Yes, I’m saying that complex behaviors are a mental assignment. There is a drawing, which I can’t find right now but I’m still trying, where there are a bunch of black dots on a white paper. Initially, there doesn’t seem to be a pattern to the black dots, but give it a moment, and they trace out a dog in the snow. So, the “emergence” of the dog pattern from amongst the dots is not a collective property of the black dots, but of our mental processing of the gross sensory input signals incident from that region of space. I’m applying this feature to our mundane and taken-for-granted phenomena within consciousness.
I don’t see why there is any roadblock here (no pun). Ultimately, what we perceive as a car is a collection of bazillion quarks spatially arranged in a certain way at a given time t[sub]0[/sub]. The fundamental forces of physics really exist, and in theory, predict the behavior of each of them. When someone starts driving, the quarks that make up the steering wheel have forces impressed on them. Due to the dynamics of the net forces (existing and new), most of them respond in such a way, so as to correspond to a gross rotation in our perception. And so on.
I am. The interval makes no qualitative difference to my argument. As long as there is no permanent status for any particle, the (finite) longevity of any specific particle as a part of the object is just a function of its net force, which may reflect anything from a very, very stable equilibrium to a very, very unstable one. Even in cellular automata simulations like Conway’s, it’s possible to have patterns persist for longer periods than a few seconds.
Maybe theres another interpretation: “our mental processing of the gross sensory input signals incident from that region of space” (also known as the act of seeing ) is PART OF the ‘emergence chain’ of a dog pattern, you just have to reduce the activity of pattern recognition in the brain to whatever goes on in the at the most basic physical level. In other words, theres another way to say what you’re saying.
Exactly. Where in your chain of events described is there an observing “soul” that finally grants existence to this car? The whole idea of emergence, from what I gather, is that all these tiny pieces of a car respond to each other in such a way “so as to correspond to a gross rotation in our perception”, when any of these things working separately would correspond (apparently) to a somewhat less gross rotation in our perception. The point is that this chain of events happens, and therefore exists in the physical sense, whether or not any “soul” is cognizant of the fact.
Yes, but our mind is the basis of the emergence, not a part of it. Consider a fly. It, supposedly, won’t see the dog pattern, even though the incident photons remain similar.
Recognizing and clustering all these responses as a gross rotation is what’s the mental operation. It’s not a property of the quarks or their collection. It’s only that as per folk naive realism, it is a cognitive convention to attribute the emergent property to some entity out there, which assumes the noumenal role of the perceived entity i.e. a car.
The emergence concept has been fashioned to reconcile what we perceive with what we believe about the noumenal constitution, when it is not possible to intuitively reconcile the constitution with the constituents.
I disagree. Our mind can be reduced down to the individual cells, and even further down to quarks doing whatever it is they do according to physical law. The human mind just happens to be fit for seeing dogs in dot patterns. Substituting a fly mind for the human mind is just a matter of the wrong piece in the emergence chain, like square wheels on a car.
Ok this kinda ran loops around my head writing wise, but I don’t see how it can be disputed that the operations of the mind happen within the realm of physical interaction, and therefore can be reduced down to properties of quarks and the things that happen to them. Or if you can, please elaborate, so we’re on the same page. But assuming that you agree with me, how are the functions of the brain anything more than the very last “piece” required for emergence to realize?
What I’m more concerned about is that you insist that emergence is just an explanation “fashioned to reconcile what we perceive with what we believe”. I certainly don’t “attribute the emergent property to some entity out there,” and in fact am arguing for the very opposite–that emergence is not an explanation for the existence of the “noumenal” entity, but an explanation for why there NEEDN’T be one. I’m inclined to think attaching a soul to cognizance is the naiver view.
You’re running in circles. By your own assessment, the interpretation of the dots as a dog pattern is a behavior of the observer’s mind; it has nothing to do with the dots, persay. To the dots, all the emerging they’re doing is being dots. Which they do equally well for any observer.
And since when is “looking like dots” a complex behavior, anyway? For an actual discussion of that, let’s move on to the car example.
So, putting all the “perception” smokescreen garbage crap aside, you’re saying that when you turn the wheel (excuse me, when “the quarks that make up the steering wheel have forces impressed on them” - look at the passive voice, pretending no action is taking place! ) then, through the “dynamics of net forces” (ie: the particles working together), the mass of quarks that are sticking together which we call a “steering wheel” actually turns the steering column, which actually (through a series of other susbequent smaller parts interacting, which are in turn based on their component particles interacting) causes the behavior of “move the car” to EMERGE from the simpler, conceptually separate actions of all the parts of the car effecting one another.
In short, you concede that the “move the car” behavior is an emergent behavior of the actions of all the little bitty particles that make up the car.
I totally agree! Also, now that we’re both talking about emergent behaviors, I propose that human actions are similarly emergent from the actions of all the little bitty particles that make up us. I support this proposition by the fact that it makes a lot more sense than positing some other particle which supposedly does impossible things, just as a sloppy substitute for the demonstrably effective behavior-causing method known as emergence, which we both agree is what causes pretty much every other observable activity to occur. (“Having dots” not being an “activity” - though it’s still an emergent behavior of the particles making up the atoms of the pigments).
Conway’s game is not a cellular automata simulation - do you have any idea what you’re talking about? It’s a curious and interesting effect caused by a collection of pixels changing color according to some rules. Any percieved patterns that occur in the dots are an amergent behavior of the entire matrix of pixels and the program that governs its changes; and any perception or interpretation of the colors in the matrix as being “patterns” or “entities” occurs in the mind of the viewer (which itself appears pretty clearly to be an emergent effect of their brain’s particles interacting).
If you want to analogize the patterns in the game of Life to anything, analogize them to a “wave”. You know, when a bunch of people in a crowd wave their arms up and down in a loose pattern. That’s as far as your analogy goes, and not farther. Analogizing them to a table is ridiculous.
Here’s where I think my comment a while back would fit (“Substituting a fly mind for the human mind is just a matter of the wrong piece in the emergence chain, like square wheels on a car.”), which you apparently missed. Convince me otherwise.
Are you TRYING to be obtuse? I recall reading somewhere further back in the thread where an argument against the fallacy of this statement was made and you more or less ignored it, only to bring this up again. I don’t believe for a second that you are unable to deduce the secondary meaning of “working together” in this context.
My argument is that this secondary meaning, if it is what I think it is, is fallacious. begbert2 admits that his definition of “working together” is “a somewhat nonstandard definition of the term”.
You’re arguing for potentially infinite chains of emergence, one for each of theoretically infinite number of observers. If a human, a dog and a fly are each looking at the black dots, then there are three chains of emergence for the three perceptions being formed, each presumably different from the other. In fact, this bolsters the case for the “emergence” being an activity of the observer, rather than of the object.
Technically, we, as oxygen breathers, are just very slow, low temperature fires.
If there is a reason for going through the motions, then the motions themselves must have an impact.
Then, the real question is, can free will not exist? If everything is preordained, why go through motions? That requires a universe seemingly without meaning.
Sure they do, as you well know. Different observers might have different degrees of ability to tell that the dots are being dots, but that doesn’t change the fact that the dots are doing exactly the same things to be dots for each observer, equally well for each observer.
Of course, this remains nothing more than a distraction from the main point - any idiot knows that action in reality is not a product of the observer; even you yourself have already conceded that the quark-level actions sum up to real, actual aggregate actions, in the car example.
Your continued attempt to smokescreen your lack of an argument with the “it’s all in your mind” red herring is noted, sneered at, and dismissed.
As you admitted in your reply to Mojo Pin, you know exactly what I mean by this, so no further explanation is necessary.
Your continued attempt to smokescreen your lack of an argument with the “pretend there’s semantic confusion” red herring is noted, sneered at, and dismissed.
I do. (It might be a cellular autonoma itself, but only in your imagination is it simulating anything.) Your continued attempt to smokescreen your lack of an argument with the “Let’s pretend yet another irrelevent point is important” red herring is noted, sneered at, and dismissed.
You’ve already conceded that the car moves (actually moves, not just in perception) due to the sum of the individual car quark-level actions and interactions resulting, together, in the actual complicated object of the car doing the actual complicated action of moving itself. You’ve already conceded that emergent properties are real and are the cause for most observed complicated behavior of objects in the world. And you have not offered any reason why we should think that the observed behaviors of people are not caused by the same process.
Unless you have something relevent to offer, perhaps by answering the actual main points of the posts opposing your preferred positions (rather than answering irrellevencies that you mine out of them), I think we can consider your position finished, argumentively speaking.
Well, technically we meet any number of definitions. Objects, mammals, paperweights, doorstops, feces producers, telephone users, hair growers, space heaters; I don’t see that our roles as ‘fires’ is partularly meaningful here. Could you clarify?
And of course our motions have an impact. Push on a stack of blocks and it has an impact - the blocks fall. Behold your fearsome destructive powers in action! As for a ‘reason’ that we go through the motions, this is of course one of the ‘big questions’; I prefer "to preserve the continuance of your existence, if possible with a respectable level of comfort. Basically, you have needs. Your reason to make motions is to meet those needs. This applies whether or not you have libertarian free will, whether or not if everything is preordained.
Out of curiousity, what ‘meaning’ would the universe have if we actually had libertarian free will? That it couldn’t still have without us having free will, that is.
To step outside of logic for JUST one second… the issue I think a lot of people have with this concept is an emotional and intuitive one, but mainly… emotional. If free will doesn’t exist we think that we are no longer responsible for our actions - I’d disagree. If free will doesn’t exist… then we have no purpose. I still disagree. I have purpose. It might be different from yours, or anyone else’s, but I DO have purpose… just not Purpose - like from “on high.”
And… if a person can reconcile to that for a moment, there’s a beauty to it. It doesn’t kill morality - in fact I submit it enhances our view of it - and how it works.
It CAN be a goosebump inspiring event…
And I’m really not sold any of us can act as though free will is dead and have our actions be - on the whole - any different. Consequences are consequences - either way.
Bringing me full circle - it may be an illusion, but it’s a damn important one.
I hope I’m making sense. And I do see… some resistance to seeing what it being said here, but I will admit… begbert2 is doing a more than adequate job of explaining the ideas.
In short, even if free will doesn’t exist, you can still feel like you matter. And so do rules. There needn’t be any dissonance.
You are an observer. Your contention that something is being a dot is based on the fact you perceive a dot. By your logic, if someone looked at the same region and saw a speck of dust instead of a dot, then they would be justified in saying that the object was (being) dust irrespective of what others perceived the object as.
The quarks that make up the car move in reality such that the car is seen to move within the human mind.
No, by my logic, when two people disagree about the dot, you can try and determine what the actual cause of the discoloration is. When you discover that the speck is caused by the actual coloration of the surface, rather than an external speck resting on it, you can then conclude that in actuality, it’s a dot. At that point it would behoove the person who guessed that it was a speck to accept the additional information, fight his own ignorace, and gracefully concede that his original guess happened to be incorrect.
Because, after all, perception (or misperception) of what’s happening doesn’t change what’s actually happening.
I’m getting tired of this ‘perception’ smokescreen crap. Is has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic under discussion. What’s under discussion is a real thing, the real collection of actions and self-awareness that we take as being indicitave of, and embodying, free will (or ‘will’, at the least). And whether it is the case, or could possibly be the case, that that will is of the ‘libertarian free will’ variety. External perception of functionality has zippo effect on that. None. Nada. Zilch. Period.
And it’s seen that way because it’s really moving. News flash - it would move even if no human was looking. How scary is that! It’s entirely independent of perception. Just like the machinery that’s supporting the functionality of your mind.
Is this beating of the dead red herring just your strange way of conceding the actual argument? Because it sure seems like it.
What you seem to be eliding is that neither of the two people disagreeing about the status of the black dot have access to noumena. They can only concur, or not, regarding their perceptions.
Are you trying to imply that, since nobody knows for 100% sure how our minds work, that every harebrained ridiculous impossible theory is just as equally valid as the reasonable explanations? If so, I will concede that you’re not swinging a red herring around. You would just be clearly and obviously wrong. (Or rather, you’d be ‘clearly’ wrong if you weren’t obfuscating your own position like your life depended on it --but if my only argument was as bad as the one you currently seem to be proposing, I’d want to hide it too. So the obfuscation is somewhat understandable.)
All silliness aside, I think it’s safe to say that the fact that we don’t have perfect knowledge certainly does not invalidate the attempt to examine what evidence we do have and attempt to weed out the probable explanations from the outrageously unlikely and impossible ones. If you disagree…then you must be doing so for just this argument only, becuase adopting a position of madness-level skepticism in normal daily life would leave you unable to function.
No. Only that assignment of validity or absurdity are value judgments. One’s theory may be completely right or completely wrong or somewhere in between.
The issue isn’t strictly of perfect knowledge; it’s of objective knowledge versus (self-)mediated knowledge.
When you say, “When you discover that the speck is caused by the actual coloration of the surface, rather than an external speck resting on it, you can then conclude that in actuality, it’s a dot.”
What does ‘discover’ mean? I take it to mean ‘obtaining data via subjective observation’. So the determination of actuality is basically a consonant organization of one’s subjective experiences, which may or may not be true.
But this interlude over dots has completely diverted the focus from my original illustration. I was talking about a series of black dots on a white paper that when observed for a certain time appear to trace out a dog. You responded that the dots were being dots irrespective of anything else. But in that example, the dog was the object, and the dots were the quarks. The dots didn’t “work together” to constitute a (paper-) doghood. That’s a synthesis of the human observer.
The whole point in a nutshell is this
1)However the world is, subjects perceive the world
2)it is generally agreed that the mind fills in stuff, binds, categorizes and otherwise processes sensory input
2)this argument is over separating which aspects of our perceptions are representative of raw input and which are the result of processing.
4)Given that as subjects, we don’t have noumenal access, assigning a certain perceptual input as actual due to emergence is a value judgment by fiat.
My stated position has no pragmatic effect. Irrespective of whether the car I see possesses an external carhood or is just my mental processing, as long as I can drive around, I’m OK. If I was skeptical about my senses or reasoning, then I would have a problem.
So, you’re entirely discounting the type, quality, and consistency of our observations and information, with regard to assessing the validity of a theory, then? Since that’s a position I consider absurd. Based on that, you would have to be skeptical about your senses and reasoning. And not be okay.
So, you’re saying one cannot trust one’s senses enough to make a decision, no matter how closely one examines the object, no matter how much one expands one’s set of subjective experiences. Otherwise, once both people got closer, and noticed that the dot didn’t go away when rubbed at, and then when they broke out the microscopes and determined that the pigmentation of the actual surface was different at that location, as opposed to there being a dust speck stuck to it - at that point, they could all agree that it was an actual dot, and not a speck of dust. Unless they were adopting madness-level skepticism about their own senses, of course.
Right. This was a red herring, a false analogy, just like all the other analogies where you speak of images as being ‘objects’, when everyone else (including you, really) is talking about objects that have component parts that interact to form larger objects, with complex interactions: cars and brains, for example.
Each and every time you try to point at ‘objects’ that are custom-selected for their lack of interacting parts, you underscore the fact that your rebuttals do not apply to the real subject under discussion, the human brain and it’s behaviors. You’re trying to prove that the brain can’t produce a mind. But you’re basically trying to do it by pointing at a photo of a brain, and announcing that the picture doesn’t think. While that’s true, it’s completely irrelevant.
I’ll tell you what. I’ll freely admit that “objects” that have non-interacting particles do not have emergent properties. With the caveat that, of course human brains (and cars) are not described by the above statement, and therefore they can, and do, have emergent properties. Thus I recognize and concede that all images produced on dot-matrix printers aren’t themselves sentient, and we can leave all discussions about such images behind and get back to something that’s not a red herring, smokescreen, or distraction. Hopefully.
This is of course an argument from ignorance - a “god of the gaps” arguement. Unlike most such arguments, though, it has to resort to inventing the ignorance - Statement 4 is “by fiat” announcing that we suddenly have to be madness-level skeptical about our senses or reasoning. Otherwise, we could (like we always do with everything in life) examine things to determine what the actual causes are, and which causes are made-up. Which we’ve done with the mind and brains: the mind is actually caused by the brain, and the external, libertarian puppeteer ‘soul’ is made up. Based on our best examination of available evidence, that is.
(bolding mine, indicating the portion of my original post that was lopped in the quoting of it.)
Well, like I said in the post you’re responding to, then you must be doing so for just this argument only. Which just underscores how inapplicable your argument’s position of “oh nos we can’t assess our perceptual input” is to reality.
(Note: when you find youself having to cut out portions my sentences and posts to prevent them ruining your point, just don’t bother. The original posts are still there for everyone to see, intact, the whole time, remember.)
All of those observations and information are arrived at subjectively. If you observed the same thing happening a hundred times, only phenomenal consistency can be strictly inferred. One may think that phenomenal consistency represents noumenal consistency, but that’s a presumption, correct or otherwise.
No, I’m saying that you have to recognize that you are trusting your senses. Your sensory information isn’t non-mediated.
But the quarks that make up the paper with the black dots are interacting with each other. It’s just the temporal dynamics of “real” objects that is throwing you off.
You can only do this presumptively.
Most of your derisions are without any substance. You claimed that I am just playing here because of the implications presented in the dependent clause. I rebutted the dependent clause; there was no need to quote the whole sentence.
) is PART OF the ‘emergence chain’ of a dog pattern, you just have to reduce the activity of pattern recognition in the brain to whatever goes on in the at the most basic physical level. In other words, theres another way to say what you’re saying.