Hi Craig, I've been following the pattern of thought you've be exhibiting this entire thread, trying to understand why you believe in such a strange way. In all cases it seems to stem from ignorance of the processes that bring about your behavior, compounded with the belief that we lose something of value if we discard the concept of free will.
First, I feel you are being willfully blind to the constraints your biology puts on your supposedly "free" will. Daily, I stop doing the things I love to do to pass fluids or the corpses of carbon based organisms through my mouth. Later, defecate or micturate, further activities that honestly, I would rather not do. At night, I sleep, though I would rather stay up through the night. Though I am not enslaved in doing these things, I am certainly not free in a metaphysical sense. This illusory free will you are bound to is an artifact that emerges in a system that is complex enough to reflect on what it does, yet cannot completely grasp the causes of that which it does do. A system like this can trace some of the factors that contribute to its actions, but not all of them, and those factors it cannot picture seem to have no definite value, and therefore it thinks there is no logical contradction in believing that it could have done y in the situation in which it actually did action x. Furthermore, a system that can draw a large number of distinctions about the distribution of energy crossing its surface and respond in a large variety of ways, and yet does not understand how these distinctions are made, will, when asked how it determines an object is yellow, respond "i don't know, it just looks yellow." No matter how complex a system is, it can never be complex enough to contain itself, and is therefore unable to perceive itself directly as a deterministic process. Only in the special cases, where the major causes of its action are made apparent, such as when someone holds a gun to its head, will it realize that it is acting in compulsion and not freedom. In other cases, when the desire to act comes about in a subtle fashion, the system might say to itself, I did x because I wanted to do x, and I could have wanted to do y. The system may be satisfied with such an explanation, without probing into a complete physical description of what constitutes wanting. Since the causal explanation is not easily available or comprehensible (it arose out of the particular and peculiar interaction of many subunits of the system in question), the system settles with the explanation that it acted freely and could have done otherwise. This is how an eight cylinder engine mistakes itself for something which is the specific opposite of engines. You can deny that you are such a system, but I don't think you could deny these things are true of a complex deterministic system. Lastly, it is trivial to build a deterministic system that desires in a prototypical form. All you need is a system that exhibits operant learning. 1) Wire some sensors to trigger effectors. 2) In the event that the effectors bring about certain event (they might bathe the sensors in a certain chemical), strengthen the ability of sensors that were active directly before the event (that activated the effectors) to trigger the effectors they are wired to. 3) In the event that the chemical bath is removed, weaken the strength of sensors that were active right before the removal of the chemical. The system will begin to "want" to do things that increase the concentration of the chemical and dislike doing things that lower it. If the concentration exhibits noisy behavior (is not solely a function of the effectors of the system in question), then the system will even develop novel, unpredictable behavior. Desire and qualia pose no real problem for determinism. On Monday, September 2, 2013 5:15:47 PM UTC-5, chris peck wrote: > > Hi Brent > > I think the researchers would agree. Its definately present stimuli they > have in mind. > > All the best > > > > --- Original Message --- > > From: "meekerdb" <meek...@verizon.net <javascript:>> > Sent: 3 September 2013 4:11 AM > To: everyth...@googlegroups.com <javascript:> > Subject: Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade > > On 9/2/2013 7:34 AM, chris peck wrote: > > The study you're citing firstly claims the 60% of the variance they > uncovered is explained by 'spontaneous' brain activity not 60% of all brain > activity. More importantly, by spontaneous they just mean brain activity > that has not been triggered by external stimuli: > > > And how could they possibly know whether some brain event was triggered by > a stored perception of you grandmother when you were five? All they can > say is it wasn't triggered by a *present* external stimuli. > > Brent > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. > To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com<javascript:> > . > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
