subject:"Re\: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not"

On May 6, 10:17 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 5/6/2012 5:47 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

  On May 6, 4:06 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:

  Newton, Boyle, Tyndall, Descarte, Laplace,
  Kepler,...none of them were from the universities, which were dominated by 
  theology.
  All of them were still theological thinkers though,

 Theological in that the concerned themselves with fundamentals and god 
 (although Laplace
 famously said he had no need of that hypothesis),

from the Wiki:

Pierre Simon Laplace attended a school in the village run at a
Benedictine priory, his father intending that he would be ordained in
the Roman Catholic Church, and at sixteen he was sent to further his
father's intention at the University of Caen, reading theology.

At the university, he was mentored by two enthusiastic teachers of
mathematics, Christophe Gadbled and Pierre Le Canu, who awoke his zeal
for the subject. Laplace did not graduate in theology but left for
Paris with a letter of introduction from Le Canu to Jean le Rond
d'Alembert.

This illustrates the point I'm trying to make, that scientific
empiricism is an offshoot of theology/gnosticism/philosophy/mysticism/
shamanism - the first offshoot which explores subjectivity indirectly;
through its antithesis. Science represents a mechanization of
philosophy. Enlightenment does not seem to ever occur atavistically,
but rather always as an evolution through and refinement of spiritual-
philosophical principles.

 but all unconventional.  Descarte was on
 the index of prohibited books until the index was abandoned in 1962.  Newton 
 was an Aryan
 heretic.

The Rosicrucians claim Descartes and Newton, (along with da Vinci,
Bacon, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson,
and Faraday). All may have been deemed heretical to some extent for
threatening church authority, but all of them had minds which were
deeply theological and philosophical.


  as were Bacon,
  Copernicus, Paracelsus, the Islamic alchemists, etc. If anything, they
  were more personally committed to theology than the political
  bureaucracies that had been built up through the church.

  There are Christian parties, Zionist parties, and Muslim parties and Tea 
  parties, but
  there is no science party.  So it's pretty clear who is interested in 
  power and who in
  knowledge.
  I wouldn't say that science is apolitical. Just as the church has
  traditionally served as a cheerleader for war, academic science now
  typically serves to advocate the agendas of the military industrial
  complex and big business. Scientific authority is a political
  instrument precisely because it is assumed to be apolitical, just as
  theological authority was supposed to be.

 Theological authority was apolitical while it taught the divine right of 
 kings and
 performed coronations - you've gotta be kidding.  Next you'll claim musical 
 criticism is
 political because it's assumed to be apolitical.

Of course musical criticism is political. A negative review from a
prominent critic is supposed to have consequences for the career of
the musician. Same for restaurant critics, film critics, etc. Part of
being a successful critic is being courted by those who seek favorable
reviews, and all of them struggle with how much of their integrity is
worth to them. Science, as the modern anti-religion, sanctifies
political and commercial powers with strategic studies that produce
the desired statistics for long enough to secure funding, grants,
revolving-door appointments, promotions, etc. Science supplies
egalitarian rhetoric and intellectual validation with one face, while
it weaponizes technologies and serves authoritarian agendas with the
other.

It's a huge improvement over Crusades and Inquisitions, to be sure. At
least it seems like that from my perspective since I don't have to
work in an iPad factory in China. I don't think that it's any less
political though.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 06.05.2012 22:06 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/6/2012 10:51 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 05.05.2012 23:34 meekerdb said the following:


...


I would agree with that. Rome fell for other, more material reasons. But
its fall created a power vacuum which was filled by organized
Christianity and Christianity like any dogmatic religion is in conflict
with the skeptical, inquiring, testing nature of science. When the
reformation broke the intellectual monopoly of the Church, science
flowered and for a time it was regarded as an adjunct to theology:
discovering the creator through nature. But that only lasted up till
Darwin.


I am afraid that the conflict between Christianity and science that
you describe is not consistent with historical facts. According to
Prof Hoenen, who is an expert on Middle Age, science and theology has
been developed rather like a brother and a sister.


More like a master and slave - until the slaves revolted. Honen is a
professor of philosophy and theology who specializes in commenting on
theologians of the middle ages: Marilius, Boethius, and Albert Magnus.
Although Bruno (not Marchal) was burned at the stake and Galileo was put
under house arrest, science was allowed as a servant of the church up
until the Victorian era. Newton, Boyle, Tyndall, Descarte, Laplace,
Kepler,...none of them were from the universities, which were dominated
by theology. And the real break came with Darwin. To say they developed
like brother and sister is to suppose theology developed. While science
has advance enormously in scope and accuracy, theologians now do no
better than in the 13th century.



For science to be started in a sense that you have mentioned, the 
society should reach a certain limit of development. I am afraid that 
you forget about this simple fact. Science in the middle ages has 
started from logic, grammatic, etc. Without this there would be no 
science that you mean.


Again, the science has developed in the Christian Europe. This could be 
coincidence but one cannot exclude that this was destiny. You are 
talking about skeptical inquiry but you do not want to apply it for all 
questions. I am afraid that you take some answers just from ideological 
considerations, not from historical research.


The favorite authors of Prof Hoenen are Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas 
von Aquin. I like a lot On Truth by Anselm of Canterbury. Prof Hoenen 
has demonstrated nicely that his work influenced many thinkers in the 
West a lot that pondered on what is truth.


Right now I listen to Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. The book 
is not bad but the style is just terrible: I know the truth because 
this truth (that I know) is objective. Anselm and Thomas in this 
respect were more clever.


Evgenii

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 07.05.2012 04:17 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/6/2012 5:47 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On May 6, 4:06 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote:


Newton, Boyle, Tyndall, Descarte, Laplace,
Kepler,...none of them were from the universities, which were
dominated by theology.

All of them were still theological thinkers though,


Theological in that the concerned themselves with fundamentals and god
(although Laplace famously said he had no need of that hypothesis), but
all unconventional. Descarte was on the index of prohibited books until
the index was abandoned in 1962. Newton was an Aryan heretic.


The statement of Laplace is a part of the story when Newton called in 
God to preserve the stability of the Sun system. Two quotes from Feyerabend


“Laplace showed a century later, that the planetary system did not fall 
apart but oscillated with a very large period. ‘I do not need this 
hypothesis’, he said, when Napoleon asked him about the need for a 
divine being.”


“But this was not yet the end of matter. … A precise calculation would 
have given infinities. … But this meant that Newton’s theory gave 
correct results only when used in an ad hoc way.”


The second quote shows that Laplace is actually was wrong, as his prove 
was not yet a correct one. Strictly speaking at the level of his 
knowledge (provided he would develop his series correctly) he would 
still need God to preserve the stability of the Sun system.


Evgenii

http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/04/god-as-a-cosmic-operator.html

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On 5/7/2012 8:40 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

Of course musical criticism is political. A negative review from a
prominent critic is supposed to have consequences for the career of
the musician. Same for restaurant critics, film critics, etc. Part of
being a successful critic is being courted by those who seek favorable
reviews, and all of them struggle with how much of their integrity is
worth to them.

So now you expanded politics to include all activities of civil society. No point arguing
with someone to whom words meant whatever they want them to mean.

Brent

Science, as the modern anti-religion, sanctifies
political and commercial powers with strategic studies that produce
the desired statistics for long enough to secure funding, grants,
revolving-door appointments, promotions, etc. Science supplies
egalitarian rhetoric and intellectual validation with one face, while
it weaponizes technologies and serves authoritarian agendas with the
other.

It's a huge improvement over Crusades and Inquisitions, to be sure. At
least it seems like that from my perspective since I don't have to
work in an iPad factory in China. I don't think that it's any less
political though.

Craig

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-07 Thread John Clark

On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi use...@rudnyi.ru wrote:


  To me the logic of trinity is perverse in the same extent as quantum
 mechanics.


Perverse it may be but it's not my business to judge what quantum mechanics
does in private when nobody is looking, that's up to quantum mechanics and
the electron, but the point is that love it or hate it the logic of quantum
mechanics works, it makes correct predictions on how the world works and if
you don't like it complain to the universe not me.  But the logic of the
trinity does nothing and is just brain dead dumb.

  John K Clark

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On 5/7/2012 10:35 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 06.05.2012 22:06 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/6/2012 10:51 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 05.05.2012 23:34 meekerdb said the following:

...

I would agree with that. Rome fell for other, more material reasons. But
its fall created a power vacuum which was filled by organized
Christianity and Christianity like any dogmatic religion is in conflict
with the skeptical, inquiring, testing nature of science. When the
reformation broke the intellectual monopoly of the Church, science
flowered and for a time it was regarded as an adjunct to theology:
discovering the creator through nature. But that only lasted up till
Darwin.

More like a master and slave - until the slaves revolted. Honen is a
professor of philosophy and theology who specializes in commenting on
theologians of the middle ages: Marilius, Boethius, and Albert Magnus.
Although Bruno (not Marchal) was burned at the stake and Galileo was put
under house arrest, science was allowed as a servant of the church up
until the Victorian era. Newton, Boyle, Tyndall, Descarte, Laplace,
Kepler,...none of them were from the universities, which were dominated
by theology. And the real break came with Darwin. To say they developed
like brother and sister is to suppose theology developed. While science
has advance enormously in scope and accuracy, theologians now do no
better than in the 13th century.

For science to be started in a sense that you have mentioned, the society should reach a
certain limit of development. I am afraid that you forget about this simple fact.
Science in the middle ages has started from logic, grammatic, etc. Without this there
would be no science that you mean.

Logic, grammar, mathematics were developed for a long time before science. They are
necessary for science, but what marks science as a distinct intellectual enterprise is
skeptical observation and empirical testing. The scholastics inbred study of logic,
grammar, etc was sterile - as theology has continued to be.

Again, the science has developed in the Christian Europe. This could be coincidence but
one cannot exclude that this was destiny.

It must have had its causes, but I note that it coincided with the reformation and the
fragmentation of the Church's power. Science developed most in England where Henry VIII
had divorced the Church from Rome and made it much weaker.

You are talking about skeptical inquiry but you do not want to apply it for all
questions. I am afraid that you take some answers just from ideological considerations,
not from historical research.
The favorite authors of Prof Hoenen are Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas von Aquin.

It's not my field to research - nor yours. You rely a few experts two of whom I note are
noted Catholic apologists - hardly skeptical thinkers, but promoters of faith.

Brent
“There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease
of curiosity…. It is this which draws us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those
secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing, and which man
should not wish to learn.”

-- St. Augustine

I like a lot On Truth by Anselm of Canterbury. Prof Hoenen has demonstrated nicely that
his work influenced many thinkers in the West a lot that pondered on what is truth.

Right now I listen to Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. The book is not bad but
the style is just terrible: I know the truth because this truth (that I know) is
objective. Anselm and Thomas in this respect were more clever.

Evgenii

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 5/7/2012 10:42 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 07.05.2012 04:17 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/6/2012 5:47 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On May 6, 4:06 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote:


Newton, Boyle, Tyndall, Descarte, Laplace,
Kepler,...none of them were from the universities, which were
dominated by theology.

All of them were still theological thinkers though,


Theological in that the concerned themselves with fundamentals and god
(although Laplace famously said he had no need of that hypothesis), but
all unconventional. Descarte was on the index of prohibited books until
the index was abandoned in 1962. Newton was an Aryan heretic.


The statement of Laplace is a part of the story when Newton called in God to preserve 
the stability of the Sun system. Two quotes from Feyerabend


“Laplace showed a century later, that the planetary system did not fall
apart but oscillated with a very large period. ‘I do not need this hypothesis’, he said, 
when Napoleon asked him about the need for a divine being.”


Napoleon was not asking about the stability of the solar system.  He had not even read 
Laplace's book.




“But this was not yet the end of matter. … A precise calculation would have given 
infinities. … But this meant that Newton’s theory gave correct results only when used in 
an ad hoc way.”


Where has Feyerbrand written this?  Is he claiming that the solar system cannot be stable 
within Newton's theory?  Does he think GR is needed (NASA doesn't)?




The second quote shows that Laplace is actually was wrong, as his prove was not yet a 
correct one. Strictly speaking at the level of his knowledge (provided he would develop 
his series correctly) he would still need God to preserve the stability of the Sun system.


Just because you don't know how something works doesn't mean you need God.

Brent
Like all great theology, Bill's can be boiled down to one sentence.  'There must be a 
God, because I don't know how things work.'

--- Stephen Colbert, on Bill O'Reilly

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On May 7, 1:45 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 5/7/2012 8:40 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

  Of course musical criticism is political. A negative review from a
  prominent critic is supposed to have consequences for the career of
  the musician. Same for restaurant critics, film critics, etc. Part of
  being a successful critic is being courted by those who seek favorable
  reviews, and all of them struggle with how much of their integrity is
  worth to them.

 So now you expanded politics to include all activities of civil society.  No 
 point arguing
 with someone to whom words meant whatever they want them to mean.

Civil society is a political system. It is not much of a stretch to
see that most enduring aspects of it have a political dimension. The
more central to the political system (civilization) the thing is, the
more politically powerful the thing in question would have to be. How
could it be otherwise?

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On May 7, 2:01 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:


 Logic, grammar, mathematics were developed for a long time before science. 
 They are
 necessary for science, but what marks science as a distinct intellectual 
 enterprise is
 skeptical observation and empirical testing. The scholastics inbred study of 
 logic,
 grammar, etc was sterile - as theology has continued to be.

It's like saying that that apes didn't evolve as hominids did,
therefore apes are inherently an evolutionary dead end. Logic and
scholasticism are what science is made of. The ideas of empirical
testing and skeptical observation are direct outgrowths of theology in
the specific case of Western science, but in all cases and all
cultures that I know of, things like astronomy and medicine arise out
of things like astrology and divination. Science has never appeared
out of whole cloth in a society.




  Again, the science has developed in the Christian Europe. This could be 
  coincidence but
  one cannot exclude that this was destiny.

 It must have had its causes, but I note that it coincided with the 
 reformation and the
 fragmentation of the Church's power. Science developed most in England where 
 Henry VIII
 had divorced the Church from Rome and made it much weaker.

It's not as if the Reformation got rid of God. I agree the weakening
of the church as a political influence was a great benefit to science,
but that was about a particular monopoly on power in Europe being
broken that just happened to be religious. There was nothing
inherently less theological about the Anglican church that would have
led to scientific progress by itself if that were the only criteria.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 07.05.2012 19:52 John Clark said the following:

On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Evgenii Rudnyiuse...@rudnyi.ru  wrote:


To me the logic of trinity is perverse in the same extent as quantum

mechanics.



Perverse it may be but it's not my business to judge what quantum mechanics
does in private when nobody is looking, that's up to quantum mechanics and
the electron, but the point is that love it or hate it the logic of quantum
mechanics works, it makes correct predictions on how the world works and if
you don't like it complain to the universe not me.  But the logic of the
trinity does nothing and is just brain dead dumb.

   John K Clark



You are wrong. With the trinity logic you can find for example an answer 
why human language allows us to describe events that has happened long 
before the life has been created.


How for example the equations of quantum mechanics (that are certainly a 
creation of a human mind) can describe the Universe when there was no life?


This is why, according to Prof Hoenen (Collingwood) trinity was an 
important ingredient of culture. With trinity a human being can 
understand the inexorable equations of Nature (or at least this was the 
belief at that time).


Evgenii

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 07.05.2012 20:01 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/7/2012 10:35 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:


...


It must have had its causes, but I note that it coincided with the
reformation and the fragmentation of the Church's power. Science
developed most in England where Henry VIII had divorced the Church from
Rome and made it much weaker.


That's British chauvinism. You should come to Paris and cry it loudly. 
Then let us see what happens.



You are talking about skeptical inquiry but you do not want to apply
it for all questions. I am afraid that you take some answers just from
ideological considerations, not from historical research.
The favorite authors of Prof Hoenen are Anselm of Canterbury and
Thomas von Aquin.


It's not my field to research - nor yours. You rely a few experts two of
whom I note are noted Catholic apologists - hardly skeptical thinkers,
but promoters of faith.


Prof Hoenen is a skeptical thinker, he always contrasts many different 
viewpoints. He is an expert for middle ages, so he knows better what 
happened at that time as you. He does not promote faith, he just says 
how it was in the reality at that time.


In general however, it would be make much more sense to read more about 
that development. This what I am saying, instead of ideology it is 
better to promote knowledge.


Evgenii
Evgenii

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 07.05.2012 20:11 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/7/2012 10:42 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 07.05.2012 04:17 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/6/2012 5:47 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On May 6, 4:06 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote:


Newton, Boyle, Tyndall, Descarte, Laplace,
Kepler,...none of them were from the universities, which were
dominated by theology.

All of them were still theological thinkers though,


Theological in that the concerned themselves with fundamentals and god
(although Laplace famously said he had no need of that hypothesis), but
all unconventional. Descarte was on the index of prohibited books until
the index was abandoned in 1962. Newton was an Aryan heretic.


The statement of Laplace is a part of the story when Newton called in
God to preserve the stability of the Sun system. Two quotes from
Feyerabend

“Laplace showed a century later, that the planetary system did not fall
apart but oscillated with a very large period. ‘I do not need this
hypothesis’, he said, when Napoleon asked him about the need for a
divine being.”


Napoleon was not asking about the stability of the solar system. He had
not even read Laplace's book.



“But this was not yet the end of matter. … A precise calculation would
have given infinities. … But this meant that Newton’s theory gave
correct results only when used in an ad hoc way.”


Where has Feyerbrand written this? Is he claiming that the solar system
cannot be stable within Newton's theory? Does he think GR is needed
(NASA doesn't)?


This is a quote from Tyranny of Science

http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/04/god-as-a-cosmic-operator.html

Feyerbrand claims that the creation of knowledge does not happen 
according to so called scientific method


From Wikipedia The Oxford English Dictionary says that scientific 
method is: a method or procedure that has characterized natural science 
since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, 
measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and 
modification of hypotheses.


Feyerbrand does not care by himself, whether Solar system is stable or 
not, this is not his business. He justs comments on how the development 
of science has happened according to historical facts.


Evgenii

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 5/7/2012 11:50 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

It's like saying that that apes didn't evolve as hominids did,
therefore apes are inherently an evolutionary dead end. Logic and
scholasticism are what science is made of. The ideas of empirical
testing and skeptical observation are direct outgrowths of theology in
the specific case of Western science,


I guess I just imagined Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake, Copernicus refusing to 
have his theories published till he was dying, Galileo under house arrest, Cardinal 
Bellarmine writing To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous
as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin. The Church burning books and creating a 
list of prohibited works.


I see nothing in theology that says test your theories, see if you can falsify them. 
Tertullian says he believes *because* it is absurd and writes, “When we come to believe, 
we have no desire to believe anything else, for we begin by believing that there is 
nothing else which we have to believe…. I warn people not to seek for anything beyond what 
they came to believe, for that was all they needed to seek for. In the last resort, 
however, it is better for you to remain ignorant, for fear that you come to know what you 
should not know…. Let curiosity give place to faith, and glory to salvation. Let them at 
least be no hindrance, or let them keep quiet. To know nothing against the Rule [of faith] 
is to know everything.” Augustine warned against studying mathematics. Later Martin Luther 
writes, Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his Reason.


Sure science grew out of Christianity, out of the decay and fragmentation of Christianity. 
When Christianity was strong and in control is what we call The Dark Ages. Now that it 
is no longer in control and the Western world relies on the technology of science, 
Christian apologists are writing revisionist histories.



but in all cases and all
cultures that I know of, things like astronomy and medicine arise out
of things like astrology and divination. Science has never appeared
out of whole cloth in a society.


Of course not. At one time belief in agency in nature and magic and spirits were all part 
of a reasonable world view. Eventually those views divided. Magic begat alchemy and 
astrology which begat science. The belief in spirits evolved into religion which served a 
useful unifying function in tribes and the early city states. But it stagnated with the 
invention of writing and the adoption of holy writings as dogma and the emphasis on faith.



Brent
Christianity claimed to bring light, hope, and truth, but its
central myth was incredible, its dogma a conflation of rustic superstitions,
its sacred book an incoherent collection of primitive tales, its church a
cohort of servile fanatics as long as they were out of power and of despotic
fanatics once they had seized control. With its triumph in the fourth
century, Christianity secured the victory of infantile credulity; one by
one, the lamps of learning were put out, and for centuries darkness covered
the earth.
--- Peter Gay, The Rise of New Paganism

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 5/7/2012 12:09 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 07.05.2012 19:52 John Clark said the following:

On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Evgenii Rudnyiuse...@rudnyi.ru  wrote:


  To me the logic of trinity is perverse in the same extent as quantum

mechanics.



Perverse it may be but it's not my business to judge what quantum mechanics
does in private when nobody is looking, that's up to quantum mechanics and
the electron, but the point is that love it or hate it the logic of quantum
mechanics works, it makes correct predictions on how the world works and if
you don't like it complain to the universe not me.  But the logic of the
trinity does nothing and is just brain dead dumb.

   John K Clark



You are wrong. With the trinity logic you can find for example an answer why human 
language allows us to describe events that has happened long before the life has been 
created.


A remarkable discovery.  The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians (and the present day 
Muslims) were unable to describe events before life on Earth (but maybe there was life 
elsewhere?).  Or maybe you just refer to ex falso quodlibet, so by logic 1=3 implies 
anything at all.


Brent



How for example the equations of quantum mechanics (that are certainly a creation of a 
human mind) can describe the Universe when there was no life?


This is why, according to Prof Hoenen (Collingwood) trinity was an important ingredient 
of culture. With trinity a human being can understand the inexorable equations of Nature 
(or at least this was the belief at that time).


Evgenii



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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 5/7/2012 12:29 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 07.05.2012 20:11 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/7/2012 10:42 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 07.05.2012 04:17 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/6/2012 5:47 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On May 6, 4:06 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote:


Newton, Boyle, Tyndall, Descarte, Laplace,
Kepler,...none of them were from the universities, which were
dominated by theology.

All of them were still theological thinkers though,


Theological in that the concerned themselves with fundamentals and god



(although Laplace famously said he had no need of that hypothesis), but
all unconventional. Descarte was on the index of prohibited books until
the index was abandoned in 1962. Newton was an Aryan heretic.


The statement of Laplace is a part of the story when Newton called in
God to preserve the stability of the Sun system. Two quotes from
Feyerabend

“Laplace showed a century later, that the planetary system did not fall
apart but oscillated with a very large period. ‘I do not need this
hypothesis’, he said, when Napoleon asked him about the need for a
divine being.”


Napoleon was not asking about the stability of the solar system. He had
not even read Laplace's book.



“But this was not yet the end of matter. … A precise calculation would
have given infinities. … But this meant that Newton’s theory gave
correct results only when used in an ad hoc way.”


Where has Feyerbrand written this? Is he claiming that the solar system
cannot be stable within Newton's theory? Does he think GR is needed
(NASA doesn't)?


This is a quote from Tyranny of Science

http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/04/god-as-a-cosmic-operator.html


He is really saying that using Laplaces method of series, taking the limit of the series 
would have given infinities.  He recognizes that Poincare showed how the solar system is 
stable within Newtonian physics.  So it is not the case that Newton's theory gave correct 
results only when used in an ad hoc way.


Brent



Feyerbrand claims that the creation of knowledge does not happen according to so called 
scientific method


From Wikipedia The Oxford English Dictionary says that scientific method is: a method 
or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting 
in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, 
and modification of hypotheses.


As I read him, Feyerbrand does not deny this general outline, he just notes that 
scientists do not always abandon a theory because of one or a few contrary observations.  
They know that observations and calculations have been in error.


Brent
Nobody believes a theory, except the guy who thought of it.
Everybody believes an experiment, except the guy who did it.
 --- Leon Lederman on physics




Feyerbrand does not care by himself, whether Solar system is stable or not, this is not 
his business. He justs comments on how the development of science has happened according 
to historical facts.


Evgenii



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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On May 7, 3:37 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 5/7/2012 11:50 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

  It's like saying that that apes didn't evolve as hominids did,
  therefore apes are inherently an evolutionary dead end. Logic and
  scholasticism are what science is made of. The ideas of empirical
  testing and skeptical observation are direct outgrowths of theology in
  the specific case of Western science,

 I guess I just imagined Giordano Bruno being burned at the stake, Copernicus 
 refusing to
 have his theories published till he was dying, Galileo under house arrest, 
 Cardinal
 Bellarmine writing To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as 
 erroneous
 as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin. The Church burning books 
 and creating a
 list of prohibited works.

The Catholic Church may indeed be the most repressive influence in the
history of the world, but that doesn't mean that science and theology
aren't part of the same root impulse.


 I see nothing in theology that says test your theories, see if you can 
 falsify them.
 Tertullian says he believes *because* it is absurd and writes,  When we come 
 to believe,
 we have no desire to believe anything else, for we begin by believing that 
 there is
 nothing else which we have to believe . I warn people not to seek for 
 anything beyond what
 they came to believe, for that was all they needed to seek for. In the last 
 resort,
 however, it is better for you to remain ignorant, for fear that you come to 
 know what you
 should not know . Let curiosity give place to faith, and glory to salvation. 
 Let them at
 least be no hindrance, or let them keep quiet. To know nothing against the 
 Rule [of faith]
 is to know everything. Augustine warned against studying mathematics. Later 
 Martin Luther
 writes, Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his 
 Reason.

Martin Luther opposed the Catholic Church doctrines too.
Epistemological fascism exists in science as well as religion. While
belief may inherently be more insular and naive than disbelief,
neither of them have a formula for transcending their own cognitive
bias. Religion advanced civilization for 10,000 years while the
advance of science in the last 500 has arguably provided us with the
tools for our own extinction. By only looking through the lens of the
last few decades, we distort the contribution of earlier ways of
thinking. I will always appreciate science more than religion, as I
appreciate using language over walking upright, but that doesn't mean
that one thing can be completely isolated from the other or that
either one can be completely bad or good.


 Sure science grew out of Christianity, out of the decay and fragmentation of 
 Christianity.
 When Christianity was strong and in control is what we call The Dark Ages. 
 Now that it
 is no longer in control and the Western world relies on the technology of 
 science,
 Christian apologists are writing revisionist histories.

I agree, organized religion has been a catastrophe for the world, and
it still is, but that doesn't change the historical emergence of
science from spiritual contemplation.


  but in all cases and all
  cultures that I know of, things like astronomy and medicine arise out
  of things like astrology and divination. Science has never appeared
  out of whole cloth in a society.

 Of course not. At one time belief in agency in nature and magic and spirits 
 were all part
 of a reasonable world view.

That's what I'm saying. Now disbelief in agency in nature and self are
parts of a reasonable worldview.

 Eventually those views divided. Magic begat alchemy and
 astrology which begat science. The belief in spirits evolved into religion 
 which served a
 useful unifying function in tribes and the early city states. But it 
 stagnated with the
 invention of writing and the adoption of holy writings as dogma and the 
 emphasis on faith.

Similarly, science has become bogged down in legal and commercial
agendas, serving to delay and suppress innovation in many cases. It's
a pendulum swing. We are in the decadent phase of the Enlightenment,
printing indulgences on the stationary of elite universities for the
well-heeled offspring of the ruling class.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On May 7, 3:49 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 so by logic 1=3 implies anything at all.

You mean the indivisible unity of the three quark proton?
Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 5/7/2012 1:24 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On May 7, 3:49 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:

so by logic 1=3 implies anything at all.

You mean the indivisible unity of the three quark proton?
Craig



First, nobody cares if you believe it, even if you're a physics graduate student.  Second, 
it's just a model and physicists everywhere are trying to invent a better one.  Third, 
it's a model that has been tested and found to work.


Brent

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On May 7, 4:28 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 5/7/2012 1:24 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

  On May 7, 3:49 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:
  so by logic 1=3 implies anything at all.
  You mean the indivisible unity of the three quark proton?
  Craig

 First, nobody cares if you believe it, even if you're a physics graduate 
 student.  Second,
 it's just a model and physicists everywhere are trying to invent a better 
 one.  Third,
 it's a model that has been tested and found to work.

I do believe it, at least as a spatial representation of what matter
does or is at that level of microcosm. My personal conjecture is that
there is a progression from literal architecture to figurative
phenomenology the further you go into the microcosmic scale, but
that's beside the point. I was pointing quarks out as an example of
how physics is ok with a 1=3 logic. I'm not anti science, and I'm
certainly not pro religion, but I am anti Manicheanism. They both have
validity and they both overlook a significant portion of the cosmos.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On 5/7/2012 1:57 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On May 7, 4:28 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote:

On 5/7/2012 1:24 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On May 7, 3:49 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.netwrote:

so by logic 1=3 implies anything at all.

You mean the indivisible unity of the three quark proton?
Craig

First, nobody cares if you believe it, even if you're a physics graduate
student. Second,
it's just a model and physicists everywhere are trying to invent a better one.
Third,
it's a model that has been tested and found to work.

I do believe it, at least as a spatial representation of what matter
does or is at that level of microcosm.

But are you going to keep the faith when string theory comes up with a
different model?

My personal conjecture is that
there is a progression from literal architecture to figurative
phenomenology the further you go into the microcosmic scale, but
that's beside the point. I was pointing quarks out as an example of
how physics is ok with a 1=3 logic.

I know, but it's a poor analogy. It's not 1=3 logic. Many things are made of three other
things, as a proton is made of to Ups and a Down quark which can be separated - but only
by making more quarks. But that's not the same as Three divine persons constitute one
person who is God.

I'm not anti science, and I'm
certainly not pro religion, but I am anti Manicheanism.

You're against a good/evil dualism, where matter is evil and mind is good?

Brent

They both have
validity and they both overlook a significant portion of the cosmos.

Craig

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-07 Thread David Nyman

On 7 May 2012 20:37, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

 To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous
 as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

The Cardinal was perfectly correct in this assertion, of course.

David

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 5/7/2012 2:11 PM, David Nyman wrote:

On 7 May 2012 20:37, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:


To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous
as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

The Cardinal was perfectly correct in this assertion, of course.

David



Do you want to explain - and I'm well aware that 'revolves around' is relative to 
coordinate frames.  But you know that Bellarme was not equating relativism of orbital 
motion with relativism about the virgin birth.


Brent

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-07 Thread David Nyman

On 7 May 2012 22:27, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

 Do you want to explain - and I'm well aware that 'revolves around' is
 relative to coordinate frames.  But you know that Bellarme was not equating
 relativism of orbital motion with relativism about the virgin birth.

The Cardinal stated To assert that the earth revolves around the sun
is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

Well, if you concur with the following two statements (as I presume you do):

(1) The earth revolves around the sun.

(2) Jesus was not born of a virgin.

It follows that statement (1) is precisely as erroneous as statement
(2) - i.e. not at all. So he was perfectly correct in his assertion!
I wonder if he was hedging his bets?

David

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On May 7, 5:10 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 5/7/2012 1:57 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

  On May 7, 4:28 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:
  On 5/7/2012 1:24 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

  On May 7, 3:49 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net    wrote:
  so by logic 1=3 implies anything at all.
  You mean the indivisible unity of the three quark proton?
  Craig
  First, nobody cares if you believe it, even if you're a physics graduate 
  student.  Second,
  it's just a model and physicists everywhere are trying to invent a better 
  one.  Third,
  it's a model that has been tested and found to work.
  I do believe it, at least as a spatial representation of what matter
  does or is at that level of microcosm.

 But are you going to keep the faith when string theory comes up with a 
 different model?

Why wouldn't I? I have faith in classical mechanics as valid theory at
that level of description.


  My personal conjecture is that
  there is a progression from literal architecture to figurative
  phenomenology the further you go into the microcosmic scale, but
  that's beside the point. I was pointing quarks out as an example of
  how physics is ok with a 1=3 logic.

 I know, but it's a poor analogy.  It's not 1=3 logic.  Many things are made 
 of three other
 things, as a proton is made of to Ups and a Down quark which can be separated 
 - but only
 by making more quarks.  But that's not the same as Three divine persons 
 constitute one
 person who is God.

It's not exactly the same but it's not far off. It still implies that
there is a sense that the proton is both three things and one thing.
If you explained both concepts side by side to an isolated tribe in
New Guinea I think they would have no trouble seeing the analogy as
strong.


  I'm not anti science, and I'm
  certainly not pro religion, but I am anti Manicheanism.

 You're against a good/evil dualism, where matter is evil and mind is good?

Yes. I am against a pathological excess of investment in either mind
or matter, but even that excess is not entirely evil or good.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-06 Thread Evgenii Rudnyi


On 05.05.2012 23:34 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/5/2012 1:07 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:


...


According to Prof Hoenen, the logic of trinity was at that time
basically in the blood. He gave several examples including even Marx.
According to Prof Hoenen, the logic in Marx's Capital is the same as
the logic of trinity.


?? Which is to say murky, ambiguous, and contradictory? I think Marx is
a lot clearer than the trinity.


To me the logic of trinity is perverse in the same extent as quantum 
mechanics.


...



I guess that the reason for the fall of Rome was not Christianity. By
the way, there is a nice book


I would agree with that. Rome fell for other, more material reasons. But
its fall created a power vacuum which was filled by organized
Christianity and Christianity like any dogmatic religion is in conflict
with the skeptical, inquiring, testing nature of science. When the
reformation broke the intellectual monopoly of the Church, science
flowered and for a time it was regarded as an adjunct to theology:
discovering the creator through nature. But that only lasted up till
Darwin.


I am afraid that the conflict between Christianity and science that you 
describe is not consistent with historical facts. According to Prof 
Hoenen, who is an expert on Middle Age, science and theology has been 
developed rather like a brother and a sister. No doubt, that one can 
observe a fight for the power between different intellectual groups 
(this happens between relatives as well) but this is quite different 
from what your are talking.




Lucio Russo. The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC
and Why it Had to Be Reborn

where the author claim that there was another scientific revolution
indeed. Yet, Rome was the reason for its fall. Lucio Russo says that
Rome as such was not interested in scientific revolution.

Let me repeat however what Collingwood has presumably done. His goal
was to find absolute presuppositions related to the statement God exists.


What's his definition of God? Does he really mean presuppositions, or
does he mean entailments. I wouldn't think you'd need any
presuppositions to simply assert, God exists.


I expect that he means presuppositions, as this is the main theme of 
his book.


Evgenii

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-06 Thread meekerdb


On 5/6/2012 10:51 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 05.05.2012 23:34 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/5/2012 1:07 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:


...


According to Prof Hoenen, the logic of trinity was at that time
basically in the blood. He gave several examples including even Marx.
According to Prof Hoenen, the logic in Marx's Capital is the same as
the logic of trinity.


?? Which is to say murky, ambiguous, and contradictory? I think Marx is
a lot clearer than the trinity.


To me the logic of trinity is perverse in the same extent as quantum mechanics.

...



I guess that the reason for the fall of Rome was not Christianity. By
the way, there is a nice book


I would agree with that. Rome fell for other, more material reasons. But
its fall created a power vacuum which was filled by organized
Christianity and Christianity like any dogmatic religion is in conflict
with the skeptical, inquiring, testing nature of science. When the
reformation broke the intellectual monopoly of the Church, science
flowered and for a time it was regarded as an adjunct to theology:
discovering the creator through nature. But that only lasted up till
Darwin.


I am afraid that the conflict between Christianity and science that you describe is not 
consistent with historical facts. According to Prof Hoenen, who is an expert on Middle 
Age, science and theology has been developed rather like a brother and a sister. 


More like a master and slave - until the slaves revolted.  Honen is a professor of 
philosophy and theology who specializes in commenting on theologians of the middle ages: 
Marilius, Boethius, and Albert Magnus.  Although Bruno (not Marchal) was burned at the 
stake and Galileo was put under house arrest, science was allowed as a servant of the 
church up until the Victorian era. Newton, Boyle, Tyndall, Descarte, Laplace, 
Kepler,...none of them were from the universities, which were dominated by theology.  And 
the real break came with Darwin.  To say they developed like brother and sister is to 
suppose theology developed. While science has advance enormously in scope and accuracy, 
theologians now do no better than in the 13th century.


No doubt, that one can observe a fight for the power between different intellectual 
groups (this happens between relatives as well) but this is quite different from what 
your are talking.


There are Christian parties, Zionist parties, and Muslim parties and Tea parties, but 
there is no science party.  So it's pretty clear who is interested in power and who in 
knowledge.


Brent





Lucio Russo. The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC
and Why it Had to Be Reborn

where the author claim that there was another scientific revolution
indeed. Yet, Rome was the reason for its fall. Lucio Russo says that
Rome as such was not interested in scientific revolution.

Let me repeat however what Collingwood has presumably done. His goal
was to find absolute presuppositions related to the statement God exists.


What's his definition of God? Does he really mean presuppositions, or
does he mean entailments. I wouldn't think you'd need any
presuppositions to simply assert, God exists.


I expect that he means presuppositions, as this is the main theme of his book.

Evgenii



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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-06 Thread Craig Weinberg

On May 6, 4:06 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

 Newton, Boyle, Tyndall, Descarte, Laplace,
 Kepler,...none of them were from the universities, which were dominated by 
 theology.

All of them were still theological thinkers though, as were Bacon,
Copernicus, Paracelsus, the Islamic alchemists, etc. If anything, they
were more personally committed to theology than the political
bureaucracies that had been built up through the church.

 There are Christian parties, Zionist parties, and Muslim parties and Tea 
 parties, but
 there is no science party.  So it's pretty clear who is interested in power 
 and who in
 knowledge.

I wouldn't say that science is apolitical. Just as the church has
traditionally served as a cheerleader for war, academic science now
typically serves to advocate the agendas of the military industrial
complex and big business. Scientific authority is a political
instrument precisely because it is assumed to be apolitical, just as
theological authority was supposed to be.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-06 Thread meekerdb

On 5/6/2012 5:47 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On May 6, 4:06 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote:

Newton, Boyle, Tyndall, Descarte, Laplace,
Kepler,...none of them were from the universities, which were dominated by
theology.

All of them were still theological thinkers though,

Theological in that the concerned themselves with fundamentals and god (although Laplace
famously said he had no need of that hypothesis), but all unconventional. Descarte was on
the index of prohibited books until the index was abandoned in 1962. Newton was an Aryan
heretic.

as were Bacon,
Copernicus, Paracelsus, the Islamic alchemists, etc. If anything, they
were more personally committed to theology than the political
bureaucracies that had been built up through the church.

There are Christian parties, Zionist parties, and Muslim parties and Tea
parties, but
there is no science party. So it's pretty clear who is interested in power and
who in
knowledge.

I wouldn't say that science is apolitical. Just as the church has
traditionally served as a cheerleader for war, academic science now
typically serves to advocate the agendas of the military industrial
complex and big business. Scientific authority is a political
instrument precisely because it is assumed to be apolitical, just as
theological authority was supposed to be.

Theological authority was apolitical while it taught the divine right of kings and
performed coronations - you've gotta be kidding. Next you'll claim musical criticism is
political because it's assumed to be apolitical.

Brent

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-05 Thread Evgenii Rudnyi


On 04.05.2012 23:45 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/4/2012 2:18 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


...


I'm not saying that science and religion are on an equal footing, but
I think it's a just-so-story to account for it by assuming that
religion must be easier to master and therefore more attractive.


Who has mastered religion? Are there any 'laws of religion' and
theorems, any experimental results (well a few which tend to show
religion is imaginary). Is the Pope an exemplar of clear thinking and
knowledge?


I have already mentioned about Colligwood. He starts with a statement 
that God exists and analyses what are hidden assumptions (absolute 
presuppositions) that makes sense for such a statement. Then he 
considers a statement that there are physical laws and again he analyses 
what are hidden assumptions (absolute presuppositions). His conclusion 
was that the absolute presuppositions in both cases are quite close to 
each other.


I have ordered his book and when I read it, I could report more on this 
subject. Right now some findings are here


http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/03/collingwood-on-monotheism-and-science.html

Evgenii

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-05 Thread Craig Weinberg

On May 4, 5:45 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 5/4/2012 2:18 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

  You are right that there are different kinds of understanding (to me
  they fall along the lines of subjective orientation vs objective
  orientation) but I wouldn't say that one is inherently easy and the
  other hard. Religious scholarship was extensive, and really gave birth
  to academia. Science owes all of its discipline and precision to one
  form of priestly monasticism or another.

 No, science owes its discipline to rejecting the Scholastics idea that one 
 could learn
 just by thinking and reading Aristotle.  Science added observation, 
 experiment, and
 skepticism to reasoning.

I'm not much of a historian, but my impression is that the transition
from monasticism to pure science in the West was a process lasting
centuries, with no formal sweeping rejection of Aristotle or
Scholasticism. Scholasticism itself was a discipline of argumentation
and reasoning that provided later thinkers with the tools to reject
some of the other aspects of scholasticism itself.

Faith in skepticism and scientific discipline did not suddenly appear
with Martin Luther or even Francis Bacon, it only a branch of the tree
that goes back to neolithic times, probably with several flowerings of
subjective and objective thought in various civilizations. All science
starts with religion, and religion is an anthropological universal.



  By the same token,
  overspecialization of the sciences has promoted a culture that makes
  it extremely easy for scientists to ignore all understandings outside
  of their narrow range. You can be incredibly intellectually lazy
  without appealing to religion or gods.

  I'm not saying that science and religion are on an equal footing, but
  I think it's a just-so-story to account for it by assuming that
  religion must be easier to master and therefore more attractive.

 Who has mastered religion?

Priests, shamans, archbishops, alchemists, cult leaders, theologians,
professors, monks, nuns, faith healers, prophets, saints, etc.

  Are there any 'laws of religion' and theorems,

Of course. That's all religion is. What are sacred books but laws and
commandments, parables, moral equivalences.

 any
 experimental results (well a few which tend to show religion is imaginary).  
 Is the Pope
 an exemplar of clear thinking and knowledge?

The need for experimentation is counter-intuitive. Religion uses
intuitive subjective truths which don't need experimental validation,
and then generates laws and seemingly logical inferences based on
that. The Bible isn't trying to tell us how to grow tomatoes more
profitably. The Pope may not now be an example of scientific thinking,
but I would imagine his career is marked by exceptionally clear
thinking and knowledge, within the specialized context of politics
within the Roman Catholic Church. He was elected CEO of an
international religious corporation with its own nation. If he's a
buffoon, then he is because the men who put him there want him to be.
At one time though, the Pope was the best they had for pre-scientific
authority. Better Pope than hillbilly witchdoctor.

As Evgenii says also, there are in fact clear thinking and
knowledgeable experts who take theological issues very seriously and
use rigorous methods to investigate them. Off the top of my head I
would point to Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung as examples. They were
both much more knowledgeable than you or I on the the subject of
religion, and probably as clear thinking as most modern academics and
scientists.


  You
  can of course go much further in the sophistication of science, but I
  would say that is actually a selling point for the ego. What science
  lacks is any satisfactory understanding of ordinary subjectivity, and
  as long as that is the case, religion and fundamentalism will continue
  to thrive in all of its forms.

 As well as mysticism about consciousness.

Yes. And pseudoskepticism and mechanemorphism.




  people tend to suppose that their empathy
  and other feelings are REAL understanding and scientific understanding is 
  ersatz, that
  computations can't produce REAL understanding.
  No, computations can't produce real understanding because they aren't
  computing for themselves, they are just doing what they are programmed
  to do. It is us who produce understanding through their computation.

 When I'm doing the computation the feeling of understanding is generated by 
 the computation.

No, the feeling of understanding is generated by the experience of
using your mind to compute. There is a difference. If you were to wake
up one morning having computed something in your sleep but then
forgotten it, there is no feeling of understanding.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-05 Thread meekerdb


On 5/4/2012 11:59 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 04.05.2012 23:45 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/4/2012 2:18 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


...


I'm not saying that science and religion are on an equal footing, but
I think it's a just-so-story to account for it by assuming that
religion must be easier to master and therefore more attractive.


Who has mastered religion? Are there any 'laws of religion' and
theorems, any experimental results (well a few which tend to show
religion is imaginary). Is the Pope an exemplar of clear thinking and
knowledge?


I have already mentioned about Colligwood. He starts with a statement that God exists 
and analyses what are hidden assumptions (absolute presuppositions) that makes sense for 
such a statement. Then he considers a statement that there are physical laws and again 
he analyses what are hidden assumptions (absolute presuppositions). His conclusion was 
that the absolute presuppositions in both cases are quite close to each other.


I have ordered his book and when I read it, I could report more on this subject. Right 
now some findings are here


http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/03/collingwood-on-monotheism-and-science.html

Evgenii



One needs to consider what it would mean for the contrary to be true.  What would it mean 
for the universe to NOT be mathematical?  Would it mean events are self contradictory?  
Yet that is exactly what has happened if QM in it's MW interpretation is true.  Yet we 
have accommodated it in a rational mathematical description that includes randomness.  
Aristotle, and many later thinkers, would have denied QM as impossible by pure reason.  
When faced with contradictions scientists change their descriptions.


Brent

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-05 Thread Evgenii Rudnyi


On 05.05.2012 18:08 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/4/2012 11:59 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 04.05.2012 23:45 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/4/2012 2:18 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


...


I'm not saying that science and religion are on an equal footing, but
I think it's a just-so-story to account for it by assuming that
religion must be easier to master and therefore more attractive.


Who has mastered religion? Are there any 'laws of religion' and
theorems, any experimental results (well a few which tend to show
religion is imaginary). Is the Pope an exemplar of clear thinking and
knowledge?


I have already mentioned about Colligwood. He starts with a statement
that God exists and analyses what are hidden assumptions (absolute
presuppositions) that makes sense for such a statement. Then he
considers a statement that there are physical laws and again he
analyses what are hidden assumptions (absolute presuppositions). His
conclusion was that the absolute presuppositions in both cases are
quite close to each other.

I have ordered his book and when I read it, I could report more on
this subject. Right now some findings are here

http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/03/collingwood-on-monotheism-and-science.html

Evgenii



One needs to consider what it would mean for the contrary to be true.
What would it mean for the universe to NOT be mathematical? Would it
mean events are self contradictory? Yet that is exactly what has
happened if QM in it's MW interpretation is true. Yet we have
accommodated it in a rational mathematical description that includes
randomness. Aristotle, and many later thinkers, would have denied QM as
impossible by pure reason. When faced with contradictions scientists
change their descriptions.

Brent



I do not think that quantum mechanics changes something in this respect. 
I should say that I have just heard this in the lectures by Prof Hoenen, 
but I try to express briefly my current understanding.


So first if to look at different societies, modern science has started 
in Christian Europe. Not by Arabs, although a lot of knowledge went into 
Europe through them. Not in China. Why?


According to Collingwood (as Prof Hoenen has told) one can find a reason 
in Christianity. First, it is monotheism and this is quite important to 
infer inexorable scientific laws. Second trinity. For example Islam is 
also based on monotheism but it does not have trinity.


I should say that I am bad with trinity (I have to learn more about it 
yet) so I will just repeat what I have heard. Science needs a belief in 
the inexorable scientific laws but also another belief is important, 
that is, we are able to learn the scientific laws (the intelligibility 
of the world). The neuron spikes not only obey physics but then can also 
comprehend it. Somehow the trinity brings us the intelligibility of the 
world (and hence may help us to understand the trick that allows the 
neurons to comprehend physics).


Hence my decision to read Collingwood by myself and to think it over. 
The difference with Bruno is that Collingwood referred to such a study 
as metaphysics and not theology.


Evgenii


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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-05 Thread meekerdb

On 5/5/2012 11:05 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 05.05.2012 18:08 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/4/2012 11:59 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 04.05.2012 23:45 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/4/2012 2:18 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

...

I'm not saying that science and religion are on an equal footing, but
I think it's a just-so-story to account for it by assuming that
religion must be easier to master and therefore more attractive.

Who has mastered religion? Are there any 'laws of religion' and
theorems, any experimental results (well a few which tend to show
religion is imaginary). Is the Pope an exemplar of clear thinking and
knowledge?

I have already mentioned about Colligwood. He starts with a statement
that God exists and analyses what are hidden assumptions (absolute
presuppositions) that makes sense for such a statement. Then he
considers a statement that there are physical laws and again he
analyses what are hidden assumptions (absolute presuppositions). His
conclusion was that the absolute presuppositions in both cases are
quite close to each other.

I have ordered his book and when I read it, I could report more on
this subject. Right now some findings are here

http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/03/collingwood-on-monotheism-and-science.html

Evgenii

One needs to consider what it would mean for the contrary to be true.
What would it mean for the universe to NOT be mathematical? Would it
mean events are self contradictory? Yet that is exactly what has
happened if QM in it's MW interpretation is true. Yet we have
accommodated it in a rational mathematical description that includes
randomness. Aristotle, and many later thinkers, would have denied QM as
impossible by pure reason. When faced with contradictions scientists
change their descriptions.

Brent

I do not think that quantum mechanics changes something in this respect.

No, but it provides an excellent example of how pure logic and reason can be upset by
empirical facts that logic said were impossible, e.g. no thing can be two places at the
same time.

I should say that I have just heard this in the lectures by Prof Hoenen, but I try to
express briefly my current understanding.

So first if to look at different societies, modern science has started in Christian
Europe. Not by Arabs, although a lot of knowledge went into Europe through them. Not in
China. Why?

That's a good question and I don't know that there is a comprehensive answer. Partly the
Arabs inherited and kept alive many Greek ideas while, except for Aristotle, they were
suppressed by Christianity in Europe. Then when the europeans reconquered Spain and the
balkans they recovered libraries from the Muslims. That was when science began (again) in
europe and it was mostly outside the universities which were still dominated by
scholasticism which consisted of comments on comments on comments on Aristotle and the
bible. But there must have been other factors too since the Arabs, after a period of
intellectual development and investigation stagnated and failed to develop science.

According to Collingwood (as Prof Hoenen has told) one can find a reason in
Christianity. First, it is monotheism and this is quite important to infer inexorable
scientific laws. Second trinity. For example Islam is also based on monotheism but it
does not have trinity.

So logic and unified laws are important, but so is believing in logically contradictory
things like the Trinity!? Newton never believed in the trinity - and I doubt anyone else
ever did either since believing in a contradictory proposition can be no more than paying
lip service to it.

I should say that I am bad with trinity (I have to learn more about it yet) so I will
just repeat what I have heard. Science needs a belief in the inexorable scientific laws
but also another belief is important, that is, we are able to learn the scientific laws
(the intelligibility of the world). The neuron spikes not only obey physics but then can
also comprehend it. Somehow the trinity brings us the intelligibility of the world (and
hence may help us to understand the trick that allows the neurons to comprehend physics).

Sounds like Collingwood is just a Christian apologist. If it had not been for the rise of
Christianity when Rome fell the thread of Greek and Roman science might have carried
forward and the dark ages might have been avoided. Christianity probably delayed the
renaissance and the enlightenment by a thousand years.

Brent

Hence my decision to read Collingwood by myself and to think it over. The difference
with Bruno is that Collingwood referred to such a study as metaphysics and not theology.

Evgenii

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-05 Thread Evgenii Rudnyi


On 05.05.2012 20:30 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/5/2012 11:05 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

...

According to Collingwood (as Prof Hoenen has told) one can find a
reason in Christianity. First, it is monotheism and this is quite
important to infer inexorable scientific laws. Second trinity. For
example Islam is also based on monotheism but it does not have trinity.


So logic and unified laws are important, but so is believing in
logically contradictory things like the Trinity!? Newton never believed
in the trinity - and I doubt anyone else ever did either since believing
in a contradictory proposition can be no more than paying lip service to
it.


I have also always thought that trinity is completely illogical. I guess 
that even now I do not see the logic. Yet, the claim is that it is 
somehow allows us to take intelligibility for granted.


Do you know another reason to believe in intelligibility?

I am no an expert on Newton, but I would say that he did believe in 
trinity. According to Prof Hoenen, the logic of trinity was at that time 
basically in the blood. He gave several examples including even Marx. 
According to Prof Hoenen, the logic in Marx's Capital is the same as the 
logic of trinity.




I should say that I am bad with trinity (I have to learn more about it
yet) so I will just repeat what I have heard. Science needs a belief
in the inexorable scientific laws but also another belief is
important, that is, we are able to learn the scientific laws (the
intelligibility of the world). The neuron spikes not only obey physics
but then can also comprehend it. Somehow the trinity brings us the
intelligibility of the world (and hence may help us to understand the
trick that allows the neurons to comprehend physics).


Sounds like Collingwood is just a Christian apologist. If it had not
been for the rise of Christianity when Rome fell the thread of Greek and
Roman science might have carried forward and the dark ages might have
been avoided. Christianity probably delayed the renaissance and the
enlightenment by a thousand years.


I guess that the reason for the fall of Rome was not Christianity. By 
the way, there is a nice book


Lucio Russo. The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC 
and Why it Had to Be Reborn


where the author claim that there was another scientific revolution 
indeed. Yet, Rome was the reason for its fall. Lucio Russo says that 
Rome as such was not interested in scientific revolution.


Let me repeat however what Collingwood has presumably done. His goal was 
to find absolute presuppositions related to the statement God exists. I 
have to read the book but I expect from lectures of Prof Hoenen that 
this was a normal logical analysis. One takes some assumptions and then 
gets results accordingly. Then Collingwood has analyzed science and its 
absolute presuppositions. It might be that his analysis was biased, I do 
not know. I have to read the book.


Evgenii

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-05 Thread meekerdb

On 5/5/2012 1:07 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

On 05.05.2012 20:30 meekerdb said the following:

On 5/5/2012 11:05 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:

...

According to Collingwood (as Prof Hoenen has told) one can find a
reason in Christianity. First, it is monotheism and this is quite
important to infer inexorable scientific laws. Second trinity. For
example Islam is also based on monotheism but it does not have trinity.

So logic and unified laws are important, but so is believing in
logically contradictory things like the Trinity!? Newton never believed
in the trinity - and I doubt anyone else ever did either since believing
in a contradictory proposition can be no more than paying lip service to
it.

I have also always thought that trinity is completely illogical. I guess that even now I
do not see the logic. Yet, the claim is that it is somehow allows us to take
intelligibility for granted.

Do you know another reason to believe in intelligibility?

A plausible reason, though I don't know how to work it all out, is that the universe
started in a state of very little (1bit?) information and this was unstable so that it
decayed into regions with information horizons so that, although the total information is
small the entanglement across the horizon can make the available information (complexity)
large. This leaves a lot of symmetry from which the regularities we describe by the 'laws
of physics' derive. Vic Stenger has written about this in his book The Comprehensible
Cosmos.

I am no an expert on Newton, but I would say that he did believe in trinity.

No, he wrote a lot about it. He was an Aryan.

According to Prof Hoenen, the logic of trinity was at that time basically in the blood.
He gave several examples including even Marx. According to Prof Hoenen, the logic in
Marx's Capital is the same as the logic of trinity.

?? Which is to say murky, ambiguous, and contradictory? I think Marx is a lot clearer
than the trinity.

I should say that I am bad with trinity (I have to learn more about it
yet) so I will just repeat what I have heard. Science needs a belief
in the inexorable scientific laws but also another belief is
important, that is, we are able to learn the scientific laws (the
intelligibility of the world). The neuron spikes not only obey physics
but then can also comprehend it. Somehow the trinity brings us the
intelligibility of the world (and hence may help us to understand the
trick that allows the neurons to comprehend physics).

For the world to be intelligble, for there to be creatures who create models of it to
evolve there must be a quasi-classical world where information can be cloned.

Sounds like Collingwood is just a Christian apologist. If it had not
been for the rise of Christianity when Rome fell the thread of Greek and
Roman science might have carried forward and the dark ages might have
been avoided. Christianity probably delayed the renaissance and the
enlightenment by a thousand years.

I guess that the reason for the fall of Rome was not Christianity. By the way, there is
a nice book

I would agree with that. Rome fell for other, more material reasons. But its fall
created a power vacuum which was filled by organized Christianity and Christianity like
any dogmatic religion is in conflict with the skeptical, inquiring, testing nature of
science. When the reformation broke the intellectual monopoly of the Church, science
flowered and for a time it was regarded as an adjunct to theology: discovering the creator
through nature. But that only lasted up till Darwin.

Lucio Russo. The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to
Be Reborn

where the author claim that there was another scientific revolution indeed. Yet, Rome
was the reason for its fall. Lucio Russo says that Rome as such was not interested in
scientific revolution.

Let me repeat however what Collingwood has presumably done. His goal was to find
absolute presuppositions related to the statement God exists.

What's his definition of God? Does he really mean presuppositions, or does he mean
entailments. I wouldn't think you'd need any presuppositions to simply assert, God
exists.

Brent

I have to read the book but I expect from lectures of Prof Hoenen that this was a normal
logical analysis. One takes some assumptions and then gets results accordingly. Then
Collingwood has analyzed science and its absolute presuppositions. It might be that his
analysis was biased, I do not know. I have to read the book.

Evgenii

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-04 Thread John Mikes

Craig:
you seem to be firmly anchored in a reductionist conventional view of the
know-it-all model of yesterday. Which is OK with me, as YOUR opinion. I
consider - in my agnostic limitations - those 'factors' (rather: relations)
we did not encounter SO FAR and give an extended view to the model. Or: not
view - *feeling* is more accurate for something we have no idea about.
I said: we are PART of an infinite complexity of which we learn details
continually and have no idea how much of it is still unknown. Those
(fellow) details influence our 'in-model' relations as well, since they are
part of the world (our world). Contribute to our FREE(?) will, adding
influencing details to our ignorance. We FEEL to be FREE, yet we are part
of a wider complexity - we do not feel.
Now you can reject this as MY belief system, discounting the view of the
past millennia with increasing our factual image of the world all over
time, from the gods, the flat earth, faith-induced superstitions, the
emergence-marvels (miracles) into the poorly (if any) understood physical
marvels (gravitation, atomics, electricity, mass, space, time, waves, etc.
etc.) together with other 'sciences' (biology, neurology, psych, even
cosmology and many 'philosophical' terms etc.).
I see the development into more understanding (did I say: better? No)
of the belief miraculous that governed human thinking earlier.
Also humanity developed a technological prowess (that is almost good) by
the newly (3000yrs?) evolved views of the world.
So I can only envy your self-confidence of a FREE WILL coming from you
only, no deterministic leads, as a random choice (random, what I deny:
there would be no physical 'LAW' if there were randomly occurring
anything.) I cannot DENY what I have no knowledge about.

Just the bartender openeth his ugly mouth.
John M
On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 6:11 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:

 On May 3, 4:08 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote:
  On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com
 wrote:
 
 
 
there is really nothing more or less to say about it other than
 that
   it is primordial orientation itself.
 
So awareness is the feeling data has when it is being processed,
 and
   there is not much more you can say about it.
 
   Data has no feeling when it is being processed.
 
  But you said awareness is primordial and I agree, so if we're right and
  awareness is just what happens when certain physical events occur

 Awareness is primordial, but physics is not. I think that physics is a
 category of awareness, and that no physical event can occur
 independently of some kind of awareness of that event.

  and there
  is nothing more to be said about it then I don't see why you would make
 the
  dogmatic assertion that you made above.

 Because you still don't understand what I'm talking about.

 
   We have evidence of this in Blindsight,
 
  I don't find it surprising that physical brain damage can hinder the
  interpretation of information signals sent from the eyes to that damaged
  organ, nor do I see how it is relevant to what we were discussing.

 With blindsight, we see that there is a difference between data
 processing functions of optical detection and visual awareness. Visual
 awareness doesn't just happen because you are able to detect optical
 stimulation. This means that any kind of evolutionary biological
 argument that suggests that perception just comes with the territory
 automatically with the evolution of function is bogus.

 
   and in the lack of indications of any sort of feeling from all data
   processing equipment we have ever constructed.
 
  What sort of indication were you looking for, what sort of thing would
  convince you?

 When a computer intentionally tries to physically injure its
 programmer, that will convince me. If a computer begs not to be turned
 off, if it lies to trick us into improving it's hardware, if it got
 tired of doing a repetitive task, if it tried to communicate in an
 unscripted way, etc. The normal things that would indicate to anyone
 that something was alive and awake and not a machine.

 
Acting on the reason you created =  Free Will
 
  So this thing called free will is deterministic whatever the hell it
 is,
  it was caused by the reason you created,

 No. Making up your mind is not caused by a reason created by making up
 your mind. It is primordial. Free will is outbound awareness. It is
 beneath causality. Since we are complex beings made up of so many
 nested frames of awareness, we have a lot of influences to inform us,
 some more insistently than others, but in many cases those influences
 have no care one way or the other and  it is us ourselves who decide
 what we prefer. Our preferring is not the cause of free will, it is
 free will and causality being created live.

  and if you created that reason for
  a reason then it's deterministic too; and it you did not created that
  reason for a reason then it's

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-04 Thread Craig Weinberg

On May 4, 3:39 pm, John Mikes jami...@gmail.com wrote:
 Craig:
 you seem to be firmly anchored in a reductionist conventional view of the
 know-it-all model of yesterday.

I think that I am instead, comfortably camped out in a make sense of
it all model of tomorrow which embraces and rejects both
reductionism, holism, relativism, functionalism, and panpsychism.

 Which is OK with me, as YOUR opinion. I
 consider - in my agnostic limitations - those 'factors' (rather: relations)
 we did not encounter SO FAR and give an extended view to the model. Or: not
 view - *feeling* is more accurate for something we have no idea about.
 I said: we are PART of an infinite complexity of which we learn details
 continually and have no idea how much of it is still unknown.

We are part of a tremendous complexity, and a tremendous complexity is
part of us. Sense cuts through that though also, giving us a degree of
simplicity and coherence on different levels.

 Those
 (fellow) details influence our 'in-model' relations as well, since they are
 part of the world (our world). Contribute to our FREE(?) will, adding
 influencing details to our ignorance. We FEEL to be FREE, yet we are part
 of a wider complexity - we do not feel.

We are part of a wider complexity which we have no direct influence
over, but that doesn't dilute the reality of the  that we do directly
influence parts of our mind and body, and the changes we make with
them to our environment and it's future.

 Now you can reject this as MY belief system, discounting the view of the
 past millennia with increasing our factual image of the world all over
 time, from the gods, the flat earth, faith-induced superstitions, the
 emergence-marvels (miracles) into the poorly (if any) understood physical
 marvels (gravitation, atomics, electricity, mass, space, time, waves, etc.
 etc.) together with other 'sciences' (biology, neurology, psych, even
 cosmology and many 'philosophical' terms etc.).
 I see the development into more understanding (did I say: better? No)
 of the belief miraculous that governed human thinking earlier.
 Also humanity developed a technological prowess (that is almost good) by
 the newly (3000yrs?) evolved views of the world.

I don't reject contemporary scientific observations, I only suggest
that we try interpreting all forms of energy as subjective experience
on different scales ('time').

 So I can only envy your self-confidence of a FREE WILL coming from you
 only,

I don't think Free Will comes from me only. All forms of energy are
free will to the entity that experiences it directly. The more
indirectly we experience it, the more it is perceived as deterministic
and random.

 no deterministic leads, as a random choice (random, what I deny:
 there would be no physical 'LAW' if there were randomly occurring
 anything.) I cannot DENY what I have no knowledge about.

With what can you conclude that you can or cannot deny something
without free will?

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-04 Thread meekerdb

On 5/4/2012 12:39 PM, John Mikes wrote:

I see the development into more understanding (did I say: better? No)
of the belief miraculous that governed human thinking earlier.

Understanding is one of those words often misunderstood. It is used to refer both to a
feeling of familiarity and empathy and also to an ability to predict and manipulate. Gods
and miracles were easily 'understood' as projections of the intuitive empathy for other
people onto agents behind natural phenomena (storm gods, volcano gods, illness
demons,...). Science and mathematics brought a much greater understanding in the sense of
prediction and manipulation of natural phenomena, but at a loss of the easy intuitive
understanding. Instead science and mathematics have to be studied and used for a long
time before intuition develops and one gains that intuitive 'understanding'. Because one
is easy while the other is hard and takes time, people tend to suppose that their empathy
and other feelings are REAL understanding and scientific understanding is ersatz, that
computations can't produce REAL understanding.

Also humanity developed a technological prowess (that is almost good) by the newly
(3000yrs?) evolved views of the world.
So I can only envy your self-confidence of a FREE WILL coming from you only, no
deterministic leads, as a random choice (random, what I deny: there would be no physical
'LAW' if there were randomly occurring anything.)

Physical 'laws' of quantum mechanics seem to work very well while being fundamentally
based on randomness. Random doesn't mean anything can happen and all possible events are
equally probable - it just means some degree of non-determinism. Identical free neutrons
have a constant probability of decaying per unit time. So the time-to-decay is
exponential. That's a pretty solid 'law', but the randomness is narrowly confined to a
prescribed one-parameter distribution with a fixed parameter value.

Brent

I cannot DENY what I have no knowledge about.
Just the bartender openeth his ugly mouth.
John M

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-04 Thread Craig Weinberg

On May 4, 4:42 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 5/4/2012 12:39 PM, John Mikes wrote:



  I see the development into more understanding (did I say: better? No)
  of the belief miraculous that governed human thinking earlier.

 Understanding is one of those words often misunderstood.  It is used to 
 refer both to a
 feeling of familiarity and empathy and also to an ability to predict and 
 manipulate.  Gods
 and miracles were easily 'understood' as projections of the intuitive empathy 
 for other
 people onto agents behind natural phenomena (storm gods, volcano gods, illness
 demons,...).

Partly, but it's simplistic. Gods are projected as being associated
with human phenomena as well. Superlative strength, beauty, wisdom, as
well as skills like hunting, sailing, and metal working. What you are
talking about doesn't explain the iconography and pageantry, the
cultural significance of their stories and characteristics.

 Science and mathematics brought a much greater understanding in the sense of
 prediction and manipulation of natural phenomena, but at a loss of the easy 
 intuitive
 understanding.  Instead science and mathematics have to be studied and used 
 for a long
 time before intuition develops and one gains that intuitive 'understanding'.  
 Because one
 is easy while the other is hard and takes time,

You are right that there are different kinds of understanding (to me
they fall along the lines of subjective orientation vs objective
orientation) but I wouldn't say that one is inherently easy and the
other hard. Religious scholarship was extensive, and really gave birth
to academia. Science owes all of its discipline and precision to one
form of priestly monasticism or another. By the same token,
overspecialization of the sciences has promoted a culture that makes
it extremely easy for scientists to ignore all understandings outside
of their narrow range. You can be incredibly intellectually lazy
without appealing to religion or gods.

I'm not saying that science and religion are on an equal footing, but
I think it's a just-so-story to account for it by assuming that
religion must be easier to master and therefore more attractive. You
can of course go much further in the sophistication of science, but I
would say that is actually a selling point for the ego. What science
lacks is any satisfactory understanding of ordinary subjectivity, and
as long as that is the case, religion and fundamentalism will continue
to thrive in all of its forms.

 people tend to suppose that their empathy
 and other feelings are REAL understanding and scientific understanding is 
 ersatz, that
 computations can't produce REAL understanding.

No, computations can't produce real understanding because they aren't
computing for themselves, they are just doing what they are programmed
to do. It is us who produce understanding through their computation.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-04 Thread meekerdb


On 5/4/2012 2:18 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On May 4, 4:42 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:

On 5/4/2012 12:39 PM, John Mikes wrote:




I see the development into more understanding (did I say: better? No)
of the belief miraculous that governed human thinking earlier.

Understanding is one of those words often misunderstood.  It is used to refer 
both to a
feeling of familiarity and empathy and also to an ability to predict and 
manipulate.  Gods
and miracles were easily 'understood' as projections of the intuitive empathy 
for other
people onto agents behind natural phenomena (storm gods, volcano gods, illness
demons,...).

Partly, but it's simplistic. Gods are projected as being associated
with human phenomena as well. Superlative strength, beauty, wisdom, as
well as skills like hunting, sailing, and metal working. What you are
talking about doesn't explain the iconography and pageantry, the
cultural significance of their stories and characteristics.


Science and mathematics brought a much greater understanding in the sense of
prediction and manipulation of natural phenomena, but at a loss of the easy 
intuitive
understanding.  Instead science and mathematics have to be studied and used for 
a long
time before intuition develops and one gains that intuitive 'understanding'.  
Because one
is easy while the other is hard and takes time,

You are right that there are different kinds of understanding (to me
they fall along the lines of subjective orientation vs objective
orientation) but I wouldn't say that one is inherently easy and the
other hard. Religious scholarship was extensive, and really gave birth
to academia. Science owes all of its discipline and precision to one
form of priestly monasticism or another.


No, science owes its discipline to rejecting the Scholastics idea that one could learn 
just by thinking and reading Aristotle.  Science added observation, experiment, and 
skepticism to reasoning.



By the same token,
overspecialization of the sciences has promoted a culture that makes
it extremely easy for scientists to ignore all understandings outside
of their narrow range. You can be incredibly intellectually lazy
without appealing to religion or gods.

I'm not saying that science and religion are on an equal footing, but
I think it's a just-so-story to account for it by assuming that
religion must be easier to master and therefore more attractive.


Who has mastered religion?  Are there any 'laws of religion' and theorems, any 
experimental results (well a few which tend to show religion is imaginary).  Is the Pope 
an exemplar of clear thinking and knowledge?



You
can of course go much further in the sophistication of science, but I
would say that is actually a selling point for the ego. What science
lacks is any satisfactory understanding of ordinary subjectivity, and
as long as that is the case, religion and fundamentalism will continue
to thrive in all of its forms.


As well as mysticism about consciousness.





people tend to suppose that their empathy
and other feelings are REAL understanding and scientific understanding is 
ersatz, that
computations can't produce REAL understanding.

No, computations can't produce real understanding because they aren't
computing for themselves, they are just doing what they are programmed
to do. It is us who produce understanding through their computation.


When I'm doing the computation the feeling of understanding is generated by the 
computation.

Brent

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-03 Thread John Clark

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:


  there is really nothing more or less to say about it other than that
 it is primordial orientation itself.


  So awareness is the feeling data has when it is being processed, and
 there is not much more you can say about it.



 Data has no feeling when it is being processed.


But you said awareness is primordial and I agree, so if we're right and
awareness is just what happens when certain physical events occur and there
is nothing more to be said about it then I don't see why you would make the
dogmatic assertion that you made above.

 We have evidence of this in Blindsight,


I don't find it surprising that physical brain damage can hinder the
interpretation of information signals sent from the eyes to that damaged
organ, nor do I see how it is relevant to what we were discussing.

 and in the lack of indications of any sort of feeling from all data
 processing equipment we have ever constructed.


What sort of indication were you looking for, what sort of thing would
convince you?


  Acting on the reason you created =  Free Will


So this thing called free will is deterministic whatever the hell it is,
it was caused by the reason you created, and if you created that reason for
a reason then it's deterministic too; and it you did not created that
reason for a reason then it's random, there is no third alternative.

 even random processes are determined


If it's determined then it's not random.

 within expected ranges of possible outcomes.


And sometime the expected happens and sometimes it does not. The movement
of a gas molecule is random and if you put a bunch of them into a container
the probability any single gas molecule will hit the side of the container
is random, however you can calculate a good approximation of the pressure
on the container but only because you are dealing with a astronomically
large number of molecules. If one molecule randomly moves in one direction
you can be pretty certain another molecule is randomly moving in the
diametrically opposite direction and the randomness cancels out, so you can
work out the average collision rate of molecules hitting the side of the
container, in other words you can calculate the pressure. But the
individual molecules still move at random.

 Free will is ordinary, not magic, and absolutely represents a third
 fundamental alternative that is neither purely random/determined, nor
 non-random/non-determined


I don't know what the ASCII string free will means but I don't need to to
know that free will is X or free will is not X. The desire to have it
both ways is just childish, it's time to face logic, and reality.

 If I decide to type this sentence, I don't need to create a reason to do
 it


Certainly, modern physics tells us that pure randomness happens all the
time, but if you really did write something for no reason it will not be
worth reading.

 I just decide what I want to say and type it.


And you decided for a reason or you did not decide for a reason.


  by choosing which of those reasons to privilege or ignore, as well as
 many other factors which are not necessarily reasonable, I freely choose my
 actions.


And you chose which of those reasons to privilege or ignore for a reason or
you did not do so for a reason.

 if you ask a computer to find the prime factors of a very large number
 you may have to wait a long time to see what it decides to do while the
 machine makes up its mind.


  It's not making up its mind, you can stop it at any point in the
 calculation and see precisely where in the process it is.


Yes, so what, Turing proved that in general you still won't know what the
computer will end up doing, if you want to know that all you can do is
watch the computer and see.

 It's like a clutch. The gears are deterministic, but you have to decide
 when to put in the clutch and pick which gear you want.


OK, and you made that decision to use the clutch for a reason or you did
not.

 preferring something is neither random nor non-random.


It's idiotic to say something is both not X and not not X. Idiotic!

  John K Clark

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-03 Thread Craig Weinberg

On May 3, 4:08 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:11 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:



   there is really nothing more or less to say about it other than that
  it is primordial orientation itself.

   So awareness is the feeling data has when it is being processed, and
  there is not much more you can say about it.

  Data has no feeling when it is being processed.

 But you said awareness is primordial and I agree, so if we're right and
 awareness is just what happens when certain physical events occur

Awareness is primordial, but physics is not. I think that physics is a
category of awareness, and that no physical event can occur
independently of some kind of awareness of that event.

 and there
 is nothing more to be said about it then I don't see why you would make the
 dogmatic assertion that you made above.

Because you still don't understand what I'm talking about.


  We have evidence of this in Blindsight,

 I don't find it surprising that physical brain damage can hinder the
 interpretation of information signals sent from the eyes to that damaged
 organ, nor do I see how it is relevant to what we were discussing.

With blindsight, we see that there is a difference between data
processing functions of optical detection and visual awareness. Visual
awareness doesn't just happen because you are able to detect optical
stimulation. This means that any kind of evolutionary biological
argument that suggests that perception just comes with the territory
automatically with the evolution of function is bogus.


  and in the lack of indications of any sort of feeling from all data
  processing equipment we have ever constructed.

 What sort of indication were you looking for, what sort of thing would
 convince you?

When a computer intentionally tries to physically injure its
programmer, that will convince me. If a computer begs not to be turned
off, if it lies to trick us into improving it's hardware, if it got
tired of doing a repetitive task, if it tried to communicate in an
unscripted way, etc. The normal things that would indicate to anyone
that something was alive and awake and not a machine.


   Acting on the reason you created =  Free Will

 So this thing called free will is deterministic whatever the hell it is,
 it was caused by the reason you created,

No. Making up your mind is not caused by a reason created by making up
your mind. It is primordial. Free will is outbound awareness. It is
beneath causality. Since we are complex beings made up of so many
nested frames of awareness, we have a lot of influences to inform us,
some more insistently than others, but in many cases those influences
have no care one way or the other and  it is us ourselves who decide
what we prefer. Our preferring is not the cause of free will, it is
free will and causality being created live.

 and if you created that reason for
 a reason then it's deterministic too; and it you did not created that
 reason for a reason then it's random, there is no third alternative.

You are talking like a broken record (which is exactly what a universe
of only determinism or randomness would be). I reject your false
dichotomy and have explained repeatedly why I do, and why anyone
should if they examine ordinary experience without prejudice and
presumption.


  even random processes are determined

 If it's determined then it's not random.

No, that's factually incorrect. I can say that random = determined by
random selection. If I flip a coin or roll dice, the outcome is
determined by many different physical forces and consequences
interacting. The result occurs within a range of heads or tails, 2-12
etc. You could say that rolling dice is random, or that it isn't
completely random, or that is entirely determined, but even if it were
completely random, you can't say that the outcome is completely
undetermined. The dice aren't going to come up 45. The coin isn't
going to turn into a potato. Randomness is a concept of statistical
selection and nothing more. It's not fundamental to reality.


  within expected ranges of possible outcomes.

 And sometime the expected happens and sometimes it does not. The movement
 of a gas molecule is random and if you put a bunch of them into a container
 the probability any single gas molecule will hit the side of the container
 is random, however you can calculate a good approximation of the pressure
 on the container but only because you are dealing with a astronomically
 large number of molecules. If one molecule randomly moves in one direction
 you can be pretty certain another molecule is randomly moving in the
 diametrically opposite direction and the randomness cancels out, so you can
 work out the average collision rate of molecules hitting the side of the
 container, in other words you can calculate the pressure. But the
 individual molecules still move at random.

The random molecules could be moving where they feel like moving. The
idea

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-02 Thread John Clark

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 5:12 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:

 If awareness is primordial,


I think it's fundamental.


  there is really nothing more or less to say about it other than that it
 is primordial orientation itself.


So awareness is the feeling data has when it is being processed, and there
is not much more you can say about it.

  You don't seem to get that color doesn't exist outside of our awareness
 of it.


Of course I get it, it's not as if it's a new or profound idea

 No, you don't need a reason to act on the reason that you create.


That makes not one bit of sense. If you act on the reason you created then
it's deterministic, if you don't then it's random and  the reason that you
create is totally irrelevant to the question of why you acted as you did.
Read what you wrote above and then spend at least 5 seconds thinking about
it and I think you will find this is one of those sentences we were talking
about that were written for no reason whatsoever, in other words gibberish.

 You are creating it for no other purpose.


Then it's deterministic caused by these nameless other purpose things.

 You are making up your mind.


And if you ask a computer to find the prime factors of a very large number
you may have to wait a long time to see what it decides to do while the
machine makes up its mind.

 So your preference for X was caused by your preference for X.


  Yes,


Then what you are saying is not very deep.

 the idea of cause is redundant. You just prefer something


If your preference had no cause then it's random.

 You can use that preference as a cause of actions


Obviously.


  and the preference itself arises from entangled ensembles of causes


Then it's deterministic.

Let me now summarize the argument you've been making over the last week or
so, on Monday Wednesday and Friday you say all human actions are
deterministic, on Tuesday Thursday and Saturday you say all human actions
are random, and on Sunday you're a bit confused and say it's not caused by
X and simultaneously not not caused by X.

  John K Clark

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-02 Thread Craig Weinberg

On May 2, 1:29 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 5:12 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:

  If awareness is primordial,

 I think it's fundamental.

Do you consider the terms to be the same or different?


   there is really nothing more or less to say about it other than that it
  is primordial orientation itself.

 So awareness is the feeling data has when it is being processed, and there
 is not much more you can say about it.

Data has no feeling when it is being processed. We have evidence of
this in Blindsight, and in the lack of indications of any sort of
feeling from all data processing equipment we have ever constructed.


   You don't seem to get that color doesn't exist outside of our awareness

  of it.

 Of course I get it, it's not as if it's a new or profound idea

I didn't say it was, but it sounds like you are saying that color, as
in the yellow light, would still exist even if nothing could ever see
it.


  No, you don't need a reason to act on the reason that you create.

 That makes not one bit of sense. If you act on the reason you created then
 it's deterministic,

Acting on the reason you created =  Free Will
You can call it deterministic, because someone indeed is determining
it, but it makes the term determinism meaningless, since even random
processes are determined within expected ranges of possible outcomes.
The experience of voluntarily deciding on some course of action is
universally understood to be distinctly different from doing something
by accident, involuntarily, or by coercion. It's a different dynamic
which does not reduce to passive spectatorship of an external order.

 if you don't then it's random and  the reason that you
 create is totally irrelevant to the question of why you acted as you did.
 Read what you wrote above and then spend at least 5 seconds thinking about
 it and I think you will find this is one of those sentences we were talking
 about that were written for no reason whatsoever, in other words gibberish.

If you are waiting for me to accept the absurd idea that the universe
must be only divided into categories of random or determined, then
don't hold your breath. Free will is ordinary, not magic, and
absolutely represents a third fundamental alternative that is neither
purely random/determined, nor non-random/non-determined but plays off
of all of those categories.


  You are creating it for no other purpose.

 Then it's deterministic caused by these nameless other purpose things.

If I decide to type this sentence, I don't need to create a reason to
do it, I just decide what I want to say and type it. There are all
kinds of potential reasons why I would type something and not
something else, but by choosing which of those reasons to privilege or
ignore, as well as many other factors which are not necessarily
reasonable, I freely choose my actions. I use reason, but I am
independent of it as well to a degree.


  You are making up your mind.

 And if you ask a computer to find the prime factors of a very large number
 you may have to wait a long time to see what it decides to do while the
 machine makes up its mind.

It's not making up its mind, you can stop it at any point in the
calculation and see precisely where in the process it is. Another
computer could pick it up just as easily. Computation is not making up
any mind, it's just latency in producing a report.


  So your preference for X was caused by your preference for X.

   Yes,

 Then what you are saying is not very deep.

Free will isn't deep, it is primitively simple and obvious.


  the idea of cause is redundant. You just prefer something

 If your preference had no cause then it's random.

No, preferring something is neither random nor non-random. It is part
of the capacities of sentient beings. We have preferences on different
levels, preferences as human beings, as Americans, as men, etc, but we
also have idiosyncratic preferences too that we can change and create
dynamically. It is an important part of what makes us alive.


  You can use that preference as a cause of actions

 Obviously.

   and the preference itself arises from entangled ensembles of causes

 Then it's deterministic.

No. It's like a clutch. The gears are deterministic, but you have to
decide when to put in the clutch and pick which gear you want. The
transmission is deterministic but the driver operates it
intentionally.


 Let me now summarize the argument you've been making over the last week or
 so, on Monday Wednesday and Friday you say all human actions are
 deterministic, on Tuesday Thursday and Saturday you say all human actions
 are random, and on Sunday you're a bit confused and say it's not caused by
 X and simultaneously not not caused by X.

When have I ever said that all human actions are deterministic or
random? I have never been confused on this issue in any sense as far
as I am aware. My position has been clear from the start. Note the
title of this

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-01 Thread John Clark

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:


  You can choose to create a new reason and act based on that.


Certainly, and you created a new reason and acted on that for a reason OR
you did not, there is no third alternative.

 You did X rather than Y because you preferred X, and you preferred X for
 a reason OR  you preferred X for no reason, there is no third alternative.



 The third alternative is that you cause your own preference for X.


So your preference for X was caused by your preference for X.
Philosophically I'm afraid that is not very enlightening, Newton would not
be famous if all he had said was apples fall from trees because apples fall
from trees.

you can actually determine your own preference in real time.


Yes in real time, that is to say you often don't know what you are going to
do until you do it, just as you often don't know what word you will say
next until you say it, and when you do say or do it you are often as
surprised as anyone at the result.

 We call it 'making up our minds'.


Yes, or you could call it finishing a calculation, and you don't know
what the result of a calculation will be until you finish it.

 but everybody agrees that a yellow traffic light is a traffic signal
 that is yellow,


 If you are going to get technical, no, color blind people do not agree
 that it is yellow.


Being color blind does not make you stupid, they agree that a yellow
traffic light is a traffic light that is yellow, they also agree that a
klogknee light is a light that is klogknee even if they don't know what
klogknee is; they even agree that a klognee spifflow is a spifflow that is
klogknee.

  John K Clark

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-05-01 Thread Craig Weinberg

On May 1, 1:49 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:

   You can choose to create a new reason and act based on that.

 Certainly, and you created a new reason and acted on that for a reason OR
 you did not, there is no third alternative.

No, you don't need a reason to act on the reason that you create. You
are creating it for no other purpose. You are making up your mind.


  You did X rather than Y because you preferred X, and you preferred X for
  a reason OR  you preferred X for no reason, there is no third alternative.

  The third alternative is that you cause your own preference for X.

 So your preference for X was caused by your preference for X.

Yes, the idea of cause is redundant. You just prefer something
actively. You can use that preference as a cause of actions, and the
preference itself arises from entangled ensembles of causes, but your
mind is the instrument which ties it together into a creative event.

 Philosophically I'm afraid that is not very enlightening, Newton would not
 be famous if all he had said was apples fall from trees because apples fall
 from trees.

Newton wasn't studying awareness itself though. If awareness is
primordial, there is really nothing more or less to say about it other
than that it is primordial orientation itself.


 you can actually determine your own preference in real time.

 Yes in real time, that is to say you often don't know what you are going to
 do until you do it, just as you often don't know what word you will say
 next until you say it, and when you do say or do it you are often as
 surprised as anyone at the result.

That's true, but it doesn't mean that who it is that is determining
what you say isn't also you. Our consciousness is really complex and
nested, all of the parts of ourselves aren't all presented
simultaneously. Part of you can be making a decision while another
part is unaware of it in one sense but aware of it in another.
Interior dynamics aren't discrete like physical systems, they are
figurative and ambiguous.



  We call it 'making up our minds'.

 Yes, or you could call it finishing a calculation, and you don't know
 what the result of a calculation will be until you finish it.

That isn't how it works though. We don't arrive at a result at all, we
fluctuate and approximate. We participate and persuade ourselves. It's
completely the opposite of a computer, which always arrives at the
same result given the same conditions. The computer has no preference,
ever.


  but everybody agrees that a yellow traffic light is a traffic signal
  that is yellow,

  If you are going to get technical, no, color blind people do not agree
  that it is yellow.

 Being color blind does not make you stupid, they agree that a yellow
 traffic light is a traffic light that is yellow,

Huh? No. Color blind people agree to follow a colorless traffic light
and call it yellow, sure, but it's never going to be a traffic light
that is yellow to them if they can't see yellow.

 they also agree that a
 klogknee light is a light that is klogknee even if they don't know what
 klogknee is; they even agree that a klognee spifflow is a spifflow that is
 klogknee.

They would agree that it is for other people, and they learn how to
act in the right social context, but that doesn't make it so for them.
You don't seem to get that color doesn't exist outside of our
awareness of it.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-30 Thread 1Z



On Apr 30, 2:53 am, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 4/29/2012 6:37 PM, 1Z wrote:











  On Apr 30, 2:30 am, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:
  On 4/29/2012 5:26 PM, 1Z wrote:

  On Apr 29, 8:37 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net    wrote:
  On 4/29/2012 3:22 AM, 1Z wrote:
  On Apr 27, 11:19 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net     wrote:
  That's why I said, except for people who believe in philosophical 
  zombies.
  Brent
  A quailess AI isn;t a p-zombie. A p-zombie is physically identical to
  a human. An AI will be
  made out of silicon or something, which could naturalsitically explain
  its lack of qualia.
  That is a different matter. With the possible exception of Craig, we
  all think our  toasters are
  zombies.
  But if our robots behave as intelligently as humans we (except Craig) 
  will suppose they
  have qualia too.
  Brent
  I don't see e why. We already don't, i n several senses. We don't
  attribute qualia to gadget that are
  smarter than us at specific tasks such as playing chess. We also don't
  expect sci fi AIs such as Mr DataA
  to havea emotions or qualia...in fact we seem to have the intuition
  that they are qualiless *because* they
  are so one sidedly logical. Why would qualia help with intelligence
  anyway? If our AIs showed aesthetic  flair,
  empathy, artistic creatviity etc, that would be another matter. How
  could you be a great painter without colour
  qualia? But that's not exactly intelligence.
  By 'behave intelligently' I intended to convey 'with purpose and 
  reflection' and just
  'logical'.
  Why would reflection (higher order thought), or purpose, require
  qualia?
     I didn't say they would, I said we will suppose they have qualia.

  Brent
  I don;t think we would infer qualia from intelligence, because we seem
  not to at the moment.

 I think we do.  My dog acts intelligently and most people suppose he 
 experiences qualia.

I don't suppose he has solved any crosswords lately. On the other
hand, he is flesh
and blood, unlike the much more intelligent Mr Data.

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-30 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Apr 30, 12:02 am, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 4/29/2012 8:59 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

  On Apr 29, 11:40 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:

  So why is it that some people don't feel pain?
  You mean physiologically, like Leprosy or a spinal cord injury?

 No, genetically.  There is no specific 'receiving instrument' for pain.

There are many receiving instruments for pain. Noiciceptors, Aδ
fibers, C fibers, particular regions of the nervous system like the
dorsal horns of the spinal cord and thalamus. If those instruments are
damaged or genetically malformed, the person's conscious reception or
interpretation of pain may be altered. This isn't to say that
something like pain isn't still experienced on other levels by
individual cells or tissues of the body.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-30 Thread John Clark

On Sun, Apr 29, 201 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 You create the reason to act for many reasons, but you may not be
 determined by any one of them


So the reason you acted was the reason you created but that is not one of
the many reasons you acted. Well I'm glad you cleared that up and made
everything crystal clear, for a second there I almost thought you were
confused.


 Your preference can count as much as any other consideration.


You did X rather than Y because you preferred X, and you preferred X for a
reason OR  you preferred X for no reason, there is no third alternative.

 Bullshit.


 That isn't a rebuttal.


But it's the gospel truth nevertheless.


  I have no system for writing these words.


Not entirely true. Judging strictly from a semantic viewpoint you have a
point, it does seem close to random; but you do follow most of the laws of
English grammar and spelling so there is some system.

 I am writing them in real time based on nothing whatsoever other than
 what makes sense to me at the moment.


So if somebody asks you, as I have done many times, why did you write
that you have a answer for them, perhaps not a good answer, I certainly
don't think they were good answers, but at least you had a answer, a
reason, for writing what you did. If you had said I had absolutely no
reason for writing what I did, I just wrote it then you would be admitting
that what you wrote was unintelligent gibberish and conceding the
argument.

 A Yellow traffic light is not Go and it isn't Stop, but doesn't mean
 'don't stop' or 'don't go' either.


The meaning of a yellow light changes according to culture and circumstance
and is not inherent in the light itself, but everybody agrees that a yellow
traffic light is a traffic signal that is yellow, and everybody agrees that
a light, any light at all, is either yellow or it is not yellow, there is
no third alternative. A action itself is independent of culture, it either
happened or it didn't happen and if it did happen it happened for a reason
or it happen for no reason, there is no third alternative. In English the
word for things that happen for no reason is random.

  John K Clark

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-30 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 29 Apr 2012, at 18:04, Craig Weinberg wrote:


On Apr 29, 11:28 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:

Biologist have not make life disappearing, they have truly  
explained

the phenomenon, from other well accepted phenomena.
But saying that AI or brain research can dispose of the notion of
consciousness is just eliminitivism of a fact.
And this non-explanation relies on another sort of spurious elan
vital-like notion: primitive matter/physicalism.



Agree with everything you've said here.


Cool. Especially if you really agree with the idea that primitive
materialism is of the same type as élan vital.


Absolutely. Ideal monism and substance monism are mirror images.


I would not go that far ... It is more complex, imo.









Now comp explain both facts: the appearance of conscious
(incommunicable but knowable first person) truth and the appearance
of
the beliefs in primitive matter, and this without need to postulate
more than what we already believe in (addition and  
multiplication) of

numbers.



I almost agree but I think if we look closely at comp we will find
that it relies on even more primitive sense-making intuitions.


This is because you ignore the infinite non boundable power of the
primitive sense-making number intuitions.


Any power associated with numbers can only be realized through a
process of sense making. No byte, symbol, or number has ever done
anything by itself. Numbers are a currency of sense.


Well nothing do anything by itself. But it can do things by obeying  
some laws.

And numbers can be and do a lot of things when you postulate some laws.
Amazingly enough, when you just postulate not much more than the  
addition and multiplication laws, they can already do what any  
computer can do.
What can do a number? Well a number can divide another number, a  
number can play the role of a local body for some person, and such a  
person can behave, in some descriptive way, exactly like you and me.  
So, denying comp, introduce an infinities of zombies in arithmetic. We  
don't need that.










Addition and multiplication are rooted in the notion of self, other,
and self-similarity.


The contrary is easier to show.


Of course it is easier to show *mathematically*, but nothing having to
do with consciousness can be shown through mathematics alone, unless
it is being shown to a conscious agent.


In your theory, but it leads to zombie (even if you call them  
puppets), and it force you to postulate infinities, like if we have  
not enough infinities with the machines.







The self is rooted in the equation
phi_x() = x, which is the most simple and concrete amoeba.


That equation is not an amoeba.


Actually you are right. It is the solution of such equation which is  
an amoeba. The solution are programs which are able to produce  
themselves as output. They can be used to makes self-generating  
collection of programs, or machines able to look inward.





It is an idea which can be applied to
countless things real and imagined, but that doesn't make it anything
more or less than a map.


But a body is already a sort of map, for a computationalist. If you  
agree that there is no real substance, this should not be a problem.  
And machine's too take some time to understand that they are not their  
bodies. It is normal, because this asks for some non trivial act of  
faith (like saying yes to the doctor).




The equation is a metaphor; a menu, not a
meal. It will never be a meal not can a meal come out of it. The menu
is an afterthought that refers to the meal figuratively.


What is a meal, if you agree that matter is like elan vitale: a words  
filling a gap.
As long as your theory is not presented, it is hard to follow, or even  
to see why it is opposed to comp. It just look like you don't like  
machine, like some people don't like some other people.





The equation can be translated in term of addition and  
multiplication.

The addition and multiplication you are talking about is the human
intuition,


I'm not assuming human intuition, I am assuming that any form of
addition or multiplication relies on deeper sense-motive principles.


That is like saying: OK, I admit Earth is a ball, but that ball has  
still to rely on infinities of Turtle.
I cannot criticize you because I cannot understand sense-motive,  
except as a reification of intuition, but then it is like assuming  
what I am interested finding an explanation for.




In computer chips, leaves on a pond, whatever - it's all sense and
motive.


which needs the concrete abstract amoeba, the real
terrestrial ancestor amoeba, and many years of evolution. It is
obviously more complex and tainted from human selves, and historical
contingencies.


Certainly human consciousness adds access to deeper qualia associated
with mathematics, but ultimately numbers have no reality other than
experience and sense (which includes the capacity of sense to reflect
many experiences in one and one experience

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-30 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Apr 30, 12:47 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sun, Apr 29, 201 Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

  You create the reason to act for many reasons, but you may not be
  determined by any one of them

 So the reason you acted was the reason you created but that is not one of
 the many reasons you acted.

No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that creating the reason
(reasoning) is not necessarily dependent upon choosing a single
influence to make up your mind. You can choose to create a new reason
and act based on that.

 Well I'm glad you cleared that up and made
 everything crystal clear, for a second there I almost thought you were
 confused.

Trying to explain something that is obvious to someone who chooses to
deny it can be confusing.


  Your preference can count as much as any other consideration.

 You did X rather than Y because you preferred X, and you preferred X for a
 reason OR  you preferred X for no reason, there is no third alternative.

The third alternative is that you cause your own preference for X. You
don't have to have a predetermined preference, you can actually
determine your own preference in real time. We call it 'making up our
minds'.


  Bullshit.

  That isn't a rebuttal.

 But it's the gospel truth nevertheless.

It can't be. If it were true then I would agree with it.


   I have no system for writing these words.

 Not entirely true. Judging strictly from a semantic viewpoint you have a
 point, it does seem close to random; but you do follow most of the laws of
 English grammar and spelling so there is some system.

There is a system, but it isn't my system. There are systems and
protocols for English, which I comply with semi-consciously, but that
isn't the level of writing I am talking about. I'm not talking about
putting words together, I'm talking about expressing ideas in
sentences.


  I am writing them in real time based on nothing whatsoever other than
  what makes sense to me at the moment.

 So if somebody asks you, as I have done many times, why did you write
 that you have a answer for them, perhaps not a good answer, I certainly
 don't think they were good answers, but at least you had a answer, a
 reason, for writing what you did. If you had said I had absolutely no
 reason for writing what I did, I just wrote it then you would be admitting
 that what you wrote was unintelligent gibberish and conceding the
 argument.

There are all kinds of answers for 'why did I write that', but none of
them caused me to have to write it. It got written only because I made
up my mind to write it. It was neither determined for me by a pre-
existing reason, nor was it random.


  A Yellow traffic light is not Go and it isn't Stop, but doesn't mean
  'don't stop' or 'don't go' either.

 The meaning of a yellow light changes according to culture and circumstance
 and is not inherent in the light itself,

Yes. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm giving you a clear
illustration of how there can be a third alternative to stopping or
going but also isn't not stopping or not going. This example is
ordinary and non-trivial and makes my point conclusively.

 but everybody agrees that a yellow
 traffic light is a traffic signal that is yellow,

If you are going to get technical, no, color blind people do not agree
that it is yellow. Infants do not agree that it is a signal.

 and everybody agrees that
 a light, any light at all, is either yellow or it is not yellow, there is
 no third alternative.

There are thousands of shades of yellow, thousands of alternatives.

 A action itself is independent of culture, it either
 happened or it didn't happen and if it did happen it happened for a reason
 or it happen for no reason, there is no third alternative. In English the
 word for things that happen for no reason is random.

Every culture's language is based on notions of subjective choice.
Every culture on Earth recognizes the fundamental difference between
doing something by choice and doing it involuntarily. I don't see what
your arbitrary denial of this basic and universal human experience
accomplishes.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not




On Apr 27, 11:19 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

  That's why I said, except for people who believe in philosophical zombies.

  Brent
  A quailess AI isn;t a p-zombie. A p-zombie is physically identical to
  a human. An AI will be
  made out of silicon or something, which could naturalsitically explain
  its lack of qualia.
  That is a different matter. With the possible exception of Craig, we
  all think our  toasters are
  zombies.

 But if our robots behave as intelligently as humans we (except Craig) will 
 suppose they
 have qualia too.

 Brent

I don't see e why. We already don't, i n several senses. We don't
attribute qualia to gadget that are
smarter than us at specific tasks such as playing chess. We also don't
expect sci fi AIs such as Mr Data
to havea emotions or qualia...in fact we seem to have the intuition
that they are qualiless *because* they
are so one sidedly logical. Why would qualia help with intelligence
anyway? If our AIs showed aesthetic  flair,
empathy, artistic creatviity etc, that would be another matter. How
could you be a great painter without colour
qualia? But that's not exactly intelligence.

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not



On Apr 27, 9:16 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 4/27/2012 12:00 PM, 1Z wrote:



  On Apr 27, 7:13 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:
     We never explained where the elan vital was or where it came
  from.  We just came up with a different kind of 'explanation'.
  And the EV is supposed to be analgous to qualia? But that paralell
  doens;t work. The EV is dismissable
  because there was never prima facie evidence for it.

 Then why was it widely believed to exist?...because somethings were alive and 
 other
 seemingly identical things weren't.

Which is the PF evidence. EV was supposed to exist becuase of absence
of other
explanations for the evidene. Until other exlanations came along.

  However, qualia
  are prima facie evidence for everything
  else. I can;t just pretend that my pains don't hurt, etc.

 We don't pretend things aren't alive either.

Yep. Qualia are parallel to obvious signs of lfe. They are not
parallel to the posited hidden
motivating factor of life.

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not



On Apr 27, 9:29 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Apr 27, 11:38 am, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote:


 What do you say the efficient cause of feeling is?

Some priori brain state.

   What could make a brain state cause a feeling?

  A psychophsical law or identity.

 An omnipotence law could cause omnipotence too.

so?

   So it's a fallacy to say that X can exist because there could be a Law
   of X that allows it to exist.

  That doens't follow, and it isn't. Even if there is some specific
  problem with
  X=omnipotence, that doens;t mean there is for other values of X.

 I used X to show specifically that the whole principle of justifying
 something by saying maybe there is a law which makes it so is a
 fallacy.


There is no evidene of omnipotence. There is evidence for feelings.


 The notion of a cause is an idea - a feeling about order and sequence.

That doesn't mean a cause itself is.

   I think that it does. Without the possible perception of causality,
   what is 'cause'?

  What the perception is a perception of. A cat is what a perception of
  a cat is a perception of, etc.

 What makes you think that that it is possible for something to exist
 without being perceived by something (including itself)?

It seems likelier than things, such as the dark side of the moon, just
springig into existence the first time they are seen.

It's a common
 assumption, but I think it's totally empty. Existence, in reality, is
 nothing more or less than perception.


I think that is based on the kind of confusion you made above, between
X and perception-of-X.


 To have cause you have to have memory and narrative pattern
 recognition.

To *recognise* a cause you have to have memory and narrative pattern
recognition

   I'm not talking about human recognition in particular, I'm saying that
   ontologically you cannot have a 'cause' without something that
   remembers the initial condition and can detect that a change has
   occurred.

  Says who?

   Otherwise there is only a perpetual now, uncaused, with no
   memory.

  Says who?

 What difference does it make who says it? Can you refute it in some
 way?

I think it is more a case of can you support your exraordinary claims.

  There is no time, no changes, no events at all, just a
   perpetual forgetting and incomprehensible fragments.

  Says who?

 If I say that a square has four sides, will you ask the same thing?


That's not an extaordinary claim.


Only disconnected fragments.

Who told you that the universe absent huamns is disconnected? God?

   Who told you that perception requires humans? Nothing that I am
   talking about is limited to humans, other than the fact that we can
   only comment with certainty on our own perception.

  You presumamnly need some kind of panpsychism to
  prop up your perception driven view of relaity.

 You need some kind of mechanemorphism to prop up your prejudice
 against panpsychism.


  OTOH,
  people who think that things Just Are, don't need that posit.

 Of course they do, since their 'thinking' makes them completely
 different from any 'thing' that ever 'Just Was'.

Not completely different, since we can solve some problems in AI.

 This is the delusion
 of mechanism - that faith in disbelief somehow escapes the
 epistemological bankruptcy of faith in belief.


   I believe that you think that, but I can't see how. When we say the
   word I followed by any verb, we are saying ' this self does X of
   it's own free will'.

  Naah. Eg I trip over and break my arm.

 I trip is still free will compared to 'I was pushed'.

Why would  want to break my arm?

 Accidents can
 still be willed, and with different degrees of consciousness.

How do you know that isn't deterministic?  A lot of people would say
that your desires
cause your action, and you can't choose your desires.

   There is bi-directional feedback. You can choose which of your many
   desires to privilege with attention, action, etc. We tell our body
   what to do, it tells us what to do.

  There are various theories. You don't know it isn;t deterministic.

 I know that it doesn't make sense for it to exist if it were
 deterministic.

You don't know that things can only exist if they need to.


 According to you nobody can say anything except what they are
 determined to say,

I am not sayign determinism is true, just that FW isn;t true apropri
in the way you keep saying.

   I'm saying the opposite, that the fact FW is even conceivable means
   that determinism is not true.

  That arguemnt doens't work. That somehting is conceivable
  does not make it really possible let alone actual.

 I didn't say that it did. I say that it means determinism is not
 universally true. If color didn't exist, you could not conceive of
 color. If you can conceive of color - that means that the universe
 can't only be black and white.

That argument doens't

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-29 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 12:49 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 It's standard use of language that if something is not determined it
 is random.

 I have never heard of that in my life. Did you say that because you
 had no choice or was it random?

If something is determined it follows necessarily from the
antecedents; if it does not follow necessarily from the antecedents
then it is uncaused or indeterminate or random. That's how people use
these words.

Note that something can be determined but unpredictable, or random but
highly predictable. Most complex natural phenomena are determined but
unpredictable; radioactive decay is random but highly predictable.

 Determined means it's not random and random means it's not
 determined.

 Why? Random is determined randomly. Free will is determined
 intentionally. So what? Word games.

The above definitions of determined and random I mentioned above are
well-understood and agreed to by most participants in debates about
free will. Choice, free will, intentionality are not so well defined.
For example, some would say that people have a choice in a
deterministic universe and some would say that they don't.

 When someone is found guilty of a crime that has nothing
 to do with whether their behaviour is determined or random.

 That would be news to attorneys and judges who spend their lives
 splitting hairs over liability.

The question is whether the understood what he was doing and was in a
position to make a different decision. This does not necessarily have
anything to do with whether the brain functions on deterministic or
random processes.

The
 consideration the legal system uses is, essentially, whether punishing
 the crime would make a difference.

 What are you talking about? Designations such as Murder, manslaughter,
 criminal negligence, etc have nothing whatsoever to do with the
 effects intended by punishment and everything to do with ascertaining
 liability. The criminal justice system is designed to do one thing
 only: assess guilt, ie degree of intentionality in a criminal act, and
 punish accordingly.

One of the main purposes of punishment is deterrence. If a person has
no understanding or control over his actions, there is no deterrence,
so (usually) the criminal justice system does not punish them. The
sleepwalker is one example: knowing that sleepwalkers who commit
crimes will be punished is not going to deter sleepwalkers from
committing crimes.

 It will deter a criminal if he
 knows he will be punished since the fear of punishment will enter the
 deterministic or probabilistic equation, swaying the decision in
 favour of not offending.

 You are mistaking your philosophy for the criminal justice system. Can
 you find any example in any legal code which implies these kinds of
 considerations?

Yes, people who would not be deterred by punishment because they don't
understand or can't control their actions are usually not punished, or
at least not punished so severely. This is the law being pragmatic as
well as just.

  On the other hand, it is pointless to punish
 a sleepwalker: sleepwalkers do make decisions, but they are probably
 not the kinds of decisions that are influenced by fear of
 consequences.

 Without free will, we are all sleepwalkers. Consequences can only
 impact our behavior if we are able to choose what our behavior will
 be.

An interesting example is seen in schizophrenia. Some patients
experience auditory hallucinations of a command nature and feel they
are unable to resist them. Terrible things have happened as a result,
including murder. The patient says that he did not want to do what the
voices said, knew it was wrong, struggled against it but still did it.
In a sense, they suffer from a disease of their free will, and they
are usually found not guilty on the grounds of insanity if their story
is considered credible. We don't really understand what the deficit is
in schizophrenia, but it seems unlikely that it affects the
fundamental physics of the brain.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 4/29/2012 3:22 AM, 1Z wrote:



On Apr 27, 11:19 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:


That's why I said, except for people who believe in philosophical zombies.
Brent

A quailess AI isn;t a p-zombie. A p-zombie is physically identical to
a human. An AI will be
made out of silicon or something, which could naturalsitically explain
its lack of qualia.
That is a different matter. With the possible exception of Craig, we
all think our  toasters are
zombies.

But if our robots behave as intelligently as humans we (except Craig) will 
suppose they
have qualia too.

Brent

I don't see e why. We already don't, i n several senses. We don't
attribute qualia to gadget that are
smarter than us at specific tasks such as playing chess. We also don't
expect sci fi AIs such as Mr Data
to havea emotions or qualia...in fact we seem to have the intuition
that they are qualiless *because* they
are so one sidedly logical. Why would qualia help with intelligence
anyway? If our AIs showed aesthetic  flair,
empathy, artistic creatviity etc, that would be another matter. How
could you be a great painter without colour
qualia? But that's not exactly intelligence.

By 'behave intelligently' I intended to convey 'with purpose and reflection' and just 
'logical'.


Brent

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On Apr 29, 1:26 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Sat, Apr 28, 2012  Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

  How many times do you want me to restate the obvious third alternative

 42.

  YOU CREATE the reason to act.

 OK, then you create the reason to act for a reason OR you create the reason
 to act for no reason, there is no third alternative.

You create the reason to act for many reasons, but you may not be
determined by any one of them to make the choice you make. Your own
capacity to create a reason (ie to 'reason') is as causally
efficacious as any of the outside influences. Your preference can
count as much as any other consideration.


  You are saying that whatever is done in a non-systematic way has no
  cause.

 Yes.

  That is a the most basic logical fallacy there is.

 Bullshit.

That isn't a rebuttal.


   You are erroneously assuming that all causes are systematic

 If it was caused then something about it must be systematic.

I understand that you believe that, but I think that it's an
unexamined assumption. I have no system for writing these words. I am
writing them in real time based on nothing whatsoever other than what
makes sense to me at the moment. Why do you have to make that
systematic? Can't you just let it be what it is?

 If not, if
 it's a miracle and not repeatable

If it's a miracle it's quite an ordinary miracle, as every living
person and many animals participate in it continuously. Exercising
your will may not be as repeatable as a machine, but it's repeatable
enough for most purposes.

 and you still insist on calling it a
 cause then the word cause has no meaning, or at least it becomes
 operationally indistinguishable from the word random.

Not random. Not systematically determined. Spontaneously generated
from consciousness. This is the primary function of consciousness. To
change the self and the world from the inside out, countering the
random and systematic changes imposed from the outside in. If you had
to make the universe from scratch, that is the way you would have to
do it if you wanted to create experiences like we have.


  My point is that intention is neither caused entirely by a system nor it
  is entirely without a system - will is the creation of system; a third
  option.

 So you think X is not Y and you also think X is not not Y, now THAT sort of
 doublethink is the most basic logical fallacy there is.

A Yellow traffic light is not Go and it isn't Stop, but doesn't mean
'don't stop' or 'don't go' either. Your assumption of black and white
thinking is the problem, not reality. I am only describing common,
ordinary reality in the simplest and most straightforward terms I
know.


  You are determined by your will?

 Yes, or at least you want to be determined by your will, but sometimes
 events conspire in such a way that you can't always get what you want; a
 great Rolling Stones song by the way.

But are you a passive spectator of an alien force or can you influence
some things in some ways?


  So you think we should say I am walked across the street by my will.

 Obviously, although that's a rather awkward way of phrasing it; I usually
 just say I'm walking across the street because I want to, of course just
 like everything else I want to for a reason OR I want to for no reason.

It doesn't work. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because road
crossing determined to express itself as a chicken.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not



On Apr 29, 8:37 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 4/29/2012 3:22 AM, 1Z wrote:









  On Apr 27, 11:19 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:

  That's why I said, except for people who believe in philosophical 
  zombies.
  Brent
  A quailess AI isn;t a p-zombie. A p-zombie is physically identical to
  a human. An AI will be
  made out of silicon or something, which could naturalsitically explain
  its lack of qualia.
  That is a different matter. With the possible exception of Craig, we
  all think our  toasters are
  zombies.
  But if our robots behave as intelligently as humans we (except Craig) will 
  suppose they
  have qualia too.

  Brent
  I don't see e why. We already don't, i n several senses. We don't
  attribute qualia to gadget that are
  smarter than us at specific tasks such as playing chess. We also don't
  expect sci fi AIs such as Mr DataA
  to havea emotions or qualia...in fact we seem to have the intuition
  that they are qualiless *because* they
  are so one sidedly logical. Why would qualia help with intelligence
  anyway? If our AIs showed aesthetic  flair,
  empathy, artistic creatviity etc, that would be another matter. How
  could you be a great painter without colour
  qualia? But that's not exactly intelligence.

 By 'behave intelligently' I intended to convey 'with purpose and reflection' 
 and just
 'logical'.

Why would reflection (higher order thought), or purpose, require
qualia?

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 4/29/2012 5:26 PM, 1Z wrote:


On Apr 29, 8:37 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:

On 4/29/2012 3:22 AM, 1Z wrote:










On Apr 27, 11:19 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net   wrote:

That's why I said, except for people who believe in philosophical zombies.
Brent

A quailess AI isn;t a p-zombie. A p-zombie is physically identical to
a human. An AI will be
made out of silicon or something, which could naturalsitically explain
its lack of qualia.
That is a different matter. With the possible exception of Craig, we
all think our  toasters are
zombies.

But if our robots behave as intelligently as humans we (except Craig) will 
suppose they
have qualia too.
Brent

I don't see e why. We already don't, i n several senses. We don't
attribute qualia to gadget that are
smarter than us at specific tasks such as playing chess. We also don't
expect sci fi AIs such as Mr DataA
to havea emotions or qualia...in fact we seem to have the intuition
that they are qualiless *because* they
are so one sidedly logical. Why would qualia help with intelligence
anyway? If our AIs showed aesthetic  flair,
empathy, artistic creatviity etc, that would be another matter. How
could you be a great painter without colour
qualia? But that's not exactly intelligence.

By 'behave intelligently' I intended to convey 'with purpose and reflection' 
and just
'logical'.

Why would reflection (higher order thought), or purpose, require
qualia?


 I didn't say they would, I said we will suppose they have qualia.

Brent

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not



On Apr 30, 2:30 am, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 4/29/2012 5:26 PM, 1Z wrote:









  On Apr 29, 8:37 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:
  On 4/29/2012 3:22 AM, 1Z wrote:

  On Apr 27, 11:19 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net   wrote:
  That's why I said, except for people who believe in philosophical 
  zombies.
  Brent
  A quailess AI isn;t a p-zombie. A p-zombie is physically identical to
  a human. An AI will be
  made out of silicon or something, which could naturalsitically explain
  its lack of qualia.
  That is a different matter. With the possible exception of Craig, we
  all think our  toasters are
  zombies.
  But if our robots behave as intelligently as humans we (except Craig) 
  will suppose they
  have qualia too.
  Brent
  I don't see e why. We already don't, i n several senses. We don't
  attribute qualia to gadget that are
  smarter than us at specific tasks such as playing chess. We also don't
  expect sci fi AIs such as Mr DataA
  to havea emotions or qualia...in fact we seem to have the intuition
  that they are qualiless *because* they
  are so one sidedly logical. Why would qualia help with intelligence
  anyway? If our AIs showed aesthetic  flair,
  empathy, artistic creatviity etc, that would be another matter. How
  could you be a great painter without colour
  qualia? But that's not exactly intelligence.
  By 'behave intelligently' I intended to convey 'with purpose and 
  reflection' and just
  'logical'.
  Why would reflection (higher order thought), or purpose, require
  qualia?

   I didn't say they would, I said we will suppose they have qualia.

 Brent

I don;t think we would infer qualia from intelligence, because we seem
not to at the moment.

And if qualia are not needed for intellgence, it would not work as an
abductive argument anyway.

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 4/29/2012 6:37 PM, 1Z wrote:


On Apr 30, 2:30 am, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:

On 4/29/2012 5:26 PM, 1Z wrote:










On Apr 29, 8:37 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.netwrote:

On 4/29/2012 3:22 AM, 1Z wrote:

On Apr 27, 11:19 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net wrote:

That's why I said, except for people who believe in philosophical zombies.
Brent

A quailess AI isn;t a p-zombie. A p-zombie is physically identical to
a human. An AI will be
made out of silicon or something, which could naturalsitically explain
its lack of qualia.
That is a different matter. With the possible exception of Craig, we
all think our  toasters are
zombies.

But if our robots behave as intelligently as humans we (except Craig) will 
suppose they
have qualia too.
Brent

I don't see e why. We already don't, i n several senses. We don't
attribute qualia to gadget that are
smarter than us at specific tasks such as playing chess. We also don't
expect sci fi AIs such as Mr DataA
to havea emotions or qualia...in fact we seem to have the intuition
that they are qualiless *because* they
are so one sidedly logical. Why would qualia help with intelligence
anyway? If our AIs showed aesthetic  flair,
empathy, artistic creatviity etc, that would be another matter. How
could you be a great painter without colour
qualia? But that's not exactly intelligence.

By 'behave intelligently' I intended to convey 'with purpose and reflection' 
and just
'logical'.

Why would reflection (higher order thought), or purpose, require
qualia?

   I didn't say they would, I said we will suppose they have qualia.

Brent

I don;t think we would infer qualia from intelligence, because we seem
not to at the moment.


I think we do.  My dog acts intelligently and most people suppose he 
experiences qualia.

Brent

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On Apr 29, 9:53 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:


 I think we do.  My dog acts intelligently and most people suppose he 
 experiences qualia.

Do we think a stupid dog experiences qualia which is not as rich as
that of a smart dog? Pain does not hurt as much for a dog that doesn't
know how to roll over on command?

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 4/29/2012 8:03 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Apr 29, 9:53 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:


I think we do.  My dog acts intelligently and most people suppose he 
experiences qualia.

Do we think a stupid dog experiences qualia which is not as rich as
that of a smart dog?


No, but I suppose that an oyster does not experience qualia as rich as that of 
a dog.


Pain does not hurt as much for a dog that doesn't
know how to roll over on command?


Pain is pretty basic.  But it is evolutionarily related to possible reactions.

Brent

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On Apr 29, 11:17 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 4/29/2012 8:03 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

  On Apr 29, 9:53 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:

  I think we do.  My dog acts intelligently and most people suppose he 
  experiences qualia.
  Do we think a stupid dog experiences qualia which is not as rich as
  that of a smart dog?

 No, but I suppose that an oyster does not experience qualia as rich as that 
 of a dog.

I agree, but not necessarily because the oyster isn't intelligent as
much as it more phylogenetically distant from Homo sapiens than a
dog.

For instance, cetaceans are more intelligent than fish but I don't
have an intuitive feel for how the qualia a dolphin experiences from
that of a shark. I suspect that how I relate to both species as a
member of Homo sapiens is to blame for that. I imagine that a dolphin
might be offended to be compared to a shark (well, I don't know if
dolphins have the ego to feel offended in that way, but still).


  Pain does not hurt as much for a dog that doesn't
  know how to roll over on command?

 Pain is pretty basic.  But it is evolutionarily related to possible reactions.

I don't think it can be evolutionarily related to anything. Not
biological evolution anyhow. Pain in and of itself has no functional
connection to any reactions. Our experience of pain influences us, but
there is no mechanical reason that would be the case. It could be a
feeling of dizzyness or no feeling at all that influences us instead.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 4/29/2012 8:34 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Apr 29, 11:17 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:

On 4/29/2012 8:03 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


On Apr 29, 9:53 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.netwrote:

I think we do.  My dog acts intelligently and most people suppose he 
experiences qualia.

Do we think a stupid dog experiences qualia which is not as rich as
that of a smart dog?

No, but I suppose that an oyster does not experience qualia as rich as that of 
a dog.

I agree, but not necessarily because the oyster isn't intelligent as
much as it more phylogenetically distant from Homo sapiens than a
dog.

For instance, cetaceans are more intelligent than fish but I don't
have an intuitive feel for how the qualia a dolphin experiences from
that of a shark. I suspect that how I relate to both species as a
member of Homo sapiens is to blame for that. I imagine that a dolphin
might be offended to be compared to a shark (well, I don't know if
dolphins have the ego to feel offended in that way, but still).


Pain does not hurt as much for a dog that doesn't
know how to roll over on command?

Pain is pretty basic.  But it is evolutionarily related to possible reactions.

I don't think it can be evolutionarily related to anything. Not
biological evolution anyhow. Pain in and of itself has no functional
connection to any reactions. Our experience of pain influences us, but
there is no mechanical reason that would be the case.


So why is it that some people don't feel pain?

Brent


It could be a
feeling of dizzyness or no feeling at all that influences us instead.

Craig



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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On Apr 29, 11:40 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:


 So why is it that some people don't feel pain?

You mean physiologically, like Leprosy or a spinal cord injury?

If your receiving instrument is damaged, you can't properly access the
experiences that others can. Lose your internet connection, no email.
It doesn't mean that email is produced by router for it's own
purposes.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not


On 4/29/2012 8:59 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:

On Apr 29, 11:40 pm, meekerdbmeeke...@verizon.net  wrote:


So why is it that some people don't feel pain?

You mean physiologically, like Leprosy or a spinal cord injury?


No, genetically.  There is no specific 'receiving instrument' for pain.

Brent

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-28 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 28 Apr 2012, at 03:05, meekerdb wrote:


On 4/27/2012 5:41 PM, John Mikes wrote:


David, IZ, Brent:
do you have some fairly acceptable (for whom?) ID


Intelligent Design??


about that darn 'vita'?
That would ease the problem to accept or reject EV. Some people  
'ride' the Terrestrial Biosphere churning of C-based molecules  
(some add: MR = metabolism and repair) but there may be more to  
it. And if there IS more to it, there may be special circumstances  
(even qualia?) to get into it (EV?)


Maybe, but why suppose there's more to it before exhausting the  
model that has worked so well for so long?


Because by construction it eliminates consciousness.

When biologists eliminate the elan vital, by using chemistry instead,  
there is a real progress because they eliminate a spurious linguistic  
gap-type explanation by an explanation from conceptually more simple  
notions.


But consciousness has never been proposed as an explanation of  
something. On the contrary, it is more the fact that we search an  
explanation for.


Biologist have not make life disappearing, they have truly explained  
the phenomenon, from other well accepted phenomena.
But saying that AI or brain research can dispose of the notion of  
consciousness is just eliminitivism of a fact.
And this non-explanation relies on another sort of spurious elan  
vital-like notion: primitive matter/physicalism.


Now comp explain both facts: the appearance of conscious  
(incommunicable but knowable first person) truth and the appearance of  
the beliefs in primitive matter, and this without need to postulate  
more than what we already believe in (addition and multiplication) of  
numbers.


So, if we apply your logic, it seems clear that the spurious idea is  
more the idea of physicalism and materialism we should eliminate,  
instead of consciousness, which no conscious being can eliminated  
without lying to him/herself.




Brent
“There is another  form of temptation, even more fraught with  
danger.  This is the  disease of curiosity….  It is this which draws  
us to try and discover  the secrets of nature, those secrets which  
are beyond our  understanding, which can avail us nothing, and which  
man should not  wish to learn.” -- St. Augustine


In other words: don't ask. St. Augustine did not read Plotinus enough.  
His thought here is a bit like what many popes said: science is the  
devil.


Bruno

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



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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-28 Thread Craig Weinberg

On Apr 28, 4:29 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:


 Because by construction it eliminates consciousness.

 When biologists eliminate the elan vital, by using chemistry instead,
 there is a real progress because they eliminate a spurious linguistic
 gap-type explanation by an explanation from conceptually more simple
 notions.

 But consciousness has never been proposed as an explanation of
 something. On the contrary, it is more the fact that we search an
 explanation for.

 Biologist have not make life disappearing, they have truly explained
 the phenomenon, from other well accepted phenomena.
 But saying that AI or brain research can dispose of the notion of
 consciousness is just eliminitivism of a fact.
 And this non-explanation relies on another sort of spurious elan
 vital-like notion: primitive matter/physicalism.

Agree with everything you've said here.


 Now comp explain both facts: the appearance of conscious
 (incommunicable but knowable first person) truth and the appearance of
 the beliefs in primitive matter, and this without need to postulate
 more than what we already believe in (addition and multiplication) of
 numbers.

I almost agree but I think if we look closely at comp we will find
that it relies on even more primitive sense-making intuitions.
Addition and multiplication are rooted in the notion of self, other,
and self-similarity. They require a sense-motive participation to
maintain a recursive process. Something has to know that something is
being computed, especially if that thing is what is doing the
computation. For this reason, I see that comp is a third elan vital-
like primitive, no more primary than either consciousness or matter.
What all three of these primordial concepts have in common is sense.
The ability to detect something, and detect it as being similar or
different from everything or nothing. Without the capacity to tune
into those kinds of symmetries, there can be no matter, no numbers,
and no consciousness. The universe has to make sense before we can
make sense of it. Numbers are a kind of sense, as is matter, emotion
and mind.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-28 Thread meekerdb


On 4/28/2012 1:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 28 Apr 2012, at 03:05, meekerdb wrote:


On 4/27/2012 5:41 PM, John Mikes wrote:


David, IZ, Brent:
do you have some fairly acceptable (for whom?) ID


Intelligent Design??


about that darn 'vita'?
That would ease the problem to accept or reject EV. Some people 'ride' the Terrestrial 
Biosphere churning of C-based molecules (some add: MR = metabolism and repair) but 
there may be more to it. And if there IS more to it, there may be special 
circumstances (even qualia?) to get into it (EV?)


Maybe, but why suppose there's more to it before exhausting the model that has worked 
so well for so long?


Because by construction it eliminates consciousness.

When biologists eliminate the elan vital, by using chemistry instead, there is a real 
progress because they eliminate a spurious linguistic gap-type explanation by an 
explanation from conceptually more simple notions.


But consciousness has never been proposed as an explanation of something. On the 
contrary, it is more the fact that we search an explanation for.


Biologist have not make life disappearing, they have truly explained the phenomenon, 
from other well accepted phenomena.
But saying that AI or brain research can dispose of the notion of consciousness is just 
eliminitivism of a fact.
And this non-explanation relies on another sort of spurious elan vital-like notion: 
primitive matter/physicalism.


Now comp explain both facts: the appearance of conscious (incommunicable but knowable 
first person) truth and the appearance of the beliefs in primitive matter, and this 
without need to postulate more than what we already believe in (addition and 
multiplication) of numbers.


It is novel and interesting and maybe it will result in some predictive power, and I wish 
you all success.  But it seems to me it too is a model; there is nothing in arithmetic or 
computation that says, Here, this is conscious and that isn't.  So you are saying, 
suppose we identify formal proof with the feeling of belief and truth with the expression 
of a fact...  It is not different than saying, Suppose we identify these neural 
processes with belief  and those with fear and those with love and...




So, if we apply your logic, it seems clear that the spurious idea is more the idea of 
physicalism and materialism we should eliminate, instead of consciousness, which no 
conscious being can eliminated without lying to him/herself.


If you can.  But I still think this is an area in which technology will 
overtake science.

Brent

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-28 Thread John Clark

On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 4:48 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote:

 Who is it other than you that claims that the proposition that all
 possible things are either random or determined is true


Anyone with half a brain or anyone who has spent 2 minutes thinking what it
means to be random!

 by virtue of it being a 'standard use of language'?


By virtue of the standard use of logic.

 Sure you have reasons, but they are *your* reasons. You reasoned them
 into existence yourself. You are ultimately responsible for choosing which
 of those sets of reasons you prefer to privilege and elevate to the level
 of expressions and actions.


And you had a reason to act on that set of reasons rather than some other
set of reasons OR you did NOT have a reason to act on that set of reasons
rather than some other set of reasons. There is no third alternative.

 Random is that which is determined


And white is that which is black.

 randomly.


Now you're saying random is random, well that's a improvement, at least now
you're correct.

 everything internally appears to be some combination of free will and
 conditioning.


Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means.

 Why is random without a cause?


Because my dictionary says random means made done or chosen without
method  and method means a procedure to do something systematically
and if the thing has no cause it can't be done systematically.

 It just has a random cause,


I guess a random cause is like a big little or a fast slow.

 Free will is not determined *for* us, free will is determined *by* us.


 Cannot comment, don't know what ASCII string free will means.

 your edict that all things must either be determined (by causes other
 than our own will) or random.


Unlike free will the word will actually means something, what I want to
do. I am determined by my will and my will is determined by other things.

 Critical thinking can be an obstacle to understanding consciousness


And there we have it, you believe in truthiness, it's better if you don't
think too hard about something. BULLSHIT!

  John K Clark

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-28 Thread 1Z



On Apr 27, 10:27 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Apr 27, 5:02 pm, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote:

  On Apr 27, 9:51 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

    To say that nothing is no-thing
   (the thing that is the absence of things) is completely valid,

  No, it is nonsense.

 Just as non-sense is a kind of sense (the sense that something fails
 to make sense

AAG!

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-27 Thread Bruno Marchal

On 26 Apr 2012, at 22:17, graytiger wrote:

On 14 mrt, 17:49, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

'The concept of an afterlife is a perfectly reasonable thing to be
able
to imagine'

It is not. There is no strongly justified argument to suppose that
aynthing 'mind' like can stay in existence when the brain stops
functioning.

Only if you assume that brain really exists, and if you assume some
identity thesis in cognitive science.

And this contradict the implicit use you made of mechanism.
See this list, or my URL showing that mechanism and wek materialism
(the belief in some primary matter, or in physicalism) is logically
incompatible with mechanism.

We have not yet solve the mind-body problem, so we have to say
agnostic on such question.

Both with the computationalist theory (digital mechanism), and with
its partial conformation by Everett QM, we are immortal.

'I'm talking about the existence of feeling as a phenomenon in the
universe. It makes no sense logically. '

But there are no evidence of a primary physical universe. Not one.
There are only evidence for a physical reality, not for a primitively
ontological physical reality. It is a metaphysical (theological)
assumption, and it contradicts mechanism.

because people don't like the idea of dying. But that doesn't prove a
thing. So it is not really reasonable in the sense of being well
justified. People can have many needs that are answered by certain
beliefs, but that doesn't make these beliefs reasonable.

People don't like the idea of suffering, especially for a long time.
If you read Sade, you can understand that the idea of mortality is
also a form of wishful thinking.

Today, there are more evidence that the universe emerge from a
number's dream matrix, say, than a reality per se.

To assert that we are mortal is not more rational than to assert we
are immortal. It is theory dependent. And the evidences favor a little
bit more the theories in which we are immortal (like comp, QM-without
collapse) than the one in which we are mortal, (physicalism + little
universe).

We can only search theories and test them. If not we do pseudo-religion.

Bruno

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 9:00 AM, Craig Weinberg
whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/22/5/613.abstract

Abstract

The feeling of being in control of one’s own actions is a
strong subjective experience. However, discoveries in psychology
and

neuroscience challenge the validity of this experience and suggest
that free will is just an illusion. This raises a question: What
would
happen if people started to disbelieve in free will? Previous
research
has shown that low control beliefs affect performance and
motivation.

Recently, it has been shown that undermining free-will beliefs
influences social behavior. In the study reported here, we
investigated whether undermining beliefs in free will affects brain
correlates of voluntary motor preparation. Our results showed
that the
readiness potential was reduced in individuals induced to
disbelieve

in free will. This effect was evident more than 1 s before
participants consciously decided to move, a finding that suggests
that

the manipulation influenced intentional actions at preconscious
stages. Our findings indicate that abstract belief systems might
have

a much more fundamental effect than previously thought.

Has anyone posted this yet? Hard to explain what brain correlates
are

doing responding to an illusion...

You might be able to show that people who believe in an afterlife
are
more relaxed when faced with death. There are recognised
neurological

correlates of relaxation. Would it thereby follow that there is in
fact an afterlife?

The concept of an afterlife is a perfectly reasonable thing to be
able

to imagine, since we are born and have a life, it is not a problem to
imagine that we could continue to have a life even after this one
ends. This is not the case with free will. Hypnotizing a computer to
think it has 'free will' will not result in any changes in its
processing, since for a computer there is no possible difference
between voluntary action and automatic action. For us there is a
tremendously significant and obvious difference.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not



On Apr 24, 7:54 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Apr 24, 4:21 am, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote:

  On Apr 21, 8:37 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

   On Apr 20, 8:36 am, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote:

  On Apr 5, 1:37 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 What do you say the efficient cause of feeling is?

Some priori brain state.

   What could make a brain state cause a feeling?

  A psychophsical law or identity.

 An omnipotence law could cause omnipotence too.

so?

   Otherwise I can just say that a
   deterministic universe includes libertarian free will, ghosts 
   goblins, whatever.

  Libertarian free will contradicts the requirment
  for sufficent causes.

 No more than feeling.

No, Feeling isn't defined in terms of the presence or absence
of any kind of determinism or causality.

   Causality is a condition within feeling,

  says who?

 The notion of a cause is an idea - a feeling about order and sequence.

That doesn't mean a cause itself is.

 To have cause you have to have memory and narrative pattern
 recognition.

To *recognise* a cause you have to have memory and narrative pattern
recognition

 Without that, there really is no difference between a
 cause and a non-cause.

Without that, there really is whatever there really is.


Only disconnected fragments.

Who told you that the universe absent huamns is disconnected? God?

   as is free will. Feeling
   gives rise to free will directly.

  Says who?

 Says most people who have ever lived.

I don;'t think so.

If I feel like doing something,
 that feeling allows me to possibly try to do it.

How do you know that isn't deterministic?  A lot of people would say
that your desires
cause your action, and you can't choose your desires.

 It's very
 straightforward.



   Whoever is doing the feeling is
   ultimately determining the expression of their own free will.

  Says who?

 According to you nobody can say anything except what they are
 determined to say,

I am not sayign determinism is true, just that FW isn;t true apropri
in the way you keep saying.


so what possible difference could it make who
 happens to say it?

Who says things have to make a difference in order to happen.


 The others don;t contradict determinism.

 Why not?

They are not defined in terms of it or its absence.

   You are the only one defining free will in terms of an absence of
   causality. I see clearly that causality arises out of feeling and free
   will.

  Maybe you could make that clear to the rest of us.

 By writing this sentence I am causing changes in a computer network,
 your screen, your eyes, and your mind. Do you doubt that I am choosing
 to do this?

Even determinists can admit that your are choosing, since they regard
choice as another deterministic process.

What physical law do you claim has an interest in what I
 write here?

Who says physcial laws have to be interested?



   What business does a feeling have being in a
   universe that is essentially a very sophisticated clock?

  Something happened that would cause a feeling.

 Are you being serious?

Yes. Why shouldn't you have laws of the form
If see kitten then feel warm and gooey ?

   Because there is no logic to it.

  Statements of scientific law tend not to be analytical in any case.

 But there is nothing to it whatsoever. You are saying that it should
 help solve a math problem if the computer can smell spaghetti just
 because we seem math on one side and spaghetti on the other.

No. I am saying that there can be an if-then relationship between
phsycial

states and mental states. I am not saying that all such relationships
hold.

And I am certainily not casting causality in terms of things being
needed or taking an interest
or helping.

  If you are positing a universe ruled
   by laws of mechanistic logic, then you are required to demonstrate
   that logic somehow applies to feeling, which it doesn't. If you have
   mechanism, you don't need feeling.

  I dare say vast tracts of the universe are unnecessary.

 Then your insistence upon mechanism is devoid of anything except
 arbitrary sentiment.

I am not insisting on it, I am just expaliing it as it has been
understood
for the past few centuries. Our understanding of mechanism is that it
has nothing to do with necessity of final causes, or sentiment or
interest,
and that it just churns away deriving future states from past ones.
You keep criticising this anthropomorphic notion of determinism
that is very much your own.

Why not have a classical pantheon of gods? We
 could say they improve computation too.

Huh?

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not



On Apr 24, 6:19 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

 It is a standard use of language to say that people are responsible in
 varying degrees for their actions. I don't understand why you claim
 that your binary determinism is 'standard language' in some way. When
 we talk about someone being guilty of a crime, that quality of guilt
 makes no sense in terms of being passively caused or randomly
 uncaused

That's a rather shallow dismissal of compatibiism. We absolve
people of guilt if they are compelled by an agency, but causaiton
is not the same as compulsion. If someone weighs up options and makes
a bad choice, they have not been compelled and so are responsible
even if the process of choice was metaphysically deterministic.
Under determinism, it makes sense to punish a person in order to
modify
their behaviour.

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not



On Apr 23, 3:49 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Apr 22, 10:57 am, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote:

  If you're bloody-minded enough you can claim here isn't really an
  obvious connection between clouds and rain either.

 Sure, it's a matter of degree. If I squeeze an orange, it follows very
 logically that what comes out of it is orange juice.

How logical is it that compressing a lump of coal produces a diamond?
How logical is it that liquid helium will try to escape a container?
How logical is it that 14kg of Uranium 233 won't explode, but 16kg
will?
How logical is it that you can levitate a frog?

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not



On Apr 24, 8:07 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:
context was a War of the Worldviews presentation, where she was
 s She likes to be provocative anyhow. I still
 don't see how calling it a mirage or illusion gets around the hard
 problem at all. A mirage to whom?

More to the point, in order to see a false appearance, one has to be
able to see an appearance.

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On Apr 27, 12:53 am, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:

 A small injection will convince you that they are feelings.

Why? If I buy you dinner with a credit card, are you convinced that
credit cards are dinner?

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not



On Apr 25, 10:21 am, Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com wrote:

 I'm not saying that consciousness is not mysterious and certainly not
 non-existent (I think people who say that do it just do it to be
 provocative). But it is a problem when a mysterious thing is explained
 in terms of another mysterious thing; for how do we explain the second
 thing, or the connection between them?

OTOH, somethings gotta be fundamental.

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not





On Apr 25, 10:25 pm, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
 On 4/25/2012 11:45 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:









  On 24.04.2012 22:22 meekerdb said the following:

  ...

  As I've posted before, when we know how look at a brain and infer what
  it's thinking and we know how to build a brain that behaves as we want,
  in other words when we can do consciousness engineering, the hard
  problem will be bypassed as a metaphysical non-question, like Where
  did the elan vital go?

  Brent

  This is a position expressed by Jeffrey Gray as follows (he does not share 
  it):

  ï¿½What looks like a Hard Problem will cease to be one when we have 
  understood the errors
  in our ways of speaking about the issues involved. If the route were 
  successful, we
  would rejoin the normal stance: once our head have been straightened out, 
  science could
  again just get on with the job of filling in the details of empirical 
  knowledge.ï¿½

  Evgenii

 http://blog.rudnyi.ru/tag/jeffrey-a-gray

 I think the main mistake in formulating the 'hard problem' is thinking that 
 we can't
 explain consciousness with mathematical theories like mechanics, 
 astrophysics, quantum
 mechanics.  The mistake isn't that we can explain consciousness, it's 
 supposing that we
 can explain physics.  We don't explain mechanics or gravity or 
 electrodynamics - we have
 models for them that work, they are predictive and can be used to control and 
 design
 things.  Bruno points out that *primitive matter* doesn't add anything to 
 physics.  When
 asked what explained the gravitational force Newton said, Hypothesi non 
 fingo.  Someday,
 consciousness will be looked at similarly.

 Brent

Is that any different to regarding cosnc. as fundamental, as dualists
do?

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not



On Apr 26, 8:31 pm, John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com wrote:

 I never said there is no choosing, we choose things all the time. Unlike
 the noise free will the word choose actually means something; if at a
 particular time I can see that there are 2 actions (X or Y)  I can take and
 I don't know which one to do and then at a later time I find that I am
 performing action Y not action X then I have *chosen* to perform action
 Y

And if you actualty could have chosen either, you had libertarian FW.
That is what
it means.


  The whole idea of 'picking' clearly, obviously, relies on a third
  alternative of intentional choice.

 It's completely binary, your intentional choice was caused for a reason
 or it was not, if it was then you're a Cuckoo Clock if it wasn't then
 you're a Roulette Wheel; a event happened for a reason or it did not happen
 for a reason, there is no third alternative.


Since reason and cause are not synonyms there are plenty of
alternatives, eg

You did it for a reason (aim, goal, end) that was efficiently caused.
You did it for a reason (aim, goal, end) that was not efficiently
caused.
You did it because of a cause but for  non reason.
You did it randomly and for no reason.

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On Apr 27, 9:11 am, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote:
 On Apr 24, 7:54 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:









  On Apr 24, 4:21 am, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote:

   On Apr 21, 8:37 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

On Apr 20, 8:36 am, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote:

   On Apr 5, 1:37 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote:

  What do you say the efficient cause of feeling is?

 Some priori brain state.

What could make a brain state cause a feeling?

   A psychophsical law or identity.

  An omnipotence law could cause omnipotence too.

 so?

So it's a fallacy to say that X can exist because there could be a Law
of X that allows it to exist.










Otherwise I can just say that a
deterministic universe includes libertarian free will, ghosts 
goblins, whatever.

   Libertarian free will contradicts the requirment
   for sufficent causes.

  No more than feeling.

 No, Feeling isn't defined in terms of the presence or absence
 of any kind of determinism or causality.

Causality is a condition within feeling,

   says who?

  The notion of a cause is an idea - a feeling about order and sequence.

 That doesn't mean a cause itself is.

I think that it does. Without the possible perception of causality,
what is 'cause'?


  To have cause you have to have memory and narrative pattern
  recognition.

 To *recognise* a cause you have to have memory and narrative pattern
 recognition

I'm not talking about human recognition in particular, I'm saying that
ontologically you cannot have a 'cause' without something that
remembers the initial condition and can detect that a change has
occurred. Otherwise there is only a perpetual now, uncaused, with no
memory. There is no time, no changes, no events at all, just a
perpetual forgetting and incomprehensible fragments. Being born as a
blank slate every trillionth of a second. Cause isn't realizable in
that universe because there is no memory of a non-now moment with
which to infer time, sequence, and cause.


  Without that, there really is no difference between a
  cause and a non-cause.

 Without that, there really is whatever there really is.

A lot of people believe that, but I don't think that's what reality
is. Everything we know about perception and relativity points to a
realism that is profoundly dependent upon perspective. What is a
tomato without any point of view? If I am a virus, a tomato is like a
planet. If I am the size of a mountain, a tomato is a speck. Without
perception, there is no 'is'. Awareness is all that is (not just human
awareness, but many frames of perceptual inertia that have accumulated
in the cosmos, including human awareness).


 Only disconnected fragments.

 Who told you that the universe absent huamns is disconnected? God?

Who told you that perception requires humans? Nothing that I am
talking about is limited to humans, other than the fact that we can
only comment with certainty on our own perception.


as is free will. Feeling
gives rise to free will directly.

   Says who?

  Says most people who have ever lived.

 I don;'t think so.

I believe that you think that, but I can't see how. When we say the
word I followed by any verb, we are saying ' this self does X of
it's own free will'.


 If I feel like doing something,
  that feeling allows me to possibly try to do it.

 How do you know that isn't deterministic?  A lot of people would say
 that your desires
 cause your action, and you can't choose your desires.

There is bi-directional feedback. You can choose which of your many
desires to privilege with attention, action, etc. We tell our body
what to do, it tells us what to do.


  It's very
  straightforward.

Whoever is doing the feeling is
ultimately determining the expression of their own free will.

   Says who?

  According to you nobody can say anything except what they are
  determined to say,

 I am not sayign determinism is true, just that FW isn;t true apropri
 in the way you keep saying.

I'm saying the opposite, that the fact FW is even conceivable means
that determinism is not true.


 so what possible difference could it make who
  happens to say it?

 Who says things have to make a difference in order to happen.

You did. By continuing to ask 'says who' and 'who says', you imply
that there is some point in asking that. I am pointing out that
nothing could be more meaningless than asking 'says who' when you
assume that there really is no 'who' that decides freely to say what
they want. Who cares who says? Why does that make a difference to you?
What does your concept of authority rest on? Free. Will. Intention.
Personal qualification.












  The others don;t contradict determinism.

  Why not?

 They are not defined in terms of it or its absence.

You are the only one defining free will in terms of an absence of
causality. I see clearly that causality arises

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

2012-04-27 Thread Bruno Marchal



On 26 Apr 2012, at 23:34, Craig Weinberg wrote:


On Apr 26, 1:52 pm, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:

On 26 Apr 2012, at 16:47, Craig Weinberg wrote:


On Apr 25, 11:44 am, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:



This means only that you have a reductionist conception of machine.



I think that reductionism is mechanistic by definition.


I guess you mean mechanism is reductionist by definition.


No, I am saying that reductionist thinking is mechanistic. They are
inseparable. How can you have a reductionist approach which is not
also mechanistic?


By reducing something into a theory involving non mechanistic element.

In logic, digital mechanism can be considered, at least for the  
ontology, as being Sigma_1 reductionism, which means you reduce the  
ontology to what can be proved from some universal arithmetical  
proposition having the form ExP(x) with P decidable. But you can  
imagine forms of reductionism into any sigma_i complete arithmetical  
proposition, that is having the form ExAyEzAtEu P(x), with P  
decidable.

Or worst like set theoretical reductionism, etc.
Note that ontological reductionism might not imply epistemological  
reductionism, also.







But that is
the old pregodelian conception of mechanism.
Today we know more. we know that we can only scratch the surface of
the machine's possibilities. And if we assume mechanism, we know, for
all machine looking inward can know (bt not necessarily) that she can
only scratch the subject.


Whatever the potential for mechanism, I think the potential for non-
mechanism will always be much greater.


For reality, yes. for the mind, possible, but there are no evidences.



The idea that mechanism has any
potential at all I think already presumes a non-mechanistic valuation
of the realization of such potential.


There is something true. Machine cannot avoid a non computable  
reality, and most theories on machine evade the computational, by  
logic. The propositional hypostases are decidable, but their well  
defined first order logical extension are sigma_2 complete, that is  
well beyond the Sigma_1 completeness of the universal machines. This  
makes machine bounded to develop theologies.




Machines don't care about their
own possibilities.


You don't know that.





All of their potentials are worthwhile only because
they interest us or other organic entities.


Well, trivially in your non mechanist theory. But trivially not in comp.










What does it mean to behave like a machine or to be robotic? Why
should it mean that? This doesn't prove that all machines must all
behave like early machines that we have manufactured thus far, but I
think that taken with the other clues that we have about
inauthenticity in digital simulation, trouble with speech synthesis
and emotion with AI, symbol grounding problem, etc.. I think there  
is
a clear basis to presume that in fact there is something  
fundamentally

different about assembled machines and autopoietic living organisms
which may in fact limit their potential.


Then you have to find something non-Turing emulable,


It's circular reasoning, because reducing things to the level of
Planck-Turing digitization already flattens all qualia to quanta,
leaving meaningless quanta as the only possibility.


In the Aristotelian theology, no in Plato's one.




Nothing other than
numbers are Turing emulable. Emulation is entirely subjective and
perspective-driven. Emulation is not an objective possibility.


So if we implement a computer on the moon, and then the earth is  
destroyed, you would say that such a computer will stop functionning?
Emulation, as defined in computer science is an arithmetical reality.  
If you say emulation is not objective, you are saying that being a  
prime number is not objective. But then I will ask you to explain how  
the notion of prime depends on humans.







and non first
person indeterminacy Turing recoverable in Nature. But you might  
also

have to explain why such feature would be better to explain emotion,
speech, etc.  It really looks like explaining the difficult by adding
more difficulties.


I don't have to explain anything. Turing has to explain me.


But that is what he did, what me and many others continues, either  
with AI or theoretical computer science.






What you take as evidence is what the theory already explain. The
theory of machine (computer science) already explain why a machine
cannot feel to be machine, and indeed cannot even know which machines
she is.


And I have already explained that computer science theories can only
prove that computation is provable.


Yes. But it proves also that many things *about* machines are not  
provable by those machines, and that machine can know propositions  
that they cannot prove, etc. In fact computability helps us to  
classify the whole hierarchy of the non computable things, including  
many which have an impact for machines.





Awareness cannot be detected

Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

On Apr 27, 10:00 am, 1Z peterdjo...@yahoo.com wrote:

 That's a rather shallow dismissal of compatibiism. We absolve
 people of guilt if they are compelled by an agency,

 but causaiton
 is not the same as compulsion.

Only if there is free will. Without free will, of course compulsion is
the same as causation.

 If someone weighs up options and makes
 a bad choice,

Then they are exercising free will.

 they have not been compelled and so are responsible
 even if the process of choice was metaphysically deterministic.

Black is white, even though it is black?

 Under determinism, it makes sense to punish a person in order to
 modify
 their behaviour.

Under determinism, it wouldn't matter how much sense it does or
doesn't make. Sense is only causally efficacious if we have the
freedom to choose what to do with our understanding. Without free
will, we would have no choice but to punish or not punish, just as the
criminal would have no choice but to commit or not commit crimes.

Craig

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Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not