Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Craig, I've been trying to stay focused studying the past few days (medical exam D: ), but now im procrastinating So which of the following are you advancing No implementation of rules could ever perfectly exemplify (or at least to such a degree that no human could every tell it was a mere implementation of rules and not the real thing) the behavior of: 1) an electron 2) an atom 3) a molecule 4) a macro-molecule 5) an organelle 6) a cell 7) a sponge 8) a nematode 9) a fruit fly 10) a frog 11) a dog 12) a rhesus macaque 13) a human ? On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 11:41 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Monday, September 9, 2013 11:39:31 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: (Resending complete email - trying to do this on a phone.) On Tuesday, September 10, 2013, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Thursday, September 5, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: My position would suggest that the more mechanistic the conditions of the test, the more it stacks the test in favor of not being able to tell the difference. If you want to fool someone into thinking an AI is alive, get a small group of people who lean toward aspberger's traits and show them short, unrelated examples in a highly controlled context. You accept, of course, that people with Aspbergers have feelings even though they don't express them like everyone else? Certainly. I was using the idea of selecting for Aspberger traits as a way of stacking the deck toward a result that de-emphasizes emotional discernment of others behavior. If you want to really bring out the differences between the two, use a diverse audience and have them interact freely for a long time in many different contexts, often without oversight. What you are looking for is aesthetic cues that may not even be able to be named - intuitions of something about the AI being off or untrustworthy, continuity gaps, non-fluidity, etc. It's sort of like taking a video screen out into the sunlight. You get a better view of what it isn't when you can see more of what it is. It sounds like you're proposing a variant of the Turing Test. What would you say if the diverse audience decided the AI probably had feelings, or probably had feelings but different to most people's, like the Aspergers case? Between the two tests, I'm showing the opposite of what is typically intended by the Turing Test. I am proposing a way to test the extent to which any given Turing-type test reflects the bias of the interpreter rather than any intrinsic quality of the target of the test. It's hard to say for sure that a positive outcome for the test has any meaning. It's mainly to prove a negative. Maybe only one person out of ten million can pick up on the subtle cues that give away the simulation, and maybe they are too shy to speak up in public. Maybe only dogs can tell its not a person. My hunch though is that this is academic. I expect that simulations will always be pretty easy to figure out given enough time and diversity of audience and interaction. If at some point in time that is no longer the case, the ability to tell the difference will probably be available as an app for our own augmented human systems. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/jDy5twbibkQ/unsubscribe. To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Tuesday, September 10, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Monday, September 9, 2013 11:39:31 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: (Resending complete email - trying to do this on a phone.) On Tuesday, September 10, 2013, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Thursday, September 5, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: My position would suggest that the more mechanistic the conditions of the test, the more it stacks the test in favor of not being able to tell the difference. If you want to fool someone into thinking an AI is alive, get a small group of people who lean toward aspberger's traits and show them short, unrelated examples in a highly controlled context. You accept, of course, that people with Aspbergers have feelings even though they don't express them like everyone else? Certainly. I was using the idea of selecting for Aspberger traits as a way of stacking the deck toward a result that de-emphasizes emotional discernment of others behavior. If you want to really bring out the differences between the two, use a diverse audience and have them interact freely for a long time in many different contexts, often without oversight. What you are looking for is aesthetic cues that may not even be able to be named - intuitions of something about the AI being off or untrustworthy, continuity gaps, non-fluidity, etc. It's sort of like taking a video screen out into the sunlight. You get a better view of what it isn't when you can see more of what it is. It sounds like you're proposing a variant of the Turing Test. What would you say if the diverse audience decided the AI probably had feelings, or probably had feelings but different to most people's, like the Aspergers case? Between the two tests, I'm showing the opposite of what is typically intended by the Turing Test. I am proposing a way to test the extent to which any given Turing-type test reflects the bias of the interpreter rather than any intrinsic quality of the target of the test. It's hard to say for sure that a positive outcome for the test has any meaning. It's mainly to prove a negative. Maybe only one person out of ten million can pick up on the subtle cues that give away the simulation, and maybe they are too shy to speak up in public. Maybe only dogs can tell its not a person. My hunch though is that this is academic. I expect that simulations will always be pretty easy to figure out given enough time and diversity of audience and interaction. If at some point in time that is no longer the case, the ability to tell the difference will probably be available as an app for our own augmented human systems. Craig You are assuming the entities around you either are or aren't conscious, but you have no way of telling. If you have no way of telling, then how do you know those around you are conscious, and how do you know that computers aren't? By analogy with your own experience, you can say that those like you are conscious, but you do this on the basis of their behaviour being like yours, not on the basis of any special tests let alone dissection to see what they are composed of. You say this test is invalid, but you presumably use it all the time. You also claim to know that a computer is not conscious regardless of its behaviour, but you need a test for consciousness and you have admitted you don't have one. The best test you can propose is an intuition, but you admit that only one in ten million might have this intuition; and it would not be possible to know if this one in ten million were right, nor if the many others who falsely claimed to have the intuition were wrong. The way you talk implies that at least in principle there is a definitive test for consciousness, but there is no such test. -- 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Tuesday, September 10, 2013 2:07:26 AM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Craig, I've been trying to stay focused studying the past few days (medical exam D: ), but now im procrastinating So which of the following are you advancing No implementation of rules could ever perfectly exemplify (or at least to such a degree that no human could every tell it was a mere implementation of rules and not the real thing) the behavior of: 1) an electron 2) an atom 3) a molecule 4) a macro-molecule 5) an organelle 6) a cell 7) a sponge 8) a nematode 9) a fruit fly 10) a frog 11) a dog 12) a rhesus macaque 13) a human ? I am advancing the idea that that there is a formula. We can say that the numbers on your list, 1-13, can correspond to what I call the pathetic constant (p). The higher the number, the more likely that we, as humans will attribute feelings and/or the expectation that the public phenomena is associated with a private experience which is worthy of our consideration. If we misattribute a high p value (i.e. human feelings) to a very low p phenomenon then we are committing the pathetic fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy). In light of that, let me reorganize the chart: (13) myself (12) people who remind me of myself (11) people who are familiar (10) people who look or behave in an unfamiliar way (9) living primates (8) living mammals (7) animals (6) reptiles, insects (5) plants (4) cells under a microscope (3) movies of any of the above (2) photos of any of the above (1) dead bodies of animals (0) stuffed animals (taxidermy) (-1) stuffed animals (synthetic), robot looking robots (-2) cartoons, fictional characters, graphic simulations, entopic hallucinations (-3) AI, verbal simulations (-4) natural phenomena - clouds, mountains (-5) significant objects - jewels, antiques (-6) common objects - trash can, pile of sand (-7/14) invisible abstraction - wraps around from absolutely generic unconsciousness to God concepts When we try to include phenomena which we cannot directly interact with, such as those on an astrophysical or subatomic scale, or 'information' constructs, we have to fit it into our natural schema intuitively, which I think is both deceptive on one level and potentially contains true insights on another. If we looked at a pile of yeast, it might look to us like powder (-6) but the actual yeast cells deserve more of a (4 to 5) rating. The gap going in that direction would be an antipathetic gap. Treating a stuffed animal (-2) as a pet (7 to 9) would be a pathetic gap. To make matters more complicated, our own state of consciousness alters and distorts the scale. A child's empathy may differ from an adult's. A child who has been traumatized by a bear may feel different about animals and be more susceptible to a pathetic gap because of their fear. Their toy bear may have to be thrown out. The entire scale is made of prejudice, but it is not prejudice which is completely unfounded. The lens through which we empathize with others is made of accumulated aesthetic experiences which have roots beyond our conscious mind. Our history as a species with snakes and spiders is present in the attitudes of people - some people more than others, and some cultures more than others. It's not the rules that make something seem alive, it is the aesthetic presence. We are exquisitely sensitive to the aesthetics of living organisms. We may not be able to tell the difference between a real plant and a plastic plant from 10 yards away, but if we can look at it close up, touch the leaves, smell it, we can know very quickly what we are dealing with. We can be easily misdirected with simulations - puppets, trompe l'oeil, etc, but this superficial empathy is not exactly the same as our deep, even subconscious understanding, and it is certainly not the same as what the entity we are judging is experiencing. To simulate an aesthetic presence is not necessarily possible. We can make synthetic fabrics now that have a natural feel to a much greater degree than was possible 20 years ago, but we can still tell the difference on some level, and our skin can tell the difference. If we keep improving the fabric, it may be possible that at some point no expert will be able to tell the difference without scientific tools, but that is not necessarily true. A human being who has a talent for appreciating fabric may have a palette whose sensitivity will always learn to spot a fake. The assumption you make is that we are talking about degrees of complexity, and that complexity is an objective value defined in mathematical terms. My view is that the complexity is only the tip of the iceberg. What we are really talking about is sensitivity and authenticity. A woodgrain laminate is easy to distinguish from a hardwood floor to someone who is paying attention, but not as easy as it is to distinguish a mannequin from a living person. Even a
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Thursday, September 5, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: My position would suggest that the more mechanistic the conditions of the test, the more it stacks the test in favor of not being able to tell the difference. If you want to fool someone into thinking an AI is alive, get a small group of people who lean toward aspberger's traits and show them short, unrelated examples in a highly controlled context. You accept, of course, that people with Aspbergers have fe If you want to really bring out the differences between the two, use a diverse audience and have them interact freely for a long time in many different contexts, often without oversight. What you are looking for is aesthetic cues that may not even be able to be named - intuitions of something about the AI being off or untrustworthy, continuity gaps, non-fluidity, etc. It's sort of like taking a video screen out into the sunlight. You get a better view of what it isn't when you can see more of what it is. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
(Resending complete email - trying to do this on a phone.) On Tuesday, September 10, 2013, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Thursday, September 5, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: My position would suggest that the more mechanistic the conditions of the test, the more it stacks the test in favor of not being able to tell the difference. If you want to fool someone into thinking an AI is alive, get a small group of people who lean toward aspberger's traits and show them short, unrelated examples in a highly controlled context. You accept, of course, that people with Aspbergers have feelings even though they don't express them like everyone else? If you want to really bring out the differences between the two, use a diverse audience and have them interact freely for a long time in many different contexts, often without oversight. What you are looking for is aesthetic cues that may not even be able to be named - intuitions of something about the AI being off or untrustworthy, continuity gaps, non-fluidity, etc. It's sort of like taking a video screen out into the sunlight. You get a better view of what it isn't when you can see more of what it is. It sounds like you're proposing a variant of the Turing Test. What would you say if the diverse audience decided the AI probably had feelings, or probably had feelings but different to most people's, like the Aspergers case? -- Stathis Papaioannou -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Monday, September 9, 2013 11:39:31 PM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: (Resending complete email - trying to do this on a phone.) On Tuesday, September 10, 2013, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Thursday, September 5, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: My position would suggest that the more mechanistic the conditions of the test, the more it stacks the test in favor of not being able to tell the difference. If you want to fool someone into thinking an AI is alive, get a small group of people who lean toward aspberger's traits and show them short, unrelated examples in a highly controlled context. You accept, of course, that people with Aspbergers have feelings even though they don't express them like everyone else? Certainly. I was using the idea of selecting for Aspberger traits as a way of stacking the deck toward a result that de-emphasizes emotional discernment of others behavior. If you want to really bring out the differences between the two, use a diverse audience and have them interact freely for a long time in many different contexts, often without oversight. What you are looking for is aesthetic cues that may not even be able to be named - intuitions of something about the AI being off or untrustworthy, continuity gaps, non-fluidity, etc. It's sort of like taking a video screen out into the sunlight. You get a better view of what it isn't when you can see more of what it is. It sounds like you're proposing a variant of the Turing Test. What would you say if the diverse audience decided the AI probably had feelings, or probably had feelings but different to most people's, like the Aspergers case? Between the two tests, I'm showing the opposite of what is typically intended by the Turing Test. I am proposing a way to test the extent to which any given Turing-type test reflects the bias of the interpreter rather than any intrinsic quality of the target of the test. It's hard to say for sure that a positive outcome for the test has any meaning. It's mainly to prove a negative. Maybe only one person out of ten million can pick up on the subtle cues that give away the simulation, and maybe they are too shy to speak up in public. Maybe only dogs can tell its not a person. My hunch though is that this is academic. I expect that simulations will always be pretty easy to figure out given enough time and diversity of audience and interaction. If at some point in time that is no longer the case, the ability to tell the difference will probably be available as an app for our own augmented human systems. Craig -- Stathis Papaioannou -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
also, unless we come up with a clever way of raising the cost of reneging, we wont be able to make any bets On Tuesday, September 3, 2013, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, this is what i mean by determined doesn't mean logical. none of my desires seem to me logically justified, but that doesnt imply they are not deterministic. 2) your thesis is essentially, i cant see how a set of rules could lead to to desire, i cant see how a set of rules could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities, therefore there can be no such rules. that's fine i suppose, but I'm unable to pretend that your blindness is some sort of insight. i just think you havent looked hard enough On Tuesday, September 3, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 8:57:13 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Craig, What UV looks like will depend on how it is transduced into the nervous system. I could add a new opsin into your blue cones and it would appear to be a shade of blue. Sure, we can look at an infra-red camera too and see IR light as green or some other color. That isn't what I'm talking about. I am talking about new primary colors. Or, I could achieve the transduction in such a way that UV doesn't confuse with blue. In which case UV will look different from other colors *in way you cannot describe because you don't have access to how you condition your behavior based of the intensity of UV light. * It wouldn't matter if you did have access to how you condition your behavior based on the intensity of the UV light. Color cannot be described, it can only be experienced directly. I don't want you to waste our time trying to tell me what I already know. http://multisenserealism.com/thesis/light-revisited/is-visible-light-electromagnetic/ I've told you in a rudimentary form what is required to build a system that has drives and motivations, from parts that are inanimate. Not at all. You are projecting drives and motivations onto a system that is unconsciously serving a function that serves your drives and motivations. Nature has constructed such a device using 302 neurons. It learns, and it has motivations. The neurons are an expression of the motivations, not the other way around. Is your argument here that if we model the nematode deterministically, its ability to learn and its biological drives will vanish like smoke? Does a rabbit's taste for carrots vanish just because we model him as Bugs Bunny? Yes. Models, cartoons, figures, functions, shapes, descriptions, simulations...none of them can have any sense of being or feeling. Bugs Bunny is not a rabbit. He is a symbol which reminds our psychology of particular themes which overlap with rabbit themes. Because if so, I'd bet good money that you're wrong. Sure, I'd love to take that bet. I was going to say $10,000 but I don't think that you are going to pay that when you lose. What amount sounds good? Drives are traceable to electrochemical gradients trying to resolve themselves, driven by thermodynamic laws. Logic is how the pipes are connected up, desire is the water pump. I agree that microphysical events correspond to microphenomenal experiences, but that does not mean that all that has to happen to scale up an inanimate object's thermodynamic motives to mammalian quality emotions is that it must be configured in the correct shapes. That is an assumption, and a seductively popular one, but it is 100% wrong. Using the hypothesis of sense as the sole universal primitive, we should anticipate that the relevant qualifier of sensitivity is not structure but experience. Giving your cat a computer will not make him computer literate, and dressing a water pump up in human clothes does not cause a human. The clues are all around us. No machine or program has every succeeded in being anything but completely impersonal and psychologically empty. Furthermore, deterministic does not equal logical. There is no logic behind why opposites attract, even though this logically leads to like dissolving like. Whatever axioms there are in this universe -- 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 11:36:29 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless. No particular determination need be justified by our expectations, but determinism in general is an expectation of a logic of causality - an airtight logic of perfect correspondence. Rationality is more of a broad term which I would not apply to determinism in the strict sense of a deterministic cosmology. Rationality implies more tolerance of humanistic dimensions like free will. A person can freely choose to act rationally or irrationally, but in a deterministic universe, the logic would be that a person always acts to complete effects set into motion by prior cause. Logic is scripted and automated. Rationality can be responsive. You're welcome to use words in whatever way you like, but I don't want to dwell on word definitions. If by introducing rationality as a logic equivalence you mean to soften determinism, then I think we should stick to the word logic, since the determinism that I argue against has a zero tolerance for soft reasoning. Determinism is a closed shop of locked steps with all novelty being a pseudo-novelty derived from recombination. this is what i mean by determined doesn't mean logical. none of my desires seem to me logically justified, but that doesnt imply they are not deterministic. The fact that you have desires at all does not make sense in a deterministic universe. It gets confusing if you pull examples from real life. If we are going to talk about the fantasy world of determinism, we should refer only to those things which we can justify as being logically deterministic. 2) your thesis is essentially, i cant see how a set of rules could lead to to desire, No, my thesis is not that I can't see something, it is that I can see something that others may not. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire. My thesis is that fact, along with many others, suggests that 'rules' are an abstraction which are fictional and derived from experience, whereas desire is a concrete fact from which abstractions can be derived. My thesis is that there is an important difference between presentations and representations, such that a natural presence has a coherent footprint across multiple levels of sense, which is itself multi-coherent and self-generated. By contrast, a representation, such as a 'rule', 'function', 'process', 'pattern', 'figure', or 'information' is a second order, symbiotic phenomenon within a natural presentation. Representations are not whole and are not grounded in the totality of nature (space, time, matter, energy, significance, entropy, sense, motive) but are rather a facade, like a hologram, which makes sense only from a particular set of externally defined perspectives. i cant see how a set of rules could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities, therefore there can be no such rules. Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. Why would the impotence of 'rules' to create natural phenomena mean that there can be no rules? When did I imply that there can't be any rules? that's fine i suppose, but I'm unable to pretend that your blindness is some sort of insight. i just think you havent looked hard enough I can tell from your responses that you haven't looked at my blindness at all, only your own, dressed up to sound like me. Craig On Tuesday, September 3, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 8:57:13 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Craig, What UV looks like will depend on how it is transduced into the nervous system. I could add a new opsin into your blue cones and it would appear to be a shade of blue. Sure, we can look at an infra-red camera too and see IR light as green or some other color. That isn't what I'm talking about. I am talking about new primary colors. Or, I could achieve the transduction in such a way that UV doesn't confuse with blue. In which case UV will look different from other colors *in way you cannot describe because you don't have access to how you condition your behavior based of the intensity of UV light. * It wouldn't matter if you did have access to how you condition your behavior based on the intensity of the UV light. Color cannot be described, it can only be experienced directly. I don't want you to waste our time trying to tell me what I already know. http://multisenserealism.com/thesis/light-revisited/is-visible-light-electromagnetic/ I've told you in a rudimentary form what is required to build a system that has
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless... Sure, whatever, I was speaking colloquially, I wasn't using it in a technical fashion. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire mmhmm, what's your evidence of this? This seems to be an empirical statement and arguing seems to be going nowhere. How are you determining if a given set of rules exhibits desires? That is, supposing (although apparently it is impossible [can you see my eyes rolling?]) someone dropped the rules on your lap that produce desire, how would you tell? Are there sets of rules that do not produce desire that you are likely to confuse as exhibiting desire? Would you deny or accept the claim, No matter what behavior the rules produce, since the behavior emanates from rules, it cannot be desire? And essentially, what would convince you your thesis is wrong? Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. me: ...therefore there can be no such rules [that could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities]. I didn't claim that that you thought there were no rules period. On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 11:36:29 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless. No particular determination need be justified by our expectations, but determinism in general is an expectation of a logic of causality - an airtight logic of perfect correspondence. Rationality is more of a broad term which I would not apply to determinism in the strict sense of a deterministic cosmology. Rationality implies more tolerance of humanistic dimensions like free will. A person can freely choose to act rationally or irrationally, but in a deterministic universe, the logic would be that a person always acts to complete effects set into motion by prior cause. Logic is scripted and automated. Rationality can be responsive. You're welcome to use words in whatever way you like, but I don't want to dwell on word definitions. If by introducing rationality as a logic equivalence you mean to soften determinism, then I think we should stick to the word logic, since the determinism that I argue against has a zero tolerance for soft reasoning. Determinism is a closed shop of locked steps with all novelty being a pseudo-novelty derived from recombination. this is what i mean by determined doesn't mean logical. none of my desires seem to me logically justified, but that doesnt imply they are not deterministic. The fact that you have desires at all does not make sense in a deterministic universe. It gets confusing if you pull examples from real life. If we are going to talk about the fantasy world of determinism, we should refer only to those things which we can justify as being logically deterministic. 2) your thesis is essentially, i cant see how a set of rules could lead to to desire, No, my thesis is not that I can't see something, it is that I can see something that others may not. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire. My thesis is that fact, along with many others, suggests that 'rules' are an abstraction which are fictional and derived from experience, whereas desire is a concrete fact from which abstractions can be derived. My thesis is that there is an important difference between presentations and representations, such that a natural presence has a coherent footprint across multiple levels of sense, which is itself multi-coherent and self-generated. By contrast, a representation, such as a 'rule', 'function', 'process', 'pattern', 'figure', or 'information' is a second order, symbiotic phenomenon within a natural presentation. Representations are not whole and are not grounded in the totality of nature (space, time, matter, energy, significance, entropy, sense, motive) but are rather a facade, like a hologram, which makes sense only from a particular set of externally defined perspectives. i cant see how a set of rules could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities, therefore there can be no such rules. Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. Why would the impotence of 'rules' to create natural phenomena mean that there can be no rules? When did I imply that there can't be any rules? that's fine i suppose, but I'm unable to pretend that your blindness is some sort of insight. i just think you havent looked hard enough I can tell from your responses that you haven't looked at my
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 1:46:14 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless... Sure, whatever, I was speaking colloquially, I wasn't using it in a technical fashion. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire mmhmm, what's your evidence of this? This seems to be an empirical statement and arguing seems to be going nowhere. How are you determining if a given set of rules exhibits desires? That is, supposing (although apparently it is impossible [can you see my eyes rolling?]) someone dropped the rules on your lap that produce desire, how would you tell? Are there sets of rules that do not produce desire that you are likely to confuse as exhibiting desire? Would you deny or accept the claim, No matter what behavior the rules produce, since the behavior emanates from rules, it cannot be desire? And essentially, what would convince you your thesis is wrong? Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything. They are abstractions we use to analyze experiences after the fact. To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon ;) is not actually happy. The evidence is in our shared understanding (as is all evidence). What would convince you that your thesis is wrong? Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. me: ...therefore there can be no such rules [that could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities]. I didn't claim that that you thought there were no rules period. Sorry, I see what you mean. It was more of the same claim twice. Since I don't believe X can exist, I also don't believe that X can exist (at all). My view is that since I understand why X doesn't yield Y, I'm not swayed by the counter argument 'maybe you don't understand X as much as you think'...which leads us back to 'maybe you don't understand my understanding as much as you want me to think'... Thanks, Craig On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 11:36:29 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless. No particular determination need be justified by our expectations, but determinism in general is an expectation of a logic of causality - an airtight logic of perfect correspondence. Rationality is more of a broad term which I would not apply to determinism in the strict sense of a deterministic cosmology. Rationality implies more tolerance of humanistic dimensions like free will. A person can freely choose to act rationally or irrationally, but in a deterministic universe, the logic would be that a person always acts to complete effects set into motion by prior cause. Logic is scripted and automated. Rationality can be responsive. You're welcome to use words in whatever way you like, but I don't want to dwell on word definitions. If by introducing rationality as a logic equivalence you mean to soften determinism, then I think we should stick to the word logic, since the determinism that I argue against has a zero tolerance for soft reasoning. Determinism is a closed shop of locked steps with all novelty being a pseudo-novelty derived from recombination. this is what i mean by determined doesn't mean logical. none of my desires seem to me logically justified, but that doesnt imply they are not deterministic. The fact that you have desires at all does not make sense in a deterministic universe. It gets confusing if you pull examples from real life. If we are going to talk about the fantasy world of determinism, we should refer only to those things which we can justify as being logically deterministic. 2) your thesis is essentially, i cant see how a set of rules could lead to to desire, No, my thesis is not that I can't see something, it is that I can see something that others may not. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire. My thesis is that fact, along with many others, suggests that 'rules' are an abstraction which are fictional and derived from experience, whereas desire is a concrete fact from which abstractions can be derived. My thesis is that there is an important difference between presentations and representations, such that a natural presence has a coherent footprint across multiple levels of sense, which is itself multi-coherent and self-generated. By contrast, a representation, such as a 'rule', 'function', 'process', 'pattern',
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything What about something like Conway's Game of Life? Why is it wrong to see the behavior of the game as produced by the rules of the game and initial conditions? To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon... So are you or are you not making a predictive statement about what can be done using a system of rules? What exactly is it you are saying cannot be done? (Not what cannot be *explained*, but what cannot be done). What are the practical implications? On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 1:46:14 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless... Sure, whatever, I was speaking colloquially, I wasn't using it in a technical fashion. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire mmhmm, what's your evidence of this? This seems to be an empirical statement and arguing seems to be going nowhere. How are you determining if a given set of rules exhibits desires? That is, supposing (although apparently it is impossible [can you see my eyes rolling?]) someone dropped the rules on your lap that produce desire, how would you tell? Are there sets of rules that do not produce desire that you are likely to confuse as exhibiting desire? Would you deny or accept the claim, No matter what behavior the rules produce, since the behavior emanates from rules, it cannot be desire? And essentially, what would convince you your thesis is wrong? Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything. They are abstractions we use to analyze experiences after the fact. To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon ;) is not actually happy. The evidence is in our shared understanding (as is all evidence). What would convince you that your thesis is wrong? Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. me: ...therefore there can be no such rules [that could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities]. I didn't claim that that you thought there were no rules period. Sorry, I see what you mean. It was more of the same claim twice. Since I don't believe X can exist, I also don't believe that X can exist (at all). My view is that since I understand why X doesn't yield Y, I'm not swayed by the counter argument 'maybe you don't understand X as much as you think'...which leads us back to 'maybe you don't understand my understanding as much as you want me to think'... Thanks, Craig On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 11:36:29 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless. No particular determination need be justified by our expectations, but determinism in general is an expectation of a logic of causality - an airtight logic of perfect correspondence. Rationality is more of a broad term which I would not apply to determinism in the strict sense of a deterministic cosmology. Rationality implies more tolerance of humanistic dimensions like free will. A person can freely choose to act rationally or irrationally, but in a deterministic universe, the logic would be that a person always acts to complete effects set into motion by prior cause. Logic is scripted and automated. Rationality can be responsive. You're welcome to use words in whatever way you like, but I don't want to dwell on word definitions. If by introducing rationality as a logic equivalence you mean to soften determinism, then I think we should stick to the word logic, since the determinism that I argue against has a zero tolerance for soft reasoning. Determinism is a closed shop of locked steps with all novelty being a pseudo-novelty derived from recombination. this is what i mean by determined doesn't mean logical. none of my desires seem to me logically justified, but that doesnt imply they are not deterministic. The fact that you have desires at all does not make sense in a deterministic universe. It gets confusing if you pull examples from real life. If we are going to talk about the fantasy world of determinism, we should refer only to those things which we can justify as being logically deterministic. 2) your thesis is essentially, i cant see how a set of rules could lead to to desire, No, my thesis is not that I can't see something, it is that I can see something that others may not.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 2:45:30 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything What about something like Conway's Game of Life? Why is it wrong to see the behavior of the game as produced by the rules of the game and initial conditions? Because something has to be able to 1) privately sense the conditions which are being 'ruled', 2) respond to those conditions with a public facing motive-strategy, and 3) have the power to cause a public effect using 2 (i.e. the power to influence distant 1 experiences). Otherwise it's rules, schmules. What cares about the rules, and how is the more fundamental issue. Once we have the factory, the workers, the raw materials, then sure, policies and procedures can be said to 'produce' a product, but what policies can produce an effect ab initio? To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon... So are you or are you not making a predictive statement about what can be done using a system of rules? What exactly is it you are saying cannot be done? (Not what cannot be *explained*, but what cannot be done). What are the practical implications? One practical implication is that we don't have to worry about accidentally creating AI which can feel or suffer. Otherwise I suppose the practical consequences are to do with how we live individually and socially - to see clearly where private and public approaches are appropriate and avoid the pathological extremes. I mean the implications are huge, ultimately...the reconciliation of religion, philosophy, and science, the dawn of a new era of understanding, blah blah blah, but that's anybody's guess. Systems of rules are great, and they can only be better if we understand more about what it is that we are ruling. Or if/when they aren't great, we can understand that there is a whole other half of the universe we can look to for ways to escape them. The effects of over-signifying the quantitative are so pervasive and invasive that its going to take a miracle for people to adjust to a different view. It's like a hardcore meth addict considering for the first time that maybe there is a down-side to the drug. On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 1:46:14 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless... Sure, whatever, I was speaking colloquially, I wasn't using it in a technical fashion. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire mmhmm, what's your evidence of this? This seems to be an empirical statement and arguing seems to be going nowhere. How are you determining if a given set of rules exhibits desires? That is, supposing (although apparently it is impossible [can you see my eyes rolling?]) someone dropped the rules on your lap that produce desire, how would you tell? Are there sets of rules that do not produce desire that you are likely to confuse as exhibiting desire? Would you deny or accept the claim, No matter what behavior the rules produce, since the behavior emanates from rules, it cannot be desire? And essentially, what would convince you your thesis is wrong? Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything. They are abstractions we use to analyze experiences after the fact. To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon ;) is not actually happy. The evidence is in our shared understanding (as is all evidence). What would convince you that your thesis is wrong? Even if that wasn't a misrepresentation of my position, it isn't even a good Straw Man. me: ...therefore there can be no such rules [that could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities]. I didn't claim that that you thought there were no rules period. Sorry, I see what you mean. It was more of the same claim twice. Since I don't believe X can exist, I also don't believe that X can exist (at all). My view is that since I understand why X doesn't yield Y, I'm not swayed by the counter argument 'maybe you don't understand X as much as you think'...which leads us back to 'maybe you don't understand my understanding as much as you want me to think'... Thanks, Craig On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 7:18 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 11:36:29 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: 1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless. No particular
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 4:54:20 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: but what policies can produce an effect ab initio? then is there anything wrong with saying the *implementation* of the rules of GOL produce the behavior of the game? Nothing wrong with that, no, just like there's nothing wrong with saying that the implementation of a cookie cutter produces the shape of the cookie. I'm pointing out that it's still the metal and the cookie dough, and the intent of the baker that are doing the heavy lifting. i think you missed the nuance of what i was asking. (i was trying fecklessly to make it clear with few words) i dont want moral implications, but empirical ones. I might observe identical outputs from an AI that doesn't really feel and a human or something else that uncontroversially does feel. I might observe the exact same thing whether or not the ai has a true inner life. what can i predict i might see or hear that is a consequence of your position bring true that isnt merely a consequence of your position being believed to be true? (obstensibly, we wouldnt worry about building ai's that can feel if we believed your position, even if it was false) My position would suggest that the more mechanistic the conditions of the test, the more it stacks the test in favor of not being able to tell the difference. If you want to fool someone into thinking an AI is alive, get a small group of people who lean toward aspberger's traits and show them short, unrelated examples in a highly controlled context. If you want to really bring out the differences between the two, use a diverse audience and have them interact freely for a long time in many different contexts, often without oversight. What you are looking for is aesthetic cues that may not even be able to be named - intuitions of something about the AI being off or untrustworthy, continuity gaps, non-fluidity, etc. It's sort of like taking a video screen out into the sunlight. You get a better view of what it isn't when you can see more of what it is. On Wednesday, September 4, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 2:45:30 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Rules don't produce anything, just as triangles or steps don't produce anything What about something like Conway's Game of Life? Why is it wrong to see the behavior of the game as produced by the rules of the game and initial conditions? Because something has to be able to 1) privately sense the conditions which are being 'ruled', 2) respond to those conditions with a public facing motive-strategy, and 3) have the power to cause a public effect using 2 (i.e. the power to influence distant 1 experiences). Otherwise it's rules, schmules. What cares about the rules, and how is the more fundamental issue. Once we have the factory, the workers, the raw materials, then sure, policies and procedures can be said to 'produce' a product, but what policies can produce an effect ab initio? To ask what my evidence is is the same as asking what evidence I have that this emoticon... So are you or are you not making a predictive statement about what can be done using a system of rules? What exactly is it you are saying cannot be done? (Not what cannot be *explained*, but what cannot be done). What are the practical implications? One practical implication is that we don't have to worry about accidentally creating AI which can feel or suffer. Otherwise I suppose the practical consequences are to do with how we live individually and socially - to see clearly where private and public approaches are appropriate and avoid the pathological extremes. I mean the implications are huge, ultimately...the reconciliation of religion, philosophy, and science, the dawn of a new era of understanding, blah blah blah, but that's anybody's guess. Systems of rules are great, and they can only be better if we understand more about what it is that we are ruling. Or if/when they aren't great, we can understand that there is a whole other half of the universe we can look to for ways to escape them. The effects of over-signifying the quantitative are so pervasive and invasive that its going to take a miracle for people to adjust to a different view. It's like a hardcore meth addict considering for the first time that maybe there is a down-side to the drug. On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Wednesday, September 4, 2013 1:46:14 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Determinism is a logical justification of cause and effect or else it is meaningless... Sure, whatever, I was speaking colloquially, I wasn't using it in a technical fashion. Nobody, including you can see how a set of rules could lead to desire mmhmm, what's your evidence of this? This seems to be an empirical statement and arguing seems to be going nowhere. How are you
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 6:41 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/2/2013 8:50 PM, Dennis Ochei wrote: 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. Good explanation. Craig has failed to absorb the dictum of Schopenhauer: Der Mensh Kann wohl tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will. Buddhists might disagree with Schopenhauer. At least in the sense that they believe it possible to suppress desire. It is perhaps interesting that the way they claim this to be possible is to observe the wanter. Telmo. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
this is in line with schopenhauer's views. he was essentially a buddhist. you can want not to want, in which case you cannot will yourself to want to want. you can have and act upon the desire to change your desires, but that doesn't constitute willing what you want. instead, this constitutes just another form of acting in accordance to one's wants On Tuesday, September 3, 2013, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 6:41 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.netjavascript:; wrote: On 9/2/2013 8:50 PM, Dennis Ochei wrote: 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. Good explanation. Craig has failed to absorb the dictum of Schopenhauer: Der Mensh Kann wohl tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will. Buddhists might disagree with Schopenhauer. At least in the sense that they believe it possible to suppress desire. It is perhaps interesting that the way they claim this to be possible is to observe the wanter. Telmo. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com javascript:;. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.comjavascript:; . 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 a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/jDy5twbibkQ/unsubscribe. To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com javascript:;. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.comjavascript:; . 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Dennis Ochei do.infinit...@gmail.com wrote: this is in line with schopenhauer's views. he was essentially a buddhist. you can want not to want, in which case you cannot will yourself to want to want. you can have and act upon the desire to change your desires, but that doesn't constitute willing what you want. instead, this constitutes just another form of acting in accordance to one's wants Ok. I was thinking about Schopenhauer's sentence on my bike ride to work and I cannot decide if it's a deep insight or a language trick. My problem is with the meaning of want and the possibility that by applying the verb to itself we might just be breaking language somehow. Sorry for the rambling. On Tuesday, September 3, 2013, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 6:41 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/2/2013 8:50 PM, Dennis Ochei wrote: 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. Good explanation. Craig has failed to absorb the dictum of Schopenhauer: Der Mensh Kann wohl tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will. Buddhists might disagree with Schopenhauer. At least in the sense that they believe it possible to suppress desire. It is perhaps interesting that the way they claim this to be possible is to observe the wanter. Telmo. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/jDy5twbibkQ/unsubscribe. To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 9/3/2013 3:54 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Dennis Ocheido.infinit...@gmail.com wrote: this is in line with schopenhauer's views. he was essentially a buddhist. you can want not to want, in which case you cannot will yourself to want to want. you can have and act upon the desire to change your desires, but that doesn't constitute willing what you want. instead, this constitutes just another form of acting in accordance to one's wants Ok. I was thinking about Schopenhauer's sentence on my bike ride to work and I cannot decide if it's a deep insight or a language trick. My problem is with the meaning of want and the possibility that by applying the verb to itself we might just be breaking language somehow. Sorry for the rambling. I think it's the same insight that Hume expressed, Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
of freedom in the first place. Such a feeling cannot be explained under determinism, not without resorting to goofy just-so-stories and denial of undeniable phenomena. 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. Why would holding a gun to someone's head be any different than a person holding a gun to their own head? If it were different, how would that change their response without their having the power to choose to change it? 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, What would it matter whether a system was satisfied with some explanation or not? If you have no free will, then your satisfaction is meaningless - you are a powerless puppet. Does it matter whether a stone is satisfied with rolling down hill? 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. Why would the explanation that it acted 'freely' be a possible explanation in a deterministic universe? What are you talking about? 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. I deny that a deterministic universe could produce even a single thought of 'freedom' or 'will', just as I deny that you can produce even a single image of a color that does not exist. 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. Novel and unpredictable behavior is not intentional behavior. You conflate local causes with understanding. A garage door spring 'wants' to contract to the extent that the material behaves *as if* it wants to contract. That doesn't mean that attaching a garage door to the spring imparts an understanding to the spring about doors and houses and cars. It doesn't mean that pushing the garage door opener involves some system view intentionality about garages. There may be, on the microphysical level of the spring's metal, some microphenomenal correlate to 'wanting' which is distantly ancestral to our own...and I suspect that there is, but no amount of configuring that metal is going to allow it to become aware of anything beyond those primitive interactions. If it did, the universe would be overflowing with intelligent non-biological species, or at least contain a single one. Desire and qualia pose no real problem for determinism. Why not? If I can program something to perform a function, why would I want to invent 'desire' or 'qualia' out of thin air in order to do what is already being done directly? If there is no free will, then desire is epiphenomenal, and an epiphenomenon which even has a hint of an illusion that it *might* be causally efficacious is a deal breaker for determinism. Thanks, Craig 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 Sent: 3 September 2013 4:11 AM To: everyth...@googlegroups.com 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
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
not exist. 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. Novel and unpredictable behavior is not intentional behavior. You conflate local causes with understanding. A garage door spring 'wants' to contract to the extent that the material behaves *as if* it wants to contract. That doesn't mean that attaching a garage door to the spring imparts an understanding to the spring about doors and houses and cars. It doesn't mean that pushing the garage door opener involves some system view intentionality about garages. There may be, on the microphysical level of the spring's metal, some microphenomenal correlate to 'wanting' which is distantly ancestral to our own...and I suspect that there is, but no amount of configuring that metal is going to allow it to become aware of anything beyond those primitive interactions. If it did, the universe would be overflowing with intelligent non-biological species, or at least contain a single one. Desire and qualia pose no real problem for determinism. Why not? If I can program something to perform a function, why would I want to invent 'desire' or 'qualia' out of thin air in order to do what is already being done directly? If there is no free will, then desire is epiphenomenal, and an epiphenomenon which even has a hint of an illusion that it *might* be causally efficacious is a deal breaker for determinism. Thanks, Craig 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 Sent: 3 September 2013 4:11 AM To: everyth...@googlegroups.com 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. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/**group/everything-listhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/**groups/opt_outhttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/jDy5twbibkQ/unsubscribe. To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
that does not exist. 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. Novel and unpredictable behavior is not intentional behavior. You conflate local causes with understanding. A garage door spring 'wants' to contract to the extent that the material behaves *as if* it wants to contract. That doesn't mean that attaching a garage door to the spring imparts an understanding to the spring about doors and houses and cars. It doesn't mean that pushing the garage door opener involves some system view intentionality about garages. There may be, on the microphysical level of the spring's metal, some microphenomenal correlate to 'wanting' which is distantly ancestral to our own...and I suspect that there is, but no amount of configuring that metal is going to allow it to become aware of anything beyond those primitive interactions. If it did, the universe would be overflowing with intelligent non-biological species, or at least contain a single one. Desire and qualia pose no real problem for determinism. Why not? If I can program something to perform a function, why would I want to invent 'desire' or 'qualia' out of thin air in order to do what is already being done directly? If there is no free will, then desire is epiphenomenal, and an epiphenomenon which even has a hint of an illusion that it *might* be causally efficacious is a deal breaker for determinism. Thanks, Craig 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 Sent: 3 September 2013 4:11 AM To: everyth...@googlegroups.com 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. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/**group/everything-listhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/**groups/opt_outhttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/jDy5twbibkQ/unsubscribe . To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript: . 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 12:41:09 AM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 9/2/2013 8:50 PM, Dennis Ochei wrote: 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. Good explanation. Craig has failed to absorb the dictum of Schopenhauer: Der Mensh Kann wohl tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will. I used to argue that point all the time. My reasoning was that you are never free to want 'the bad thing' (even if to you the bad thing is what others might consider a good thing) - whatever your desire, it is already defined for you as desirable. That logic is sound as far as it goes, but it cannot help explain how the feeling of rubber stamping the effect of a desire to a public action makes sense in a deterministic universe. What is overlooked is the difference between sub-personal and impersonal influences. Just because we are not aware of the origins of our desires does not mean that we do not intentionally participate in generating them. Humans are complex on many levels, and simple on other levels. If we try to look at the simple levels through the lens of sub-personal complexity, we lose ourselves. Every cell of our body is the same stem cell. They are all us in microcosm. The feeling of the whole is present as the feeling of the parts to some extent, and it is absent to some extent. As with the Libet type experiments, we get into trouble when we assume that the ability to act freely is identical to the ability to know that ability, and to report it, and to know that we are reporting it, especially when the private experience is rooted in eternity and the action is rooted in public locality. Thanks, Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
It's a sleight of hand because it assumes a single self on a single level which does the wanting and the willing and the discerning between the two. On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 6:54:46 AM UTC-4, telmo_menezes wrote: On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 12:43 PM, Dennis Ochei do.inf...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: this is in line with schopenhauer's views. he was essentially a buddhist. you can want not to want, in which case you cannot will yourself to want to want. you can have and act upon the desire to change your desires, but that doesn't constitute willing what you want. instead, this constitutes just another form of acting in accordance to one's wants Ok. I was thinking about Schopenhauer's sentence on my bike ride to work and I cannot decide if it's a deep insight or a language trick. My problem is with the meaning of want and the possibility that by applying the verb to itself we might just be breaking language somehow. Sorry for the rambling. On Tuesday, September 3, 2013, Telmo Menezes wrote: On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 6:41 AM, meekerdb meek...@verizon.netjavascript: wrote: On 9/2/2013 8:50 PM, Dennis Ochei wrote: 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. Good explanation. Craig has failed to absorb the dictum of Schopenhauer: Der Mensh Kann wohl tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will. Buddhists might disagree with Schopenhauer. At least in the sense that they believe it possible to suppress desire. It is perhaps interesting that the way they claim this to be possible is to observe the wanter. Telmo. 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.comjavascript:. 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 a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/jDy5twbibkQ/unsubscribe. To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript:. 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-li...@googlegroups.com javascript:. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.comjavascript:. 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
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. Why would the explanation that it acted 'freely' be a possible explanation in a deterministic universe? What are you talking about? 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. I deny that a deterministic universe could produce even a single thought of 'freedom' or 'will', just as I deny that you can produce even a single image of a color that does not exist. 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. Novel and unpredictable behavior is not intentional behavior. You conflate local causes with understanding. A garage door spring 'wants' to contract to the extent that the material behaves *as if* it wants to contract. That doesn't mean that attaching a garage door to the spring imparts an understanding to the spring about doors and houses and cars. It doesn't mean that pushing the garage door opener involves some system view intentionality about garages. There may be, on the microphysical level of the spring's metal, some microphenomenal correlate to 'wanting' which is distantly ancestral to our own...and I suspect that there is, but no amount of configuring that metal is going to allow it to become aware of anything beyond those primitive interactions. If it did, the universe would be overflowing with intelligent non-biological species, or at least contain a single one. Desire and qualia pose no real problem for determinism. Why not? If I can program something to perform a function, why would I want to invent 'desire' or 'qualia' out of thin air in order to do what is already being done directly? If there is no free will, then desire is epiphenomenal, and an epiphenomenon which even has a hint of an illusion that it *might* be causally efficacious is a deal breaker for determinism. Thanks, Craig 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 Sent: 3 September 2013 4:11 AM To: everyth...@googlegroups.com 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. To post to this group, send email to everyth...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/**group/everything-listhttp://groups.google.com/group/everything-list . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/**groups/opt_outhttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/jDy5twbibkQ/unsubscribe . To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
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. Why would holding a gun to someone's head be any different than a person holding a gun to their own head? If it were different, how would that change their response without their having the power to choose to change it? 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, What would it matter whether a system was satisfied with some explanation or not? If you have no free will, then your satisfaction is meaningless - you are a powerless puppet. Does it matter whether a stone is satisfied with rolling down hill? 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. Why would the explanation that it acted 'freely' be a possible explanation in a deterministic universe? What are you talking about? 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. I deny that a deterministic universe could produce even a single thought of 'freedom' or 'will', just as I deny that you can produce even a single image of a color that does not exist. 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. Novel and unpredictable behavior is not intentional behavior. You conflate local causes with understanding. A garage door spring 'wants' to contract to the extent that the material behaves *as if* it wants to contract. That doesn't mean that attaching a garage door to the spring imparts an understanding to the spring about doors and houses and cars. It doesn't mean that pushing the garage door opener involves some system view intentionality about garages. There may be, on the microphysical level of the spring's metal, some microphenomenal correlate to 'wanting' which is distantly ancestral to our own...and I suspect that there is, but no amount of configuring that metal is going to allow it to become aware of anything beyond those primitive interactions. If it did, the universe would be overflowing with intelligent non-biological species, or at least contain a single one. Desire and qualia pose no real problem for determinism. Why not? If I can program something to perform a function, why would I want to invent 'desire' or 'qualia' out of thin air in order to do what is already being done directly? If there is no free will, then desire is epiphenomenal, and an epiphenomenon which even has a hint of an illusion that it *might* be causally efficacious is a deal breaker for determinism. Thanks, Craig 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 Sent: 3 September 2013 4:11 AM To: everyth...@googlegroups.com 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
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 3:42:53 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 9/3/2013 12:32 PM, Dennis Ochei wrote: Telmo and Brent, The Humean quote sums it up nicely. You can think of a human as a collection of desires and a reasoning process that arbitrates between and attempts to realize them. In the process of reasoning, one might bring about new desires, but reasoning is always employed by desires one currently has. Just couple days ago I was trying futilely to logically deduce what it is that I should want to do, I realized that logic is the servant of desire, (im not quite as eloquent as hume, it seems...) and to find a logically justified want is futile. Desire is inherently illogical. I'd say extralogical. That doesn't mean though that your desires aren't caused (by evolution, by metabolism,...). Many of them may even be predictable - that's how advertising agencies make a living. *Your* desires can be included in your experience by evolution, etc, provided that desire in general exists as a possibility in the universe. No amount of statistical reproduction of inanimate objects or unconscious machines could cause a desire to appear out of nowhere though. Could it? Why would it? Craig Turns out Hume beat me to this insight by quite a bit, but I suppose he had a head start, =p It seems that if we were completely logical, we would simply cease to function Dostoevsky beat you to that one, If everything on Earth were rational, nothing would happen. But he had a head start too. :-) Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Craig, What UV looks like will depend on how it is transduced into the nervous system. I could add a new opsin into your blue cones and it would appear to be a shade of blue. Or, I could achieve the transduction in such a way that UV doesn't confuse with blue. In which case UV will look different from other colors *in way you cannot describe because you don't have access to how you condition your behavior based of the intensity of UV light. * I've told you in a rudimentary form what is required to build a system that has drives and motivations, from parts that are inanimate. Nature has constructed such a device using 302 neurons. It learns, and it has motivations. Is your argument here that if we model the nematode deterministically, its ability to learn and its biological drives will vanish like smoke? Because if so, I'd bet good money that you're wrong. Drives are traceable to electrochemical gradients trying to resolve themselves, driven by thermodynamic laws. Logic is how the pipes are connected up, desire is the water pump. Furthermore, deterministic does not equal logical. There is no logic behind why opposites attract, even though this logically leads to like dissolving like. Whatever axioms there are in this universe, they are not logically justified. On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 3:33 PM, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 3:42:53 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 9/3/2013 12:32 PM, Dennis Ochei wrote: Telmo and Brent, The Humean quote sums it up nicely. You can think of a human as a collection of desires and a reasoning process that arbitrates between and attempts to realize them. In the process of reasoning, one might bring about new desires, but reasoning is always employed by desires one currently has. Just couple days ago I was trying futilely to logically deduce what it is that I should want to do, I realized that logic is the servant of desire, (im not quite as eloquent as hume, it seems...) and to find a logically justified want is futile. Desire is inherently illogical. I'd say extralogical. That doesn't mean though that your desires aren't caused (by evolution, by metabolism,...). Many of them may even be predictable - that's how advertising agencies make a living. *Your* desires can be included in your experience by evolution, etc, provided that desire in general exists as a possibility in the universe. No amount of statistical reproduction of inanimate objects or unconscious machines could cause a desire to appear out of nowhere though. Could it? Why would it? Craig Turns out Hume beat me to this insight by quite a bit, but I suppose he had a head start, =p It seems that if we were completely logical, we would simply cease to function Dostoevsky beat you to that one, If everything on Earth were rational, nothing would happen. But he had a head start too. :-) Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/jDy5twbibkQ/unsubscribe. To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 8:57:13 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Craig, What UV looks like will depend on how it is transduced into the nervous system. I could add a new opsin into your blue cones and it would appear to be a shade of blue. Sure, we can look at an infra-red camera too and see IR light as green or some other color. That isn't what I'm talking about. I am talking about new primary colors. Or, I could achieve the transduction in such a way that UV doesn't confuse with blue. In which case UV will look different from other colors *in way you cannot describe because you don't have access to how you condition your behavior based of the intensity of UV light. * It wouldn't matter if you did have access to how you condition your behavior based on the intensity of the UV light. Color cannot be described, it can only be experienced directly. I don't want you to waste our time trying to tell me what I already know. http://multisenserealism.com/thesis/light-revisited/is-visible-light-electromagnetic/ I've told you in a rudimentary form what is required to build a system that has drives and motivations, from parts that are inanimate. Not at all. You are projecting drives and motivations onto a system that is unconsciously serving a function that serves your drives and motivations. Nature has constructed such a device using 302 neurons. It learns, and it has motivations. The neurons are an expression of the motivations, not the other way around. Is your argument here that if we model the nematode deterministically, its ability to learn and its biological drives will vanish like smoke? Does a rabbit's taste for carrots vanish just because we model him as Bugs Bunny? Yes. Models, cartoons, figures, functions, shapes, descriptions, simulations...none of them can have any sense of being or feeling. Bugs Bunny is not a rabbit. He is a symbol which reminds our psychology of particular themes which overlap with rabbit themes. Because if so, I'd bet good money that you're wrong. Sure, I'd love to take that bet. I was going to say $10,000 but I don't think that you are going to pay that when you lose. What amount sounds good? Drives are traceable to electrochemical gradients trying to resolve themselves, driven by thermodynamic laws. Logic is how the pipes are connected up, desire is the water pump. I agree that microphysical events correspond to microphenomenal experiences, but that does not mean that all that has to happen to scale up an inanimate object's thermodynamic motives to mammalian quality emotions is that it must be configured in the correct shapes. That is an assumption, and a seductively popular one, but it is 100% wrong. Using the hypothesis of sense as the sole universal primitive, we should anticipate that the relevant qualifier of sensitivity is not structure but experience. Giving your cat a computer will not make him computer literate, and dressing a water pump up in human clothes does not cause a human. The clues are all around us. No machine or program has every succeeded in being anything but completely impersonal and psychologically empty. Furthermore, deterministic does not equal logical. There is no logic behind why opposites attract, even though this logically leads to like dissolving like. Whatever axioms there are in this universe, they are not logically justified. Determinism doesn't explain why opposites attract, but given that they do in some particular context, determinism is the logic of the consequences of that attraction. Determinism doesn't address everything, but whatever it does address is considered to behave according to the logic of the precedents which have been established. If determinism was not logical, how could it claim to determine anything? Craig On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 3:33 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 3:42:53 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 9/3/2013 12:32 PM, Dennis Ochei wrote: Telmo and Brent, The Humean quote sums it up nicely. You can think of a human as a collection of desires and a reasoning process that arbitrates between and attempts to realize them. In the process of reasoning, one might bring about new desires, but reasoning is always employed by desires one currently has. Just couple days ago I was trying futilely to logically deduce what it is that I should want to do, I realized that logic is the servant of desire, (im not quite as eloquent as hume, it seems...) and to find a logically justified want is futile. Desire is inherently illogical. I'd say extralogical. That doesn't mean though that your desires aren't caused (by evolution, by metabolism,...). Many of them may even be predictable - that's how advertising agencies make a living. *Your* desires can be included in your experience by evolution, etc,
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
1) rationality (logic) in this case is to mean founded on justified principles. This is inherently a normative judgment. the principles that govern a deterministic system needn't appeal to our psychology as justified, this is what i mean by determined doesn't mean logical. none of my desires seem to me logically justified, but that doesnt imply they are not deterministic. 2) your thesis is essentially, i cant see how a set of rules could lead to to desire, i cant see how a set of rules could lead something that has experiences that seem to have irreducible qualities, therefore there can be no such rules. that's fine i suppose, but I'm unable to pretend that your blindness is some sort of insight. i just think you havent looked hard enough On Tuesday, September 3, 2013, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 8:57:13 PM UTC-4, Dennis Ochei wrote: Craig, What UV looks like will depend on how it is transduced into the nervous system. I could add a new opsin into your blue cones and it would appear to be a shade of blue. Sure, we can look at an infra-red camera too and see IR light as green or some other color. That isn't what I'm talking about. I am talking about new primary colors. Or, I could achieve the transduction in such a way that UV doesn't confuse with blue. In which case UV will look different from other colors *in way you cannot describe because you don't have access to how you condition your behavior based of the intensity of UV light. * It wouldn't matter if you did have access to how you condition your behavior based on the intensity of the UV light. Color cannot be described, it can only be experienced directly. I don't want you to waste our time trying to tell me what I already know. http://multisenserealism.com/thesis/light-revisited/is-visible-light-electromagnetic/ I've told you in a rudimentary form what is required to build a system that has drives and motivations, from parts that are inanimate. Not at all. You are projecting drives and motivations onto a system that is unconsciously serving a function that serves your drives and motivations. Nature has constructed such a device using 302 neurons. It learns, and it has motivations. The neurons are an expression of the motivations, not the other way around. Is your argument here that if we model the nematode deterministically, its ability to learn and its biological drives will vanish like smoke? Does a rabbit's taste for carrots vanish just because we model him as Bugs Bunny? Yes. Models, cartoons, figures, functions, shapes, descriptions, simulations...none of them can have any sense of being or feeling. Bugs Bunny is not a rabbit. He is a symbol which reminds our psychology of particular themes which overlap with rabbit themes. Because if so, I'd bet good money that you're wrong. Sure, I'd love to take that bet. I was going to say $10,000 but I don't think that you are going to pay that when you lose. What amount sounds good? Drives are traceable to electrochemical gradients trying to resolve themselves, driven by thermodynamic laws. Logic is how the pipes are connected up, desire is the water pump. I agree that microphysical events correspond to microphenomenal experiences, but that does not mean that all that has to happen to scale up an inanimate object's thermodynamic motives to mammalian quality emotions is that it must be configured in the correct shapes. That is an assumption, and a seductively popular one, but it is 100% wrong. Using the hypothesis of sense as the sole universal primitive, we should anticipate that the relevant qualifier of sensitivity is not structure but experience. Giving your cat a computer will not make him computer literate, and dressing a water pump up in human clothes does not cause a human. The clues are all around us. No machine or program has every succeeded in being anything but completely impersonal and psychologically empty. Furthermore, deterministic does not equal logical. There is no logic behind why opposites attract, even though this logically leads to like dissolving like. Whatever axioms there are in this universe, they are not logically justified. Determinism doesn't explain why opposites attract, but given that they do in some particular context, determinism is the logic of the consequences of that attraction. Determinism doesn't address everything, but whatever it does address is considered to behave according to the logic of the precedents which have been established. If determinism was not logical, how could it claim to determine anything? Craig On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 3:33 PM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comwrote: On Tuesday, September 3, 2013 3:42:53 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 9/3/2013 12:32 PM, Dennis Ochei wrote: Telmo and Brent, The Humean quote sums it up nicely. You can think of a human as a collection of desires and a reasoning process that
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-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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Monday, September 2, 2013 2:11:05 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: 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. Yes, that's true of course, but 1) 60% is a lot of stored perceptions triggering themselves for no reason. 2) The spontaneous activity is associated with behavioral changes. Kind of an odd thing for an archive of stored data to do independently of external stimuli. We should ask, at what point do *present* stimuli go dormant, and of how long, before they spontaneously (non-spontaneously) resurface as something that looks exactly like free will would look? We should not expect that free will can be proved to any greater extent than this. Again, if we were dealing with something which we knew for a fact had no intention or creativity, then sure, what the study shows is only that we don't know where 60% of the activity is coming from, so maybe it is just housekeeping or scheduled tasks running, or whatever. Since we do have a sense that there is a difference between behavior that is intentional, accidental, coerced, and subconsciously driven, and that those categories are distinct, it would be absurdly unscientific and biased to rule out this rather large footprint in the brain as belonging to our own shoe. Thanks, Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 9/2/2013 11:29 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Monday, September 2, 2013 2:11:05 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: 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. Yes, that's true of course, but 1) 60% is a lot of stored perceptions triggering themselves for no reason. First, by what standard is it known that 60% is too much? Second, the stored perceptions are triggering themselves (although that's what you'd like to believe). They are triggered by the brain activities preceding them, which in turn were triggered by prior activities, which in turn...and so on back till you were five and saw your grandmother. Third, suppose some of the activity was for no reason, i.e. quantum randomness. 2) The spontaneous activity is associated with behavioral changes. Kind of an odd thing for an archive of stored data to do independently of external stimuli. First, you have no standard by which to judge it odd. Second, there's no evidence it is independent of external stimuli - only of *present* external stimuli. We should ask, at what point do *present* stimuli go dormant, and of how long, before they spontaneously (non-spontaneously) resurface as something that looks exactly like free will would look? We should not expect that free will can be proved to any greater extent than this. This is just the compatibilist view. It's called free will just because it's too hard to trace all the causal contributions to the will. Again, if we were dealing with something which we knew for a fact had no intention or creativity, How could you ever know that? Only by being able to accurately predict all its actions. Which would imply free will = unpredictable will. then sure, what the study shows is only that we don't know where 60% of the activity is coming from, so maybe it is just housekeeping or scheduled tasks running, or whatever. Since we do have a sense that there is a difference between behavior that is intentional, accidental, coerced, and subconsciously driven, and that those categories are distinct, We also have a sense that the Earth is flat and Sun orbits around it. Brent it would be absurdly unscientific and biased to rule out this rather large footprint in the brain as belonging to our own shoe. Thanks, Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.3392 / Virus Database: 3222/6631 - Release Date: 09/02/13 -- 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Hi Brent I think the researchers would agree. Its definately present stimuli they have in mind. All the best --- Original Message --- From: meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net Sent: 3 September 2013 4:11 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com 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-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
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
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 9/2/2013 8:50 PM, Dennis Ochei wrote: 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. Good explanation. Craig has failed to absorb the dictum of Schopenhauer: Der Mensh Kann wohl tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 22 August 2013 15:23, chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Chris / Stathis I probably shouldn't have used the word adaptive. I think Craig is arguing : 1) whatever 'feels'/psychological states emerge from the universe must be compatible with its fundamental nature. 2) Anxiety implies that I really could avoid some feared event. 3) But que sera sera in a determined universe. what will be will be. I can't avoid my fate. consequently, anxiety can not emerge within a determined universe because of 2 and 1. Initially I took issue with 2) in the following way: I felt that uncertainty about a unavoidable fate would provide space for anxiety to emerge. But the more I thought about Craig's position the less tenable I thought this was. I think his position is very compelling (if I understand it). If nothing has ever avoided a fate how has the sense that this can be achieved emerged? What is it about the universe that allows for this delusion? What is it built out of? It's not a delusion. The animals that are anxious about predators avoid them and pass on their genes, while the ones that aren't anxious don't avoid them, get eaten, and don't pass on their genes. How is this more problematic in a deterministic world? Anyway the questions flooded in. So i thought what if 'anxiety' doesn't imply the ability to avoid a fate. Maybe its just an epiphenomenal 'feel' that floats above psychological uncertainty and isn't really susceptible to further analysis. That didn't seem to conflict with a determined universe readily. But you *can* avoid your fate in a determined universe. If you were not anxious, your fate would be different, so anxiety helps you avoid it. This is so whether or not the counterfactual is realised in a multiverse. Chris, as for whether any of this is plausible, probable etc. I'm afraid I wouldn't even begin to know how to assess that. And to be honest I'm not even sure whether Craig would accept my paraphrase of his argument. All the best. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 11:20:09 PM UTC-4, chris peck wrote: Hi Craig * am saying that the ontology of desire is impossible under strong determinism. Deterministic and random processes cannot possibly produce desire - not because desire is special, but because it doesn't make any sense. You are talking about putting in a gas pedal on a bowling ball.* I think I can meet you half way and agree that in a determined universe wants, desires and anxieties would be futile. They wouldn't make sense from an adaptive point of view. But I'm not convinced they make no logical sense. For example they could be epiphenomena coming along for the ride, unnecessarily colouring the unraveling of pre-written events. The determined universe might be inefficient, if you like, carrying along with it baggage that isn't really used. The wants and anxieties would be implied by the universe's initial conditions and not everything in those conditions need be functional. I don't see a logical contradiction there. Can't that logic be used to justify anything though? Why do we have telekinesis and and time travel-at-will?...Well, maybe its just an epiphenomenon that's left over from something else. It's unfalsifiable and no different from a religious faith, except in reverse. Instead of reaching for a supernatural explanation, determinism compulsively reaches for a sub-natural explanation. The compulsion is the same - taking comfort in the familiar. Instead of God did it. it's just Some unconscious mechanism did it.. The whole point of determinism and physical closure is to avoid unjustifiable surprises. If we are going to allow that desires are conjured randomly in the midst of barren austerity for no conceivable purpose, then why bother to assert that there are any deterministic laws at all. Maybe they are epiphenomena coming along for the ride? Why not say that the laws of physics are a random conspiracy of brain chemicals, zexires, which give the impression of validating each other because it makes us more tender and juicy for the hideous demons who raise us as cattle? Thanks, Craig All the best. -- Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 19:13:57 -0700 From: whats...@gmail.com javascript: To: everyth...@googlegroups.com javascript: Subject: Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 8:33:06 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On 21 August 2013 03:59, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: It is possible to make the distinction between doing something by accident and intentionally, between enslavement and freedom, while still acknowledging that brain mechanisms are either determined or random. Why would such a distinction be meaningful to a deterministic or random process though? I think you are smuggling our actual sense of intention into this theoretical world which is only deterministic-random (unintentional). If you are saying that something cannot be emotionally meaningful if it is random or determined you are wrong. Patients are anxious about the result of a medical test even though they know the answer is determined and gamblers are anxious about the outcome of their bet even though they know it is random. But that's only because of the impact that the random or determined condition has on our free participation. We have anxiety because a particular condition threatens to constrain our free will or cause unpleasant sensations. They are inextricably linked. A sensation can only be so unpleasant if we retain the power to escape it voluntarily. It is only when we we think that a situation will be unpleasant and that we will not be able to avoid it that anxiety is caused. We can't say whether we would have anxiety in a deterministic universe unless we knew for sure that we had been in a deterministic universe at at some point, but logically, it would not make sense for any such thing as anxiety to arise in a universe of involuntary spectators. What would be the justification of such an emotion? Anxiety makes sense if you have free will. If anything anxiety is caused by the ability to imagine the loss of the effectiveness of your free will. I do something intentionally if I want to do it and am aware that I am doing it; this is compatible with either type of brain mechanism. Only if you have the possibility of something 'wanting' to do something in the first place. Wanting doesn't make sense deterministically or randomly. In the words of Yoda, 'there is no try, either do or do not'. You know that you have wants, and you conclude from this that your brain cannot function deterministically or randomly. You make this claim repeatedly and without justification. My brain has nothing to do with it. I am saying that the ontology of desire is impossible under strong determinism. Deterministic and random processes cannot
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
The emotional life of very many animals, including the human animal, is critical to their survival in fact. Right, although only in fact, and not under the theory of strong determinism. In strong determinism the only thing that could matter to an animal's survival is its behavior. As long as they behave like animals, stay in family groups, have a social order, etc, no 'emotion' would impact that behavior in any way, especially if there were no free will. It's pretty easy to make something look like it has emotion - like this = :) But, of course that's because our consciousness includes metaphor and empathy. We might look at animals touching each other or fighting each other and say that there is emotion there, and there is, but in a theoretical deterministic universe, why would there be anything but the touching and fighting, just as there are storms in the atmosphere or supernovas exploding. Animals collide and bond with each other. So what? Thanks, Craig On Thursday, August 22, 2013 12:07:00 AM UTC-4, cdemorsella wrote: The determined universe might be inefficient, if you like, carrying along with it baggage that isn't really used. The wants and anxieties would be implied by the universe's initial conditions and not everything in those conditions need be functional. I don't see a logical contradiction there. Chris I follow what you are saying, but wouldn’t you also agree that it seems like a whole lot of energy and evolutionary lineage is invested in desire and the full panoply of the emotional spectra. Doesn’t it seem more probable that it has been very much selected for by evolutionary pressure. That it is not a mere hitchhiker along the ride on t crest of some inevitable collapsing wave in a deterministic universe playing out the preordained. Conservation of energy seems to be a first principal of all evolved systems, the easier an organism can navigate the flows of its reality in the huge numbers game of evolutionary pressure the better its chances are of surviving and passing on its heredity. Nature favors the emergence of efficient design (not always resulting in efficient designs though but that’s another story). It seems to me that the energy required in order to maintain our emotional and felt/experienced existence; to maintain this elaborate illusion of free will (it would be an illusion in a preordained world) is so great that unless it played an essential role in our lives and favored the individual’s hereditary success in whom it expressed then it would have been evolved out of us and would have never developed in the mammalian branch in the first place. The emotional life of very many animals, including the human animal, is critical to their survival in fact. Can something so critical be an accidental epiphenomena emerging out of the inefficiency of the program? Besides wouldn’t the program evolve to be as efficient as it could; doesn’t the conservation of energy apply to the deterministic universe itself or does it get to play by different rules? By the way I enjoy how you argue your position, very cogent and well laid out; it’s just that I feel that proposing that the poetry and depth of the experience of feeling that all of us to one degree or another experience, could be an accidental co-phenomena; a kind of side show that is a distracting superficial phenomena of no bearing or consequence to the underlying preordained script is not supported by the evidence that nature places a lot of energy and attention on developing and evolving precisely those phenomena in a lot of life forms we can study. Thanks for the interesting thread, Chris *From:* everyth...@googlegroups.com javascript: [mailto: everyth...@googlegroups.com javascript:] *On Behalf Of *chris peck *Sent:* Wednesday, August 21, 2013 8:20 PM *To:* everyth...@googlegroups.com javascript: *Subject:* RE: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade Hi Craig * am saying that the ontology of desire is impossible under strong determinism. Deterministic and random processes cannot possibly produce desire - not because desire is special, but because it doesn't make any sense. You are talking about putting in a gas pedal on a bowling ball.* I think I can meet you half way and agree that in a determined universe wants, desires and anxieties would be futile. They wouldn't make sense from an adaptive point of view. But I'm not convinced they make no logical sense. For example they could be epiphenomena coming along for the ride, unnecessarily colouring the unraveling of pre-written events. The determined universe might be inefficient, if you like, carrying along with it baggage that isn't really used. The wants and anxieties would be implied by the universe's initial conditions and not everything in those conditions need be functional. I don't see a logical contradiction there. All the best
RE: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Can't that logic be used to justify anything though? no. For example: Why do we have telekinesis and and time travel-at-will?...Well, maybe its just an epiphenomenon that's left over from something else. it can't be used to justify that. We have no reason to believe in telekinesis Craig nor time travel at will. Anxiety on the other hand is common. Yes? Instead of reaching for a supernatural explanation, determinism compulsively reaches for a sub-natural explanation. I don't think so. Determinism is a view people are driven to based on what they know about the world. Its an end point, a conclusion. It doesn't 'compulsively reach' for anything. The compulsion is the same - taking comfort in the familiar. Instead of God did it. it's just Some unconscious mechanism did it.. Comfort in the familiar? You think theres comfort to be had in determinism? That it is familiar? I don't think people feel that way. Whatever. when people make claims as bold as yours, that determinism is logically incompatible with the existance of anxiety; then I want to see whether they are serious or just bigging up pet theories with claims they can't justify. You're evading the question and kicking up mud. The whole point of determinism and physical closure is to avoid unjustifiable surprises. Like I said, there isn't a point to determinism. It is a conclusion that is reached. If we are going to allow that desires are conjured randomly in the midst of barren austerity for no conceivable purpose, then why bother to assert that there are any deterministic laws at all. Who's conjuring what and whats barren and austere??? What are you talking about? Look, It is because the world can be decribed by laws that are deterministic or probabilistic that we feel led to and caught between this pincer. Between randomness and fate. You put the cart way before the horse. aybe they are epiphenomena coming along for the ride? Why not say that the laws of physics are a random conspiracy of brain chemicals, zexires, which give the impression of validating each other because it makes us more tender and juicy for the hideous demons who raise us as cattle? You're out with fairies tonight Craig. Good luck to you. Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 03:34:59 -0700 From: whatsons...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade The emotional life of very many animals, including the human animal, is critical to their survival in fact. Right, although only in fact, and not under the theory of strong determinism. In strong determinism the only thing that could matter to an animal's survival is its behavior. As long as they behave like animals, stay in family groups, have a social order, etc, no 'emotion' would impact that behavior in any way, especially if there were no free will. It's pretty easy to make something look like it has emotion - like this = :) But, of course that's because our consciousness includes metaphor and empathy. We might look at animals touching each other or fighting each other and say that there is emotion there, and there is, but in a theoretical deterministic universe, why would there be anything but the touching and fighting, just as there are storms in the atmosphere or supernovas exploding. Animals collide and bond with each other. So what? Thanks, Craig On Thursday, August 22, 2013 12:07:00 AM UTC-4, cdemorsella wrote: The determined universe might be inefficient, if you like, carrying along with it baggage that isn't really used. The wants and anxieties would be implied by the universe's initial conditions and not everything in those conditions need be functional. I don't see a logical contradiction there. Chris I follow what you are saying, but wouldn’t you also agree that it seems like a whole lot of energy and evolutionary lineage is invested in desire and the full panoply of the emotional spectra. Doesn’t it seem more probable that it has been very much selected for by evolutionary pressure. That it is not a mere hitchhiker along the ride on t crest of some inevitable collapsing wave in a deterministic universe playing out the preordained.Conservation of energy seems to be a first principal of all evolved systems, the easier an organism can navigate the flows of its reality in the huge numbers game of evolutionary pressure the better its chances are of surviving and passing on its heredity. Nature favors the emergence of efficient design (not always resulting in efficient designs though but that’s another story). It seems to me that the energy required in order to maintain our emotional and felt/experienced existence; to maintain this elaborate illusion of free will (it would be an illusion in a preordained world) is so great that unless it played an essential role in our lives and favored the individual’s hereditary success in whom it expressed then it would have been evolved out of us and would have
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Brent wrote: *Just *any* response? Doesn't the response have to be something we can identify as intelligent or purposeful?* Depends on your definition of 'intelligent or purposeful' - Oh, and of RESPONSE of course. My def. of response includes your characterisation. * Brent wrote: * So do you agree that if we build a machine, such as a Mars Rover, that exhibits intelligence in its response then we may conclude it is aware/conscious?* Aware like a thermostat? conscious like the response of it? YES. We use loose meanings and draw even looser conclusions. We are loosers. Bren t wrote: *To exhibit intelligence the Rover would have to do more than follow instructions, it would have to learn from experience, act and plan through simulation and prediction. If it did exhibit intelligence like that, I'd grant it 'consciousness', whatever that means. If it learns and acts based on chemical types I'd grant it has a sense of smell. To say it's conscious is just a way of modeling how it learns and acts that we can relate to (what Dennett calls the intentional stance).* * * That's exactly what I called your 'right' to call *consciousness* whatever fits your purpose. I have no firm rules between conscious and its noun (-ness). Both may be related to the 'inventory' we know of. JM * * * * * * * * On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 9:59 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/17/2013 2:01 PM, John Mikes wrote: Consciousness is different: it is a hoax some high hatted scientists/pholosophers invented to make themselves smart. No basis, every author uses the term for a content that fits her/his theoretical stance. Me, too. Mine is: a response to relations we get to know about. Nothing more. Not human/elephant/dolphin, not universe, not awareness, not nothing, just RESPONSE. Just *any* response? Doesn't the response have to be something we can identify as intelligent or purposeful? By anything on anything. You may even include the figments of the Physical World into the inventory. So do you agree that if we build a machine, such as a Mars Rover, that exhibits intelligence in its response then we may conclude it is aware/conscious? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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.
RE: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
I am enslaved if someone physically constrains me or threatens me in order to make me behave in a certain way; this is also compatible with either type of brain mechanism. I would argue that people can be as much enslaved by chains within their minds, and that belief and habit have the potential to be as powerful a constraint as bonds of iron can ever be. Habit belief, once established in a host brain are exceedingly difficult to root out; they remain and operate largely unexamined by the person affected by them, generating assumed truth, unquestioned assumptions and deciding actions and judgments that are generated from within the inner universe the marvelously and massively parallel, and also very noisy brains. Habit belief often reflect and enforce external enslavement; we become habituated into our various assorted lots in life, and after the habit takes root we are largely driven forward along the desired behavioral patterns by the well rooted habits inside of us. And in some senses habitual behavior is a great thing; I love not having to think about everything that is constantly occurring and which demands a response from the brain. Habitual behavior to the rescue J But the unexamined habit and belief can imprison a brain as or even more effectively than physical imprisonment can. Apart from this one minor quibble, I agree with the thrust of your argument that we all intuitively grasp our own free will in a most visceral sense, and that while it cannot be defined precisely or pinned down or proved; that just because it is a little fuzzy and impossible to rigorously define does not mean it therefore does not exist or must remain outside of any serious discussion on such matters. Even if free will does not exist -- in which case it matter not whether we believe in it or not - it appears that regardless of whether free will truly exists or not, our belief in free will is vital for our morality. When we believe we have free will that we, the inner self-aware agents in our brains are deciding our actions then we tend to behave in more moral ways; conversely when we are led to believe that free will does not exist and that we are chatty marionettes driven by a fundamental determinism or programs outside of our control then we behave in far less moral manners. So, even if we inhabit a deterministic universe, that universe has found it necessary - in us (self-aware and at least semi-conscious beings) -- to develop/evolve this elaborate inner charade, to produce an illusion of free will that is so perfect in us that few question its existence. One could argue that the very fact that this very real sensation and experience of having free will and of being conscious has evolved to the exquisite degree that it has evolved in us is indicative of a deep centrality of importance to our being. Believing in free will, which seems very evolved in us - after all, human individuals, on average, very much tend to believe in their own free will --believing in it, independent of whether it actually exists or not in the underlying physical reality matrix in which our virtual mental entities are most intimately immersed seems vital to our being. and on many levels from the moral, to the motivational and emotional. Behaviorism misses the mark, sure behaviors can be induced, subjects controlled through conditioning, but that is merely generating superficial behavioral effects and demonstrating that behaviors can be imprinted on minds. It is not therefore a theory of the mind. It's akin to the torturers belief in the methodology of torture; while it is true that the one tortured will eventually become broken by torture and seek above all to please the torturer and will tell them whatever they want to hear. this in no ways actually implies that anything of value has been achieved. The information extracted by torture all too often proves to be of little value. Not calling behaviorists torturers although I find their world view tortured J The poetry of the mind is not so easily reducible, the esthetics of inner life cannot be so easily dissected and defined. That which is most beautiful and real in us. self-emerging within this truly vast dynamic electro-chemical inner-verse is the mind. I suspect the mind is rather much more a subtle multi-faceted, multi-reflecting, dynamically inter-acting and co-evolving self-emergent entity, which quite self-evidently, transcends the crude attempts of reducing this symphony to an impoverished assemblage of deterministic behaviors and mental programs. -Chris From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Craig Weinberg Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2013 10:59 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade On Monday, August 19, 2013 11:02:00 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On 17 August 2013 04:01, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: The objection
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 21 August 2013 03:59, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: It is possible to make the distinction between doing something by accident and intentionally, between enslavement and freedom, while still acknowledging that brain mechanisms are either determined or random. Why would such a distinction be meaningful to a deterministic or random process though? I think you are smuggling our actual sense of intention into this theoretical world which is only deterministic-random (unintentional). If you are saying that something cannot be emotionally meaningful if it is random or determined you are wrong. Patients are anxious about the result of a medical test even though they know the answer is determined and gamblers are anxious about the outcome of their bet even though they know it is random. I do something intentionally if I want to do it and am aware that I am doing it; this is compatible with either type of brain mechanism. Only if you have the possibility of something 'wanting' to do something in the first place. Wanting doesn't make sense deterministically or randomly. In the words of Yoda, 'there is no try, either do or do not'. You know that you have wants, and you conclude from this that your brain cannot function deterministically or randomly. You make this claim repeatedly and without justification. I am enslaved if someone physically constrains me or threatens me in order to make me behave in a certain way; this is also compatible with either type of brain mechanism. In the deterministic universe, you would be enslave no matter what, so what difference would it make whether your constraint is internally programmatic or externally modified? I don't think being a slave to brain processes is considered to be real slavery by most people. You are free to differ in your definition. Some questions for determinist thinkers: Can we effectively doubt that we have free will? I can't effectively doubt that I decide to do something and do it. I can effectively doubt that my actions are random, that they are determined, or that they are neither random nor determined It sounds like you are agreeing with me? On this point, yes; but I'm using the common, legal or compatibilist definition of free will, not yours. Or is the doubt a mental abstraction which denies the very capacity for intentional reasoning upon which the doubt itself is based? Yes: if I intend to do something, I can't doubt that I intend to do it, for otherwise I wouldn't intend to do it. If you doubt anything though, it is because you intend to believe what is true and your sense is that some proposition is not true. To say I doubt that there is a such thing as free will (intention) is itself an intentional, free-will act. You are saying not just that there is a sense of doubt, but that you voluntarily invest your personal authority in that doubt. I don't doubt free will in the common, legal or compatibilist sense. I doubt it in your sense, since it is not even conceptually possible. How would an illusion of doubt be justified, either randomly or deterministically? What function would an illusion of doubt serve, even in the most blue-sky hypothetical way? Why wouldn’t determinism itself be just as much of an illusion as free will or doubt under determinism? Determinism and randomness can be doubted. There is no problem here. Only because we live in a universe which supports voluntary intentional doubt. They couldn't be doubted in a universe which was limited to determinism and randomness. That's my point. To doubt, you need to be able to determine personally. Free will is the power not just to predict but to dictate. I can doubt something if it was determined at the beginning of the universe that I would doubt it. Where is the logical problem with that? For psychology not to be reducible to physiology, something extra would be needed, such as non-physical soul. Then the opposite would have to be true also. For select brain physiology not to be reducible to psychology, you would need some homunculus running translation traffic in infinite regress. Non-physical and soul are labels which are not useful to me. Physics is reducible to sense, and sense tends to polarize as public and private phenomena. A house is reducible to bricks because if you put all the bricks in place the house necessarily follows. Psychology is reducible to physiology because if you put all the physiology in place the psychology follows necessarily. Absent this something extra, the reduction stands. That's my definition of reductionism. If your definition is different then, according to this different definition, it could be that reductionism is wrong in this case. Physical reductionism is wrong because it arbitrarily starts with objects as real and subjects as somehow other than real. It's not really reductionism, it's just stealth dualism, where mind-soul is recategorized as an
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 8:33:06 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On 21 August 2013 03:59, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: It is possible to make the distinction between doing something by accident and intentionally, between enslavement and freedom, while still acknowledging that brain mechanisms are either determined or random. Why would such a distinction be meaningful to a deterministic or random process though? I think you are smuggling our actual sense of intention into this theoretical world which is only deterministic-random (unintentional). If you are saying that something cannot be emotionally meaningful if it is random or determined you are wrong. Patients are anxious about the result of a medical test even though they know the answer is determined and gamblers are anxious about the outcome of their bet even though they know it is random. But that's only because of the impact that the random or determined condition has on our free participation. We have anxiety because a particular condition threatens to constrain our free will or cause unpleasant sensations. They are inextricably linked. A sensation can only be so unpleasant if we retain the power to escape it voluntarily. It is only when we we think that a situation will be unpleasant and that we will not be able to avoid it that anxiety is caused. We can't say whether we would have anxiety in a deterministic universe unless we knew for sure that we had been in a deterministic universe at at some point, but logically, it would not make sense for any such thing as anxiety to arise in a universe of involuntary spectators. What would be the justification of such an emotion? Anxiety makes sense if you have free will. If anything anxiety is caused by the ability to imagine the loss of the effectiveness of your free will. I do something intentionally if I want to do it and am aware that I am doing it; this is compatible with either type of brain mechanism. Only if you have the possibility of something 'wanting' to do something in the first place. Wanting doesn't make sense deterministically or randomly. In the words of Yoda, 'there is no try, either do or do not'. You know that you have wants, and you conclude from this that your brain cannot function deterministically or randomly. You make this claim repeatedly and without justification. My brain has nothing to do with it. I am saying that the ontology of desire is impossible under strong determinism. Deterministic and random processes cannot possibly produce desire - not because desire is special, but because it doesn't make any sense. You are talking about putting in a gas pedal on a bowling ball. I am enslaved if someone physically constrains me or threatens me in order to make me behave in a certain way; this is also compatible with either type of brain mechanism. In the deterministic universe, you would be enslave no matter what, so what difference would it make whether your constraint is internally programmatic or externally modified? I don't think being a slave to brain processes is considered to be real slavery by most people. You are free to differ in your definition. Why not? What exactly is the difference whether your enslavement is internally based or externally based? Some questions for determinist thinkers: Can we effectively doubt that we have free will? I can't effectively doubt that I decide to do something and do it. I can effectively doubt that my actions are random, that they are determined, or that they are neither random nor determined It sounds like you are agreeing with me? On this point, yes; but I'm using the common, legal or compatibilist definition of free will, not yours. Ok Or is the doubt a mental abstraction which denies the very capacity for intentional reasoning upon which the doubt itself is based? Yes: if I intend to do something, I can't doubt that I intend to do it, for otherwise I wouldn't intend to do it. If you doubt anything though, it is because you intend to believe what is true and your sense is that some proposition is not true. To say I doubt that there is a such thing as free will (intention) is itself an intentional, free-will act. You are saying not just that there is a sense of doubt, but that you voluntarily invest your personal authority in that doubt. I don't doubt free will in the common, legal or compatibilist sense. I doubt it in your sense, since it is not even conceptually possible. It doesn't have to be conceptually possible, it is more primitive than concept. We have no choice but to experience it directly, and can only deny that this is the case by demonstrating that we have the power to do that as an act of free will. How would an illusion of doubt be
RE: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Hi Craig am saying that the ontology of desire is impossible under strong determinism. Deterministic and random processes cannot possibly produce desire - not because desire is special, but because it doesn't make any sense. You are talking about putting in a gas pedal on a bowling ball. I think I can meet you half way and agree that in a determined universe wants, desires and anxieties would be futile. They wouldn't make sense from an adaptive point of view. But I'm not convinced they make no logical sense. For example they could be epiphenomena coming along for the ride, unnecessarily colouring the unraveling of pre-written events. The determined universe might be inefficient, if you like, carrying along with it baggage that isn't really used. The wants and anxieties would be implied by the universe's initial conditions and not everything in those conditions need be functional. I don't see a logical contradiction there. All the best. Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 19:13:57 -0700 From: whatsons...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 8:33:06 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote:On 21 August 2013 03:59, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: It is possible to make the distinction between doing something by accident and intentionally, between enslavement and freedom, while still acknowledging that brain mechanisms are either determined or random. Why would such a distinction be meaningful to a deterministic or random process though? I think you are smuggling our actual sense of intention into this theoretical world which is only deterministic-random (unintentional). If you are saying that something cannot be emotionally meaningful if it is random or determined you are wrong. Patients are anxious about the result of a medical test even though they know the answer is determined and gamblers are anxious about the outcome of their bet even though they know it is random. But that's only because of the impact that the random or determined condition has on our free participation. We have anxiety because a particular condition threatens to constrain our free will or cause unpleasant sensations. They are inextricably linked. A sensation can only be so unpleasant if we retain the power to escape it voluntarily. It is only when we we think that a situation will be unpleasant and that we will not be able to avoid it that anxiety is caused. We can't say whether we would have anxiety in a deterministic universe unless we knew for sure that we had been in a deterministic universe at at some point, but logically, it would not make sense for any such thing as anxiety to arise in a universe of involuntary spectators. What would be the justification of such an emotion? Anxiety makes sense if you have free will. If anything anxiety is caused by the ability to imagine the loss of the effectiveness of your free will. I do something intentionally if I want to do it and am aware that I am doing it; this is compatible with either type of brain mechanism. Only if you have the possibility of something 'wanting' to do something in the first place. Wanting doesn't make sense deterministically or randomly. In the words of Yoda, 'there is no try, either do or do not'. You know that you have wants, and you conclude from this that your brain cannot function deterministically or randomly. You make this claim repeatedly and without justification. My brain has nothing to do with it. I am saying that the ontology of desire is impossible under strong determinism. Deterministic and random processes cannot possibly produce desire - not because desire is special, but because it doesn't make any sense. You are talking about putting in a gas pedal on a bowling ball. I am enslaved if someone physically constrains me or threatens me in order to make me behave in a certain way; this is also compatible with either type of brain mechanism. In the deterministic universe, you would be enslave no matter what, so what difference would it make whether your constraint is internally programmatic or externally modified? I don't think being a slave to brain processes is considered to be real slavery by most people. You are free to differ in your definition. Why not? What exactly is the difference whether your enslavement is internally based or externally based? Some questions for determinist thinkers: Can we effectively doubt that we have free will? I can't effectively doubt that I decide to do something and do it. I can effectively doubt that my actions are random, that they are determined, or that they are neither random nor determined It sounds like you are agreeing with me? On this point, yes; but I'm using the common, legal or compatibilist definition of free will, not yours. Ok Or is the doubt a mental abstraction which denies the very
RE: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
The determined universe might be inefficient, if you like, carrying along with it baggage that isn't really used. The wants and anxieties would be implied by the universe's initial conditions and not everything in those conditions need be functional. I don't see a logical contradiction there. Chris I follow what you are saying, but wouldn't you also agree that it seems like a whole lot of energy and evolutionary lineage is invested in desire and the full panoply of the emotional spectra. Doesn't it seem more probable that it has been very much selected for by evolutionary pressure. That it is not a mere hitchhiker along the ride on t crest of some inevitable collapsing wave in a deterministic universe playing out the preordained. Conservation of energy seems to be a first principal of all evolved systems, the easier an organism can navigate the flows of its reality in the huge numbers game of evolutionary pressure the better its chances are of surviving and passing on its heredity. Nature favors the emergence of efficient design (not always resulting in efficient designs though but that's another story). It seems to me that the energy required in order to maintain our emotional and felt/experienced existence; to maintain this elaborate illusion of free will (it would be an illusion in a preordained world) is so great that unless it played an essential role in our lives and favored the individual's hereditary success in whom it expressed then it would have been evolved out of us and would have never developed in the mammalian branch in the first place. The emotional life of very many animals, including the human animal, is critical to their survival in fact. Can something so critical be an accidental epiphenomena emerging out of the inefficiency of the program? Besides wouldn't the program evolve to be as efficient as it could; doesn't the conservation of energy apply to the deterministic universe itself or does it get to play by different rules? By the way I enjoy how you argue your position, very cogent and well laid out; it's just that I feel that proposing that the poetry and depth of the experience of feeling that all of us to one degree or another experience, could be an accidental co-phenomena; a kind of side show that is a distracting superficial phenomena of no bearing or consequence to the underlying preordained script is not supported by the evidence that nature places a lot of energy and attention on developing and evolving precisely those phenomena in a lot of life forms we can study. Thanks for the interesting thread, Chris From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of chris peck Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2013 8:20 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: RE: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade Hi Craig am saying that the ontology of desire is impossible under strong determinism. Deterministic and random processes cannot possibly produce desire - not because desire is special, but because it doesn't make any sense. You are talking about putting in a gas pedal on a bowling ball. I think I can meet you half way and agree that in a determined universe wants, desires and anxieties would be futile. They wouldn't make sense from an adaptive point of view. But I'm not convinced they make no logical sense. For example they could be epiphenomena coming along for the ride, unnecessarily colouring the unraveling of pre-written events. The determined universe might be inefficient, if you like, carrying along with it baggage that isn't really used. The wants and anxieties would be implied by the universe's initial conditions and not everything in those conditions need be functional. I don't see a logical contradiction there. All the best. _ Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 19:13:57 -0700 From: whatsons...@gmail.com To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 8:33:06 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On 21 August 2013 03:59, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com wrote: It is possible to make the distinction between doing something by accident and intentionally, between enslavement and freedom, while still acknowledging that brain mechanisms are either determined or random. Why would such a distinction be meaningful to a deterministic or random process though? I think you are smuggling our actual sense of intention into this theoretical world which is only deterministic-random (unintentional). If you are saying that something cannot be emotionally meaningful if it is random or determined you are wrong. Patients are anxious about the result of a medical test even though they know the answer is determined and gamblers are anxious about the outcome of their bet even though they know it is random. But that's only because of the impact that the random or determined condition has on our free participation. We have anxiety because a particular
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 22 August 2013 13:20, chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Craig am saying that the ontology of desire is impossible under strong determinism. Deterministic and random processes cannot possibly produce desire - not because desire is special, but because it doesn't make any sense. You are talking about putting in a gas pedal on a bowling ball. I think I can meet you half way and agree that in a determined universe wants, desires and anxieties would be futile. They wouldn't make sense from an adaptive point of view. That's no more true for a determined universe than it is for a non-determined universe. But I'm not convinced they make no logical sense. For example they could be epiphenomena coming along for the ride, unnecessarily colouring the unraveling of pre-written events. The determined universe might be inefficient, if you like, carrying along with it baggage that isn't really used. The wants and anxieties would be implied by the universe's initial conditions and not everything in those conditions need be functional. I don't see a logical contradiction there. All the best. If it were possible to have the same behaviour without consciousness then consciousness would not have evolved - there would be no adaptive value to it. That is one reason why I think consciousness must be a necessary side-effect of intelligent behaviour, at least in organic machines such as we are. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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.
RE: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Hi Chris / Stathis I probably shouldn't have used the word adaptive. I think Craig is arguing : 1) whatever 'feels'/psychological states emerge from the universe must be compatible with its fundamental nature. 2) Anxiety implies that I really could avoid some feared event. 3) But que sera sera in a determined universe. what will be will be. I can't avoid my fate. consequently, anxiety can not emerge within a determined universe because of 2 and 1. Initially I took issue with 2) in the following way: I felt that uncertainty about a unavoidable fate would provide space for anxiety to emerge. But the more I thought about Craig's position the less tenable I thought this was. I think his position is very compelling (if I understand it). If nothing has ever avoided a fate how has the sense that this can be achieved emerged? What is it about the universe that allows for this delusion? What is it built out of? Anyway the questions flooded in. So i thought what if 'anxiety' doesn't imply the ability to avoid a fate. Maybe its just an epiphenomenal 'feel' that floats above psychological uncertainty and isn't really susceptible to further analysis. That didn't seem to conflict with a determined universe readily. Chris, as for whether any of this is plausible, probable etc. I'm afraid I wouldn't even begin to know how to assess that. And to be honest I'm not even sure whether Craig would accept my paraphrase of his argument. All the best. From: stath...@gmail.com Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 15:01:35 +1000 Subject: Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade To: everything-list@googlegroups.com On 22 August 2013 13:20, chris peck chris_peck...@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Craig am saying that the ontology of desire is impossible under strong determinism. Deterministic and random processes cannot possibly produce desire - not because desire is special, but because it doesn't make any sense. You are talking about putting in a gas pedal on a bowling ball. I think I can meet you half way and agree that in a determined universe wants, desires and anxieties would be futile. They wouldn't make sense from an adaptive point of view. That's no more true for a determined universe than it is for a non-determined universe. But I'm not convinced they make no logical sense. For example they could be epiphenomena coming along for the ride, unnecessarily colouring the unraveling of pre-written events. The determined universe might be inefficient, if you like, carrying along with it baggage that isn't really used. The wants and anxieties would be implied by the universe's initial conditions and not everything in those conditions need be functional. I don't see a logical contradiction there. All the best. If it were possible to have the same behaviour without consciousness then consciousness would not have evolved - there would be no adaptive value to it. That is one reason why I think consciousness must be a necessary side-effect of intelligent behaviour, at least in organic machines such as we are. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Monday, August 19, 2013 11:02:00 AM UTC-4, stathisp wrote: On 17 August 2013 04:01, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.com javascript:wrote: The objection that the terms ‘consciousness’ or ‘free will’ are used in too many different ways to be understandable is one of the most common arguments that I run into. I agree that it is a superficially valid objection, but on deeper consideration, it should be clear that it is a specious and ideologically driven detour. The term *free will* is not as precise as a more scientific term might be (I tend to use *motive*, *efferent participation*, or *private intention*), but it isn’t nearly the problem that it is made to be in a debate. Any eight year old knows well enough what free will refers to. Nobody on Earth can fail to understand the difference between doing something by accident and intentionally, or between enslavement and freedom. The claim that these concepts are somehow esoteric doesn’t wash, unless you already have an expectation of a kind of verbal-logical supremacy in which nothing is allowed to exist until we can agree on a precise set of terms which give it existence. I think that this expectation is not a neutral or innocuous position, but actually contaminates the debate over free will, stacking the deck unintentionally in favor of the determinism. It is possible to make the distinction between doing something by accident and intentionally, between enslavement and freedom, while still acknowledging that brain mechanisms are either determined or random. Why would such a distinction be meaningful to a deterministic or random process though? I think you are smuggling our actual sense of intention into this theoretical world which is only deterministic-random (unintentional). I do something intentionally if I want to do it and am aware that I am doing it; this is compatible with either type of brain mechanism. Only if you have the possibility of something 'wanting' to do something in the first place. Wanting doesn't make sense deterministically or randomly. In the words of Yoda, 'there is no try, either do or do not'. I am enslaved if someone physically constrains me or threatens me in order to make me behave in a certain way; this is also compatible with either type of brain mechanism. In the deterministic universe, you would be enslave no matter what, so what difference would it make whether your constraint is internally programmatic or externally modified? It’s subtle, but ontologically, it is a bit like letting a burglar talk you into opening up the door to the house for them since breaking a window would only make a mess for you to clean up. Because the argument for hard determinism begins with an assumption that impartiality and objectivity are inherently desirable in all things, it asks that you put your king in check from the start. The argument doubles down on this leverage with the implication that subjective intuition is notoriously naive and flawed, so that not putting your king in check from the start is framed as a weak position. This is the James Randi kind of double-bind. If you don’t submit to his rules, then you are already guilty of fraud, and part of his rules are that you have no say in what his rules will be. This is the sleight of hand which is also used by Daniel Dennett as well. What poses as a fair consideration of hard determinism is actually a stealth maneuver to create determinism – to demand that the subject submit to the forced disbelief system and become complicit in undermining their own authority. The irony is that it is only through a personal/social, political attack on subjectivity that the false perspective of objectivity can be introduced. It is accepted only by presentation pf an argument of personal insignificance so that the subject is shamed and bullied into imagining itself an object. Without knowing it, one person’s will has been voluntarily overpowered and confounded by another person’s free will into accepting that this state of affairs is not really happening. In presenting free will and consciousness as a kind of stage magic, the materialist magician performs a meta-magic trick on the audience. Some questions for determinist thinkers: - Can we effectively doubt that we have free will? I can't effectively doubt that I decide to do something and do it. I can effectively doubt that my actions are random, that they are determined, or that they are neither random nor determined It sounds like you are agreeing with me? - Or is the doubt a mental abstraction which denies the very capacity for intentional reasoning upon which the doubt itself is based? Yes: if I intend to do something, I can't doubt that I intend to do it, for otherwise I wouldn't intend to do it. If you doubt anything though, it is because you intend to believe what is true and
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 17 August 2013 04:01, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: The objection that the terms ‘consciousness’ or ‘free will’ are used in too many different ways to be understandable is one of the most common arguments that I run into. I agree that it is a superficially valid objection, but on deeper consideration, it should be clear that it is a specious and ideologically driven detour. The term *free will* is not as precise as a more scientific term might be (I tend to use *motive*, *efferent participation*, or *private intention*), but it isn’t nearly the problem that it is made to be in a debate. Any eight year old knows well enough what free will refers to. Nobody on Earth can fail to understand the difference between doing something by accident and intentionally, or between enslavement and freedom. The claim that these concepts are somehow esoteric doesn’t wash, unless you already have an expectation of a kind of verbal-logical supremacy in which nothing is allowed to exist until we can agree on a precise set of terms which give it existence. I think that this expectation is not a neutral or innocuous position, but actually contaminates the debate over free will, stacking the deck unintentionally in favor of the determinism. It is possible to make the distinction between doing something by accident and intentionally, between enslavement and freedom, while still acknowledging that brain mechanisms are either determined or random. I do something intentionally if I want to do it and am aware that I am doing it; this is compatible with either type of brain mechanism. I am enslaved if someone physically constrains me or threatens me in order to make me behave in a certain way; this is also compatible with either type of brain mechanism. It’s subtle, but ontologically, it is a bit like letting a burglar talk you into opening up the door to the house for them since breaking a window would only make a mess for you to clean up. Because the argument for hard determinism begins with an assumption that impartiality and objectivity are inherently desirable in all things, it asks that you put your king in check from the start. The argument doubles down on this leverage with the implication that subjective intuition is notoriously naive and flawed, so that not putting your king in check from the start is framed as a weak position. This is the James Randi kind of double-bind. If you don’t submit to his rules, then you are already guilty of fraud, and part of his rules are that you have no say in what his rules will be. This is the sleight of hand which is also used by Daniel Dennett as well. What poses as a fair consideration of hard determinism is actually a stealth maneuver to create determinism – to demand that the subject submit to the forced disbelief system and become complicit in undermining their own authority. The irony is that it is only through a personal/social, political attack on subjectivity that the false perspective of objectivity can be introduced. It is accepted only by presentation pf an argument of personal insignificance so that the subject is shamed and bullied into imagining itself an object. Without knowing it, one person’s will has been voluntarily overpowered and confounded by another person’s free will into accepting that this state of affairs is not really happening. In presenting free will and consciousness as a kind of stage magic, the materialist magician performs a meta-magic trick on the audience. Some questions for determinist thinkers: - Can we effectively doubt that we have free will? I can't effectively doubt that I decide to do something and do it. I can effectively doubt that my actions are random, that they are determined, or that they are neither random nor determined - Or is the doubt a mental abstraction which denies the very capacity for intentional reasoning upon which the doubt itself is based? Yes: if I intend to do something, I can't doubt that I intend to do it, for otherwise I wouldn't intend to do it. - How would an illusion of doubt be justified, either randomly or deterministically? What function would an illusion of doubt serve, even in the most blue-sky hypothetical way? - Why wouldn’t determinism itself be just as much of an illusion as free will or doubt under determinism? Determinism and randomness can be doubted. There is no problem here. Another common derailment is to conflate the position of recognizing the phenomenon of subjectivity as authentic with religious faith, naive realism, or soft-headed sentimentality. This also is ironic, as it is an attack on the ego of the subject, not on the legitimacy of the issue. There is no reason to presume any theistic belief is implied just because determinism can be challenged at its root rather than on technicalities. To challenge determinism at its root requires (appropriately) the freedom to question the
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 8/17/2013 10:09 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Don't be so evasive, Brent. Being dense is how science works. It's about stripping away your assumptions. Your assumption is that somehow a sense of smell is an expected outcome of chemical detection, so I ask you to explain why you assume that. You are bluffing. And you're putting no thought into the problem. Otherwise you'd have realized that smell/chemical detection doesn't have the angular disribution and projective geometry of sight or the localization of touch and so you could have answered you own questions if you'd actually been interested in the answer. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
I can nothing but laugh at at a Physicist pontificating about what they call free will . It show how far the destruction of philosophy by metaphisical-ideological-religious reductionism has gone since Occam. Calvin would be surprised about the twists that have suffered his theory of predestination by ignorants of the history of ideas that know nothing but the fashionable discussions of their concrete time. 2013/8/18, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net: On 8/17/2013 10:09 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Don't be so evasive, Brent. Being dense is how science works. It's about stripping away your assumptions. Your assumption is that somehow a sense of smell is an expected outcome of chemical detection, so I ask you to explain why you assume that. You are bluffing. And you're putting no thought into the problem. Otherwise you'd have realized that smell/chemical detection doesn't have the angular disribution and projective geometry of sight or the localization of touch and so you could have answered you own questions if you'd actually been interested in the answer. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- Alberto. -- 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Synesthesia proves that data can be formatted in multiple ways, irrespective of assumed correlations. A computer proves this also. Your argument is essentially that we couldn't look at the data of an mp3 in any other way except listening to it with an ear. You'd have realized that visual/alphanumeric detection doesn't have the harmonic oscillation and melodic structure to contain music theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story Try again? Craig On Sun, Aug 18, 2013 at 2:47 AM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/17/2013 10:09 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Don't be so evasive, Brent. Being dense is how science works. It's about stripping away your assumptions. Your assumption is that somehow a sense of smell is an expected outcome of chemical detection, so I ask you to explain why you assume that. You are bluffing. And you're putting no thought into the problem. Otherwise you'd have realized that smell/chemical detection doesn't have the angular disribution and projective geometry of sight or the localization of touch and so you could have answered you own questions if you'd actually been interested in the answer. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/jDy5twbibkQ/unsubscribe. To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
Brent, your 'quip' comes close, but... It is a fundamental view of the world as we see it (the MODEL of it we know about). We can detect the affecting of many factors we know about, which is a portion only. We THINK the rest is up to us. It isn't - however we are not slaves of deterministic effects. There are conter-effects to choose from and stronger/weaker argumentative decisions to pnder. So we HAVE som (free? relatively so) choices within given situations where we have effects to ponder. Even the counterproductive decision is such a result. When the Sun traveled the Dome of the Sky - that was congruent with the model of that time. Today we are not much smarter just think so. We have other (mis)beliefs we hold true. We call it conventional science (maybe QM? - anyway The Physical World (ask Bruno). Consciousness is different: it is a hoax some high hatted scientists/pholosophers invented to make themselves smart. No basis, every author uses the term for a content that fits her/his theoretical stance. Me, too. Mine is: a response to relations we get to know about. Nothing more. Not human/elephant/dolphin, not universe, not awareness, not nothing, just RESPONSE. By anything on anything. You may even include the figments of the Physical World into the inventory. We spend too much time on items of our fictions we indeed do not know much about. We even get Nobel prizes for them. (Not me). Then comes a religious indoctrination and steals the list. John Mikes On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 2:45 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 8/16/2013 11:01 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Nobody on Earth can fail to understand the difference between doing something by accident and intentionally, Really? Intentionally usually means with conscious forethought. But the Grey Walter and Libet experiments make it doubtful that consciousness of intention precedes the decision. Remember when nobody on Earth could doubt that the Sun traveled across the dome of the sky and the Earth was flat. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 8/17/2013 2:01 PM, John Mikes wrote: Consciousness is different: it is a hoax some high hatted scientists/pholosophers invented to make themselves smart. No basis, every author uses the term for a content that fits her/his theoretical stance. Me, too. Mine is: a response to relations we get to know about. Nothing more. Not human/elephant/dolphin, not universe, not awareness, not nothing, just RESPONSE. Just *any* response? Doesn't the response have to be something we can identify as intelligent or purposeful? By anything on anything. You may even include the figments of the Physical World into the inventory. So do you agree that if we build a machine, such as a Mars Rover, that exhibits intelligence in its response then we may conclude it is aware/conscious? Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Saturday, August 17, 2013 9:59:26 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 8/17/2013 2:01 PM, John Mikes wrote: Consciousness is different: it is a hoax some high hatted scientists/pholosophers invented to make themselves smart. No basis, every author uses the term for a content that fits her/his theoretical stance. Me, too. Mine is: a response to relations we get to know about. Nothing more. Not human/elephant/dolphin, not universe, not awareness, not nothing, just RESPONSE. Just *any* response? Doesn't the response have to be something we can identify as intelligent or purposeful? By anything on anything. You may even include the figments of the Physical World into the inventory. So do you agree that if we build a machine, such as a Mars Rover, that exhibits intelligence in its response then we may conclude it is aware/conscious? What if you wanted to build a Mars Rover that was completely unconscious, but still followed a sophisticated set of instructions. Would that be impossible? If the Mars Rover detects enough different kinds of compounds in the Martian atmosphere, is there no way of preventing it from developing a sense of smell? Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 8/17/2013 7:05 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Saturday, August 17, 2013 9:59:26 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 8/17/2013 2:01 PM, John Mikes wrote: Consciousness is different: it is a hoax some high hatted scientists/pholosophers invented to make themselves smart. No basis, every author uses the term for a content that fits her/his theoretical stance. Me, too. Mine is: a response to relations we get to know about. Nothing more. Not human/elephant/dolphin, not universe, not awareness, not nothing, just RESPONSE. Just *any* response? Doesn't the response have to be something we can identify as intelligent or purposeful? By anything on anything. You may even include the figments of the Physical World into the inventory. So do you agree that if we build a machine, such as a Mars Rover, that exhibits intelligence in its response then we may conclude it is aware/conscious? What if you wanted to build a Mars Rover that was completely unconscious, but still followed a sophisticated set of instructions. Would that be impossible? If the Mars Rover detects enough different kinds of compounds in the Martian atmosphere, is there no way of preventing it from developing a sense of smell? To exhibit intelligence the Rover would have to do more than follow instructions, it would have to learn from experience, act and plan through simulation and prediction. If it did exhibit intelligence like that, I'd grant it 'consciousness', whatever that means. If it learns and acts based on chemical types I'd grant it has a sense of smell. To say it's conscious is just a way of modeling how it learns and acts that we can relate to (what Dennett calls the intentional stance). Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Saturday, August 17, 2013 11:14:22 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 8/17/2013 7:05 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Saturday, August 17, 2013 9:59:26 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 8/17/2013 2:01 PM, John Mikes wrote: Consciousness is different: it is a hoax some high hatted scientists/pholosophers invented to make themselves smart. No basis, every author uses the term for a content that fits her/his theoretical stance. Me, too. Mine is: a response to relations we get to know about. Nothing more. Not human/elephant/dolphin, not universe, not awareness, not nothing, just RESPONSE. Just *any* response? Doesn't the response have to be something we can identify as intelligent or purposeful? By anything on anything. You may even include the figments of the Physical World into the inventory. So do you agree that if we build a machine, such as a Mars Rover, that exhibits intelligence in its response then we may conclude it is aware/conscious? What if you wanted to build a Mars Rover that was completely unconscious, but still followed a sophisticated set of instructions. Would that be impossible? If the Mars Rover detects enough different kinds of compounds in the Martian atmosphere, is there no way of preventing it from developing a sense of smell? To exhibit intelligence the Rover would have to do more than follow instructions, it would have to learn from experience, act and plan through simulation and prediction. Would you say that it is impossible to build a machine which learns and plans without it developing perception and qualia automatically? Could any set of instructions suppress this development? If qualia can appear anywhere that learning and planning behaviors can be inferred, does that mean that there are also be programs or processes which must be protected from qualitative contamination or leakage? If it did exhibit intelligence like that, I'd grant it 'consciousness', whatever that means. Why would you grant that it has a quality which you claim not to understand? If it learns and acts based on chemical types I'd grant it has a sense of smell. Would the sense of smell be like our sense of smell automatically, or could its sense of smell be analogous to our sense of touch, or intuition, or sense of humor? Why have any of them? What does a sense of smell add to your understanding of how chemical detection works? If there were no such thing as smell, could anything even remotely resembling olfactory qualia be justified quantitatively? Unless you can explain exactly why you grant a machine qualities that you claim not to understand and why you grant a superfluous aesthetic dimension to simple stochastic predictive logic, I will consider the perspective that you offer as lacking any serious scientific justification. To say it's conscious is just a way of modeling how it learns and acts that we can relate to (what Dennett calls the intentional stance). If that were true, then nobody should mind if they spend the rest of their life under comatose-level anesthetic while we replace their brain with a device that models how it learns in the same way that you once did. It's not true though. There is an important difference between feeling and doing, between being awake and having your body walk around. Can you really not see that? Can you really not see why a machine that acts like we expect a person to act doesn't have to mean that the machine's abilities automatically conjure feeling, seeing, smelling, etc out of thin air? Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 8/17/2013 8:59 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Saturday, August 17, 2013 11:14:22 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 8/17/2013 7:05 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Saturday, August 17, 2013 9:59:26 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 8/17/2013 2:01 PM, John Mikes wrote: Consciousness is different: it is a hoax some high hatted scientists/pholosophers invented to make themselves smart. No basis, every author uses the term for a content that fits her/his theoretical stance. Me, too. Mine is: a response to relations we get to know about. Nothing more. Not human/elephant/dolphin, not universe, not awareness, not nothing, just RESPONSE. Just *any* response? Doesn't the response have to be something we can identify as intelligent or purposeful? By anything on anything. You may even include the figments of the Physical World into the inventory. So do you agree that if we build a machine, such as a Mars Rover, that exhibits intelligence in its response then we may conclude it is aware/conscious? What if you wanted to build a Mars Rover that was completely unconscious, but still followed a sophisticated set of instructions. Would that be impossible? If the Mars Rover detects enough different kinds of compounds in the Martian atmosphere, is there no way of preventing it from developing a sense of smell? To exhibit intelligence the Rover would have to do more than follow instructions, it would have to learn from experience, act and plan through simulation and prediction. Would you say that it is impossible to build a machine which learns and plans without it developing perception and qualia automatically? Could any set of instructions suppress this development? If qualia can appear anywhere that learning and planning behaviors can be inferred, does that mean that there are also be programs or processes which must be protected from qualitative contamination or leakage? If it did exhibit intelligence like that, I'd grant it 'consciousness', whatever that means. Why would you grant that it has a quality which you claim not to understand? Because it helps me understand what it would do as it helps me understand what other people may do. I didn't claim not to understand it, but I'm not sure your understanding is the same as mine. If it learns and acts based on chemical types I'd grant it has a sense of smell. Would the sense of smell be like our sense of smell automatically, or could its sense of smell be analogous to our sense of touch, or intuition, or sense of humor? No. As you would realize if you thought about it. Why have any of them? What does a sense of smell add to your understanding of how chemical detection works? Don't be so dense, Craig. If there were no such thing as smell, could anything even remotely resembling olfactory qualia be justified quantitatively? Unless you can explain exactly why you grant a machine qualities that you claim not to understand and why you grant a superfluous aesthetic dimension to simple stochastic predictive logic, I will consider the perspective that you offer as lacking any serious scientific justification. To say it's conscious is just a way of modeling how it learns and acts that we can relate to (what Dennett calls the intentional stance). If that were true, then nobody should mind if they spend the rest of their life under comatose-level anesthetic while we replace their brain with a device that models how it learns in the same way that you once did. I specifically wrote and acts above. Brent It's not true though. There is an important difference between feeling and doing, between being awake and having your body walk around. Can you really not see that? Can you really not see why a machine that acts like we expect a person to act doesn't have to mean that the machine's abilities automatically conjure feeling, seeing, smelling, etc out of thin air? Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com http://www.avg.com Version: 2013.0.3392 / Virus Database: 3211/6586 - Release Date: 08/17/13 -- 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.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Sunday, August 18, 2013 12:24:18 AM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 8/17/2013 8:59 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Saturday, August 17, 2013 11:14:22 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 8/17/2013 7:05 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Saturday, August 17, 2013 9:59:26 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 8/17/2013 2:01 PM, John Mikes wrote: Consciousness is different: it is a hoax some high hatted scientists/pholosophers invented to make themselves smart. No basis, every author uses the term for a content that fits her/his theoretical stance. Me, too. Mine is: a response to relations we get to know about. Nothing more. Not human/elephant/dolphin, not universe, not awareness, not nothing, just RESPONSE. Just *any* response? Doesn't the response have to be something we can identify as intelligent or purposeful? By anything on anything. You may even include the figments of the Physical World into the inventory. So do you agree that if we build a machine, such as a Mars Rover, that exhibits intelligence in its response then we may conclude it is aware/conscious? What if you wanted to build a Mars Rover that was completely unconscious, but still followed a sophisticated set of instructions. Would that be impossible? If the Mars Rover detects enough different kinds of compounds in the Martian atmosphere, is there no way of preventing it from developing a sense of smell? To exhibit intelligence the Rover would have to do more than follow instructions, it would have to learn from experience, act and plan through simulation and prediction. Would you say that it is impossible to build a machine which learns and plans without it developing perception and qualia automatically? Could any set of instructions suppress this development? If qualia can appear anywhere that learning and planning behaviors can be inferred, does that mean that there are also be programs or processes which must be protected from qualitative contamination or leakage? If it did exhibit intelligence like that, I'd grant it 'consciousness', whatever that means. Why would you grant that it has a quality which you claim not to understand? Because it helps me understand what it would do as it helps me understand what other people may do. I didn't claim not to understand it, but I'm not sure your understanding is the same as mine. But why does it help you understand anything? It sounds like you are saying that granting a system consciousness is a formality that you find superfluous, but then you are saying that this empty gesture helps you understand something. If it learns and acts based on chemical types I'd grant it has a sense of smell. Would the sense of smell be like our sense of smell automatically, or could its sense of smell be analogous to our sense of touch, or intuition, or sense of humor? No. As you would realize if you thought about it. That was an either or question, so it can't have an answer of 'no'. Why have any of them? What does a sense of smell add to your understanding of how chemical detection works? Don't be so dense, Craig. Don't be so evasive, Brent. Being dense is how science works. It's about stripping away your assumptions. Your assumption is that somehow a sense of smell is an expected outcome of chemical detection, so I ask you to explain why you assume that. You are bluffing. How about this. Could a TV show be closed captioned so thoroughly that a deaf person could read it and have the same experience as someone who listened to the show? Is a scroll of type that reads [grunting] enough of an understanding of the sound that it represents to say it is identical? Could there be a particular sound which would best and most unambiguously fit the description of [grunting], or could the description be extended to such a length and nuance that any sound could be described with 100% fidelity? If there were no such thing as smell, could anything even remotely resembling olfactory qualia be justified quantitatively? Unless you can explain exactly why you grant a machine qualities that you claim not to understand and why you grant a superfluous aesthetic dimension to simple stochastic predictive logic, I will consider the perspective that you offer as lacking any serious scientific justification. To say it's conscious is just a way of modeling how it learns and acts that we can relate to (what Dennett calls the intentional stance). If that were true, then nobody should mind if they spend the rest of their life under comatose-level anesthetic while we replace their brain with a device that models how it learns in the same way that you once did. I specifically wrote and acts above. I specifically omitted 'acts' because it is too loaded with metaphorical connotations in this context. You are trying to smuggle intention into an algorithm
Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
The objection that the terms ‘consciousness’ or ‘free will’ are used in too many different ways to be understandable is one of the most common arguments that I run into. I agree that it is a superficially valid objection, but on deeper consideration, it should be clear that it is a specious and ideologically driven detour. The term *free will* is not as precise as a more scientific term might be (I tend to use *motive*, *efferent participation*, or *private intention*), but it isn’t nearly the problem that it is made to be in a debate. Any eight year old knows well enough what free will refers to. Nobody on Earth can fail to understand the difference between doing something by accident and intentionally, or between enslavement and freedom. The claim that these concepts are somehow esoteric doesn’t wash, unless you already have an expectation of a kind of verbal-logical supremacy in which nothing is allowed to exist until we can agree on a precise set of terms which give it existence. I think that this expectation is not a neutral or innocuous position, but actually contaminates the debate over free will, stacking the deck unintentionally in favor of the determinism. It’s subtle, but ontologically, it is a bit like letting a burglar talk you into opening up the door to the house for them since breaking a window would only make a mess for you to clean up. Because the argument for hard determinism begins with an assumption that impartiality and objectivity are inherently desirable in all things, it asks that you put your king in check from the start. The argument doubles down on this leverage with the implication that subjective intuition is notoriously naive and flawed, so that not putting your king in check from the start is framed as a weak position. This is the James Randi kind of double-bind. If you don’t submit to his rules, then you are already guilty of fraud, and part of his rules are that you have no say in what his rules will be. This is the sleight of hand which is also used by Daniel Dennett as well. What poses as a fair consideration of hard determinism is actually a stealth maneuver to create determinism – to demand that the subject submit to the forced disbelief system and become complicit in undermining their own authority. The irony is that it is only through a personal/social, political attack on subjectivity that the false perspective of objectivity can be introduced. It is accepted only by presentation pf an argument of personal insignificance so that the subject is shamed and bullied into imagining itself an object. Without knowing it, one person’s will has been voluntarily overpowered and confounded by another person’s free will into accepting that this state of affairs is not really happening. In presenting free will and consciousness as a kind of stage magic, the materialist magician performs a meta-magic trick on the audience. Some questions for determinist thinkers: - Can we effectively doubt that we have free will? Or is the doubt a mental abstraction which denies the very capacity for intentional reasoning upon which the doubt itself is based? - How would an illusion of doubt be justified, either randomly or deterministically? What function would an illusion of doubt serve, even in the most blue-sky hypothetical way? - Why wouldn’t determinism itself be just as much of an illusion as free will or doubt under determinism? Another common derailment is to conflate the position of recognizing the phenomenon of subjectivity as authentic with religious faith, naive realism, or soft-headed sentimentality. This also is ironic, as it is an attack on the ego of the subject, not on the legitimacy of the issue. There is no reason to presume any theistic belief is implied just because determinism can be challenged at its root rather than on technicalities. To challenge determinism at its root requires (appropriately) the freedom to question the applicability of reductive reasoning to reason itself. The whole question of free will is to what extent it is an irreducible phenomenon which arises at the level of the individual. This question is already rendered unspeakable as soon as the free will advocate agrees to the framing of the debate in terms which require that they play the role of cross-examined witness to the prosecutor of determinism. As soon as the subject is misdirected to focus their attention on the processes of the sub-personal level, a level where the individual by definition does not exist, the debate is no longer about the experience of volition and intention, but of physiology. The ‘witness’ is then invited to give a false confession, making the same mistake that the prosecutor makes in calling the outcome of the debate before it even begins. The foregone conclusion that physiological processes define psychological experiences entirely is used to justify itself, and the deterministic
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On 8/16/2013 11:01 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Nobody on Earth can fail to understand the difference between doing something by accident and intentionally, Really? Intentionally usually means with conscious forethought. But the Grey Walter and Libet experiments make it doubtful that consciousness of intention precedes the decision. Remember when nobody on Earth could doubt that the Sun traveled across the dome of the sky and the Earth was flat. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Re: Determinism - Tricks of the Trade
On Friday, August 16, 2013 2:45:56 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote: On 8/16/2013 11:01 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: Nobody on Earth can fail to understand the difference between doing something by accident and intentionally, Really?� Intentionally usually means with conscious forethought.� But the Grey Walter and Libet experiments make it doubtful that consciousness of intention precedes the decision. Cognition is not necessary to discern the intentional from the unintentional. A salmon who swims upstream does so with more intent than a dead salmon floats downstream. Intention is more primitive than thought as thought itself is driven by the intention to influence your environment. The experiments that you mention do not make intention doubtful at all, they only suggest that intention exists at the sub-personal level as well. Breaking down events on the scale of an individual person to micro-events on which no individual exists is the first mistake. Because intention has everything to do with time and causality, we cannot assume that our naive experience of time holds true outside of our own perceptual frame. The presumption that intention is a complex computational sequence building up to a personal feeling of taking action voluntarily unnecessarily biases the bottom-up view. I think that what is actually going on is that time itself is a relativistic measure which extends from more fundamental sensory qualities of significance, rhythm, and memory. This means that personal time happens on a personally scaled inertial frame - just as c is a velocity which is infinite within any given inertial frame, our experience of exercising our will is roughly instantaneous. The exercise of will relates to our context, so seeking faster, sub-personal inertial frames for insight is like trying to measure the plot of a movie by analyzing the patterns of pixels on the screen. It does not illuminate the physics of will, it obscures it. Remember when nobody on Earth could doubt that the Sun traveled across the dome of the sky and the Earth was flat. The perception that the Earth is flat is more important that the knowledge that the Earth is round. The sophisticated view is useful for some purposes, but the native view is indispensable. With free will it is not enough to know that the world is round, we must know why it seems flat, and why the flat seeming and round seeming are both true in their own context. Thanks, Craig Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
