Re: Two Studies. Visual Cortex does not see. Consciousness is not thought.
Craig, You may like this paper as well Klemm, W. (2010). Free will debates: Simple experiments are not so simple, Advances in Cognitive Psychology http://versita.metapress.com/content/l820g65u22883625/fulltext.pdf I have seen it on a Russian cite: http://nature-wonder.livejournal.com/189090.html Evgenii On 06.04.2012 14:17 Craig Weinberg said the following: Two more reasons to suspect that consciousness is received through the brain directly as primitive sense rather than decoded as complex information. The data from the seven participants were unambiguous. Paying attention to the target consistently and strongly increased the fMRI activity, regardless of whether the subject saw the target or not. This result was expected because many previous studies had shown that attending to a signal reinforces its representation in the cortex. Much more intriguing, though, was that whether or not the stimulus was consciously perceived made no difference to signal strength. Visibility didn’t matter to V1; what did was whether or not selective visual attention focused on the grating. Indeed, the experimentalists could not decode from the signal whether or not the subject saw the stimulus. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=consciousness-does-not-reside-here We expected to see the outer bits of brain, the cerebral cortex (often thought to be the seat of higher human consciousness), would turn back on when consciousness was restored following anesthesia. Surprisingly, that is not what the images showed us. In fact, the central core structures of the more primitive brain structures including the thalamus and parts of the limbic system appeared to become functional first, suggesting that a foundational primitive conscious state must be restored before higher order conscious activity can occur http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/aof-sst040412.php -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Studies. Visual Cortex does not see. Consciousness is not thought.
On 07 Apr 2012, at 08:22, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: Craig, You may like this paper as well Klemm, W. (2010). Free will debates: Simple experiments are not so simple, Advances in Cognitive Psychology http://versita.metapress.com/content/l820g65u22883625/fulltext.pdf I have not yet read the whole paper, but I agree with his main critics against the idea that free will is an illusion. It is almost like saying that consciousness is an illusion. I refute only the conception that free-will is opposed to determinism, or that free will has no mechanical justification. But as I define it, (free will is the ability to make a voluntary conscious choice in situation with partial information), free will is real, and it gives the main role to consciousness as a speeding up factor, and often as building a simplified conception of the local reality around us. Free-will is a generalization of responsibility, and attempts to defend the idea that free-will does not exist can lead to an elimination of the role of consciousness and conscience. That attitude is doubly dangerous socially, I think, in time where (white collar) bandits develop tools for diluting responsibility in all sort of economical and health affair. In fact I think that the idea that free will is an illusion is one of the many defect brought by Aristotle naturalistic philosophy, and the idea that we can separate science from religion. This can only transform science into a pseudo-religion, and indeed into the worst possible religion, where humans become the tools of the environment and others. It leads to confusion of means and goals. It kill spiritual values. The fake political use of religion, which lasts since a long time in occident, can only be promoted by the rejection of free-will and conscience. Basically, I suspect some 1/3 confusion in any attempt to reject free will. It is like confusing a third person account of your behavior, which exists and does not use free will, with the first person account which can use it. it is just impossible for a machine to identify those accounts. Such abstract appeal to the view from outside is a form of lie, quite compatible to the use of God as argument per authority. Free-will is based on a form of necessary self-ignorance, and it can be said not existing, in some absolute sense which can not make sense in the first person vision. It is an illusion, but only in a third person sense which is simply NOT available to the subject: so it cannot be an illusion from the first person perspective: the ignorance is real, and we have to take into account in our local real concrete decisions. That is why, also, consciousness can be real, and do have an important role in evolution and life. Those things are unreal only from a point of view which is not accessible to us. The fact that God, or some omniscient being or equation can predict my behavior does not prevent it to be free. I defend the compatibilist approach to free will, if that was not clear. With comp, a similar error would be to derive the non existence of matter from the non existence of primitive matter. I can, in some conversation conceded that free will is an illusion, but then it is a real illusion, like matter and everything. This illustrates also that mechanism + materialism can lead to nihilism, of sense, conscience, and in fine of humanity. Free-will is necessary for keeping the vigilance against the pressure against your universal nature. It is necessary to fight for having more freedom, and for avoiding being swallowed and became a particular tool of your neighborhood. Those arguing against free will can only help those wanting to manipulate you for their special interests. Bruno I have seen it on a Russian cite: http://nature-wonder.livejournal.com/189090.html Evgenii On 06.04.2012 14:17 Craig Weinberg said the following: Two more reasons to suspect that consciousness is received through the brain directly as primitive sense rather than decoded as complex information. The data from the seven participants were unambiguous. Paying attention to the target consistently and strongly increased the fMRI activity, regardless of whether the subject saw the target or not. This result was expected because many previous studies had shown that attending to a signal reinforces its representation in the cortex. Much more intriguing, though, was that whether or not the stimulus was consciously perceived made no difference to signal strength. Visibility didn’t matter to V1; what did was whether or not selective visual attention focused on the grating. Indeed, the experimentalists could not decode from the signal whether or not the subject saw the stimulus. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=consciousness-does-not-reside-here We expected to see the outer bits of brain, the cerebral cortex (often thought to be the seat
Re: deism and Newton
On 06.04.2012 19:22 meekerdb said the following: On 4/6/2012 9:26 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: ... “The very possibility of applied mathematics is an expression . . . of the Christian belief that nature is the creation of an omnipotent God.” Of course the regularity of nature is more consistent with a single god than with many contending gods, but it is still more consistent with a deist god who creates the world and then leaves it to itself than a theist god who answers prayers. Brent I am reading now Feyerabend's The Tyranny of Science. A couple of related quotes: “After Newton had found his law of gravitation, he applied it to the moon and to the planets. It seemed that Jupiter and Saturn, when treated in this way, slowly moved away from each other – the planetary system seemed to fall apart.” ”Newton concluded that it was being kept stable by an additional force and he assumed that God from time to time intervened in the course of planets. That agreed with his theological views. God, Newton believed, was not just an abstract principle.” More to this story http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/04/god-as-a-cosmic-operator.html where there are results of my search in Google. The story seems to have a happy end. Yet if Newton were a deist, then we would not have the Newton laws. Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not
On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:28 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi use...@rudnyi.ru wrote: Why does feeling have to have purpose? The universe as a whole does not have purpose unless you believe in a certain kind of god. Let us imagine that we have a deterministic theory of everything and it has started at time zero with given initial conditions. Then it is possible to state that the purpose of that initial conditions was to reach the state that we have now. Otherwise, why exactly these initial conditions have been employed? One could definitely imagine that the theory of everything starts with some other initial conditions (also with some values of fundamental constants, etc.). In my view, the same event can have purpose or not depending on how you describe it. Say a mechanical system develops itself according some Lagrangian. There is no purpose. Yet, if you remember about the variational principle, then the trajectory minimizes some functional and this could be considered as the purpose of the trajectory. Well, this is a word game but then you have also to make your definitions to justify your statement. It's possible to define purpose to mean whatever happens but I don't think that's what Craig meant. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Primitive Awareness and Symmetry
On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:37 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi use...@rudnyi.ru wrote: On 05.04.2012 01:59 Stathis Papaioannou said the following: On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:56 AM, Evgenii Rudnyiuse...@rudnyi.ru wrote: On 03.04.2012 02:06 Stathis Papaioannou said the following: Since there is no evolutionary advantage to consciousness it must be a side-effect of the sort of behaviour that conscious organisms display. Otherwise, why did we not evolve as zombies? The evolutionary advantage of consciousness, according to Jeffrey Gray, is late-error detection. But the late-error detection processing could be done in the same way by a philosophical zombie. Since, by definition, a philosophical zombie's behaviour is indistinguishable from that of a conscious being there is no way that nature could favour a conscious being over the equivalent philosophical zombie. You then have two options to explain why we are not zombies: (a) It is impossible to make a philosophical zombie as consciousness is just a side-effect of intelligent behaviour; (b) It is possible to make a philosophical zombie but the mechanism for intelligent behaviour that nature chanced upon has the side-effect of consciousness. Though (b) is possible I don't think it's plausible. Jeffrey Gray considers consciousness from a viewpoint of empirical studies. Philosophical zombies so far exist only in the minds of crazy philosophers, so I am not sure if this is relevant. As I have written, conscious experience offers unique capabilities to tune all running servomechanisms to the brain that otherwise it has not. This is what neuroscience says. When neuroscience will find zombies, then it would be possible to consider this hypothesis as well. Clearly one can imagine that he/she is not zombie and others are zombies. But then he/she must convince others that they are zombies. I think you've missed the point. It is not necessary that philosophical zombies exist, it is only necessary that the idea is coherent. The question then is, Could philosophical zombies exist? If you say no, then you are saying that consciousness is a necessary side-effect of the kind of intelligent behaviour that humans display. Do you believe that that is so, or do you believe that it is possible for a being to be made that behaves just like a human but lacks consciousness? You are free to dismiss this question as uninteresting to you but I think it is still a coherent question. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not
On Apr 5, 1:37 pm, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: Stathis and Brent, I'll respond to both at once since they are the same core objection: Why does feeling have to have purpose? I can't even conceive of what it would mean for them to be justified. They have to be justified and have a purpose because that is what a deterministic universe would require. Nope. Determinism requires efficient causes,, not final causes or purposes. 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. The others don;t contradict determinism. What business does a feeling have being in a universe that is essentially a very sophisticated clock? Something happened that would cause a feeling. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Studies. Visual Cortex does not see. Consciousness is not thought.
On 4/7/2012 1:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: The fake political use of religion, which lasts since a long time in occident, can only be promoted by the rejection of free-will and conscience. I agree with most of what you write about free-will, but the above seems empirically false. Organized religion and the political use of it has always assumed free will and the guilt of the individual. At one time even animals were tried and convicted for crimes. I also think you're wrong to single out the Occident. The Orient has effectively combined religion and politics too. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: deism and Newton
On 4/7/2012 5:11 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 06.04.2012 19:22 meekerdb said the following: On 4/6/2012 9:26 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: ... “The very possibility of applied mathematics is an expression . . . of the Christian belief that nature is the creation of an omnipotent God.” Of course the regularity of nature is more consistent with a single god than with many contending gods, but it is still more consistent with a deist god who creates the world and then leaves it to itself than a theist god who answers prayers. Brent I am reading now Feyerabend's The Tyranny of Science. A couple of related quotes: “After Newton had found his law of gravitation, he applied it to the moon and to the planets. It seemed that Jupiter and Saturn, when treated in this way, slowly moved away from each other – the planetary system seemed to fall apart.” ”Newton concluded that it was being kept stable by an additional force and he assumed that God from time to time intervened in the course of planets. That agreed with his theological views. God, Newton believed, was not just an abstract principle.” More to this story http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/04/god-as-a-cosmic-operator.html where there are results of my search in Google. The story seems to have a happy end. Yet if Newton were a deist, then we would not have the Newton laws. What? You think he would have discarded his law of universal gravitation if he had been a deist? Why wouldn't he have just concluded the solar system was unstable and would eventually be dispersed? Brent Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Primitive Awareness and Symmetry
On 4/7/2012 6:18 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:37 AM, Evgenii Rudnyiuse...@rudnyi.ru wrote: On 05.04.2012 01:59 Stathis Papaioannou said the following: On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:56 AM, Evgenii Rudnyiuse...@rudnyi.ruwrote: On 03.04.2012 02:06 Stathis Papaioannou said the following: Since there is no evolutionary advantage to consciousness it must be a side-effect of the sort of behaviour that conscious organisms display. Otherwise, why did we not evolve as zombies? The evolutionary advantage of consciousness, according to Jeffrey Gray, is late-error detection. But the late-error detection processing could be done in the same way by a philosophical zombie. Since, by definition, a philosophical zombie's behaviour is indistinguishable from that of a conscious being there is no way that nature could favour a conscious being over the equivalent philosophical zombie. You then have two options to explain why we are not zombies: (a) It is impossible to make a philosophical zombie as consciousness is just a side-effect of intelligent behaviour; (b) It is possible to make a philosophical zombie but the mechanism for intelligent behaviour that nature chanced upon has the side-effect of consciousness. Though (b) is possible I don't think it's plausible. Jeffrey Gray considers consciousness from a viewpoint of empirical studies. Philosophical zombies so far exist only in the minds of crazy philosophers, so I am not sure if this is relevant. As I have written, conscious experience offers unique capabilities to tune all running servomechanisms to the brain that otherwise it has not. This is what neuroscience says. When neuroscience will find zombies, then it would be possible to consider this hypothesis as well. Clearly one can imagine that he/she is not zombie and others are zombies. But then he/she must convince others that they are zombies. I think you've missed the point. It is not necessary that philosophical zombies exist, it is only necessary that the idea is coherent. The question then is, Could philosophical zombies exist? If you say no, then you are saying that consciousness is a necessary side-effect of the kind of intelligent behaviour that humans display. Do you believe that that is so, or do you believe that it is possible for a being to be made that behaves just like a human but lacks consciousness? You are free to dismiss this question as uninteresting to you but I think it is still a coherent question. But is it an empirical question? What would it mean for neuroscience to find zombies? We have some idea what it would mean to find a soul: some seemingly purposeful sequence of brain processes begin without any physical cause. But I'm not sure what test you would perform on a zombie to find that it was not conscious. I think if we had a very detailed understanding of the human brain we might be able to study and intelligent robot or a zombie android at the same level and say something like, This zombie probably experiences numbers differently than people. But if it truly acted exactly like a human, we wouldn't be able to say what the difference was. Of course humans don't all act the same, some have synesthesia for example. So we might be able to say this zombie sees numbers with colors - but this would show up in the zombies actions too. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two Studies. Visual Cortex does not see. Consciousness is not thought.
Thanks Evgenii, Yes, that looks really good. I'm going to save it to read tomorrow on the plane. Craig On Apr 7, 2:22 am, Evgenii Rudnyi use...@rudnyi.ru wrote: Craig, You may like this paper as well Klemm, W. (2010). Free will debates: Simple experiments are not so simple, Advances in Cognitive Psychologyhttp://versita.metapress.com/content/l820g65u22883625/fulltext.pdf I have seen it on a Russian cite: http://nature-wonder.livejournal.com/189090.html Evgenii On 06.04.2012 14:17 Craig Weinberg said the following: Two more reasons to suspect that consciousness is received through the brain directly as primitive sense rather than decoded as complex information. The data from the seven participants were unambiguous. Paying attention to the target consistently and strongly increased the fMRI activity, regardless of whether the subject saw the target or not. This result was expected because many previous studies had shown that attending to a signal reinforces its representation in the cortex. Much more intriguing, though, was that whether or not the stimulus was consciously perceived made no difference to signal strength. Visibility didn t matter to V1; what did was whether or not selective visual attention focused on the grating. Indeed, the experimentalists could not decode from the signal whether or not the subject saw the stimulus. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=consciousness-does-n... We expected to see the outer bits of brain, the cerebral cortex (often thought to be the seat of higher human consciousness), would turn back on when consciousness was restored following anesthesia. Surprisingly, that is not what the images showed us. In fact, the central core structures of the more primitive brain structures including the thalamus and parts of the limbic system appeared to become functional first, suggesting that a foundational primitive conscious state must be restored before higher order conscious activity can occur http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-04/aof-sst040412.php -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: deism and Newton
On 07.04.2012 22:16 meekerdb said the following: On 4/7/2012 5:11 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 06.04.2012 19:22 meekerdb said the following: On 4/6/2012 9:26 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: ... “The very possibility of applied mathematics is an expression . . . of the Christian belief that nature is the creation of an omnipotent God.” Of course the regularity of nature is more consistent with a single god than with many contending gods, but it is still more consistent with a deist god who creates the world and then leaves it to itself than a theist god who answers prayers. Brent I am reading now Feyerabend's The Tyranny of Science. A couple of related quotes: “After Newton had found his law of gravitation, he applied it to the moon and to the planets. It seemed that Jupiter and Saturn, when treated in this way, slowly moved away from each other – the planetary system seemed to fall apart.” ”Newton concluded that it was being kept stable by an additional force and he assumed that God from time to time intervened in the course of planets. That agreed with his theological views. God, Newton believed, was not just an abstract principle.” More to this story http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/04/god-as-a-cosmic-operator.html where there are results of my search in Google. The story seems to have a happy end. Yet if Newton were a deist, then we would not have the Newton laws. What? You think he would have discarded his law of universal gravitation if he had been a deist? Why wouldn't he have just concluded the solar system was unstable and would eventually be dispersed? Ancient Babylonian records showed that the planetary system had been stable for a considerable time. At any rate, there was a clash between the facts and Newton's law of gravitation used without additional assumptions. You may want to find Leibniz's critics of Newton. Leibniz ridiculed Newton's god for being an incompetent universe-maker and declared that what god does once, he does in a perfect way. Evgenii Brent Evgenii -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
