

 How do you define this difference in your worldview?


The only logical conclusion to make is that not everything the brain does
has something to do with consciousness, there must be more than one
subsystem in operation inside that bone box resting on your shoulders.
Sigmund Freud figured that out a long time ago.

 John K Clark

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-16 Thread John Clark

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:

 So all free will means is that sometimes we can make correct
 predictions about what we will do before we do it,


Then a Turing Machine has free will because it can correctly predict that
it will list all the factors of 128 and then stop, and it can correctly it
will never list all the prime numbers and then stop.  The Turing machine
doesn't know if it will ever print out the smallest  even number greater
than 4 is not the sum of two primes greater than 2 because neither it nor
we currently have a proof to show its true or a counterexample to show its
false.

  John K Clark

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Saturday, March 16, 2013 12:22:19 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote:

 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 , Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote:

 If someone sells you into slavery, or brainwashes you in a cult, can you 
 not see that you have lost something?


 Yes.
  

  Can you not 'control' your lungs to a greater extent than you can 
 control your heartbeat? 


 Yes

  How do you define this difference in your worldview?


 The only logical conclusion to make is that not everything the brain does 
 has something to do with consciousness, there must be more than one 
 subsystem in operation inside that bone box resting on your shoulders. 
 Sigmund Freud figured that out a long time ago. 


Sure, but why do some subsystems have a quality of being under our control 
and some don't? What is the meaning of this quality?

Craig
 


  John K Clark 



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Saturday, March 16, 2013 12:41:27 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote:

 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript:
  wrote:

  So all free will means is that sometimes we can make correct 
 predictions about what we will do before we do it, 



That's what you say, not me. I guess now you are trying your hand at 
putting words in my mouth and agreeing with your own positions.
 


 Then a Turing Machine has free will because it can correctly predict


No, prediction has nothing to do with free will. Intention is not a passive 
knowledge or belief that is true in the future, it is the active power to 
change aspects of public reality to suit your preference.
 

 that it will list all the factors of 128 and then stop, and it can 
 correctly it will never list all the prime numbers and then stop.  The 
 Turing machine doesn't know if it will ever print out the smallest  even 
 number greater than 4 is not the sum of two primes greater than 2 because 
 neither it nor we currently have a proof to show its true or a 
 counterexample to show its false.


If a Turing machine had free will, then it would decide what it would list 
and what it wouldn't.

Craig
 


   John K Clark 

   






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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-16 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 15 Mar 2013, at 20:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:
No, I think that you haven't understood it,

That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is  
it that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that  
if you have many molecular systems working together mechanically,  
you will naturally get emergent properties that could be mistaken  
for teleological entities. You can't tell the difference between a  
brain change that seems meaningful to you and a meaningful  
experience which causes a brain change. Just because you feel like  
you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just a narrative  
fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.


All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our  
universe however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose  
for consciousness or narrative fictions. The existence of the  
feeling that you can control your body makes no sense in universe  
where control is impersonal and involuntary. There is no possibility  
for teleology to even be conceived in a universe of endless  
meaningless chain reactions - no basis for proprietary attachment of  
any kind. It's circular to imagine that it could be important for an  
epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal. Important how? It's  
like adding a steering wheel to a mountain.


due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your theory  
- a theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and predicts  
nothing.


No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable,  
because falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as  
prediction goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are  
bound to the extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be  
intolerant and misrepresent other perspectives. They will cling  
pathologically to unreal abstractions while flatly denying ordinary  
experience.


Materialism + computationalism can lead to nihilism. But  
computationalism, per se,  does not deny ordinary experiences. It  
starts from that, as it is a principle of invariance of consciousness  
for a digital substitution made at some level.


Bruno





Craig





On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com  
wrote:



On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:55:26 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:



On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com  
wrote:


Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of  
those ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on one  
fixed idea of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing any  
other, even if they themselves are sitting on top of it.



The irony in that statement is staggering. I couldn't satirize you  
any better if I tried.


Why, do you think that I have never considered the bottom up model  
of causation?



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-16 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 15 Mar 2013, at 21:18, John Clark wrote:

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be  
wrote:
 No that is the exact opposite of the truth, we cannot follow our  
own self determination. If you tell me that a system is  
deterministic you have added exactly zero information by telling me  
that the system also has free will, thus free will means  
nothing and is just a noise.
If you tell me that a system is deterministic you have added  
exactly zero information by telling me that the system also has  
consciousness, thus consciousness means nothing and is just a  
noise.


Loss of consciousness such as in sleep or anesthesia has observable  
consequences for me, I formed no new memories and the external  
universe seems to have instantaneously jumped ahead, but loss of  
free will has no observable consequences to me or to anybody else  
because nobody has a clue what the dumb thing is supposed to mean.


Well it is either the loss of the will, like in some severe  
depression, or the loss of freedom, like in jail or camps.





 if you tell me that a black hole is deterministic you have added  
exactly zero information by telling me that the black hole also has  
also a mass, thus mass means nothing and is just a noise.


What the hell are you talking about?? Change the mass of a Black  
Hole and you change the event horizon and that can be measured.  
Black holes are the simplest macroscopic objects in the known  
universe but you've got to know the mass, if you know the mass, spin  
and electrical charge that the Black Hole has then you know  
everything that can distinguish one Black Hole from another.  You  
can know all there is to know about a Black Hole with just 3 numbers  
(2 really because for a actual Black Hole the electrical charge is  
always zero, or at least very small) but one of those numbers is the  
mass.


My point was just to invalidate the kind of reasoning you were doing.





 Having self-determination does not entail that we can self- 
determine ourself completely. I did not say total self- 
determination.


So all free will means is that sometimes we can make correct  
predictions about what we will do before we do it, and sometimes we  
cannot, and in general beforehand there is no way to tell which ones  
we can make good predictions for and which ones we can't. And even  
when we make a correct prediction about what we will do (I will  
never do X for example) sometimes we'll have to wait literally  
forever to know it was the correct prediction.


A pretty useless definition don't you think?



It is useful to decide if some one must be send in a jail or in an  
hospital, or asylum, etc.






 You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead.  
You know of advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you aren't  
sure if you will go right or left, you haven't finished the  
calculation yet, you haven't decided yet. Once you get to the fork  
you find yourself on the left path and retroactively conclude that  
you must have decided to go left.


 Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking.

And a powerful demon could be able to look into your head and  
quickly deduce that you would eventually choose to go to the left.  
Meanwhile you, whose mind works much more slowly than the demon's,  
hasn't completed the thought process yet. You might be saying to  
yourself I haven't decided yet, I'll have to think about it, I'm  
free to go either way but the demon already knows for a fact that  
despite your present uncertainty by the time you reach the fork you  
will decide to go to the left.




No problem with that, unless the daemon interfere, but I am remain  
free to contradict him, if he decides to talk.


Bruno





  John K Clark


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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-16 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 15 Mar 2013, at 22:14, Terren Suydam wrote:



Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. - Feynman

A great quote that admonishes us to never trust our beliefs 100%.  
Very few people I have met have Feynman's humility.


Wonderful (and funny) quote.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-16 Thread Stephen P. King

On 3/16/2013 3:15 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
 
 On 15 Mar 2013, at 20:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:
 


 On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:
 No, I think that you haven't understood it,

 That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is it
 that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that if you
 have many molecular systems working together mechanically, you will
 naturally get emergent properties that could be mistaken for
 teleological entities. You can't tell the difference between a brain
 change that seems meaningful to you and a meaningful experience which
 causes a brain change. Just because you feel like you are moving your
 arm doesn't mean that isn't just a narrative fiction that serves a
 valuable evolutionary purpose.

 All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our
 universe however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose for
 consciousness or narrative fictions. The existence of the feeling that
 you can control your body makes no sense in universe where control is
 impersonal and involuntary. There is no possibility for teleology to
 even be conceived in a universe of endless meaningless chain reactions
 - no basis for proprietary attachment of any kind. It's circular to
 imagine that it could be important for an epiphenomenal self to
 believe it is phenomenal. Important how? It's like adding a steering
 wheel to a mountain.

 due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your theory -
 a theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and predicts nothing.

 No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable, because
 falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as prediction
 goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are bound to the
 extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be intolerant and
 misrepresent other perspectives. They will cling pathologically to
 unreal abstractions while flatly denying ordinary experience.
 
 Materialism + computationalism can lead to nihilism. But
 computationalism, per se,  does not deny ordinary experiences. It starts
 from that, as it is a principle of invariance of consciousness for a
 digital substitution made at some level.
 


Dear Bruno,

Could you elaborate on what you mean by 'nihilism' here?


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Onward!

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Saturday, March 16, 2013 3:15:43 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 15 Mar 2013, at 20:38, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:

 No, I think that you haven't understood it, 


 That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is it 
 that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that if you have 
 many molecular systems working together mechanically, you will naturally 
 get emergent properties that could be mistaken for teleological entities. 
 You can't tell the difference between a brain change that seems meaningful 
 to you and a meaningful experience which causes a brain change. Just 
 because you feel like you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just 
 a narrative fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.

 All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our universe 
 however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose for consciousness 
 or narrative fictions. The existence of the feeling that you can control 
 your body makes no sense in universe where control is impersonal and 
 involuntary. There is no possibility for teleology to even be conceived in 
 a universe of endless meaningless chain reactions - no basis for 
 proprietary attachment of any kind. It's circular to imagine that it could 
 be important for an epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal. 
 Important how? It's like adding a steering wheel to a mountain.
  

 due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your theory - a 
 theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and predicts nothing.


 No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable, because 
 falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as prediction 
 goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are bound to the 
 extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be intolerant and misrepresent 
 other perspectives. They will cling pathologically to unreal abstractions 
 while flatly denying ordinary experience.


 Materialism + computationalism can lead to nihilism. But computationalism, 
 per se,  does not deny ordinary experiences. It starts from that, as it is 
 a principle of invariance of consciousness for a digital substitution made 
 at some level.


It may not deny ordinary experiences, but it doesn't support them 
rationally either. What is a reason why computation would be processed as 
an ordinary experience, when we clearly can be accomplished through 
a-signifying mechanical activities?

Craig
 


 Bruno




 Craig

  




 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:55:26 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:




 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:


 Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of 
 those ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on one 
 fixed 
 idea of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing any other, even if 
 they themselves are sitting on top of it.


 The irony in that statement is staggering. I couldn't satirize you any 
 better if I tried. 


 Why, do you think that I have never considered the bottom up model of 
 causation?


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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-15 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 I didn't say that. I said When five billion of them jump to attention at
 once, it  is **often** because of something that the person is experiencing
 intentionally,. Biochemistry, among other things, can cause billions of
 neurons to react, but also intentional thought can do that with no external
 force.

 You need to find
 some experimental evidence for this, and astound the scientific world.


 Straw man cabaret continues..

You claim that I don't understand you and perhaps I don't. I'm not
deliberately constructing straw man arguments.

The scientific conception of neurons is that *nothing* in them happens
without a physical reason, ever. When a person decides to do
something, this corresponds to certain changes in his brain, and these
changes all follow absolutely rigidly from the physical laws
describing electrochemical reactions. This applies to every molecule
in the brains in those fMRI pictures you have referenced. You may not
be able to predict exactly what the brain will do but you can't
predict much simpler systems such as where a billiard ball will end up
after bouncing off several cushions either, and that does not lead you
to doubt that it is mechanistic.

In the standard scientific view, spontaneously excitable cells are
just a special subtype of excitable cells and still follow absolutely
rigidly the physical laws describing electrochemical reactions. Google
excitable cells and you can read about it. If I understand your
view, you think that spontaneous means there is neuronal activity
not explained by these rigid physical laws. That must be evident in
some experiment or observation; for otherwise the brain would follow
the rigid physical laws in a machine-like way, which you do not
believe is the case.

Can you explain if I have this wrong where exactly I have it wrong?


-- 
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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Friday, March 15, 2013 12:23:42 AM UTC-4, John Clark wrote:

 On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 5:32 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript:
  wrote:

  A wheel is just [...]  a mouse trap does not [...]  it doesn't care 
 about [...]  it doesn't matter to [...]


 This is really getting tedious. Again and again you are decreeing what is 
 and what is not so but you're not even attempting to give us a reason for 
 believing it is true except for your word. You're not the Pope and I don't 
 believe what the Pope says without evidence or rational argument either. 


You can believe what you like. I have not met anyone else who would even 
argue these kinds of self-evident facts. I use simple and obvious examples 
like a wheel and a mousetrap because no argument is required - everyone 
knows what happens with wheels and mousetraps so that it should not be 
controversial to say that they are devices which have no intentional 
capacities. It would be different if they arose naturally, then we might 
allow that they are part of a larger or smaller intentional system, but 
since we constructed them specifically to do what we want, we can be 
certain that there is nothing that they want.
 


  As a practical matter both you and I judge that something is conscious 
 in exactly the same way, we look for intelligence.


  No, I would generally look for movement. Breathing. 


 So when I undergo anesthesia I'm conscious  but when Einstein holds his 
 breath he's not.


If you are breathing then you might be able to sustain consciousness. 
Holding your breath doesn't last long enough to consider, it isn't a stable 
condition. The less time you have to observe something like that, the more 
likely that you will make a mistake. A mannequin or a sock puppet can fool 
you for a moment, but in time, the artificiality and unconsciousness is 
revealed.
 

   

  ESP parapsychology junk science. 


 You must be psychic to know the results of experiments before they are 
 even designed.


 These sort of experiments have been performed ad nauseam for at least 2 
 centuries and have produced null results, it's time to move on.


Nah, we have barely begun. The more we know about communication in plants 
and bacteria, the more we see that consciousness is universal.
 


  Machines are getting better in some ways, but not in any way that 
 matters to anything except human minds.


 A machine mattered very much to 2 champion human minds who got their ass 
 beaten on Jeopardy by a certain machine. 


A person made a machine to rapidly access a pool of data and parse it into 
a fixed format for other people to marvel at. Watson is an automated file 
cabinet of pre-loaded trivia.
 

  

  In your universe, the Free Will noise either exists for a reason or it 
 does not. 


 Obviously 

  You don't seem to allow that it could have a reason,


 Not at all, there might be a reason people believe in free will just as 
 there is a reason children believe in Santa Claws.


What might be the reason?
 


   nor do you allow that the belief in free will could be random


 Not at all, there might be no reason; but one thing is certain, there is a 
 reason people believe in free will or there is not a reason people 
 believe in free will


Either way, it is not their choice, nor is it yours. You disbelieve in free 
will for a reason or for no reason, but you can't change the reason so it 
is not your opinion at all.
 


  You clearly believe that people intentionally choose their belief in 
 free will and that they could and should correct this error by educating 
 themselves in a particular way. 


 Maybe, or maybe some people are just hardwired that way. 


What about those who aren't?

Craig
 


   John K Clark



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-15 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 14 Mar 2013, at 17:10, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Thursday, March 14, 2013 10:59:14 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 14 Mar 2013, at 05:37, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

 On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Craig Weinberg
 whats...@gmail.com wrote:

 Who are you to say that natural phenomena are superfluous?


 Who are you to say that they aren't?

 The natural world is as it is. It's not my place to say the the  
Great
 Red Spot of Jupiter is superfluous, that the electron is  
superfluous,

 or that intelligent apes are superfluous.

Hmm... Keep in mind that IF the brain work like a digital computer,
THEN the physical reality is emerging in a special way from number
relations. Up to now, the quantum reality seems completely OK with
computationalism, but we must keep open the possibility of a
refutation of comp. In that case a physicalist association between a
non computable matter and a non computable mind would be necessary. So
Craig's point might make sense. But most of his argument does not and
he begs the question systematically.
What we know today (or should know) is that the mind body problem is
necessarily reduced to the problem of justifying the emergence of the
physical laws from arithmetic/computer science. As long as this is not
done (compeletely: propositional physics has already been isolated) we
must remain open to a refutation of computationalism. In a  
sense,

with comp, nature is *superfluous* as it is the border of the possible
arithmetical mind. Nature is something complex with a quite precise
logical, or logico-arithmetical origin.

Bruno

My argument only seems to you to beg the question because you frame  
the question from the start in a way that unfairly places a theory  
about experience as being equivalent to experience itself.


On the contrary. The theory of machine experience, which is  
expressible, explains in all detail why most experiences are not  
expressible.





Comp assumes that third person realism is reality and the question  
is only who does first person experience fit in with that reality. I  
see that this assumption takes the foundation of experience itself  
for granted. Arithmetic and machines are conjured into Platonic non- 
locality and erupt spontaneously into florid locality, when in fact  
no such geometric expression is explainable by Comp.


You make too much negative assertion without any argument.




I have pointed out many times that all arithmetic operations  
supervene on lower level input-output sense ontologies,


input-output sense ontologies are too fuzzy to me, and a priori more  
complex than elementary arithmetic.






but you seem to avoid this stark revelation


I don't. But I show that comp + materialism can't avoid that avoidance.




and try to patch it up with the expediencies of theory.


You betray here that you are not interested in a theory. Yet you make  
negative assertion about possibilities. Without a sharable set of  
assumptions this look like arbitrariness.




You say 'we have to start somewhere', but that too is an intuitive  
anchor rather than something which can be produced by machine logic.  
The logic of Comp rests on the unacknowledged physics of sense,  
which it mistakes for a disembodied arithmetic primitive - the  
shadow of sense reflected on disowned idealized matter (digital,  
solid body groupings).


You clearly have not studied the theory. Your critics miss the point.

Bruno





Craig



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/




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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Friday, March 15, 2013 6:59:42 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:

 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:48 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 

  I didn't say that. I said When five billion of them jump to attention 
 at 
  once, it  is **often** because of something that the person is 
 experiencing 
  intentionally,. Biochemistry, among other things, can cause billions of 
  neurons to react, but also intentional thought can do that with no 
 external 
  force. 
  
  You need to find 
  some experimental evidence for this, and astound the scientific world. 
  
  
  Straw man cabaret continues.. 

 You claim that I don't understand you and perhaps I don't. I'm not 
 deliberately constructing straw man arguments. 


Then stop saying that my view must have something to do with violating 
physics.
 


 The scientific conception of neurons is that *nothing* in them happens 
 without a physical reason, ever. 


Which is why we those scientists have no idea what consciousness is. 
Physical is a meaningless term. Whatever happens is physical, whether it is 
smiling at a neighbor or welding a trashcan shut. The only good use for 
physical in my view is to discern relative presentations from 
representations. The letter A is not physical, but any particular 
instantiation of experience of object that we read as A is physical.
 

 When a person decides to do 
 something, this corresponds to certain changes in his brain, and these 
 changes all follow absolutely rigidly from the physical laws 
 describing electrochemical reactions. 


No, not all changes in the brain cannot be predicted at all from 
electrochemical reactions. If I decide to go on vacation next week, there 
is no electrochemical chain reaction which can explain why my body will 
drive to work today but not in a week. The explanation is only realized in 
the semantic content of the mind. This is why there is a clear and 
important different in our awareness between voluntary and involuntary 
reactions. To be addicted, coerced, enslaved, trapped, etc, are among the 
most dire conditions which humans confront, yet they have no chemical 
correlate at all. Whether someone is picking up trash on a prison chain 
gang or they are picking up trash on the grounds of their vast estate, 
there is no functional basis for either option being chemically preferable.
 

 This applies to every molecule 
 in the brains in those fMRI pictures you have referenced. 


There were mostly spontaneous changes of large groups of molecules and 
neurons in those images. That's why I included them, because it is so 
obvious that this is not some kind of rippling, ricocheting, cymatic 
pattern which could conceivably propagate from bottom up chemistry.
 

 You may not 
 be able to predict exactly what the brain will do but you can't 
 predict much simpler systems such as where a billiard ball will end up 
 after bouncing off several cushions either, and that does not lead you 
 to doubt that it is mechanistic. 


Prediction is not the test. We know for a fact that we experience direct 
participation in our lives. That cannot be explained by chemistry as it is 
currently assumed to be. The model is incomplete, not the validity of our 
own experience.
 


 In the standard scientific view, 


which is wrong.
 

 spontaneously excitable cells are 
 just a special subtype of excitable cells and still follow absolutely 
 rigidly the physical laws describing electrochemical reactions. Google 
 excitable cells and you can read about it. If I understand your 
 view, you think that spontaneous means there is neuronal activity 
 not explained by these rigid physical laws.


Nothing is explained by any physical laws which cannot conceive of top-down 
voluntary control of muscle tissue, cells, and molecules. Excitable doesn't 
exhaustively determine what it is excited by. In some cases they are 
excited by surrounding conditions, in some cases they generate excitement 
internally - and that is who we are, the agency associated with the 
spontaneous internal excitement of those cells (as well as the unseen 
excitement or whatever it is going on in glial cells, etc)
 

 That must be evident in 
 some experiment or observation; for otherwise the brain would follow 
 the rigid physical laws in a machine-like way, which you do not 
 believe is the case. 


You are conceiving of the brain in a way which is so pathologically 
prejudiced that there is no possibility of your seeing beyond it. You have 
decided a priori that all there is is what physics has defined, and 
therefore no matter how absurd it is, everything that exists must 'really' 
be part of that. Your view makes it impossible for any organism to do 
anything other than passively wait until something external causes a chain 
reaction that makes their legs move around and their hands shove food into 
their mouth. The universe that you imagine cannot possibly include you or 
your ability to imagine anything - but rather than

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Friday, March 15, 2013 9:01:24 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 14 Mar 2013, at 17:10, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Thursday, March 14, 2013 10:59:14 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 14 Mar 2013, at 05:37, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: 

  On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Craig Weinberg   
  whats...@gmail.com wrote: 
  
  Who are you to say that natural phenomena are superfluous? 
  
  
  Who are you to say that they aren't? 
  
  The natural world is as it is. It's not my place to say the the Great 
  Red Spot of Jupiter is superfluous, that the electron is superfluous, 
  or that intelligent apes are superfluous. 

 Hmm... Keep in mind that IF the brain work like a digital computer,   
 THEN the physical reality is emerging in a special way from number   
 relations. Up to now, the quantum reality seems completely OK with   
 computationalism, but we must keep open the possibility of a   
 refutation of comp. In that case a physicalist association between a   
 non computable matter and a non computable mind would be necessary. So   
 Craig's point might make sense. But most of his argument does not and   
 he begs the question systematically. 
 What we know today (or should know) is that the mind body problem is   
 necessarily reduced to the problem of justifying the emergence of the   
 physical laws from arithmetic/computer science. As long as this is not   
 done (compeletely: propositional physics has already been isolated) we   
 must remain open to a refutation of computationalism. In a sense, 
   
 with comp, nature is *superfluous* as it is the border of the possible   
 arithmetical mind. Nature is something complex with a quite precise   
 logical, or logico-arithmetical origin. 

 Bruno 


 My argument only seems to you to beg the question because you frame the 
 question from the start in a way that unfairly places a theory about 
 experience as being equivalent to experience itself. 


 On the contrary. The theory of machine experience, which is expressible, 
 explains in all detail why most experiences are not expressible.


It is only expressible if expression is already possible. Theory in general 
is only possible through experience. You seem to place theory in a voyeur's 
position, above and beyond actual participation in experience. For you, 
theory is not an experience, but a pure commentary from elsewhere.
 





 Comp assumes that third person realism is reality and the question is only 
 who does first person experience fit in with that reality. I see that this 
 assumption takes the foundation of experience itself for granted. 
 Arithmetic and machines are conjured into Platonic non-locality and erupt 
 spontaneously into florid locality, when in fact no such geometric 
 expression is explainable by Comp. 


 You make too much negative assertion without any argument.


It's not an argument, its an observation. Comp has no reason to support 
geometry.
 





 I have pointed out many times that all arithmetic operations supervene on 
 lower level input-output sense ontologies, 


 input-output sense ontologies are too fuzzy to me, and a priori more 
 complex than elementary arithmetic.


A Turing machine needs to read and write. It needs tape that is 
addressable. These are sensory-motor capacities which arithmetic machines 
need to function. Storage, memory, processing momentum, nested cycling and 
orientation. Sense. Coherence. Sanity. These are more elementary than 
arithmetic.
 





 but you seem to avoid this stark revelation 


 I don't. But I show that comp + materialism can't avoid that avoidance.


Why not? Can you explain briefly without referencing any variables?
 




 and try to patch it up with the expediencies of theory. 


 You betray here that you are not interested in a theory. Yet you make 
 negative assertion about possibilities. Without a sharable set of 
 assumptions this look like arbitrariness.


I'm interested in theory only to the extent that it reflects reality. I 
don't think it's arbitrary, I'm just trying to avoid pointless distractions.
 




 You say 'we have to start somewhere', but that too is an intuitive anchor 
 rather than something which can be produced by machine logic. The logic of 
 Comp rests on the unacknowledged physics of sense, which it mistakes for a 
 disembodied arithmetic primitive - the shadow of sense reflected on 
 disowned idealized matter (digital, solid body groupings).


 You clearly have not studied the theory. Your critics miss the point.


It is my theory that should be studied. My critics expose the entire class 
of possible theories as second order.

Craig
 


 Bruno




 Craig
  



 http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ 




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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-15 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 15 Mar 2013, at 04:19, John Clark wrote:

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 9:59 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be  
wrote:
 Because both dragons and God are well defined concepts, just  
concepts that don’t happen to have the attribute of existence. In  
contrast “free will” is not only incoherently defined it is every  
bit as self contradictory as the largest prime number is.


 You have yourself provided a counter-example to this claim. We  
have concluded that the free-will based on non determinacy is non  
sensical, but not so for the notion of free-will based on  
determinacy. Free-will does makes sense in that case: it is the  
ability to follow our own self-determination,


No that is the exact opposite of the truth, we cannot follow our own  
self determination. If you tell me that a system is deterministic  
you have added exactly zero information by telling me that the  
system also has free will, thus free will means nothing and is  
just a noise.


That's a curious way of reasoning.

-If you tell me that a system is deterministic you have added exactly  
zero information by telling me that the system also has  
consciousness, thus consciousness means nothing and is just a noise.


-If you tell me that a system is deterministic you have added exactly  
zero information by telling me that the system also has the american  
citizenship, thus american citizenship means nothing and is just a  
noise.


-If you tell me that a black hole is deterministic you have added  
exactly zero information by telling me that the black hole also has  
also a mass, thus mass means nothing and is just a noise.


etc.






Turing proved 80 years ago that even in a 100% deterministic system  
sometimes you can tell if that system will ever be in sate X (such  
as the stop state for example) BUT sometimes you can not and in  
general there is no way to tell when you can and when you can't, so  
the only way to know is to just watch it and see, and you might end  
up watching it literally forever. There is no shortcut, sometimes  
nobody, not even we ourselves know what we will do until we do it.


Having self-determination does not entail that we can self-determine  
ourself completely. I did not say total self-determination.






You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead.  
You know of advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you arn't  
sure if you will go right or left, you haven't finished the  
calculation yet, you haven't decided yet. Once you get to the fork  
you find yourself on the left path and retroactively conclude that  
you must have decided to go left.


Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking. Except that I  
decided consciously before acting. If not, it is like randomness, or  
unconscious decision, and that is not free will. Free-will is when I  
want to go the left, and decide accordingly to go to the left, and  
nobody coerce me to not go to the left. It is not much different than  
will + freedom.


Bruno



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-15 Thread meekerdb

Craig thinks his theory mind is perfectly compatible with physics because he thinks
physics is different from what all those stupid physicists think it is. They just don't
know about his top-down physics, which no one has observed but which he *directly
experiences* and therefore *just knows he's right*. Give it up John, Stathis. There's no
point arguing with cranks and mystics.

Brent
There are those who claim that magic is like the tide; that it
swells and fades over the surface of the earth, collecting in
concentrated pools here and there, almost disappearing from other
spots, leaving them parched for wonder. There are also those who
believe that if you stick your fingers up your nose and blow, it
will increase your intelligence.
-- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VII

On 3/15/2013 6:07 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Friday, March 15, 2013 6:59:42 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com
javascript:
wrote:

I didn't say that. I said When five billion of them jump to attention at
once, it is **often** because of something that the person is
experiencing
intentionally,. Biochemistry, among other things, can cause billions of
neurons to react, but also intentional thought can do that with no
external
force.

You need to find
some experimental evidence for this, and astound the scientific world.

Straw man cabaret continues..

You claim that I don't understand you and perhaps I don't. I'm not
deliberately constructing straw man arguments.

Then stop saying that my view must have something to do with violating physics.

The scientific conception of neurons is that *nothing* in them happens
without a physical reason, ever.

Which is why we those scientists have no idea what consciousness is. Physical is a
meaningless term. Whatever happens is physical, whether it is smiling at a neighbor or
welding a trashcan shut. The only good use for physical in my view is to discern
relative presentations from representations. The letter A is not physical, but any
particular instantiation of experience of object that we read as A is physical.

When a person decides to do
something, this corresponds to certain changes in his brain, and these
changes all follow absolutely rigidly from the physical laws
describing electrochemical reactions.

No, not all changes in the brain cannot be predicted at all from electrochemical
reactions. If I decide to go on vacation next week, there is no electrochemical chain
reaction which can explain why my body will drive to work today but not in a week. The
explanation is only realized in the semantic content of the mind. This is why there is a
clear and important different in our awareness between voluntary and involuntary
reactions. To be addicted, coerced, enslaved, trapped, etc, are among the most dire
conditions which humans confront, yet they have no chemical correlate at all. Whether
someone is picking up trash on a prison chain gang or they are picking up trash on the
grounds of their vast estate, there is no functional basis for either option being
chemically preferable.

This applies to every molecule
in the brains in those fMRI pictures you have referenced.

There were mostly spontaneous changes of large groups of molecules and neurons in those
images. That's why I included them, because it is so obvious that this is not some kind
of rippling, ricocheting, cymatic pattern which could conceivably propagate from bottom
up chemistry.

You may not
be able to predict exactly what the brain will do but you can't
predict much simpler systems such as where a billiard ball will end up
after bouncing off several cushions either, and that does not lead you
to doubt that it is mechanistic.

Prediction is not the test. We know for a fact that we experience direct participation
in our lives. That cannot be explained by chemistry as it is currently assumed to be.
The model is incomplete, not the validity of our own experience.

In the standard scientific view,

which is wrong.

spontaneously excitable cells are
just a special subtype of excitable cells and still follow absolutely
rigidly the physical laws describing electrochemical reactions. Google
excitable cells and you can read about it. If I understand your
view, you think that spontaneous means there is neuronal activity
not explained by these rigid physical laws.

Nothing is explained by any physical laws which cannot conceive of top-down voluntary
control of muscle tissue, cells, and molecules. Excitable doesn't exhaustively determine
what it is excited by. In some cases they are excited by surrounding conditions, in some
cases they generate excitement internally - and that is who we are, the agency
associated with the spontaneous internal excitement of those cells (as

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:07:19 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

  Craig thinks his theory mind is perfectly compatible with physics 
 because he thinks physics is different from what all those stupid 
 physicists think it is.  They just don't know about his top-down physics, 
 which no one has observed but which he *directly experiences* and therefore 
 *just knows he's right*.  Give it up John, Stathis.  There's no point 
 arguing with cranks and mystics.  


I can't hear you, there's just some kind of deterministic neurological 
phenomenon babbling out its evolutionarily inevitable flatulence.

Craig
 


 Brent
 There are those who claim that magic is like the tide; that it
 swells and fades over the surface of the earth, collecting in
 concentrated pools here and there, almost disappearing from other
 spots, leaving them parched for wonder. There are also those who
 believe that if you stick your fingers up your nose and blow, it
 will increase your intelligence.
 -- The Teachings of Ebenezum, Volume VII


 On 3/15/2013 6:07 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
  


 On Friday, March 15, 2013 6:59:42 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: 

 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com 
 wrote: 

  I didn't say that. I said When five billion of them jump to attention 
 at 
  once, it  is **often** because of something that the person is 
 experiencing 
  intentionally,. Biochemistry, among other things, can cause billions 
 of 
  neurons to react, but also intentional thought can do that with no 
 external 
  force. 
  
  You need to find 
  some experimental evidence for this, and astound the scientific world. 
  
  
  Straw man cabaret continues.. 

 You claim that I don't understand you and perhaps I don't. I'm not 
 deliberately constructing straw man arguments. 


 Then stop saying that my view must have something to do with violating 
 physics.
  
  

 The scientific conception of neurons is that *nothing* in them happens 
 without a physical reason, ever. 


 Which is why we those scientists have no idea what consciousness is. 
 Physical is a meaningless term. Whatever happens is physical, whether it is 
 smiling at a neighbor or welding a trashcan shut. The only good use for 
 physical in my view is to discern relative presentations from 
 representations. The letter A is not physical, but any particular 
 instantiation of experience of object that we read as A is physical.
  
  
 When a person decides to do 
 something, this corresponds to certain changes in his brain, and these 
 changes all follow absolutely rigidly from the physical laws 
 describing electrochemical reactions. 


 No, not all changes in the brain cannot be predicted at all from 
 electrochemical reactions. If I decide to go on vacation next week, there 
 is no electrochemical chain reaction which can explain why my body will 
 drive to work today but not in a week. The explanation is only realized in 
 the semantic content of the mind. This is why there is a clear and 
 important different in our awareness between voluntary and involuntary 
 reactions. To be addicted, coerced, enslaved, trapped, etc, are among the 
 most dire conditions which humans confront, yet they have no chemical 
 correlate at all. Whether someone is picking up trash on a prison chain 
 gang or they are picking up trash on the grounds of their vast estate, 
 there is no functional basis for either option being chemically preferable.
  
  
 This applies to every molecule 
 in the brains in those fMRI pictures you have referenced. 


 There were mostly spontaneous changes of large groups of molecules and 
 neurons in those images. That's why I included them, because it is so 
 obvious that this is not some kind of rippling, ricocheting, cymatic 
 pattern which could conceivably propagate from bottom up chemistry.
  
  
 You may not 
 be able to predict exactly what the brain will do but you can't 
 predict much simpler systems such as where a billiard ball will end up 
 after bouncing off several cushions either, and that does not lead you 
 to doubt that it is mechanistic. 


 Prediction is not the test. We know for a fact that we experience direct 
 participation in our lives. That cannot be explained by chemistry as it is 
 currently assumed to be. The model is incomplete, not the validity of our 
 own experience.
  
  

 In the standard scientific view, 


 which is wrong.
  
  
 spontaneously excitable cells are 
 just a special subtype of excitable cells and still follow absolutely 
 rigidly the physical laws describing electrochemical reactions. Google 
 excitable cells and you can read about it. If I understand your 
 view, you think that spontaneous means there is neuronal activity 
 not explained by these rigid physical laws.


 Nothing is explained by any physical laws which cannot conceive of 
 top-down voluntary control of muscle tissue, cells, and molecules. 
 Excitable doesn't exhaustively determine what it is excited by. In some

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-15 Thread meekerdb


On 3/15/2013 7:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead. You know of 
advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you arn't sure if you will go right or 
left, you haven't finished the calculation yet, you haven't decided yet. Once you get 
to the fork you find yourself on the left path and retroactively conclude that you must 
have decided to go left.


Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking. Except that I decided 
consciously before acting. If not, it is like randomness, or unconscious decision, and 
that is not free will. Free-will is when I want to go the left, and decide accordingly 
to go to the left, and nobody coerce me to not go to the left. It is not much different 
than will + freedom.


That seems to me just and explanation of a certain *feeling* of a feeling of freedom and 
of will.  If you find yourself on the left path without having consciously thought I'll 
take the left. then you miss the feeling of will.  But it may just be that your conscious 
thoughts are lagging a little.  When you're playing a game, say tennis, and you hit the 
ball to the left you may have done so without conscious consideration yet it was just the 
right shot and so was what you willed to win which you realize on reflection.  You have 
a feeling of freedom so long as you are not coerced or limited by something you can 
consciously consider; that's essentially all the feeling of freedom is, not being able to 
think of anything that is restricting or coercing you from taking an action.  Since you 
can't be directly aware of deterministic or random processes in your brain, whether they 
are random or deterministic has no bearing on the freedom+will feeling.


Brent

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-15 Thread Stephen P. King

On 3/15/2013 1:11 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
 
 
 On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:07:19 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

  Craig thinks his theory mind is perfectly compatible with physics 
 because he thinks physics is different from what all those stupid 
 physicists think it is.  They just don't know about his top-down physics, 
 which no one has observed but which he *directly experiences* and therefore 
 *just knows he's right*.  Give it up John, Stathis.  There's no point 
 arguing with cranks and mystics.  

 
 I can't hear you, there's just some kind of deterministic neurological 
 phenomenon babbling out its evolutionarily inevitable flatulence.
 
 Craig
Hi Craig,

LOL, right on. Please Sir, can you be consistent with your own
claims? Seriously! This is the trap that materialist fall in everyday,
the neglect that their statements mean things that can be contradicted
by physical facts and the converse is true as well.
Languaging - the active use of language - cannot be said to be coherent
in its intensionality if it contradicts the means to make languaging! If
we are deterministic systems then there is no room for meaningfulness of
utterances.


-- 
Onward!

Stephen

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:28:45 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote:

 On 3/15/2013 1:11 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: 
  
  
  On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:07:19 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: 
  
   Craig thinks his theory mind is perfectly compatible with physics 
  because he thinks physics is different from what all those stupid 
  physicists think it is.  They just don't know about his top-down 
 physics, 
  which no one has observed but which he *directly experiences* and 
 therefore 
  *just knows he's right*.  Give it up John, Stathis.  There's no point 
  arguing with cranks and mystics.   
  
  
  I can't hear you, there's just some kind of deterministic neurological 
  phenomenon babbling out its evolutionarily inevitable flatulence. 
  
  Craig 
 Hi Craig, 

 LOL, right on. Please Sir, can you be consistent with your own 
 claims? Seriously! This is the trap that materialist fall in everyday, 
 the neglect that their statements mean things that can be contradicted 
 by physical facts and the converse is true as well. 
 Languaging - the active use of language - cannot be said to be 
 coherent 
 in its intensionality if it contradicts the means to make languaging! If 
 we are deterministic systems then there is no room for meaningfulness of 
 utterances. 


Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of those 
ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on one fixed idea 
of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing any other, even if they 
themselves are sitting on top of it.

What's frustrating for me though, is that these accusations of nonsense 
physics are the wrong criticism of my ideas. Since there is no 
physiological difference between the way that a voluntary action and an 
involuntary action initiates in the nervous system, these accusations that 
voluntary action would violate physics are also accusations on any kind of 
action initiating in the nervous system. The argument seems to be that the 
nervous system can only be entirely passive since physical forces are rigid 
and tend toward equilibrium. So much for growth, reproduction, struggling 
to survive, defying gravity by standing upright...the entire biological 
universe is witchcraft!

Craig



 -- 
 Onward! 

 Stephen 



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:


 Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of those
 ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on one fixed idea
 of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing any other, even if they
 themselves are sitting on top of it.


The irony in that statement is staggering. I couldn't satirize you any
better if I tried.

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:55:26 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:




 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript:
  wrote:


 Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of those 
 ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on one fixed idea 
 of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing any other, even if they 
 themselves are sitting on top of it.


 The irony in that statement is staggering. I couldn't satirize you any 
 better if I tried. 


Why, do you think that I have never considered the bottom up model of 
causation?

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

No, I think that you haven't understood it, due to whatever biases have led
you to invest so much in your theory - a theory which is AFAICT completely
unfalsifiable and predicts nothing.



On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:55:26 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:




 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:


 Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of those
 ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on one fixed idea
 of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing any other, even if they
 themselves are sitting on top of it.


 The irony in that statement is staggering. I couldn't satirize you any
 better if I tried.


 Why, do you think that I have never considered the bottom up model of
 causation?

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:

 No, I think that you haven't understood it, 


That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is it that 
you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that if you have many 
molecular systems working together mechanically, you will naturally get 
emergent properties that could be mistaken for teleological entities. You 
can't tell the difference between a brain change that seems meaningful to 
you and a meaningful experience which causes a brain change. Just because 
you feel like you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just a 
narrative fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.

All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our universe 
however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose for consciousness 
or narrative fictions. The existence of the feeling that you can control 
your body makes no sense in universe where control is impersonal and 
involuntary. There is no possibility for teleology to even be conceived in 
a universe of endless meaningless chain reactions - no basis for 
proprietary attachment of any kind. It's circular to imagine that it could 
be important for an epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal. 
Important how? It's like adding a steering wheel to a mountain.
 

 due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your theory - a 
 theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and predicts nothing.


No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable, because 
falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as prediction 
goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are bound to the 
extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be intolerant and misrepresent 
other perspectives. They will cling pathologically to unreal abstractions 
while flatly denying ordinary experience.

Craig

 




 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript:
  wrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:55:26 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:




 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:


 Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of 
 those ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on one fixed 
 idea of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing any other, even if 
 they themselves are sitting on top of it.


 The irony in that statement is staggering. I couldn't satirize you any 
 better if I tried. 


 Why, do you think that I have never considered the bottom up model of 
 causation?

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:

 No, I think that you haven't understood it,


 That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is it
 that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that if you have
 many molecular systems working together mechanically, you will naturally
 get emergent properties that could be mistaken for teleological entities.
 You can't tell the difference between a brain change that seems meaningful
 to you and a meaningful experience which causes a brain change. Just
 because you feel like you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just
 a narrative fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.

 All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our universe
 however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose for consciousness
 or narrative fictions.


The entire field of evolutionary psychology would beg to differ.


 The existence of the feeling that you can control your body makes no sense
 in universe where control is impersonal and involuntary. There is no
 possibility for teleology to even be conceived in a universe of endless
 meaningless chain reactions - no basis for proprietary attachment of any
 kind. It's circular to imagine that it could be important for an
 epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal. Important how? It's like
 adding a steering wheel to a mountain.


The fact that you can't conceive of how consciousness could arise from
mechanism does not amount to an argument against it.




 due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your theory - a
 theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and predicts nothing.


 No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable, because
 falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as prediction
 goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are bound to the
 extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be intolerant and misrepresent
 other perspectives. They will cling pathologically to unreal abstractions
 while flatly denying ordinary experience.


But you don't have a theory of consciousness, because you assume it. You
beg the question. And if you are saying physics is wrong - something you
have asserted many times - then it should be possible to construct an
experiment that shows that.


 Craig






 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:55:26 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:




 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:


 Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of
 those ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on one fixed
 idea of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing any other, even if
 they themselves are sitting on top of it.


 The irony in that statement is staggering. I couldn't satirize you any
 better if I tried.


 Why, do you think that I have never considered the bottom up model of
 causation?

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-15 Thread John Clark

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:

  No that is the exact opposite of the truth, we cannot follow our own
 self determination. If you tell me that a system is deterministic you have
 added exactly zero information by telling me that the system also has free
 will, thus free will means nothing and is just a noise.

 If you tell me that a system is deterministic you have added exactly zero
 information by telling me that the system also has consciousness, thus
 consciousness means nothing and is just a noise.


Loss of consciousness such as in sleep or anesthesia has observable
consequences for me, I formed no new memories and the external universe
seems to have instantaneously jumped ahead, but loss of free will has no
observable consequences to me or to anybody else because nobody has a clue
what the dumb thing is supposed to mean.

 if you tell me that a black hole is deterministic you have added exactly
 zero information by telling me that the black hole also has also a mass,
 thus mass means nothing and is just a noise.


What the hell are you talking about?? Change the mass of a Black Hole and
you change the event horizon and that can be measured. Black holes are the
simplest macroscopic objects in the known universe but you've got to know
the mass, if you know the mass, spin and electrical charge that the Black
Hole has then you know everything that can distinguish one Black Hole from
another.  You can know all there is to know about a Black Hole with just 3
numbers (2 really because for a actual Black Hole the electrical charge is
always zero, or at least very small) but one of those numbers is the mass.

 Having self-determination does not entail that we can self-determine
 ourself completely. I did not say total self-determination.


So all free will means is that sometimes we can make correct predictions
about what we will do before we do it, and sometimes we cannot, and in
general beforehand there is no way to tell which ones we can make good
predictions for and which ones we can't. And even when we make a correct
prediction about what we will do (I will never do X for example) sometimes
we'll have to wait literally forever to know it was the correct
prediction.

A pretty useless definition don't you think?

 You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead. You
 know of advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you aren't sure if
 you will go right or left, you haven't finished the calculation yet, you
 haven't decided yet. Once you get to the fork you find yourself on the left
 path and retroactively conclude that you must have decided to go left.


  Yes. That's what I mean by free will. Roughly speaking.


And a powerful demon could be able to look into your head and quickly
deduce that you would eventually choose to go to the left. Meanwhile you,
whose mind works much more slowly than the demon's, hasn't completed the
thought process yet. You might be saying to yourself I haven't decided
yet, I'll have to think about it, I'm free to go either way but the demon
already knows for a fact that despite your present uncertainty by the time
you reach the fork you will decide to go to the left.

  John K Clark

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Friday, March 15, 2013 4:11:32 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:


 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript:
  wrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:

 No, I think that you haven't understood it, 


 That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is it 
 that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that if you have 
 many molecular systems working together mechanically, you will naturally 
 get emergent properties that could be mistaken for teleological entities. 
 You can't tell the difference between a brain change that seems meaningful 
 to you and a meaningful experience which causes a brain change. Just 
 because you feel like you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just 
 a narrative fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.

 All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our universe 
 however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose for consciousness 
 or narrative fictions. 


 The entire field of evolutionary psychology would beg to differ.


Argument from authority. If evolutionary psychologists assume consciousness 
has evolutionary benefits it is because they make the same mistake that you 
do in looking backward in 20/20 hindsight. Looking from a pre-conscious era 
in the past, the idea of consciousness is no more reasonable than magic 
appearing spontaneously. Once you take the emergence of consciousness for 
granted, sure it's easy to find all kinds of exciting (and utterly 
unfalsifiable) uses.
 

  

 The existence of the feeling that you can control your body makes no 
 sense in universe where control is impersonal and involuntary. There is no 
 possibility for teleology to even be conceived in a universe of endless 
 meaningless chain reactions - no basis for proprietary attachment of any 
 kind. It's circular to imagine that it could be important for an 
 epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal. Important how? It's like 
 adding a steering wheel to a mountain.


 The fact that you can't conceive of how consciousness could arise from 
 mechanism does not amount to an argument against it.


You can't conceive of it either though. That is because it is 
inconceivable. Like a square circle. That it is inconceivable tells us 
about both squares and circles, as well as logic and sense.
 

  

  

 due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your theory - a 
 theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and predicts nothing.


 No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable, because 
 falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as prediction 
 goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are bound to the 
 extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be intolerant and misrepresent 
 other perspectives. They will cling pathologically to unreal abstractions 
 while flatly denying ordinary experience.


 But you don't have a theory of consciousness, because you assume it. 


I don't assume it, it is assumed period. Consciousness is inescapable. How 
can you claim to construct any theory independently of it?
 

 You beg the question. And if you are saying physics is wrong - something 
 you have asserted many times - 


I do not say that physics is wrong, I say that is it incomplete. It is 
missing half of the universe, but in the half that it addresses, it 
addresses it remarkably well.
 

 then it should be possible to construct an experiment that shows that.


We are the experiment. All that is required is for us to think with honesty 
and curiosity - to avoid the traps of kneejerk arrogance, fear, conformity, 
idolatry for authority, etc.

*Science* is the belief in the ignorance of *experts*. - Feynman

Craig

  



  


  

 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:02 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 1:55:26 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:




 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:


 Exactly. It is interesting also in that it seems to be like one of 
 those ambiguous images, in that as long as people are focused on one 
 fixed 
 idea of reality, they are honestly incapable of seeing any other, even 
 if 
 they themselves are sitting on top of it.


 The irony in that statement is staggering. I couldn't satirize you any 
 better if I tried. 


 Why, do you think that I have never considered the bottom up model of 
 causation?

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Friday, March 15, 2013 4:18:58 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote:

 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Bruno Marchal mar...@ulb.ac.bejavascript:
  wrote:

  No that is the exact opposite of the truth, we cannot follow our own 
 self determination. If you tell me that a system is deterministic you have 
 added exactly zero information by telling me that the system also has free 
 will, thus free will means nothing and is just a noise. 

 If you tell me that a system is deterministic you have added exactly 
 zero information by telling me that the system also has consciousness, 
 thus consciousness means nothing and is just a noise.


 Loss of consciousness such as in sleep or anesthesia has observable 
 consequences for me, I formed no new memories and the external universe 
 seems to have instantaneously jumped ahead, but loss of free will has no 
 observable consequences to me or to anybody else because nobody has a clue 
 what the dumb thing is supposed to mean. 


If someone sells you into slavery, or brainwashes you in a cult, can you 
not see that you have lost something?
... 

So all free will means is that sometimes we can make correct predictions 
about what we will do before we do it, 

No. I can make correct predictions about my heartbeat and my respiration. 
Of the two, I can only influence my lungs with my free will. Do you deny 
that there is a difference in your own body? Can you not 'control' your 
lungs to a greater extent than you can control your heartbeat? How do you 
define this difference in your worldview?
 
Craig


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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 4:11:32 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:


 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:

 No, I think that you haven't understood it,


 That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is it
 that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that if you have
 many molecular systems working together mechanically, you will naturally
 get emergent properties that could be mistaken for teleological entities.
 You can't tell the difference between a brain change that seems meaningful
 to you and a meaningful experience which causes a brain change. Just
 because you feel like you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just
 a narrative fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.

 All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our universe
 however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose for consciousness
 or narrative fictions.


 The entire field of evolutionary psychology would beg to differ.


 Argument from authority. If evolutionary psychologists assume
 consciousness has evolutionary benefits it is because they make the same
 mistake that you do in looking backward in 20/20 hindsight. Looking from a
 pre-conscious era in the past, the idea of consciousness is no more
 reasonable than magic appearing spontaneously. Once you take the emergence
 of consciousness for granted, sure it's easy to find all kinds of exciting
 (and utterly unfalsifiable) uses.


It's not a mistake, it's science. They may be wrong, but they do
experiments in support of, or to refute, a given premise. Whether or not
the premise is true is beside the point. But you don't even want to
entertain the proposition. You just dismiss it, simply because it doesn't
agree with your prejudices.






 The existence of the feeling that you can control your body makes no
 sense in universe where control is impersonal and involuntary. There is no
 possibility for teleology to even be conceived in a universe of endless
 meaningless chain reactions - no basis for proprietary attachment of any
 kind. It's circular to imagine that it could be important for an
 epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal. Important how? It's like
 adding a steering wheel to a mountain.


 The fact that you can't conceive of how consciousness could arise from
 mechanism does not amount to an argument against it.


 You can't conceive of it either though. That is because it is
 inconceivable. Like a square circle. That it is inconceivable tells us
 about both squares and circles, as well as logic and sense.



Sure I can. I can easily conceive of it. I might be wrong, but I can
conceive of it. It's funny that you assume that I can't. Projection
fallacy?

Anyway, even if I couldn't, it *still* would not be an argument against it
for the same reason as before.






 due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your theory -
 a theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and predicts nothing.


 No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable, because
 falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as prediction
 goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are bound to the
 extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be intolerant and misrepresent
 other perspectives. They will cling pathologically to unreal abstractions
 while flatly denying ordinary experience.


 But you don't have a theory of consciousness, because you assume it.


 I don't assume it, it is assumed period. Consciousness is inescapable. How
 can you claim to construct any theory independently of it?


A real theory of consciousness explains consciousness in terms of other
premises. For instance, any theory of consciousness worth considering
should tell you why some things are conscious, and some things aren't...
something your theory cannot do because it assumes it from the outset.


 You beg the question. And if you are saying physics is wrong - something
 you have asserted many times -


 I do not say that physics is wrong, I say that is it incomplete. It is
 missing half of the universe, but in the half that it addresses, it
 addresses it remarkably well.


Then my point still stands. Describe to us an experiment that shows *how*
physics is incomplete.




 then it should be possible to construct an experiment that shows that.


 We are the experiment. All that is required is for us to think with
 honesty and curiosity - to avoid the traps of kneejerk arrogance, fear,
 conformity, idolatry for authority, etc.


Decades of literature in psychology is rife with examples of why
introspection is suspect. It has its place, but only in terms of
conditional evidence. Nothing we gain from introspection alone could ever
be used to refute a theory.


 *Science* is the belief in the ignorance of

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Friday, March 15, 2013 5:14:16 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:


 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript:
  wrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 4:11:32 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:


 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:

 No, I think that you haven't understood it, 


 That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is it 
 that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that if you 
 have 
 many molecular systems working together mechanically, you will naturally 
 get emergent properties that could be mistaken for teleological entities. 
 You can't tell the difference between a brain change that seems meaningful 
 to you and a meaningful experience which causes a brain change. Just 
 because you feel like you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just 
 a narrative fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.

 All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our 
 universe however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose for 
 consciousness or narrative fictions. 


 The entire field of evolutionary psychology would beg to differ.


 Argument from authority. If evolutionary psychologists assume 
 consciousness has evolutionary benefits it is because they make the same 
 mistake that you do in looking backward in 20/20 hindsight. Looking from a 
 pre-conscious era in the past, the idea of consciousness is no more 
 reasonable than magic appearing spontaneously. Once you take the emergence 
 of consciousness for granted, sure it's easy to find all kinds of exciting 
 (and utterly unfalsifiable) uses.


 It's not a mistake, it's science. They may be wrong, but they do 
 experiments in support of, or to refute, a given premise.


For example? What kind of experiment can tell you that consciousness could 
appear in the universe under some particular material condition?
 

 Whether or not the premise is true is beside the point. But you don't even 
 want to entertain the proposition. You just dismiss it, simply because it 
 doesn't agree with your prejudices.


Not at all, it is because I understand how and why the entire approach is 
built on bad presumptions. I welcome ideas of all stripes; wacky, 
conservative, that doesn't bother me at all. What I care about is that it 
makes sense and plausibly reflects the fullness of reality.
 

  

  

   

 The existence of the feeling that you can control your body makes no 
 sense in universe where control is impersonal and involuntary. There is no 
 possibility for teleology to even be conceived in a universe of endless 
 meaningless chain reactions - no basis for proprietary attachment of any 
 kind. It's circular to imagine that it could be important for an 
 epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal. Important how? It's like 
 adding a steering wheel to a mountain.


 The fact that you can't conceive of how consciousness could arise from 
 mechanism does not amount to an argument against it.


 You can't conceive of it either though. That is because it is 
 inconceivable. Like a square circle. That it is inconceivable tells us 
 about both squares and circles, as well as logic and sense.
  


 Sure I can. I can easily conceive of it. I might be wrong, but I can 
 conceive of it. It's funny that you assume that I can't. Projection 
 fallacy?  


What is it that you conceive of though? Is it a mechanism which switches on 
and some kind of green gas begins to leak out of a glob of protein? Is 
there a genie or a fanfare of some kind, or is it just a collection of 
inanimate objects that suddenly begins to do something that has never 
happened before? I think that when you say that you conceive of it, you 
haven't really even considered it, and what you actually consider is a 
broad abstraction about complexity and feedback.
 


 Anyway, even if I couldn't, it *still* would not be an argument against it 
 for the same reason as before.


Right, because when inanimate objects agree, then it's 'evidence', but when 
we agree it's fantasy.

 

  

  

 due to whatever biases have led you to invest so much in your theory - 
 a theory which is AFAICT completely unfalsifiable and predicts nothing.


 No theory which models consciousness will ever be falsifiable, because 
 falsifiability is a quality within consciousness. As far as prediction 
 goes, one of the things it predicts that people who are bound to the 
 extremes of the philosophical spectrum will be intolerant and misrepresent 
 other perspectives. They will cling pathologically to unreal abstractions 
 while flatly denying ordinary experience.


 But you don't have a theory of consciousness, because you assume it. 


 I don't assume it, it is assumed period. Consciousness is inescapable. 
 How can you claim to construct any theory independently of it?


 A real theory of consciousness explains

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

This has to be my last response on this for a while. I will just say, about
consciousness arising from other premises: It is not the material itself
that is important, but the organization of it. Consciousness *might* be
what happens when certain kinds of organization arise. The human brain
might represent one particular kind of organization that is conscious. I am
interested in theories of consciousness that describe that organization,
and what kinds of organization support consciousness and what kinds don't.
Note that when we take the emphasis off material and put it on
organization, it means that there many different kinds of structures that
could support consciousness, including virtual structures, structures made
out of networks of people, and so on.  I'm not saying this is right. But I
am saying that it is conceivable. You seem utterly closed to that
possibility, and I don't understand why, except that you appear to be
locked into your own beliefs, unwilling to even set them aside for the sake
of argument.

Feynman's quote might make more sense if you realize that he was also
talking about himself. Obviously, he was one of the experts he warns about
in that quote.

Terren


On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 5:42 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 5:14:16 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:


 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 4:25 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 4:11:32 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:


 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote:



 On Friday, March 15, 2013 3:04:24 PM UTC-4, Terren Suydam wrote:

 No, I think that you haven't understood it,


 That's because you are only working with a straw man of me. What is it
 that you think that I don't understand? The legacy view is that if you 
 have
 many molecular systems working together mechanically, you will naturally
 get emergent properties that could be mistaken for teleological entities.
 You can't tell the difference between a brain change that seems meaningful
 to you and a meaningful experience which causes a brain change. Just
 because you feel like you are moving your arm doesn't mean that isn't just
 a narrative fiction that serves a valuable evolutionary purpose.

 All of that is fine, in some other theoretical universe. In our
 universe however, it can't work. There is no evolutionary purpose for
 consciousness or narrative fictions.


 The entire field of evolutionary psychology would beg to differ.


 Argument from authority. If evolutionary psychologists assume
 consciousness has evolutionary benefits it is because they make the same
 mistake that you do in looking backward in 20/20 hindsight. Looking from a
 pre-conscious era in the past, the idea of consciousness is no more
 reasonable than magic appearing spontaneously. Once you take the emergence
 of consciousness for granted, sure it's easy to find all kinds of exciting
 (and utterly unfalsifiable) uses.


 It's not a mistake, it's science. They may be wrong, but they do
 experiments in support of, or to refute, a given premise.


 For example? What kind of experiment can tell you that consciousness could
 appear in the universe under some particular material condition?


 Whether or not the premise is true is beside the point. But you don't
 even want to entertain the proposition. You just dismiss it, simply because
 it doesn't agree with your prejudices.


 Not at all, it is because I understand how and why the entire approach is
 built on bad presumptions. I welcome ideas of all stripes; wacky,
 conservative, that doesn't bother me at all. What I care about is that it
 makes sense and plausibly reflects the fullness of reality.








 The existence of the feeling that you can control your body makes no
 sense in universe where control is impersonal and involuntary. There is no
 possibility for teleology to even be conceived in a universe of endless
 meaningless chain reactions - no basis for proprietary attachment of any
 kind. It's circular to imagine that it could be important for an
 epiphenomenal self to believe it is phenomenal. Important how? It's like
 adding a steering wheel to a mountain.


 The fact that you can't conceive of how consciousness could arise from
 mechanism does not amount to an argument against it.


 You can't conceive of it either though. That is because it is
 inconceivable. Like a square circle. That it is inconceivable tells us
 about both squares and circles, as well as logic and sense.



 Sure I can. I can easily conceive of it. I might be wrong, but I can
 conceive of it. It's funny that you assume that I can't. Projection
 fallacy?


 What is it that you conceive of though? Is it a mechanism which switches
 on and some kind of green gas begins to leak out of a glob of protein? Is
 there a genie or a fanfare of some kind, or is it just a collection of
 inanimate objects that suddenly begins to do something that has never
 happened before? I

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-14 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 13 Mar 2013, at 17:32, John Clark wrote:

Because both dragons and God are well defined concepts, just  
concepts that don’t happen to have the attribute of existence. In  
contrast “free will” is not only incoherently defined it is every  
bit as self contradictory as the largest prime number is.



You have yourself provided a counter-example to this claim.

We have concluded that the free-will based on non determinacy is non  
sensical, but not so for the notion of free-will based on determinacy.


Free-will does makes sense in that case: it is the ability to follow  
our own self-determination, and that notion can be defined in a  
precise mathematical way using the usual technic of computer self- 
reference.


Bruno



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-14 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 14 Mar 2013, at 05:37, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Craig Weinberg  
whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:



Who are you to say that natural phenomena are superfluous?



Who are you to say that they aren't?


The natural world is as it is. It's not my place to say the the Great
Red Spot of Jupiter is superfluous, that the electron is superfluous,
or that intelligent apes are superfluous.


Hmm... Keep in mind that IF the brain work like a digital computer,  
THEN the physical reality is emerging in a special way from number  
relations. Up to now, the quantum reality seems completely OK with  
computationalism, but we must keep open the possibility of a  
refutation of comp. In that case a physicalist association between a  
non computable matter and a non computable mind would be necessary. So  
Craig's point might make sense. But most of his argument does not and  
he begs the question systematically.
What we know today (or should know) is that the mind body problem is  
necessarily reduced to the problem of justifying the emergence of the  
physical laws from arithmetic/computer science. As long as this is not  
done (compeletely: propositional physics has already been isolated) we  
must remain open to a refutation of computationalism. In 	a sense,  
with comp, nature is *superfluous* as it is the border of the possible  
arithmetical mind. Nature is something complex with a quite precise  
logical, or logico-arithmetical origin.


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Thursday, March 14, 2013 10:59:14 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 14 Mar 2013, at 05:37, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: 

  On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Craig Weinberg   
  whats...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: 
  
  Who are you to say that natural phenomena are superfluous? 
  
  
  Who are you to say that they aren't? 
  
  The natural world is as it is. It's not my place to say the the Great 
  Red Spot of Jupiter is superfluous, that the electron is superfluous, 
  or that intelligent apes are superfluous. 

 Hmm... Keep in mind that IF the brain work like a digital computer,   
 THEN the physical reality is emerging in a special way from number   
 relations. Up to now, the quantum reality seems completely OK with   
 computationalism, but we must keep open the possibility of a   
 refutation of comp. In that case a physicalist association between a   
 non computable matter and a non computable mind would be necessary. So   
 Craig's point might make sense. But most of his argument does not and   
 he begs the question systematically. 
 What we know today (or should know) is that the mind body problem is   
 necessarily reduced to the problem of justifying the emergence of the   
 physical laws from arithmetic/computer science. As long as this is not   
 done (compeletely: propositional physics has already been isolated) we   
 must remain open to a refutation of computationalism. In a sense, 
   
 with comp, nature is *superfluous* as it is the border of the possible   
 arithmetical mind. Nature is something complex with a quite precise   
 logical, or logico-arithmetical origin. 

 Bruno 


My argument only seems to you to beg the question because you frame the 
question from the start in a way that unfairly places a theory about 
experience as being equivalent to experience itself. Comp assumes that 
third person realism is reality and the question is only who does first 
person experience fit in with that reality. I see that this assumption 
takes the foundation of experience itself for granted. Arithmetic and 
machines are conjured into Platonic non-locality and erupt spontaneously 
into florid locality, when in fact no such geometric expression is 
explainable by Comp. I have pointed out many times that all arithmetic 
operations supervene on lower level input-output sense ontologies, but you 
seem to avoid this stark revelation and try to patch it up with the 
expediencies of theory. You say 'we have to start somewhere', but that too 
is an intuitive anchor rather than something which can be produced by 
machine logic. The logic of Comp rests on the unacknowledged physics of 
sense, which it mistakes for a disembodied arithmetic primitive - the 
shadow of sense reflected on disowned idealized matter (digital, solid body 
groupings).

Craig
 



 http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ 





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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-14 Thread John Clark

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 The color white is not red, but since white cannot be made without using
 red wavelengths, then it can't be said that it is not not red either.


If that's true, and you're the one who keeps telling me that the qualia
color has nothing to do with wavelengths of electromagnetism, then either
your assumption is wrong and the white is red or you are talking gibberish
again. It's mind boggling to me that I must continually explain grade
school logic to someone who thinks he's unraveled the secrets of the
universe.

 Warm water can be said not to be hot but also not to be not hot either,


BULLSHIT. If warm is not hot and warm is not not hot then the concept of
warm is as useful as a bucket of warm spit.


  Free will doesn't need to be defined because it is inescapable and
 obvious.


I've escaped it and free will is not obvious to me, I don't know what the
hell you're talking about! And not only can't you define free will you
can't point to example of it that is not deterministic and not random and
not gibberish.

 Just exactly like you the program is the way it is for a reason OR it is
 the way it is for no reason.


  The reason that the machine stops has nothing to do with the goals of
 the machine.


You continue to make oracular declarations and insisting without evidence
or argument that you speak the truth, but I don't believe the Pope when he
engages in that sort of crap so I don't see why I should believe you either.


  I can catch a mouse in a trap and the mouse will stop moving.


  True, and the mouse trap will stop moving too.


 You could make one that resets itself. What's the difference?


The difference is that then the mouse trap would have a different goal.

 It could have been a child's finger broken in the trap instead.


And the trap moved very fast and then stopped when it was touched.

  I respond to the game voluntarily,


   So you responded the way you did for a reason, namely because you
 wanted to. The computer game responds the way it does for a reason too.


  'Because I wanted to' is the opposite of 'because it is programmed to'.


Both the program and you behaved the way they did for a reason. Or are you
saying its opposite because a program does what it does because it doesn't
want to?

 The former intentionally creates and initiates a sequence of actions, the
 latter executes and acts as a consequence of unintentional following.


So if we follow your chain of reasoning its voluntary because its
intentional and its intentional because its voluntary. Well, that's as
illuminating as much of what modern philosophers say so there may be a
future for you in that line of work yet.

 That doesn't mean that we have no access to valid intuition and judgment
 beyond the evidence of objects.


As a practical matter both you and I judge that something is conscious in
exactly the same way, we look for intelligence. That's why neither of us
believes our fellow human beings are conscious when they are sleeping or
under anesthesia or dead.

 There might be a way to conduct some useful experiments to prove whether
 or not people can unconsciously detect the presence of living organisms


ESP parapsychology junk science.


  I'd be in favor of that,


I sure as hell don't want my tax money funding that crap.

 but I don't need it to know exactly why machines built from the bottom up
 from human motives are different from organisms who grow from the inside
 out from their own motives.


Organisms grow according to digital instructions encoded in their DNA, and
they learn from their environment. Machines are built from written digital
instructions and can learn from the environment as we do,  and they are
continually getting better at it. People are not.


 And people have control over their actions for a reason and so are
 deterministic or they have control over their actions for no reason and so
 are random, and if they have no control over their impulses to murder then
 they should be treated more harshly not less than those that do because
 they are far more dangerous.


  What do you mean by control over their impulses? How does such a
 concept fit in with determinism?


Some systems are more nonlinear than others and allow trivial fluctuations
in the environment to grow without bound and overpower everything else in
the system. I was reading about a guy in a movie theater who got up to get
popcorn and accidentally stepped on a stranger's foot, so the stranger got
out a knife and stabbed popcorn guy to death. Knife guy was a very
nonlinear system, that is to say poor impulse control.

 Deterrence makes no sense to a machine.


Nonsense.  The environment is a important factor in determining the way
machines behave, just like with people.

 without free will, their want isn't connected to anything that can
 cause changes in the universe.


Cannot comment, don’t know what ASCII sequence “free will” means.

 Deterrence

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Thursday, March 14, 2013 4:27:17 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote:

 On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote:

  The color white is not red, but since white cannot be made without using 
 red wavelengths, then it can't be said that it is not not red either.


 If that's true, and you're the one who keeps telling me that the qualia 
 color has nothing to do with wavelengths of electromagnetism, then either 
 your assumption is wrong and the white is red or you are talking gibberish 
 again. It's mind boggling to me that I must continually explain grade 
 school logic to someone who thinks he's unraveled the secrets of the 
 universe. 


Maybe you should stop trying to use grade school logic to understand the 
universe? Color qualia has something to do with electromagnetic 
wavelengths, but it is not the former which is caused by the latter. 
Remember, I never deny any observations of nature. Color mixing, 
reflection, and absorption do make sense when modeled mathematically - just 
as sentences can be analyzed grammatically. The mistake that people make is 
to jump to the conclusion that sentences are make themselves through 
grammar, or that 'wavelengths of light' are colorful. You can readily 
observe by the pixels of your monitor that white areas of the screen can be 
seen as red, green, and blue pixels at full brightness and equal balance. 
That is all that is necessary to understand that white is both not red and 
not not red.
 


  Warm water can be said not to be hot but also not to be not hot either, 


 BULLSHIT. If warm is not hot and warm is not not hot then the concept of 
 warm is as useful as a bucket of warm spit.


No, concepts don't have to communicate a single unambiguous meaning, they 
can contain all kinds of indirect associations and subtle understandings. 
Again, your view of the universe seems arrested at some adolescent level.
 

   

  Free will doesn't need to be defined because it is inescapable and 
 obvious.


 I've escaped it and free will is not obvious to me, 


You've escaped it using your free will. You choose to see the concept as 
ill-defined.
 

 I don't know what the hell you're talking about! And not only can't you 
 define free will you can't point to example of it that is not 
 deterministic and not random and not gibberish.   


Free will doesn't need to be defined any more than the color red needs to 
be defined. If you have not experienced free will then no example will help 
you experience it, and if you have experienced free will then no example is 
necessary. It is beneath the threshold of definition. It's not a big deal, 
it's not a mystical koan, it's the simple fact. You can't dehydrate water, 
and you can't get outside of your own free will to treat it as an object.
 


  Just exactly like you the program is the way it is for a reason OR it 
 is the way it is for no reason.


  The reason that the machine stops has nothing to do with the goals of 
 the machine. 


 You continue to make oracular declarations and insisting without evidence 
 or argument that you speak the truth, but I don't believe the Pope when he 
 engages in that sort of crap so I don't see why I should believe you either.


I try to explain with reason what cannot be understood with evidence. The 
evidence is already all around you, you just don't recognize it as such. It 
is incredibly obvious that a mouse trap does not have a goal of catching a 
mouse, yet you try to make even something so clear and sensible into a 
sleazy sales pitch. 

 

  I can catch a mouse in a trap and the mouse will stop moving.


  True, and the mouse trap will stop moving too.


 You could make one that resets itself. What's the difference?


 The difference is that then the mouse trap would have a different goal.  


Why is it different? No goal repeated is still no goal.
 


  It could have been a child's finger broken in the trap instead. 


 And the trap moved very fast and then stopped when it was touched.


Not sure what you mean. My point is that whatever sets off the trap; mouse, 
finger, carrot, or just a loud thump nearby, it doesn't matter to the trap. 
The trap knows nothing. There is metal in a tense condition and when that 
condition is changed, the tension is relieved. That is the extent of the 
goal of the trap - to spring when it can, or to bend or break over time. 
Any option is equal for the piece of wire, it doesn't care about mice.


   I respond to the game voluntarily,

  
   So you responded the way you did for a reason, namely because you 
 wanted to. The computer game responds the way it does for a reason too.


  'Because I wanted to' is the opposite of 'because it is programmed to'. 


 Both the program and you behaved the way they did for a reason. Or are you 
 saying its opposite because a program does what it does because it doesn't 
 want to?


Yes, the program neither wants to execute the program nor doesn't want to. 
The program is constructed

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-14 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 And what is determining your personal will is your brain, which
 follows the laws of physics.


 What law of physics makes my will decide to get my house painted in exactly
 30 days? Does electromagnetism have some 30 day cycle that is predicted by
 gravity for me and nobody else?

What laws of physics will make it rain in exactly 30 days? Why will it
rain in Singapore but not in Kuala Lumpur?

 If the atoms bouncing around in your brain follow a causal chain then
 so does your brain.


 You act as if there were one single chain reaction from neuron to neuron.
 That is not a viable model.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2H6UdQVEFY

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhCF-zlk0jY

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJLdNRebeWE

 The last one is especially cool. As you can see, the brain's behavior
 reflects massive, simultaneous, spontaneously formed patterns that have
 nothing whatsoever to do with physical laws. The same physical laws are in
 place whether the subject has meditated or not, so there is no basis for
 your claim of flat biochemical momentum somehow being responsible for
 orchestrating mental changes.

Would you be as amazed to see the pattern of charge changing in the
memory of a computer playing chess? Would it prove to you that
planning its next move caused the charge shifts, rather than the
physics of electric circuits?

 If you believe that your free will somehow acts to
 cause atoms to move or electrical fields to change


 Not really a belief, it is an observable fact. As you can see in the third
 video, the subject uses free will to meditate and change the behavior of
 electric fields in their brain.

And the computer uses the chess game to change charge distribution in memory.

 in a not
 determined, not probabilistic way then that would be obvious in
 experiments as a break in the causal chain. There's no way to escape
 this.


 There's nothing to escape. Your causal chain is a fantasy. Watch the videos.
 We control (some) of our brain activity. How can you argue against that
 obvious fact based on your 19th century expectations of atomic physics? We
 already know that QM reveals uncertainty and entanglement beneath all atomic
 interactions. We are that uncertainty, and we will see that if we do physics
 experiments on living brains.

Quantum level events are still mechanistic in your sense, in that
they follow probabilistic rules. But you don't need quantum level
events to make the brain unpredictable. Classical complexity is enough
for that.

 You frequently say that the brain does things due to free will, while
 I say the brain only does things due to its components blindly
 following the laws of physics, like a pinball machine (your example).


 Do the videos make the brain look like a pinball machine?  What would it
 have to look like for you to be able to entertain the idea that you are 100%
 wrong?

The videos make the brain look just like a complex pinball machine,
yes. What would be remarkable would be if there were no physical
change in the brain at all while the subject was thinking. That would
show that thinking is not done with the brain but with something else,
perhaps an immaterial soul. Closer to what you claim, it would be
remarkable if we could zoom in on some of the neuronal activity and
see that there was activity in neurons not explainable in terms of
biochemistry, such as a transmembrane voltage other than what is
calculated from measuring the concentration of anions and cations.
That would be relatively simple to show and it would be consistent
with the idea that the mind is not just epiphenomenal but can have a
direct effect on the body.

 This is the
 problem with your insistence on saying that the neurons change because
 of your decision, rather than that your decision occurs because your
 neurons change.


 No, it is not a problem, because if you claim that it is the neurons who
 change, then you are just asserting that I don't have free will because my
 neurons do. You have the exact same mind-body problem that you had with me,
 only now it is hundreds of billions of tiny bodies who have formed this
 civilization of independent beings, all coordinating their activities in
 response to an outside world that must be perceived by all of them as a
 coherent whole. Your view only makes more problems. The neurons still change
 in response to semantic conditions rather than blind physics - which doesn't
 care about anything except thermodynamic states, field strength, ionic
 bonds, etc. None of those things change with meditation.

I still don't see where you find any evidence in science that neurons
change in response to anything other than blind physics.

 The semantic changes and sensory events supervene on the biochemical
 changes.


 Look at the video. Where do you see biochemical changes as being relevant at
 all? What biochemical conditions would be changing millisecond to

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Thursday, March 14, 2013 6:42:10 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:

 On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 

  And what is determining your personal will is your brain, which 
  follows the laws of physics. 
  
  
  What law of physics makes my will decide to get my house painted in 
 exactly 
  30 days? Does electromagnetism have some 30 day cycle that is predicted 
 by 
  gravity for me and nobody else? 

 What laws of physics will make it rain in exactly 30 days? Why will it 
 rain in Singapore but not in Kuala Lumpur? 


Geographic variation and water content contribute to determining where and 
when it is likely to rain, but they do not determine when I will have my 
house painted. The rain certainly does not find its way to Singapore 
because of an appointment that it sets intentionally.
 


  If the atoms bouncing around in your brain follow a causal chain then 
  so does your brain. 
  
  
  You act as if there were one single chain reaction from neuron to 
 neuron. 
  That is not a viable model. 
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2H6UdQVEFY 
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhCF-zlk0jY 
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJLdNRebeWE 
  
  The last one is especially cool. As you can see, the brain's behavior 
  reflects massive, simultaneous, spontaneously formed patterns that have 
  nothing whatsoever to do with physical laws. The same physical laws are 
 in 
  place whether the subject has meditated or not, so there is no basis for 
  your claim of flat biochemical momentum somehow being responsible for 
  orchestrating mental changes. 

 Would you be as amazed to see the pattern of charge changing in the 
 memory of a computer playing chess? Would it prove to you that 
 planning its next move caused the charge shifts, rather than the 
 physics of electric circuits? 


Would meditation change the pattern like it does for a human brain?
 


  If you believe that your free will somehow acts to 
  cause atoms to move or electrical fields to change 
  
  
  Not really a belief, it is an observable fact. As you can see in the 
 third 
  video, the subject uses free will to meditate and change the behavior of 
  electric fields in their brain. 

 And the computer uses the chess game to change charge distribution in 
 memory. 


If you have the computer play the same game of chess you will see the same 
charge distribution whether or not the computer has meditated.
 


  in a not 
  determined, not probabilistic way then that would be obvious in 
  experiments as a break in the causal chain. There's no way to escape 
  this. 
  
  
  There's nothing to escape. Your causal chain is a fantasy. Watch the 
 videos. 
  We control (some) of our brain activity. How can you argue against that 
  obvious fact based on your 19th century expectations of atomic physics? 
 We 
  already know that QM reveals uncertainty and entanglement beneath all 
 atomic 
  interactions. We are that uncertainty, and we will see that if we do 
 physics 
  experiments on living brains. 

 Quantum level events are still mechanistic in your sense, in that 
 they follow probabilistic rules.


The events in our brain follow non-probabilistic, spontaneous, intentional 
rules.
 

 But you don't need quantum level 
 events to make the brain unpredictable. Classical complexity is enough 
 for that. 

  You frequently say that the brain does things due to free will, while 
  I say the brain only does things due to its components blindly 
  following the laws of physics, like a pinball machine (your example). 
  
  
  Do the videos make the brain look like a pinball machine?  What would it 
  have to look like for you to be able to entertain the idea that you are 
 100% 
  wrong? 

 The videos make the brain look just like a complex pinball machine, 
 yes. What would be remarkable would be if there were no physical 
 change in the brain at all while the subject was thinking. That would 
 show that thinking is not done with the brain but with something else, 
 perhaps an immaterial soul. 


That is exactly what NDE studies seem to suggest. I don't require that to 
be true since I think that brain activity is the public-spatial view of a 
moment out of a private-temporal experience. The videos clearly show that 
the brain is not merely reacting to outside stimulation, nor is there any 
sign of a linear pattern of cause and effect in place. They show that 
awareness drives spontaneous brain activity - not that it is dormant until 
interacted with.
 

 Closer to what you claim, it would be 
 remarkable if we could zoom in on some of the neuronal activity and 
 see that there was activity in neurons not explainable in terms of 
 biochemistry, such as a transmembrane voltage other than what is 
 calculated from measuring the concentration of anions and cations. 


You still don't understand why that is a ridiculous straw man. It's like 
saying that for me to choose these letters there would

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-14 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

  What law of physics makes my will decide to get my house painted in
  exactly
  30 days? Does electromagnetism have some 30 day cycle that is predicted
  by
  gravity for me and nobody else?

 What laws of physics will make it rain in exactly 30 days? Why will it
 rain in Singapore but not in Kuala Lumpur?


 Geographic variation and water content contribute to determining where and
 when it is likely to rain, but they do not determine when I will have my
 house painted. The rain certainly does not find its way to Singapore because
 of an appointment that it sets intentionally.

But if there were consciousness associated with the rain, it might. We
would have no way of knowing, would we?

 Would you be as amazed to see the pattern of charge changing in the
 memory of a computer playing chess? Would it prove to you that
 planning its next move caused the charge shifts, rather than the
 physics of electric circuits?


 Would meditation change the pattern like it does for a human brain?

Yes, of course. Do you think that the computer could do computations
without any physical change?

 And the computer uses the chess game to change charge distribution in
 memory.


 If you have the computer play the same game of chess you will see the same
 charge distribution whether or not the computer has meditated.

But if meditation changes the computer then it may play a different
game, just as if meditation changes the human player's brain he may
play a different game.

 Quantum level events are still mechanistic in your sense, in that
 they follow probabilistic rules.


 The events in our brain follow non-probabilistic, spontaneous, intentional
 rules.

If they are non-probabilistic they are deterministic. They can be
intentional and spontaneous whether probabilistic or deterministic.
Intentional means the person wants to do it and spontaneous could mean
the person decides to do it without any obvious external stimulus.

 The videos make the brain look just like a complex pinball machine,
 yes. What would be remarkable would be if there were no physical
 change in the brain at all while the subject was thinking. That would
 show that thinking is not done with the brain but with something else,
 perhaps an immaterial soul.


 That is exactly what NDE studies seem to suggest. I don't require that to be
 true since I think that brain activity is the public-spatial view of a
 moment out of a private-temporal experience. The videos clearly show that
 the brain is not merely reacting to outside stimulation, nor is there any
 sign of a linear pattern of cause and effect in place. They show that
 awareness drives spontaneous brain activity - not that it is dormant until
 interacted with.

Of course the brain is not dormant until stimulated. Even under
anaesthesia there is complex, continuous brain activity.

 Closer to what you claim, it would be
 remarkable if we could zoom in on some of the neuronal activity and
 see that there was activity in neurons not explainable in terms of
 biochemistry, such as a transmembrane voltage other than what is
 calculated from measuring the concentration of anions and cations.


 You still don't understand why that is a ridiculous straw man. It's like
 saying that for me to choose these letters there would have to be some
 violation of the English language going on to allow words to appear from
 nowhere.

Well, what else can I say when you deny that the activity of the brain
is entirely determined by the biochemistry? You say it isn't just the
biochemistry, then you say it is, then you say it isn't again. If it
isn't then somewhere in the brain there must be an anomalous event you
can point to. If you can't point to any such events then brain
activity is mechanistic to the same extent that biochemistry is
mechanistic.

 That would be relatively simple to show and it would be consistent
 with the idea that the mind is not just epiphenomenal but can have a
 direct effect on the body.



 Or you could just tell someone to imagine that they are playing tennis and
 then look at the area of the brain associated with motor activity and
 observe that it changes when they imagine playing tennis. Oh, wait, they did
 that. Case closed. Mind is not an epiphenomenon.

To show the mental is not epiphenomenal you would have to show that a
physical change is effected by the mental that cannot be explained
entirely in physical terms.

 I still don't see where you find any evidence in science that neurons
 change in response to anything other than blind physics.


 See above. Does physical law detail how one 'imagines playing tennis'? Is
 that sudden re-orchestration of a region of the brain's activity just a
 coincidence that was going to happen anyways?

The re-orchestration of the brain when someone thinks of playing
tennis happens because of the physical interactions in the brain. If
it were not so then we would see

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-14 Thread John Clark

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 9:59 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:

  Because both dragons and God are well defined concepts, just concepts
 that don’t happen to have the attribute of existence. In contrast “free
 will” is not only incoherently defined it is every bit as self
 contradictory as the largest prime number is.

  You have yourself provided a counter-example to this claim. We have
 concluded that the free-will based on non determinacy is non sensical, but
 not so for the notion of free-will based on determinacy. Free-will does
 makes sense in that case: it is the ability to follow our own
 self-determination,


No that is the exact opposite of the truth, we cannot follow our own self
determination. If you tell me that a system is deterministic you have added
exactly zero information by telling me that the system also has free
will, thus free will means nothing and is just a noise. Turing proved 80
years ago that even in a 100% deterministic system sometimes you can tell
if that system will ever be in sate X (such as the stop state for example)
BUT sometimes you can not and in general there is no way to tell when you
can and when you can't, so the only way to know is to just watch it and
see, and you might end up watching it literally forever. There is no
shortcut, sometimes nobody, not even we ourselves know what we will do
until we do it.

You're walking down a road and spot a fork in the road far ahead. You know
of advantages and disadvantages to both paths so you arn't sure if you will
go right or left, you haven't finished the calculation yet, you haven't
decided yet. Once you get to the fork you find yourself on the left path
and retroactively conclude that you must have decided to go left.

  John k Clark

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Thursday, March 14, 2013 9:29:09 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:

 On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 

   What law of physics makes my will decide to get my house painted in 
   exactly 
   30 days? Does electromagnetism have some 30 day cycle that is 
 predicted 
   by 
   gravity for me and nobody else? 
  
  What laws of physics will make it rain in exactly 30 days? Why will it 
  rain in Singapore but not in Kuala Lumpur? 
  
  
  Geographic variation and water content contribute to determining where 
 and 
  when it is likely to rain, but they do not determine when I will have my 
  house painted. The rain certainly does not find its way to Singapore 
 because 
  of an appointment that it sets intentionally. 

 But if there were consciousness associated with the rain, it might. We 
 would have no way of knowing, would we? 


Knowing is not something that applies to consciousness. We can have a sense 
of sentience without knowing though. It's an open area of physics; 
perceptual relativity. When we open ourselves up to differently scaled 
phenomena, we can tune into super-personal awareness to some extent, but 
the more that we do, the harder it can be to discern between intuition and 
delusion.


  Would you be as amazed to see the pattern of charge changing in the 
  memory of a computer playing chess? Would it prove to you that 
  planning its next move caused the charge shifts, rather than the 
  physics of electric circuits? 
  
  
  Would meditation change the pattern like it does for a human brain? 

 Yes, of course. Do you think that the computer could do computations 
 without any physical change? 


There is no reason to assume that meditation has a computational 
equivalent. Computers don't ever meditate, nor could they benefit by it.
 


  And the computer uses the chess game to change charge distribution in 
  memory. 
  
  
  If you have the computer play the same game of chess you will see the 
 same 
  charge distribution whether or not the computer has meditated. 

 But if meditation changes the computer then it may play a different 
 game, just as if meditation changes the human player's brain he may 
 play a different game. 


Meditation couldn't change a computer because a computer can't meditate. To 
a computer, there is only computing and pause.
 


  Quantum level events are still mechanistic in your sense, in that 
  they follow probabilistic rules. 
  
  
  The events in our brain follow non-probabilistic, spontaneous, 
 intentional 
  rules. 

 If they are non-probabilistic they are deterministic. 


No. Where do you get this edict from? They are non-deterministic and 
non-probabilistic. They are neither red light or green light - they are 
yellow light; intentional. Probabilistic and deterministic systems are both 
equally *unintentional*. They do not *try* to do anything, ever. Intention 
is predicated on intensities of effort. Patience. Focus. There is none of 
that in deterministic or probabilistic systems - it is ontologically 
impossible. How is this so impossible to grasp? How can you sit on a 
mountain of stubborn intentions and deny that there is a mountain there?

 

 They can be 
 intentional and spontaneous whether probabilistic or deterministic. 


No. Nothing intentional can be probabilistic or deterministic or random. It 
is the opposite of all three by definition. You can be coerced by 
deterministic circumstances to the point that you have no practical control 
over your own actions, but that does not make your action intentional. 
Intentional is more voluntary than involuntary.
 

 Intentional means the person wants to do it and spontaneous could mean 
 the person decides to do it without any obvious external stimulus. 


That's fine, but where does the determinism come in?
 


  The videos make the brain look just like a complex pinball machine, 
  yes. What would be remarkable would be if there were no physical 
  change in the brain at all while the subject was thinking. That would 
  show that thinking is not done with the brain but with something else, 
  perhaps an immaterial soul. 
  
  
  That is exactly what NDE studies seem to suggest. I don't require that 
 to be 
  true since I think that brain activity is the public-spatial view of a 
  moment out of a private-temporal experience. The videos clearly show 
 that 
  the brain is not merely reacting to outside stimulation, nor is there 
 any 
  sign of a linear pattern of cause and effect in place. They show that 
  awareness drives spontaneous brain activity - not that it is dormant 
 until 
  interacted with. 

 Of course the brain is not dormant until stimulated. Even under 
 anaesthesia there is complex, continuous brain activity. 


But machines can be dormant when they are not stimulated.
 


  Closer to what you claim, it would be 
  remarkable if we could zoom in on some of the neuronal activity and 
  see that there was activity in

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-14 Thread John Clark

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 5:32 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:

 A wheel is just [...]  a mouse trap does not [...]  it doesn't care about
 [...]  it doesn't matter to [...]


This is really getting tedious. Again and again you are decreeing what is
and what is not so but you're not even attempting to give us a reason for
believing it is true except for your word. You're not the Pope and I don't
believe what the Pope says without evidence or rational argument either.

 As a practical matter both you and I judge that something is conscious
 in exactly the same way, we look for intelligence.


  No, I would generally look for movement. Breathing.


So when I undergo anesthesia I'm conscious  but when Einstein holds his
breath he's not.


  ESP parapsychology junk science.


 You must be psychic to know the results of experiments before they are
 even designed.


These sort of experiments have been performed ad nauseam for at least 2
centuries and have produced null results, it's time to move on.

 Machines are getting better in some ways, but not in any way that matters
 to anything except human minds.


A machine mattered very much to 2 champion human minds who got their ass
beaten on Jeopardy by a certain machine.


  In your universe, the Free Will noise either exists for a reason or it
 does not.


Obviously

 You don't seem to allow that it could have a reason,


Not at all, there might be a reason people believe in free will just as
there is a reason children believe in Santa Claws.

 nor do you allow that the belief in free will could be random


Not at all, there might be no reason; but one thing is certain, there is a
reason people believe in free will or there is not a reason people
believe in free will

 You clearly believe that people intentionally choose their belief in free
 will and that they could and should correct this error by educating
 themselves in a particular way.


Maybe, or maybe some people are just hardwired that way.

  John K Clark

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 10:45:10 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:



 On 13/03/2013, at 4:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 

  We're talking about the basic principle of determinism though. We should 
 use a basic example of it. What special ingredient does complexity add 
 which changes the nature of determinism? One stone rolling or a trillion 
 digital stones rolling and colliding and sticking together and breaking 
 apart - what difference does it make to the ontology of determinism? 

 If you can't demonstrate that one carbon atom is intelligent or conscious 
 does that mean that trillions of them together can't be either?


If your model of physics doesn't include intelligence then it can't 
interpret any behaviors as intelligent or conscious. Determinism is not 
even physics, it is an ideology based on the behaviors of objects. The 
problem with it is that rather than making the obvious discovery that no 
amount of pure objects equals a subject, it tries to insert some cloud of 
endless possibilities in between one object and many objects which obscures 
the obvious. If trillions of something make a subject, then you have to 
explain why that should be the case - what deterministic purpose does the 
subject serve, how does it come to be even a possibility if it serves no 
purpose, etc. 

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 1:56:00 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:



 On 12/03/2013, at 12:30 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 

  No, it doesn't make sense to me that there would be a highly valued 
 qualia of free will (and highly charged qualia of responsibility) if our 
 participation did not actually contribute causally in determining the 
 universe. A free spectator in a deterministic machine can feel no 
 responsibility or presence. 

 That many believe something or that something seems true at a gut level 
 does not make it true. 


Sure, but if you understand why the belief has to be true ontologically, 
then it does strongly suggest that it could be true. If you can explain why 
a free spectator in a deterministic machine would feel presence or 
responsibility toward that machine, even though there is no possibility 
that they can change the machine in any way, then I would be interested in 
hearing about that.
 


  I was watching a CGI cartoon this morning and was noticing that the 
 sterility of the medium must be fought every step of the way by the 
 animators to inject some warmth and character. The digital medium is not 
 neutral, it is anesthetically biased. Because computation is devoid both of 
 the gravity of realism and the vitality of animation, the CGI animator must 
 compensate with low level visual distractions at all times - plugging the 
 holes in the audience's experience with lots of clever details. 

 A non-CGI movie on a medium such as DVD is digitally encoded so is 
 potentially generable by computer. Indeed, it is generable by a program 
 enumerating all possible movies.


Potentially but not necessarily actually. Copying a photograph pixel by 
pixel is not the same as generating an image. This is at the heart of the 
issue - the recognition of the different levels of quality of consciousness:

Y1. detection: input/output - amplitude/intensity, frequency, 
presence/participation.
Y2. sensation: color/tone, attraction/repulsion, association potential
Y3. perception: image, experienced gestalt.
Y4: feeling: episodic awareness, fluid continuum of perceptions.
Y5: awareness: worldly embeddedness, narrative continuity, parallel 
experiences of others.
Y6. consciousness: awareness of self as other, abstract thought and 
language.
Y7: intuition: awareness of synchronicity, symbolic depths, super-personal 
archetypes
Y8: fusion: identification with the eternal, loss of body identity, 
Satori/enlightenment/Nirvana

Information processing is on the opposite axis. Where Y0 is Sense, X0 is 
the opposite - Logic. Logic replaces sense with a structure that can be 
referred to instead of relying on a subject's sensations and feelings. 
Logic is about controlling functions and needs no feelings at all (ask Mr. 
Spock's Dad).

X1. information: low level discernment only - digital universal. Binary 
code. Bits.
X-1. switching: a device used to register and store a discrete, testable 
state of a physical object.
X2.  Meta-data. Grouping of bits into bytes, Kb, Mb, Gb... Copy and paste. 
Sequential analysis.
X-2. Meta-switches. Grouping of devices by division of labor. Routing and 
nesting of functions.
X3. Programs. Logical groupings of functions which are composed 
independently of hardware but executed as data.
X-3. Machines. Devices which compute, route, switch, execute programs 
(silently, invisibly, without experience)
X4. Meta-programs. Self-extending programs which use logic to edit 
themselves. Turing Machines.
X-4. Universal Machines. Devices driven by Meta-programs to modify their 
own hardware (or meta-software in Comp).

That's just a rough run-down of course, my point is only to show that the 
considerations of information are completely perpendicular to those of 
sense. We use logic, we use computation, and computation and logic use us - 
but - we are not computation or logic, we are genuine sensory-motor 
experience which is anchored permanently into the on-and-only, 
authentically and concretely real narrative of eternity.

Craig

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 6:51:56 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:

 On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 12:18 AM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 

  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. 

 I may not be able to predict what your brain will do 30 days from now, 
 but that does not necessarily mean your brain is not deterministic.  

And it certainly doesn't mean your brain is neither deterministic nor 
 probabilistic. 


But I *can* predict what my brain will do 30 days from now if I decide to 
do something in 30 days. That means that what is determining my brain's 
behavior (in addition to whatever physiological realities are in play) is 
my personal will.
 


  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. 

 There is a chain of causation between you reading these words and you 
 throwing the ball. Where exactly do you think is the break in this 
 causal chain? 


There is no break at all. Did you not see the part about top-down, 
bottom-up, center-out, and periphery-in causal influences all being 
dynamically interactive? When I make a decision about throwing the ball, 
the public symptoms of that decision can be seen as billions of 
simultaneous and near-simulataneous events, retro-causal events, 
premonitory events.
 


  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. 

 No, I think you believe the brain does things by itself and you 
 don't understand how an experiment could be set up to demonstrate 
 this. 


When did I ever say that the brain does things by itself? Why do you keep 
pointing at this straw man?
 


  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? 

 Do you know how the transmembrane potential is set? It is due to the 
 difference between the sum of positive and negative ions on either 
 side of the membrane. Do you know how

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-13 Thread John Clark

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:


  There is no reason to think that a deterministic universe universe had
 to have a beginning, or a non-deterministic one either for that matter.


  Then determinism, having no prior cause, violates determinism.


No, every state in the universe would have a cause determined by a previous
state of the universe, the fact there are a infinite number of such states
is irrelevant.

  John K Clark

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 12:32:34 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote:

 On Mon, Mar 11, 2013  Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote:

  the phrase dragons exist or God exists is not gibberish just wrong, 
 and free will is not even wrong.  I'm saying that  if free will doesn't 
 exist and “free will” doesn't not exist then that’s just another way of 
 saying that free will is gibberish.


  I'm not saying that free will doesn't exist though,

  
 I know, you’re not talking about something that does not exist, you’re 
 talking about something that is not deterministic and not not 
 deterministic. In other words you’re talking gibberish.  


It's mind boggling to me that you have no capacity to tolerate the obvious 
non-Aristotelian qualities of nature. The color white is not red, but since 
white cannot be made without using red wavelengths, then it can't be said 
that it is not not red either. Warm water can be said not to be hot but 
also not to be not hot either, in that it includes hot water mixed with 
cold. Where are you getting this fantasy expectation that everything fits 
into one box or the opposite box?
 

  

  Why do you put free will in a different category from dragons or God

  
 Because both dragons and God are well defined concepts, just concepts that 
 don’t happen to have the attribute of existence. In contrast “free will” is 
 not only incoherently defined it is every bit as self contradictory as the 
 largest prime number is.


Free will doesn't need to be defined because it is inescapable and obvious. 
Color doesn't need to be defined either, or hunger, or itching.
 


  When the computer reaches its goal we know because when it reaches the 
 billionth digit of PI the machine will stop.


  The machines stops because the programmer has programmed it to stop,

  
 Yes. So what?  Just exactly like you the program is the way it is for a 
 reason OR it is the way it is for no reason.


The reason that the machine stops has nothing to do with the goals of the 
machine. Your view has no way to accommodate the reality that meaning can 
be projected onto actions by the audience. To give a machine a full range 
of human emotions in your world is to simply use emoticons. A smiley face 
can't just be ASCII text, it must be a smile because how things look to you 
is how they must actually be.
  

  

  not because the machine had a goal which was satisfied. There is a huge 
 difference.

  
 If there is a huge difference it’s a bit odd that you are unable to 
 rationally describe even a tiny difference without just decreeing without 
 evidence or argument that certain things do or do not have subjective 
 states; and after all logically  investigating those states is the entire 
 point of the debate so your faith based assertions are not helpful. 


Do you believe that this  ;-)   has an emotion? Does the computer have an 
emotion about it? Do the bits in RAM or pixels on the screen have a feeling 
about what ;-) means? Why not? 


  I can catch a mouse in a trap and the mouse will stop moving.


 True, and the mouse trap will stop moving too.


You could make one that resets itself. What's the difference?
 


  That doesn't mean that the mouse has achieved some kind of personal 
 mouse goal.


 Also true, not every living thing successfully reaches its goal and not 
 everything even has a goal but the mouse trap certainly did, it was built 
 to move very fast and then stop if it was touched, and that is exactly what 
 happened.   


It could have been a child's finger broken in the trap instead. The trap 
would have broken it with exactly the same indifference. The mouse trap has 
no goal. 
 


  And the motion of your thumb on the joystick of the computer game you 
 were playing were sent into motion by the computer which will stop when it 
 reaches its goal, the end of the game.


  I respond to the game voluntarily,

  
 So you responded the way you did for a reason, namely because you wanted 
 to. The computer game responds the way it does for a reason too.


'Because I wanted to' is the opposite of 'because it is programmed to'. The 
former intentionally creates and initiates a sequence of actions, the 
latter executes and acts as a consequence of unintentional following.

 

  the game responds to me unconsciously

  
 As I said the entire point of this conversation is to investigate what is 
 conscious and what is not, so for you to decree without evidence or 
 argument that this this and this is conscious but that that and that is not 
 just doesn’t get us very far.


Consciousness itself cannot be accessed by third person evidence. That 
doesn't mean that we have no access to valid intuition and judgment beyond 
the evidence of objects. That gets us as far as we need to get. There might 
be a way to conduct some useful experiments to prove whether or not people 
can unconsciously detect the presence of living organisms. I'd be in favor 
of that, but I don't need it to know

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 1:36:36 PM UTC-4, John Clark wrote:

 On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript:
  wrote:


  There is no reason to think that a deterministic universe universe had 
 to have a beginning, or a non-deterministic one either for that matter.


  Then determinism, having no prior cause, violates determinism. 


 No, every state in the universe would have a cause determined by a 
 previous state of the universe, the fact there are a infinite number of 
 such states is irrelevant.


You are not including determinism itself as a state in the universe.

Craig
 


   John K Clark
  



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis


On 3/13/2013 3:51 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

  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.


At last Craig admits that a computer can be conscious - but only by not really being a 
computer at some magic level where it becomes an animal.



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.


No you don't, or at least I don't.  I experience many things but I don't experience being 
determined or not-determined.


Brent

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 2:00:27 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

 On 3/13/2013 3:51 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: 
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. 

 At last Craig admits that a computer can be conscious - but only by not 
 really being a 
 computer at some magic level where it becomes an animal. 


No, you misunderstand. Stathis used computer as a metaphor here for a 
person, saying that if any part of the person acts like a machine then 
every part of the person ant the person as a whole must be a machine. I was 
correcting him saying that in fact a person is an animal through and 
through, and it only looks like a machine on the lowest levels because of 
perceptual relativism. A machine cannot ever be human, but we can be 
fooled. A human can act like a machine for a while but it isn't healthy.

Please avoid putting words in my mouth - my position is that computers 
executed on inorganic material are not likely to ever be conscious. They 
can progress on the X axis that I laid out above, but not the Y axis.
 


  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. 

 No you don't, or at least I don't.  I experience many things but I don't 
 experience being 
 determined or not-determined. 


If you get food when you are hungry, then you experience yourself being 
determined. If you debate online and decide what you say based on your own 
thoughts rather than the content of neurochemical sites in your brain, then 
you experience being not-determined. 

Craig
 


 Brent 


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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis


On 3/13/2013 3:32 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 2:00:27 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

On 3/13/2013 3:51 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
   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.

At last Craig admits that a computer can be conscious - but only by not 
really being a
computer at some magic level where it becomes an animal.


No, you misunderstand. Stathis used computer as a metaphor here for a person, saying 
that if any part of the person acts like a machine then every part of the person ant the 
person as a whole must be a machine. I was correcting him saying that in fact a person 
is an animal through and through, and it only looks like a machine on the lowest levels 
because of perceptual relativism. A machine cannot ever be human,


So you say.


but we can be fooled.


How do you're not already fooled; that what you take to be humans beings really are 
computers - including yourself?



A human can act like a machine for a while but it isn't healthy.

Please avoid putting words in my mouth -


The above was a direct quote extracted from your email.


my position is that computers executed on inorganic material are not likely to ever be 
conscious. They can progress on the X axis that I laid out above, but not the Y axis.



 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.

No you don't, or at least I don't.  I experience many things but I don't 
experience
being
determined or not-determined.


If you get food when you are hungry, then you experience yourself being 
determined.


And what if I don't get food because I want to be slimmer.  Is that *not* 
determined?

If you debate online and decide what you say based on your own thoughts rather than the 
content of neurochemical sites in your brain, then you experience being not-determined.


Are you claiming my own thoughts are distinct from the neurochemistry of my 
brain?

Brent
The first principle of science is don't fool yourself - and you
are the easiest person to fool.
  --- Richard Feynman

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 7:38:24 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

  On 3/13/2013 3:32 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
  


 On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 2:00:27 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: 

 On 3/13/2013 3:51 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: 
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. 

 At last Craig admits that a computer can be conscious - but only by not 
 really being a 
 computer at some magic level where it becomes an animal. 


 No, you misunderstand. Stathis used computer as a metaphor here for a 
 person, saying that if any part of the person acts like a machine then 
 every part of the person ant the person as a whole must be a machine. I was 
 correcting him saying that in fact a person is an animal through and 
 through, and it only looks like a machine on the lowest levels because of 
 perceptual relativism. A machine cannot ever be human, 


 So you say.

  but we can be fooled. 


 How do you're not already fooled; that what you take to be humans beings 
 really are computers - including yourself?


Because experience by definition cannot be simulated. You may be 
experiencing something other than what you think you are experiencing, but 
the fact that you experience is not something that you can doubt. How would 
you know that your doubt were real?
 


  A human can act like a machine for a while but it isn't healthy.

 Please avoid putting words in my mouth - 


 The above was a direct quote extracted from your email.


It was taken out of context so that it appeared to mean the opposite of 
what I was trying to say.
 



  my position is that computers executed on inorganic material are not 
 likely to ever be conscious. They can progress on the X axis that I laid 
 out above, but not the Y axis.
  
  

  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. 

 No you don't, or at least I don't.  I experience many things but I don't 
 experience being 
 determined or not-determined. 


 If you get food when you are hungry, then you experience yourself being 
 determined. 


 And what if I don't get food because I want to be slimmer.  Is that *not* 
 determined?


It depends on whether you want to be slimmer more because it is something 
that you decided for yourself or more because of social conditioning, peer 
pressure, etc. There are different degrees to which our behavior is 
influenced externally.
 


  If you debate online and decide what you say based on your own thoughts 
 rather than the content of neurochemical sites in your brain, then you 
 experience being not-determined. 
  

 Are you claiming my own thoughts are distinct from the neurochemistry of 
 my brain?


Is the plot of a TV show distinct from the pixels on your TV screen?

Craig
 


 Brent
 The first principle of science is don't fool yourself - and you
 are the easiest person to fool.
   --- Richard Feynman

  

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:33 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 If you can't demonstrate that one carbon atom is intelligent or conscious
 does that mean that trillions of them together can't be either?


 If your model of physics doesn't include intelligence then it can't
 interpret any behaviors as intelligent or conscious. Determinism is not even
 physics, it is an ideology based on the behaviors of objects. The problem
 with it is that rather than making the obvious discovery that no amount of
 pure objects equals a subject, it tries to insert some cloud of endless
 possibilities in between one object and many objects which obscures the
 obvious. If trillions of something make a subject, then you have to explain
 why that should be the case - what deterministic purpose does the subject
 serve, how does it come to be even a possibility if it serves no purpose,
 etc.

The theory is that lots of atoms put together in a specific way lead
to intelligence, just as lots of atoms put together in a specific way
lead to gas giant planets. The potential for the gas giant planet was
in the atoms and the potential for intelligence was also in the atoms.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 7:53:23 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:

 On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:33 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 

  If you can't demonstrate that one carbon atom is intelligent or 
 conscious 
  does that mean that trillions of them together can't be either? 
  
  
  If your model of physics doesn't include intelligence then it can't 
  interpret any behaviors as intelligent or conscious. Determinism is not 
 even 
  physics, it is an ideology based on the behaviors of objects. The 
 problem 
  with it is that rather than making the obvious discovery that no amount 
 of 
  pure objects equals a subject, it tries to insert some cloud of endless 
  possibilities in between one object and many objects which obscures the 
  obvious. If trillions of something make a subject, then you have to 
 explain 
  why that should be the case - what deterministic purpose does the 
 subject 
  serve, how does it come to be even a possibility if it serves no 
 purpose, 
  etc. 

 The theory is that lots of atoms put together in a specific way lead 
 to intelligence, just as lots of atoms put together in a specific way 
 lead to gas giant planets.


How is that different in principle from the theory that particular 
incantations lead to the appearance of demons?
 

 The potential for the gas giant planet was 
 in the atoms and the potential for intelligence was also in the atoms. 


The gas giant planet makes sense given our experience of seeing many small 
objects from a distance as a cloud or haze. A planet is just a collection 
of atoms at different densities. Why would that equate to an expectation 
for intelligence in atoms (or empathy, imagination, sense of humor, or any 
other magical powers)?

Craig
 



 -- 
 Stathis Papaioannou 


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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis


On 3/13/2013 4:47 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 7:38:24 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

On 3/13/2013 3:32 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 2:00:27 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

On 3/13/2013 3:51 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
   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.

At last Craig admits that a computer can be conscious - but only by not 
really
being a
computer at some magic level where it becomes an animal.


No, you misunderstand. Stathis used computer as a metaphor here for a 
person,
saying that if any part of the person acts like a machine then every part 
of the
person ant the person as a whole must be a machine. I was correcting him 
saying
that in fact a person is an animal through and through, and it only looks 
like a
machine on the lowest levels because of perceptual relativism. A machine 
cannot
ever be human,


So you say.


but we can be fooled.


How do you're not already fooled; that what you take to be humans beings 
really are
computers - including yourself?


Because experience by definition cannot be simulated. You may be experiencing something 
other than what you think you are experiencing, but the fact that you experience is not 
something that you can doubt. How would you know that your doubt were real?


But you don't experience not being a computer or being a computer.  You experience 
images, sounds, taste,... The rest is inference.






A human can act like a machine for a while but it isn't healthy.

Please avoid putting words in my mouth -


The above was a direct quote extracted from your email.


It was taken out of context so that it appeared to mean the opposite of what I was 
trying to say.


My apologies.





my position is that computers executed on inorganic material are not likely 
to ever
be conscious. They can progress on the X axis that I laid out above, but 
not the Y
axis.


 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.

No you don't, or at least I don't.  I experience many things but I don't
experience being
determined or not-determined.


If you get food when you are hungry, then you experience yourself being 
determined.


And what if I don't get food because I want to be slimmer.  Is that *not* 
determined?


It depends on whether you want to be slimmer more because it is something that you 
decided for yourself or more because of social conditioning, peer pressure, etc. There 
are different degrees to which our behavior is influenced externally.




If you debate online and decide what you say based on your own thoughts 
rather than
the content of neurochemical sites in your brain, then you experience being
not-determined.


Are you claiming my own thoughts are distinct from the neurochemistry of 
my brain?


Is the plot of a TV show distinct from the pixels on your TV screen?


The latter are causally related to the first.

Brent

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 8:59:04 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

  On 3/13/2013 4:47 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
  


 On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 7:38:24 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: 

  On 3/13/2013 3:32 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
  


 On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 2:00:27 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: 

 On 3/13/2013 3:51 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: 
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. 

 At last Craig admits that a computer can be conscious - but only by not 
 really being a 
 computer at some magic level where it becomes an animal. 


 No, you misunderstand. Stathis used computer as a metaphor here for a 
 person, saying that if any part of the person acts like a machine then 
 every part of the person ant the person as a whole must be a machine. I was 
 correcting him saying that in fact a person is an animal through and 
 through, and it only looks like a machine on the lowest levels because of 
 perceptual relativism. A machine cannot ever be human, 


 So you say.

  but we can be fooled. 


 How do you're not already fooled; that what you take to be humans beings 
 really are computers - including yourself?
  

 Because experience by definition cannot be simulated. You may be 
 experiencing something other than what you think you are experiencing, but 
 the fact that you experience is not something that you can doubt. How would 
 you know that your doubt were real?
  

 But you don't experience not being a computer or being a computer.  
 You experience images, sounds, taste,... The rest is inference.


So you have experiences which you can't deny, and which you can't explain 
as being necessary or sensible for a computer to have in any way. Why would 
you decide to infer that computers have superfluous phenomena attached to 
their computations and that your own experiences are somehow connected with 
those? 

The key is understanding that there are different levels of pattern 
recognition, and that lower levels of copying and pasting or matching and 
sequencing have never added up to higher levels of empathy or imagination. 
Our AI research has been based on simulating high level responsiveness 
using low level computation, but it doesn't really work. The results are 
never any better than we would expect from a machine imitating some narrow 
aspect of intelligence.
 


   
  
  
  A human can act like a machine for a while but it isn't healthy.

 Please avoid putting words in my mouth - 


 The above was a direct quote extracted from your email.
  

 It was taken out of context so that it appeared to mean the opposite of 
 what I was trying to say.
  

 My apologies.


Thanks. No problem, it was an awkward phrasing anyhow. I was surprised that 
I had said it until I pieced it together.
 

   
  
  

  my position is that computers executed on inorganic material are not 
 likely to ever be conscious. They can progress on the X axis that I laid 
 out above, but not the Y axis.
  
  

  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. 

 No you don't, or at least I don't.  I experience many things but I don't 
 experience being 
 determined or not-determined. 


 If you get food when you are hungry, then you experience yourself being 
 determined. 


 And what if I don't get food because I want to be slimmer.  Is that *not* 
 determined?
  

 It depends on whether you want to be slimmer more because it is something 
 that you decided for yourself or more because of social conditioning, peer 
 pressure, etc. There are different degrees to which our behavior is 
 influenced externally.
  
  
  
  If you debate online and decide what you say based on your own thoughts 
 rather than the content of neurochemical sites in your brain, then you 
 experience being not-determined. 
  

 Are you claiming my own thoughts are distinct from the neurochemistry 
 of my brain?
  

 Is the plot of a TV show distinct from the pixels on your TV screen?
  

 The latter are causally related to the first.


I would say the situation is similar. There are a lot of possible ways that 
experiences can be expressed neurologically and there are a lot of possible 
experiences in consciousness which can express a given neurological event. 
There is a lot of overlap and underlap I would guess. You could have many 
different TV shows with the same plot and many different plots dubbed into 
the dialogue of the same silent movie.  I used to assume that there was a 
one to one correspondence to brain states, but I don't think it has to be 
that way any more. Looking at the experiments with congenitally blind 
people helps clarify the role that experience has in the quality of sensory 
experience. Identical brain

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 So you have experiences which you can't deny, and which you can't explain as
 being necessary or sensible for a computer to have in any way. Why would you
 decide to infer that computers have superfluous phenomena attached to their
 computations and that your own experiences are somehow connected with those?

Who are you to say that natural phenomena are superfluous?

-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 10:51:20 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:

 On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 

  So you have experiences which you can't deny, and which you can't 
 explain as 
  being necessary or sensible for a computer to have in any way. Why would 
 you 
  decide to infer that computers have superfluous phenomena attached to 
 their 
  computations and that your own experiences are somehow connected with 
 those? 

 Who are you to say that natural phenomena are superfluous? 


Who are you to say that they aren't?

Craig
 


 -- 
 Stathis Papaioannou 


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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:53 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 I may not be able to predict what your brain will do 30 days from now,
 but that does not necessarily mean your brain is not deterministic.

 And it certainly doesn't mean your brain is neither deterministic nor
 probabilistic.


 But I *can* predict what my brain will do 30 days from now if I decide to do
 something in 30 days. That means that what is determining my brain's
 behavior (in addition to whatever physiological realities are in play) is my
 personal will.

And what is determining your personal will is your brain, which
follows the laws of physics.

 There is a chain of causation between you reading these words and you
 throwing the ball. Where exactly do you think is the break in this
 causal chain?


 There is no break at all. Did you not see the part about top-down,
 bottom-up, center-out, and periphery-in causal influences all being
 dynamically interactive? When I make a decision about throwing the ball, the
 public symptoms of that decision can be seen as billions of simultaneous and
 near-simulataneous events, retro-causal events, premonitory events.

If the atoms bouncing around in your brain follow a causal chain then
so does your brain. If you believe that your free will somehow acts to
cause atoms to move or electrical fields to change in a not
determined, not probabilistic way then that would be obvious in
experiments as a break in the causal chain. There's no way to escape
this.

 No, I think you believe the brain does things by itself and you
 don't understand how an experiment could be set up to demonstrate
 this.


 When did I ever say that the brain does things by itself? Why do you keep
 pointing at this straw man?

You frequently say that the brain does things due to free will, while
I say the brain only does things due to its components blindly
following the laws of physics, like a pinball machine (your example).

 Do you know how the transmembrane potential is set? It is due to the
 difference between the sum of positive and negative ions on either
 side of the membrane. Do you know how the ion concentrations are set?
 Ions diffuse across the membrane following their concentration
 gradients, diffuse more quickly through specific ion channels, and are
 transported against concentration gradients via energy-dependent
 transmembrane proteins.


 Let's say that you are looking at a live video of someone's neurons as they
 decide to throw a basketball four inches in the air or three feet in the
 air. What happens? What does it matter? The result is the same. Whether it
 is at the level of the entire brain, a particular neural pathway, a group of
 neurons, membranes, ion channel, molecule... it doesn't matter at all
 because they all are changed according to what the person decides. The
 person's decision could be pushed from the neural level also, but we would
 need to do that intentionally because transmembrane potentials don't know
 what a basketball is. Also, your entire model needs a complete revision
 since human glial cells have been discovered to increase the performance of
 mouse brains. All of our assumptions about coded electric signals as
 fundamental factors of consciousness could now easily be wrong.

Does a ball roll down the hill because of the pull of gravity or does
gravity pull on the ball because it rolls down the hill? This is the
problem with your insistence on saying that the neurons change because
of your decision, rather than that your decision occurs because your
neurons change.

 You would be surprised if the balls in a
 pinball machine just started levitating or something all by
 themselves, and yet that is what you claim happens in the brain. Where
 does it happen, and why has it never been observed?


 It is observed any time a person exercises their voluntary will and we look
 at what the brain does. Look at Libet even. We don't see sudden responses
 coming out of any inevitable physiology of ions, we see semantic responses
 to sensory events. What is your claim, that the test just happens to
 correspond to a moment when the ion balance was drifting toward an action
 potential anyways? What is your theory of how membranes react to non-local
 changes?

The semantic changes and sensory events supervene on the biochemical
changes. You still seem to believe that this isn't the case and an ion
channel might open by itself, in the absence of the normal stimulus,
because you decide to do something.

 If the general does not behave mechanistically then the army as a
 whole doesn't either.


 Why? Where is that dictum from?

From you: The general makes a decision personally, and the army
follows mechanically. I only disagree with you when you are wrong or
incoherent.

 The only way the general could behave
 non-mechanistically is if some part of him does not; for if every part
 behaved mechanistically then he and the army would behave
 mechanistically. So which part exactly of

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 Who are you to say that natural phenomena are superfluous?


 Who are you to say that they aren't?

The natural world is as it is. It's not my place to say the the Great
Red Spot of Jupiter is superfluous, that the electron is superfluous,
or that intelligent apes are superfluous.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Thursday, March 14, 2013 12:13:47 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:

 On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:53 AM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 

  I may not be able to predict what your brain will do 30 days from now, 
  but that does not necessarily mean your brain is not deterministic. 
  
  And it certainly doesn't mean your brain is neither deterministic nor 
  probabilistic. 
  
  
  But I *can* predict what my brain will do 30 days from now if I decide 
 to do 
  something in 30 days. That means that what is determining my brain's 
  behavior (in addition to whatever physiological realities are in play) 
 is my 
  personal will. 

 And what is determining your personal will is your brain, which 
 follows the laws of physics. 


What law of physics makes my will decide to get my house painted in exactly 
30 days? Does electromagnetism have some 30 day cycle that is predicted by 
gravity for me and nobody else?
 


  There is a chain of causation between you reading these words and you 
  throwing the ball. Where exactly do you think is the break in this 
  causal chain? 
  
  
  There is no break at all. Did you not see the part about top-down, 
  bottom-up, center-out, and periphery-in causal influences all being 
  dynamically interactive? When I make a decision about throwing the ball, 
 the 
  public symptoms of that decision can be seen as billions of simultaneous 
 and 
  near-simulataneous events, retro-causal events, premonitory events. 

 If the atoms bouncing around in your brain follow a causal chain then 
 so does your brain.


You act as if there were one single chain reaction from neuron to neuron. 
That is not a viable model.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2H6UdQVEFY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhCF-zlk0jY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJLdNRebeWE

The last one is especially cool. As you can see, the brain's behavior 
reflects massive, simultaneous, spontaneously formed patterns that have 
nothing whatsoever to do with physical laws. The same physical laws are in 
place whether the subject has meditated or not, so there is no basis for 
your claim of flat biochemical momentum somehow being responsible for 
orchestrating mental changes.

If you believe that your free will somehow acts to 
 cause atoms to move or electrical fields to change 


Not really a belief, it is an observable fact. As you can see in the third 
video, the subject uses free will to meditate and change the behavior of 
electric fields in their brain.
 

 in a not 
 determined, not probabilistic way then that would be obvious in 
 experiments as a break in the causal chain. There's no way to escape 
 this. 


There's nothing to escape. Your causal chain is a fantasy. Watch the 
videos. We control (some) of our brain activity. How can you argue against 
that obvious fact based on your 19th century expectations of atomic 
physics? We already know that QM reveals uncertainty and entanglement 
beneath all atomic interactions. We are that uncertainty, and we will see 
that if we do physics experiments on living brains.
 


  No, I think you believe the brain does things by itself and you 
  don't understand how an experiment could be set up to demonstrate 
  this. 
  
  
  When did I ever say that the brain does things by itself? Why do you 
 keep 
  pointing at this straw man? 

 You frequently say that the brain does things due to free will, while 
 I say the brain only does things due to its components blindly 
 following the laws of physics, like a pinball machine (your example). 


Do the videos make the brain look like a pinball machine?  What would it 
have to look like for you to be able to entertain the idea that you are 
100% wrong?


  Do you know how the transmembrane potential is set? It is due to the 
  difference between the sum of positive and negative ions on either 
  side of the membrane. Do you know how the ion concentrations are set? 
  Ions diffuse across the membrane following their concentration 
  gradients, diffuse more quickly through specific ion channels, and are 
  transported against concentration gradients via energy-dependent 
  transmembrane proteins. 
  
  
  Let's say that you are looking at a live video of someone's neurons as 
 they 
  decide to throw a basketball four inches in the air or three feet in the 
  air. What happens? What does it matter? The result is the same. Whether 
 it 
  is at the level of the entire brain, a particular neural pathway, a 
 group of 
  neurons, membranes, ion channel, molecule... it doesn't matter at all 
  because they all are changed according to what the person decides. The 
  person's decision could be pushed from the neural level also, but we 
 would 
  need to do that intentionally because transmembrane potentials don't 
 know 
  what a basketball is. Also, your entire model needs a complete revision 
  since human glial cells have been discovered to increase the performance 
 of 
  mouse brains. All of our assumptions

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis


On 3/13/2013 10:09 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
The last one is especially cool. As you can see, the brain's behavior reflects massive, 
simultaneous, spontaneously formed patterns that have nothing whatsoever to do with 
physical laws. The same physical laws are in place whether the subject has meditated or not,


But the same external influences are not.  The physical laws just connect one state of the 
world to another - not the state of one brain to a later state of that brain; all 
influences must be considered.


Brent

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Thursday, March 14, 2013 12:37:21 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:

 On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Craig Weinberg 
 whats...@gmail.comjavascript: 
 wrote: 

  Who are you to say that natural phenomena are superfluous? 
  
  
  Who are you to say that they aren't? 

 The natural world is as it is. 


I agree, and as part of the natural world, I am evidence of intention and 
free will as physical facts of the natural world.
 

 It's not my place to say the the Great 
 Red Spot of Jupiter is superfluous, that the electron is superfluous, 
 or that intelligent apes are superfluous. 


My point was not to claim that consciousness is actually superfluous in the 
real world but to point out the absurdity of your worldview, the logic of 
which insists that consciousness must be superfluous since it adds nothing 
to the functions which you claim the universe can only consist of. Of 
course my view is always that consciousness is the indispensable  ground of 
existence itself, so I am not suggesting by any means that consciousness 
could ever be actually superfluous in this universe.

Craig



 -- 
 Stathis Papaioannou 


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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Thursday, March 14, 2013 1:12:37 AM UTC-4, Brent wrote:

  On 3/13/2013 10:09 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
  
 The last one is especially cool. As you can see, the brain's behavior 
 reflects massive, simultaneous, spontaneously formed patterns that have 
 nothing whatsoever to do with physical laws. The same physical laws are in 
 place whether the subject has meditated or not,


 But the same external influences are not.  The physical laws just connect 
 one state of the world to another - not the state of one brain to a later 
 state of that brain; all influences must be considered.


All influences, apparently, except for the blindingly obvious influence of 
the subject themselves voluntarily influencing their own brain. What 
external influences are you claiming account for the differences seen in 
the video?

Craig 


 Brent
  

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-12 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 10:50 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com 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. That is what contrary
to physics means! It would be easy to show that something funny was
going on in a laboratory. 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. 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. And
insofar as physics is mechanistic - deterministic or probabilistic -
the behaviour of the body will be mechanistic.

 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.

 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?


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On 11 Mar 2013, at 16:17, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Monday, March 11, 2013 10:01:08 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 11 Mar 2013, at 00:57, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Sunday, March 10, 2013 5:51:35 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:
On 3/10/2013 1:08 PM, spudb...@aol.com wrote:
Question- I also thought determinism  mean't that you could  
predict where and when, a particle could move. But that Werner  
Heisenberg, said that you could determine, on, but never the  
other. Would you say that the universe is predictable and  
Heisenberg might be wrong?


Thanks.

Mitch


Determinism doesn't mean that you can predict everything.   
Determinism means the future is completely determined by the past.


Which means that a deterministic universe always begins with a  
miracle that is never allowed to happen again.


There is no deterministic universe because there is no universe (in  
the common Aristotelian sense).


I don't know that we have to assert an Aristotelian universe to have  
an expectation of first cause. The universe can just be the idea of  
the set of all phenomena.


I prefer to not assume ideas, nor universe.




If determinism is to mean anything, then its meaning supervenes on  
an expectation of temporal sequence and an arrow of time. What does  
it mean that this arrow is itself not subject to any arrow?


It might be. There is plenty of time in arithmetic. I mean plenty  
sorts of time.







The appearance of a universe appears from the average Löbian  
arithmetical relation existing in arithmetic.


Why would it though?


That follows logically from the assumption that my brain or body is  
Turing emulable.




What if you wanted to generate Löbian arithmetical relations without  
making a universe appear - like a Thin Client. Suppose you only want  
the arithmetic and not any kind of appearance?


That is impossible, or my brain or body is not Turing emulable.





That explains both qualia and quanta, qualitatively and  
quantitatively, and is the only solution available when you bet on  
computationalism.


I don't think that we can bet on computationalism if we understand  
the consequences. We would have nothing to bet with and no authority  
to place a bet.


Ah?






The only miracles here are that 0+1 = 1, 0*1 = 0, + similar, and  
that you stay conscious with an artificial brain.


In your approach it looks like there are more miracles: the miracle  
of sense, the miracle of matter, and the miracle of a non  
intelligible relation between both.


You rely on the miracle of sense and the miracle of rigid bodies  
also, but you don't acknowledge them because they are beneath the  
threshold of 0, +, 1. =, etc.


I aknowledge sense and bodies. I don't need a miracle for that.  
Invoking a miracle is not really convincing, and lead to  
arbitrariness, as you illustrate by preventing the possibility that  
mechanical beings can live sense.




My approach reveals that if you have the underlying sensory-motor  
interaction behind +, =, n, etc, then you already have  
consciousness. Numbers, like musical notes or colors on the  
spectrum, serve to augment the qualitative richness of sense, not to  
provide a functional framework.


You might confuse number truth, with syntactical presentation of them.



Sense doesn't need numbers, but numbers need sense. Sense *wants*  
numbers, however, to act as lenses and amplifiers. Sense needs its  
opposite just as our bodies need a skeleton to lend structure. Your  
view sees the universality of skeletal structures and presumes that  
it is the most essential aspect of the organism where I see it as  
the most existential aspect - least living, most indifferent and  
unconscious.


Making you belive that my son is law is necessary a zombie. No thanks!






And all this to refuse to allow a man with a wounded brain to have a  
chance of surviving  Hmm...


As long as there is some brain left, there is a chance of extending  
it prosthetically.


How much of the brain you need? Is one cell enough?




We could replace every limb on a person's body also, but we can't  
replace the head. If there is no head left, then there is nothing  
left to survive.


That's seems arbitrary to me. Like others claim, it looks like putting  
a magical components in the brain. What is it? Where is it? In the  
cortex? In the limbic system? In the hippocampus? In the cerebral stem?


Bruno






Craig


Bruno









Craig


But in order to use that for prediction you have to know the past  
as well as the time evolution operator. This is impossible for a  
couple of reasons.  First, you can only know about the past that is  
within your past light cone.  There are things happening on the Sun  
that you can't know about for another eight minutes.  If those are  
things that can influence what you're trying to predict then you're  
out of luck.  Second, deterministic systems are not necessarily  
stable, so infinitesimal errors in your knowledge of the present

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



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.comjavascript: 
 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

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On 11 Mar 2013, at 18:48, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Monday, March 11, 2013 1:27:57 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 11 Mar 2013, at 14:30, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Monday, March 11, 2013 8:43:03 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 10 Mar 2013, at 15:14, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Sunday, March 10, 2013 4:33:43 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 10 Mar 2013, at 01:48, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Saturday, March 9, 2013 7:26:25 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:
On 3/9/2013 4:06 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:



On Saturday, March 9, 2013 6:30:53 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote:
On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Craig Weinberg  
whats...@gmail.com wrote:


 They are not powerless to stop them since if someone yells,  
Hey, stop!
 they may stop. This is the case even though the process is  
still

 deterministic or probabilistic.


 In a deterministic universe, a person who is determined to  
steal a car will
 steal it regardless of whether someone yells at them. If  
someone yelling at
 the thief creates an opportunity for the them to exercise free  
will over
 their own actions, then it is not a deterministic universe.  
You can yell at
 a stone rolling down a hill as much as you want and there will  
be no change

 in where the stone rolls.

In a deterministic universe it is determined whether the thief  
will
stop if someone yells at him. However, neither the person  
yelling nor

the thief knows for sure whether he will stop or not.

What difference would it make to them if neither the person  
yelling nor the thief can control whether or not they are  
yelling or stealing?


It will make exactly whatever difference is determined (or random).

You're not getting my point. If you say that the boat doesn't  
exist, why would it matter if it has a hole in it or not?



I don't know whether or not a puddle in the gutter will dry out  
or not overnight, but why would that generate some sort of  
interest to me?


Furthermore, it
is not possible to know for sure if the thief will stop or not  
even

with a perfect model of his brain, due to the nature of classical
chaotic systems.

It doesn't matter because in a deterministic universe it would  
be impossible to care whether the thief would stop or not.


Unless it was determined that you would care, in which case it  
would impossible not to care.  That's what deterministic means,  
things are *determined*.


Why would there be a such thing as care in a deterministic  
universe? I don't think it is defensible that it could. If *all  
things are determined* then there can be no care.


Everything is determined does not entail that *you* can determine  
everything.


But it does entail that we cannot determine anything. That's my  
point, is that care can only arise out of the possibility of  
determining something ourselves, just as the idea of a game can  
only arise out of the possibility of participation. Without that  
possibility of direct participation, the whole ontological basis  
of care is nullified as clouds would be nullified in the  
absence of the possibility of atmosphere.


OK, but then you agree that the universe can be entirely  
deterministic, and determined (perhaps only in God eyes), and yet  
we have still free will, due to the fact that we cannot determine  
everything. this will be in general the case when we are confronted  
with machine as complex, or more complex than ourselves.


No, it doesn't make sense to me that there would be a highly valued  
qualia of free will (and highly charged qualia of responsibility)  
if our participation did not actually contribute causally in  
determining the universe.


But our participation do actually contribute, causally indeed, in  
determining the universe. It is real genuine high level causation,  
capable of reflecting our values and our deepest beliefs.


What does it mean to contribute causally to a deterministic process  
though? What contribution does the stone make to its rolling down  
hill?


I have no evidence that a stone support a will relatively to its  
environment. I was not talking about stones, but about computers.











A free spectator in a deterministic machine can feel no  
responsibility or presence.


Not only a machine (the person supervening on a machine) can feel  
responsibility, but that person can be responsible.


Why should there be any such feeling even possible in the universe  
as 'responsibility' under determinism? Who feels responsible for the  
rolling stone?





I was watching a CGI cartoon this morning and was noticing that the  
sterility of the medium must be fought every step of the way by the  
animators to inject some warmth and character. The digital medium  
is not neutral, it is anesthetically biased. Because computation is  
devoid both of the gravity of realism


You betray a naive conception of computations.

I would say that my analysis is more rooted in aesthetic and  
experiential qualities rather than conceptual evaluations of  
computation. I

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 9:20:02 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 11 Mar 2013, at 18:48, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Monday, March 11, 2013 1:27:57 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 11 Mar 2013, at 14:30, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Monday, March 11, 2013 8:43:03 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 10 Mar 2013, at 15:14, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Sunday, March 10, 2013 4:33:43 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 10 Mar 2013, at 01:48, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Saturday, March 9, 2013 7:26:25 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote:

  On 3/9/2013 4:06 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
  


 On Saturday, March 9, 2013 6:30:53 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: 

 On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com 
 wrote: 

  They are not powerless to stop them since if someone yells, Hey, 
 stop! 
  they may stop. This is the case even though the process is still 
  deterministic or probabilistic. 
  
  
  In a deterministic universe, a person who is determined to steal a 
 car will 
  steal it regardless of whether someone yells at them. If someone 
 yelling at 
  the thief creates an opportunity for the them to exercise free will 
 over 
  their own actions, then it is not a deterministic universe. You can 
 yell at 
  a stone rolling down a hill as much as you want and there will be 
 no change 
  in where the stone rolls. 

 In a deterministic universe it is determined whether the thief will 
 stop if someone yells at him. However, neither the person yelling nor 
 the thief knows for sure whether he will stop or not. 


 What difference would it make to them if neither the person yelling 
 nor the thief can control whether or not they are yelling or stealing? 


 It will make exactly whatever difference is determined (or random).


 You're not getting my point. If you say that the boat doesn't exist, 
 why would it matter if it has a hole in it or not?
  


  I don't know whether or not a puddle in the gutter will dry out or 
 not overnight, but why would that generate some sort of interest to me?
  

 Furthermore, it 
 is not possible to know for sure if the thief will stop or not even 
 with a perfect model of his brain, due to the nature of classical 
 chaotic systems. 


 It doesn't matter because in a deterministic universe it would be 
 impossible to care whether the thief would stop or not.
  

 Unless it was determined that you would care, in which case it would 
 impossible not to care.  That's what deterministic means, things are 
 *determined*.


 Why would there be a such thing as care in a deterministic universe? 
 I don't think it is defensible that it could. If *all things are 
 determined* then there can be no care.


 Everything is determined does not entail that *you* can determine 
 everything.


 But it does entail that we cannot determine anything. That's my point, 
 is that care can only arise out of the possibility of determining something 
 ourselves, just as the idea of a game can only arise out of the possibility 
 of participation. Without that possibility of direct participation, the 
 whole ontological basis of care is nullified as clouds would be 
 nullified in the absence of the possibility of atmosphere.


 OK, but then you agree that the universe can be entirely 
 deterministic, and determined (perhaps only in God eyes), and yet we have 
 still free will, due to the fact that we cannot determine everything. 
 this will be in general the case when we are confronted with machine as 
 complex, or more complex than ourselves. 


 No, it doesn't make sense to me that there would be a highly valued 
 qualia of free will (and highly charged qualia of responsibility) if our 
 participation did not actually contribute causally in determining the 
 universe. 


 But our participation do actually contribute, causally indeed, in 
 determining the universe. It is real genuine high level causation, capable 
 of reflecting our values and our deepest beliefs. 


 What does it mean to contribute causally to a deterministic process 
 though? What contribution does the stone make to its rolling down hill?


 I have no evidence that a stone support a will relatively to its 
 environment. I was not talking about stones, but about computers.


Computers are fuzzy though, because we can always point to an open ended 
future of possibility. Stones are a better example to work with because of 
the absurd simplicity. Any understanding about determinism should be 
clearer there. A computer is informed by human will, so it is really a bad 
example of determinism.
 





  





 A free spectator in a deterministic machine can feel no responsibility or 
 presence.


 Not only a machine (the person supervening on a machine) can feel 
 responsibility, but that person can be responsible.


 Why should there be any such feeling even possible in the universe as 
 'responsibility' under determinism? Who feels responsible for the rolling 
 stone?




 I was watching a CGI cartoon this morning and was

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On 12 Mar 2013, at 00:01, meekerdb wrote:


On 3/11/2013 6:27 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 10 Mar 2013, at 22:51, meekerdb wrote:


On 3/10/2013 1:08 PM, spudboy...@aol.com wrote:
Question- I also thought determinism  mean't that you could  
predict where and when, a particle could move. But that Werner  
Heisenberg, said that you could determine, on, but never the  
other. Would you say that the universe is predictable and  
Heisenberg might be wrong?


Thanks.

Mitch


Determinism doesn't mean that you can predict everything.   
Determinism means the future is completely determined by the  
past.  But in order to use that for prediction you have to know  
the past as well as the time evolution operator. This is  
impossible for a couple of reasons.  First, you can only know  
about the past that is within your past light cone.  There are  
things happening on the Sun that you can't know about for another  
eight minutes.  If those are things that can influence what you're  
trying to predict then you're out of luck.  Second, deterministic  
systems are not necessarily stable, so infinitesimal errors in  
your knowledge of the present state or in the evolution operator  
can result in large errors in  prediction.  So even if Heisenberg  
was wrong (and there's lots of evidence he wasn't and none that  
was) the universe still wouldn't be predictable.




 the universe still wouldn't be predictable, by the observers  
inside.


What outside is there?


Heaven, Gods, or ... large categories, model of big set theories. With  
comp those things might only be machines/numbers' epistemological  
tools. but some numbers believe in their absolute existence. Anyway,  
it is handy to point on such Gods' eye view or on the point of view of  
nowhere, to make a point. No need to make those things basically  
ontological, as they do exist on the epistemological plane. from  
inside arithmetic, numbers can dream on far bigger things, and even  
have to invoke them to figure out the inside structure (like we can  
need the complex plane to study the prime number distribution).


Bruno



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On 12 Mar 2013, at 14:45, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 9:20:02 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 11 Mar 2013, at 18:48, Craig Weinberg wrote:


What does it mean to contribute causally to a deterministic process  
though? What contribution does the stone make to its rolling down  
hill?


I have no evidence that a stone support a will relatively to its  
environment. I was not talking about stones, but about computers.


Computers are fuzzy though, because we can always point to an open  
ended future of possibility. Stones are a better example to work  
with because of the absurd simplicity. Any understanding about  
determinism should be clearer there. A computer is informed by human  
will, so it is really a bad example of determinism.



What is that for a kind of reasoning?

I will show you that computer cannot be conscious, but as computer  
are complex man made machine, I will show you this for my fridge  
instead. Come on Craig.

















A free spectator in a deterministic machine can feel no  
responsibility or presence.


Not only a machine (the person supervening on a machine) can feel  
responsibility, but that person can be responsible.


Why should there be any such feeling even possible in the universe  
as 'responsibility' under determinism? Who feels responsible for  
the rolling stone?





I was watching a CGI cartoon this morning and was noticing that  
the sterility of the medium must be fought every step of the way  
by the animators to inject some warmth and character. The digital  
medium is not neutral, it is anesthetically biased. Because  
computation is devoid both of the gravity of realism


You betray a naive conception of computations.

I would say that my analysis is more rooted in aesthetic and  
experiential qualities rather than conceptual evaluations of  
computation. I look at what all CGI has in common, and how that  
differs from what other forms of animation, or film, or reality  
have in common.


You can rely only on 3p behavior. Once a machine is allowed to look  
inward, his behavior can become very complex, and involve non  
communicable truth. Nobody says that all computations support  
consciousness, but that some might.


How do you know the machine looks inward at all?


A machine can invoke herself and represent herself in different  
possible situation. That self-reference is made possible by a theorem  
in computer science (Kleene's second recursion theorem). I have  
explained and will re-explain on FOAR. It is sump up by the Dx = xx  
trick. If DA gives AA, DD gives DD.






If I watch a movie, it might look like characters are being  
introspective, but that has nothing to do with the video screen or  
DVD player.


It is a branch of math, and we reason from what we know. Character in  
a movie have no self-referential abilities at all, and there is no  
computation involved in the movie projection (or a trivial one). In  
the frame of the content of the movie, the character have self- 
referential abilities, in the sense that we can locally attribute them  
such, for appreciating the plot, but we tend to believe they have not  
(if not we would find all horror drama being inhuman and forbid them).
















and the vitality of animation, the CGI animator must compensate  
with low level visual distractions at all times - plugging the  
holes in the audience's experience with lots of clever details.


I am not talking about today's machine, but about what is Turing  
emulable in principle.


Emulation is a theory or an assumption. I don't think that it holds  
up. Emulation is always limited to observations of observations,  
not realities.


You might be right. The point is that you might be false, also.

OK.


That was my point. But then why do you assert that comp is false.




Another possibility is that how true or false it seems depends on  
the intentions and awareness of the person asking.


This escapes the conclusion. The consciousness of someone with a  
digital brain will not depend on what other can think and ask, even  
if, obviously, the quality life of the person having that  
consciousness, will depend on other's attitude.


... and the dentist told me: ---I will no more use anesthetics  
because I came to the conclusion that all that pain is only in your  
head.  Well, no thanks.















What is not Turing emulable in your theory.

The only thing that is Turing emulable is public positions in  
space. Nothing private is emulable.



But here you are provably false. Self-referential machines have  
private life, in the sense that they too can refer to sense and  
uncommunicable true knowledge.


How do you know that though?


But that is exactly what I explain in the papers, and here in the posts.



How can you demonstrate that the movie, even an interactive movie,  
has some kind of private life when you can see how easy it is for us  
to fall into the pathetic fallacy?


There is

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-12 Thread John Clark

On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 4:08 PM, spudboy...@aol.com wrote:

 Question- I also thought determinism  mean't that you could predict where
 and when, a particle could move.


No, determinism and predictability are two different things. In
adeterministic system its
future state depends entirely on its past state, but that doesn't
necessarily mean its predictable. We can make good predictions about the
movements of the planets because a small uncertainty in our knowledge about
the position and velocity that the planets have right now causes only a
small uncertainty about where they will be in the future, but most things
are not like that; you would have to know the present state of a chaotic
system in INFINITE detail to make long range predictions because even the
tiniest error will very rapidly grow and become huge.

 But that Werner Heisenberg, said that you could determine, on, but never
 the other.


Heisenberg said you can find the position of a particle as precisely as you
like, but the more you know about the particle's position the less you know
about the particle's velocity and vice versa. But even if we forget about
Heisenberg we still couldn't make long term predictions because of chaos.

  John K Clark

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-12 Thread John Clark

On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 a deterministic universe always begins with a miracle that is never
 allowed to happen again.


There is no reason to think that a deterministic universe universe had to
have a beginning, or a non-deterministic one either for that matter.

  John K Clark

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis

2013-03-12 Thread John Clark

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013  Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:

 Free will is not an illusion. It is real.


Unless declared a integer.

  John K Clark

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Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis



On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 12:53:24 PM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 12 Mar 2013, at 14:45, Craig Weinberg wrote:



 On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 9:20:02 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:


 On 11 Mar 2013, at 18:48, Craig Weinberg wrote:


 What does it mean to contribute causally to a deterministic process 
 though? What contribution does the stone make to its rolling down hill?


 I have no evidence that a stone support a will relatively to its 
 environment. I was not talking about stones, but about computers.


 Computers are fuzzy though, because we can always point to an open ended 
 future of possibility. Stones are a better example to work with because of 
 the absurd simplicity. Any understanding about determinism should be 
 clearer there. A computer is informed by human will, so it is really a bad 
 example of determinism.



 What is that for a kind of reasoning?
  


 I will show you that computer cannot be conscious, but as computer are 
 complex man made machine, I will show you this for my fridge instead. Come 
 on Craig. 


We're talking about the basic principle of determinism though. We should 
use a basic example of it. What special ingredient does complexity add 
which changes the nature of determinism? One stone rolling or a trillion 
digital stones rolling and colliding and sticking together and breaking 
apart - what difference does it make to the ontology of determinism?
 





  





  





 A free spectator in a deterministic machine can feel no responsibility 
 or presence.


 Not only a machine (the person supervening on a machine) can feel 
 responsibility, but that person can be responsible.


 Why should there be any such feeling even possible in the universe as 
 'responsibility' under determinism? Who feels responsible for the rolling 
 stone?




 I was watching a CGI cartoon this morning and was noticing that the 
 sterility of the medium must be fought every step of the way by the 
 animators to inject some warmth and character. The digital medium is not 
 neutral, it is anesthetically biased. Because computation is devoid both of 
 the gravity of realism 


 You betray a naive conception of computations. 

 I would say that my analysis is more rooted in aesthetic and 
 experiential qualities rather than conceptual evaluations of computation. I 
 look at what all CGI has in common, and how that differs from what other 
 forms of animation, or film, or reality have in common.


 You can rely only on 3p behavior. Once a machine is allowed to look 
 inward, his behavior can become very complex, and involve non communicable 
 truth. Nobody says that all computations support consciousness, but that 
 some might.


 How do you know the machine looks inward at all? 


 A machine can invoke herself and represent herself in different possible 
 situation.


How do you know that it represents herself to herself rather than to the 
programmer?
 

 That self-reference is made possible by a theorem in computer science 
 (Kleene's second recursion theorem). I have explained and will re-explain 
 on FOAR. It is sump up by the Dx = xx trick. If DA gives AA, DD gives 
 DD.


These words do not refer to themselves. 

You are taking symbols literally, which is your privilege as a conscious 
person. Computers don't have that capacity. They can take symbols only in 
the way that we intend them to be taken. I don't think that I have even 
heard you acknowledge that there is a such thing as the Use-mention 
distinction or map-territory relation. Do you see that a computer need not 
be able to hear music itself in order for you to hear music as a result of 
what a computer does? If so, then why assume that Dx = xx is anything 
other than an empty formalism? A simple monkey-see, monkey-do substitution.
 






 If I watch a movie, it might look like characters are being introspective, 
 but that has nothing to do with the video screen or DVD player.


 It is a branch of math, and we reason from what we know. Character in a 
 movie have no self-referential abilities at all, 


Sure they do. They can tell you all about themselves. You can arrange many 
different movie clips which correspond to a number of buttons that you can 
push which have certain questions written next to them that the character 
will answer. A museum kiosk could have just such a video information system 
with canned responses about the character reading them. The Bugs Bunny 
museum can have Bugs Bunny recordings that kids can watch where he answers 
the questions that have been scripted.
 

 and there is no computation involved in the movie projection (or a trivial 
 one). In the frame of the content of the movie, the character have 
 self-referential abilities, in the sense that we can locally attribute them 
 such, for appreciating the plot, but we tend to believe they have not (if 
 not we would find all horror drama being inhuman and forbid them).


What Comp says though, is that given enough computing power, the

Re: Dartmouth neuroscientist finds free will has neural basis