I’m gonna say that you’re both right. But I’ll also allow that a lot of what is being said is a touchy subject.
We, as humans, tend to be more certain of ourselves and our senses than we should be. They, like many other things, lie to us for the sake of economy (and others). We’ve all seen optical illusions that confuse our senses, etc. Additionally, a round of humility to science/materialism/naturalism/empiricism is… well… it’s what they are supposed to be founded on - else they wouldn’t be about searching for truth.
Flipside: At some point, things ARE so damn consistent one CAN begin to know things. I really do think that works. The extreme of nihilism (what this is starting to sound like) is impracticable and honestly… often tends to sound like academic handwaving and an uncertainty that is beyond all possibilities when living a functional life.
I AM a skeptic. I put asterisks next to a lot more than some might think (disclaimers, etc) - mentally. Even so, there is a line that I think many recognize, where functioning in the world, and even the evidence, says “this far - and no further.”
The choice between both points is, imo, a false choice. Both are right, but need a middle place.
So you’re arging for solipsism, then? Becuase if you reject the input of your senses, you also reject the idea that you are able to detect other entities and their supposed ‘souls’.
There’s no problem with saying “we can’t know that our perceptions are correct” and then immidiately proceeding to act as they are, not only for the purpose of living your daily life, but also for constructing arguments about the overt functionality of reality. There is a problem with accepting your perceptions for the purpose of your argument (that there are souls, and you know it, because you observe people’s behaviors with your senses, and then rejecting them when we’re talking about my argument. If you get to have perceptions in your argument, I get to have them too.
Suffice to say, this perception smokescreen you’re desperately trying to throw up there destroys your argument too. Either my argument applies, or you’re arguing for solipsistic madness-level skepticism, which is conceptually correct…but does not allow a person to accept the existence of souls (especially not in the plural).
Plus, of course, even WITH your peception smokescreen up, you still haven’t countered the fact that your idea of a libertaran free willed soul is inherently incoherent. Even sitting there all alone in your solipsistic uber-skeptical nightmare, your percieved surroundings and percieved memories still effect your percieved decisions to a certain amount - which part is not “free”, and the remainder of your decision (if any) remains absolutely undirected (having not even false perceptions to decide based on), and therefore not “willed”.
In other words, even with this annoying smokescreen of yours, your are up the crick without an argument for libertarian free will. Which may be why you’re not trying to defend your original position anymore…but which doesn’t explain why you’re still bothering to argue at all.
So what? Who cares? The imperfect certainty of our senses has nothing whatsoever to do with whether we have souls or free will, or the arguments for or against such beliefs.
Nothing is throwing me off; stop projecting your own confusion onto others.
Your analogy was about the dots analogizing quarks; not the dots’ quarks themselves at all. Allow me to repeat: your analogy specifically addresses the dots as noninteractive dots and not as interactive quarks. Ergo, this rebuttal of yours serves only to destroy your own analogy. Do you even know what you’re talking about anymore?
I can do it as certainly as any argument you can make about anything, if you ever come out from behind your smokescreen and start arguing your actual point again. Actually, I can argue my points better than you can, since I don’t have to ignore reality to do it.
That was a conditional, and taken intact the whole sentence rebutted your “rebuttal” preemptively, and you know it. Stop flailing about so desperately; it’s unseemly.
Regardless, this is another substanceless distraction from the actual topic of this thread. Are you ever going to try to defend your house-of-cards position of there being libertarian free-willed souls again?
And Anomalous Reading, don’t give him too much credit. He, I, you, and everyone else know that your perceptions are uncertain and imperfect - he’s not going to convince anyone of that. The problem is, he’s using the pointless ‘argument’ about this to claim that no arguments can be made about souls/minds (except presumably his argument, 'cause it’s special). If we let him get away with it, he could and, in my estimation, likely would try and do is god-of-the-gaps thing again, arguing his glorious double standards left and right with all the fallacy he could muster.
No worries. I know where I stand and I think it’s a sensible place. SOME degree of humility and willingness to look at things is central to being open minded. I am NOT so open minded that claims that can’t and won’t have any evidence get much of a hearing from me. I’m polite. Not dumb.
I’m willing to hear things out for a little while. When it becomes clear that a person is going to insist on an absolute truth and have no evidence to back it up, I push back and will pit the offender.
All my earlier post was trying to do was stave off a death spiral of absolute nihilism vs experience and common sense. There’s a point to SOME humility in the approach to life. There’s also something to conceding that nihilism is a non-functioning, over the top, annoying as (not the pit) philosophy that some people seem to adopt so as to sound smarter than they really are.
I’m arguing for perspectivalness. Solipsism is not required.
The latter clause holds as it is. Earlier debates over whether animals are conscious and current debates over the fetus personhood issue in abortion or state of consciousness of someone in a coma illustrate that sentience in others is assigned, not detected. The zombie conceivability argument by the philosopher of mind David Chalmers solidifies this position. I don’t reject the input of my senses, only I treat them as filters, not unadorned reality.
The debate is over how and why they affect decisions. You are assigning their influence as non-free. That is a matter of debate.
My original position was that it is irrational to infer no free will, and had nothing to do with the actual state of affairs since that can’t be determined either way.
It has everything to do with it. If we are trying to ascertain state of actual affairs in the world, and our perception is how we know of the world, then features and quirks of perception have every bearing on our ability to know the state of actual affairs.
A person who sees the paper with these dots does end up seeing the dots interacting with each other i.e. to form the dog.
Then make up your frikking mind, pick a position, and stick to it. Is reality-as-we-perceive-it generally close enough to reality-as-it-is that we can use the former as guide to understanding the latter? Because if not, they your position inevitably collapses to a combination of solipsism and irrational unfounded-in-reality wild guesses, and you have also withdrawn yourself from any further rational debate on the subject. On the other hand, if our senses do convey some reasonably useful perception of reality, then all my (and science’s) arguments can be applied to deduce that our minds are an emergent effect of our brains’ physical process.
You can’t have it one way for your argument and the other way for mine.
So debate it already. Not this irrelevent perception smokescreen garbage.
Since what can’t? The actual state of affairs? Then what do you base your position on, wishful thinking?
Of course, it is indeed possible to make an argument without even referring to observable evidence - that argument which proves that libertarian free will is inherently incoherent is such an argument, and it destroys your original position regardless of the perception stuff. Unless you have some sort of agument on topic that can demonstrate a flaw in the incoherency argument? (That is, that once you take away the bits that are guided by external factors, there’s nothing left that a ‘will’ can use to make decisions in a non-random way.)
Unless you’re on better drugs than I am, you’ve never seen dots on paper ‘interacting’ either. Sorry, but you don’t get to redefine words as you see fit, and dots on paper don’t interact. Any connecting of the dots that is done is done in the mind of the perciever, and could happen even if the dots weren’t there - as long as the mind could imagine them…the same way it imagines the ‘dog’.
Face it - your analogy was/is really poor. If I were you, I’d stop beating that dead horse of an analogy, and also stop beating the dead horse of your perception smokescreen entirely, and maybe even get back to trying to defend your actual position on libertarian free will. Because it’s in pretty dire straits.
We can’t tell and it doesn’t seem to matter. As long as you are wearing blue-tinted glasses and I’m wearing similar blue-tinted glasses, then we can communicate without worrying about what things really look like. How do I know that your glasses are tinted blue? I don’t, I presume so from what I make out from behind my glasses.
An argument has to involve observations even if it doesn’t explicitly refer to them. If you think not, give an illustration otherwise.
You seem to imply that ‘external factors’ determine output, whereas they may just as well be inputs for the self to decide on.
‘Interaction’ does not have to refer to temporal correlations. But if you want, imagine an electronic animation of these dots and we’re back with Conway, essentially.
Libets old experiment recently revisited using NMR imaging.
The pattern of change in brain activity “predicted a left or right decision with about 60% accuracy and occurred about 10 seconds before the conscious choice.”
10 seconds!! Certainly doesn’t bolster the case for free will.
To pretend there is no answer (in order to avoid admitting that you’re applying an intellectually dishonest double standard), and then to continue on and argue points as though one specific answer or the other applied; that’s just another intellectually dishonest double standard. Are you really going to make another one to try and cover for the first?
Or are you going to make up your frikking mind, pick a position, and stick to it?
Argument: 1 + 2 = 3 is true.
Proof: Apply rules of arithmetic to left side to get 3 = 3. Recognise that the defintion of “=” makes 3 = 3 by definition true.
No observations were harmed or otherwise involved in the making of this argument.
We’re talking about what goes on within the deciding process, as you well know.
It’s simple. For ANY decision-making process (in your brain, your “spirit”, or even your personal computer or blender or written out on paper - any such process), the decision can be divided into two types of deciding - calculating a result that is strictly based on, and determined by, the inputs/state/fixed processing rules, or, picking a result independently of the inputs/state/fixed processing rules (aside from the rule “pick something blindly”, that is). Any sort of deciding that appears to be a combination of the two can be further subdivided to have its randomity separated out from the determinism.
Because, you see, pure non-determinisim is randomity, by definition. If it wasn’t random, it would have to be influenced by something - and when you factor out the deterministic influence, you’re left with nothing to steer you in any direction - and thus the only possible choice is either an arbitrary choice or a random one - and any existing inclination towards a specific arbitrary decision is another influencing factor. When you factor all those out too, if there’s any deciding left, there’s no way left for it to be but pure, undirected randomity.
That’s how ALL decision-making processes work, so, that also describes how the brain works, and how the soul would work, if it existed. So, even if a soul existed, it would not grant libertarian free will. Because libertarian free will wants to make decisions without being burdened by the realities about decision making processes, which forces it into the realm of incoherency.
And Conway’s dots don’t interact, and don’t have emergent properties either! The computer and algorithm that produces the dots have many internally-interacting parts, but by the time you see the dots, the interaction is over. Face it, your analogy is garbage. You cannot demonstrate that non-interactive things have emergent properties independent of the imagination of percievers, because that’s not how things work. Reality disagrees with you.
Besides which, you do realize that this whole side-argument about whether reality exists as we percieve it or not is entirely beside the point, right? If reality is real and somewhat like we percieve it, my arguments all apply, even the ones based on physical phenomena, and you have not a leg to stand on. If not, then none of your arguments are even coherent anymore and you still don’t have a leg to stand on, and I still have the above arugment about the mechanisms of decision making, which still proves that libertarian free will is as real and true as thor’s smelted thunderbolt. That is, it’s a cute idea that somebody made up and some people have very much believed, but nonetheless it’s absolutely wrong.
Where did the rules of arithmetic come from? Are they abstracted ex nihilo? A concrete instance provides the substrate for the abstraction, whether it is hunters dividing their kill or accountants doing their work.
The free in free will means freedom from external forces and hence self-determination. So, libertarian free will simply means that instead of Input → Output, it is Input → Decision → Output. Here the tendency to subdivide ‘Decision’ is incoherent, since it inherently seeks to define it in terms of other things.
That is no different than atoms, made up of quarks. How do quarks interact?
5 animal pelts is a concrete example from reality. The unqualified number 5 has no analogue in reality. It, and all mathematics done without qualifying their units and values to real units and quantities of a real substance, are abstract arguments that make no reference to observed examples in reality.
And, not that the origin of mathematics matters to the status of any particular argument, the rules of arithmetic were indeed abstracted occasionally from real examples, but more often from other abstract concepts. The abstract nature of mathematics is increasingly obvious the further you get from the basic (yet still abstract) number line, though the number line itself contains concepts without direct examples in reality. Can you show me a pile of real objects with a negative count? No? That’s because the negative number, like the perfectly round circle, is something purely abstract. Like all of mathematics is, until you apply it to a specific real-world example.
To actually be free of influences of external forces, it would have to ignore all input completely. That is, Decision --> Output, without the controlling influence of inputs. However, that implies that the Decision is completely ignorant of external reality, which 1) obviously isn’t the case, and 2) would require that all decisions about external reality were made completely randomly then.
But, if you want to arbitrarily (and incorrectly) redefine libertarian free will as anything that has “Input --> Decision --> Output”, then congratualtions! A microwave oven now has libertarian free will - you input your preferences by pushing the buttons on the front, and it decides to activate, light up its interior, spin its spinning tray, and irradiate its interior for a while, after which it decides to beep a few times and then stop all the aforedescribed behavior.
Heck, if you want to arbitrarily (and incorrectly) redefine libertarian free will as anything that has “Input --> Decision --> Output”, then a dinger-bell on a hotel front desk has libertarian free will. You input your desire by pushing a stud on top vertically downward, and as a result it decides to output a clear ringing noise. Free will in action, baby!
Even better: when you provide the input of pushing the left side of a rock, it decides not to squish in like jello, and instead decides to have the output behavior of either sliding in the direction you pushed, or of deciding to ignore your weak pushing entirely. By your new, incorrect definition, rocks have free will!
In case you haven’t gotten the point yet, the entire issue here is fundamentally dependent on the porperties and behavior of ‘Decision’, including and especially the steps that go into the deciding process. If we cannot examine the Decision process, then either everything has libertarian free will, or nothing does.
Of course it’s different. The dots are the output of the decision-making process described by the name “The Game of Life”. (The input is the prior arrangement of dots.) Any image of Conway’s game you see is a static, non-moving, non-interactive picture. If you think you see something moving or animating there, then perhaps you should look up how “moving pictures” work to enlighten yourself in how the illusion of movement can be incited in your brain. Lest you next try to tell me that the little people on your TV screen have libertarian free will or something.
If quarks are interacting, the manner that they interact is how they decide to interact. It’s not the output.
Are you? All the arguments that you have advanced towards the idea that non-interactive things have emergent properties independent of the imagination of percievers have been countered, pretty effectively by my estimation.
I can totally understand arguing a lost point on principle, at least for a while, but do you seriously think that your position is standing strong here? Either your position about reality being a pile of noninteractive sand that we only imagine to interact and have emergent properties, or your position on libertarian free will in general?
Like I said earlier, reference is not required, but involvement is. Without the initial concrete substrate, the ability to later deal with abstractions won’t happen. Down the line, all arguments have to involve concrete foundations, whether those are derived from sight, sound, emotions or other qualia. Imaginary numbers started out as placeholders and were then extended with properties that made them useful.
Of course inputs can be involved. A person can decide to eat chips when they’re hungry. The input prompts a self-decision, but doesn’t determine what the output is.
A microwave doesn’t exist. Its quarks do. That is what we have been arguing about.
The point is that free will is fundamental and wanting to examine a fundamental is incoherent. It’s like asking about the intervals that make up a Planck time unit. A microwave is a mental assignment given to a quark ensemble, and is not fundamental.
That’s no different than atoms being the “emergent” output of an ensemble of quarks. Maybe you can describe the difference between two ensemble of quarks arranged in space as a table, one from which the table emerges, and one from which it doesn’t. In other words, how does this emergence happen? And “working together” is just saying the same thing in different words.
False. Abstract concepts can, in fact, be conceptualized, and extrapolated upon to reach further abstract concepts.
In other news: Logical systems have been developed. News at eleven.
Okay, you assert that the input “doesn’t determine what the output is”; it’s nice to see the actual argument at hand be briefly addressed. Now, do you have any support for this belief that the input doesn’t have a determining influence on the decision? Because if it doesn’t, it sounds to me like it shouldn’t matter what the input is. Are we eating potato chips, or eating paint chips? In my case, the value of that input has a strong influence on my decision. Doesn’t it have a strong influence in your case?
Keep in mind, that the external inputs aren’t the only factor here, as well - there is also the internal state. Your mood, your memories, your feelings. So, sometimes you feel like eating chips, and sometimes you don’t. But if you feel like eating chips, and you have chips on hand, of a type you feel like eating at the moment - to me, it looks like the the inputs and the agent state decide everything. No impossible particles necessary.
Bullshit. Not only is this not what we are arguing about, and not only is it a silly way to look at the world, this smokescreen has has also been proven not to work as supporting your position in any functional way, not so long ago in this very thread.
Some free advice: stop wasting time.
Quarks, schmarks. Stop wasting time.
And, prove that free will is fundamental, please. I think that idea is stupid and impossible, and therefore an outrageous claim. So, I call upon you to fulfull your responisibility to prove it. If you hope for anybody to take your position seriously, that is.
As you can’t possibly find and show me a free will particle, it seems clear that your only possible hope to prove that there is a free will particle is to make an argument showing that it has to exist. This is what you’re trying to do with your quark stuff, but that argument doesn’t work thanks to the demonstrable fact of emergent behavior, which you have already admitted happens. (“What moves the car”, remember?) So, that avenue won’t work. Try another.
Really your only hope to actually support your position would be to prove that emergent behavior is not enough to explain the behavior of willed beings. Of course, that would require you to first openly and freely admit the obvious, that emergent behavior happens.
Of course it’s different - or do you think that the things you see on TV are really there inside your television box? Just because something looks like something else, doesn’t mean it is that something else.
Are you trying to get a soundbyte answer from me of “how does everything work”? 'Cause there isn’t one. I can almost give you one for the table (“the quark’s properties cause them to interact in such a way that they ‘stick together’ and form a solid substance”), but even then I’m summarizing like mad.
If the quarks are arranged to form a substance that correctly adheres rigidly to itself and has the other aggregate behaviors to form a table, then they’ve made a table. If the quarks fail to do that (like, if they’re arranged into unconnected air molecules in the shape of a table), then they don’t. For table-hood, pretty much all you need is rigidity, so that can almost be described simply. (If you gloss over the multiple levels of physics and chemistry one needs to describe how this “sticking together rigidly” behavior works.)
To assemble a person with will is, of course, hugely more complicated than making a table; you can’t just make a slab of granite in the shape of a person and have it qualify, any more than a slab of granite in the shape of a television makes a real television. So, no, I can’t tell you how to get your nanoscopic tweezers out and assemble quarks one-by-one into a willed person. However, I’m pretty sure it can happen (or rather, that such ‘arrangements of quarks’ can happen by some method), because of all the willed people I see wandering around all over the place. (And not a single free-will particle in sight.)
You are sitting there, supremely striving for the right answer to the philosophical problem, when it suddenly dawns that you, the observer, are not distinct from the question itself. There is an answer, but it is an experiential one, not a logical one: you, the factors in the question, the question itself and the answer are all the same.
The methods of conceptualization and extrapolation don’t come out of nowhere. They are carried forward from memory and intuitions inspired by experience.
Why are you relegating the choices to ‘determining’ influence or no influence? Anyway, that’s besides the point. They key point here how does it influence the output. Via the self. That’s the free-will argument.
Now, that’s a post-facto assignment of determinism. If you’re hungry and you don’t eat chips, then, after the decision, you say “I didn’t feel like…”. The assignment of what the feeling factor was, is a post-facto assignment, based on what the decision was.
If you think it’s impossible, why are you still here and why call on me to prove it? Remember, my original position was that it is irrational to infer no-free-will, not about the actual state of affairs.
Now we are getting somewhere i.e. perception is not reality. The same applies for composite “objects”.
In other words, if the quarks exhibit emergent properties, then there are emergent properties. The key question is what is any individual quark doing differently if it were part of an ensemble showing “emergent properties” compared to not?
With “inspired by” being a handy phrase to lump together and cover up all the abstraction that’s going on, of course.
Is there a point to this side-argument again? Or is this just another tangent, inspired by a response to a single statement in one or the other of our posts? Because if it’s just a tangent, and can’t be related back to the main point, it’s not worth arguing about.
And my argument is that the self* probably doesn’t have libertarian free will. That’s the utter destruction of your free will argument. Unless you can, say, defend the position. And pretending that we can’t analyse the ‘self’ doesn’t support your argument, becuase it doesn’t refute my counter to it.
If you’re unwilling or unable to postulate on how the “self” works, I’m willing to. It probably works like every other algorithm. The inputs have a certain amount of influence on the results.
The “self” of course being an emergent effect of your brain, since no ‘free will’ particles have been shown to exist nor have we been given any reason to believe in them.
False; I can know that I feel like eating chips before I eat any - heck, I can want to eat chips and not eat any, if there are none to be found or for various other possible reasons. The eventual decision has no effect whatsoever on the ‘assignment’ of the ‘feeling factor’ - ever. Heck, that’d be reverse causation!
It’s a fact that we have an internal mental ‘state’. We have moods, thoughts, emotions, inclinations - and at any given time, they’re not in some sort of shroedinger’s cat-like flux. They don’t depend on the outcome of a future decision based on them to have a specific value now - they already have a specific value now. If I’m angry now, then I’m angry now - and I don’t have to decide to punch somebody to post-facto assign anger to myself. (That’s just silly.)
Because at the time of any moment of decision the internal state is a fixed thing, it can be thought of like any other input. The external input and the internal state sum are assembled together via the fixed-at-any-moment-of-decision mental processes, which then spit out the answer. If there are any random elements to this process, then the result has some uncertainty in it; however, the inputs and mental state at that moment are fixed at that moment, including which mental process are in position at that moment to make the decision with. Ergo, the result that pops out the end will be the straightforward result of those mental processes working machinelike to process everything.
Because I’m not such a frigging egotist that I think it’s impossible that I’m wrong. So, I offer you the chance to support and defend your assertions, and possibly even succeed in doing so, in which case I’ll have no choice but to adjust my position accordingly.
I think it’s been made pretty clear that there are several perfectly rational reasons to infer no-free-will, most notably among them being that we can’t think of a mechanism by which free will could even conceptually work, while no-free-will makes perfect sense (and we see examples of it all over the place), and we can see how no-free-will could work, and we can even figure to a reasonable degree how it could theoretically produce humanlike behavior.
Unless I’m misreading something, that completely disproves and contradicts your stated position. Feel free to try to convince me to adjust my opinion on that, though.
You are getting nowhere, becasuse it isn’t the case that just because something looks like something, doesn’t mean it isn’t that something. In other words, the possibility for things not to be as they superficially appear does not imply that things cannot be as they appear.
Sometimes a pipe is actually a pipe. Even if a picture of a pipe is not a pipe.
(And the beating of the dead red herring continues…)
Probably the same thing a piston is doing differently if instead of being in its cylinder hooked to its connecting rod, it’s instead impaled in the forehead of the driver. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong neighboring parts to get the desired emergent behavior. (Same quark, though.)
That’s a claim and not a “destruction”. You argument for no-free-will relies on a self ‘emerging’ from the brain and conscious will being an epiphenomenon.
Requiring analysis of the self inherently denies the possibility of free will. What’s an analysis? A: n. - The separation of an intellectual or material whole into its constituent parts for individual study. Free will means determination by self. If the self is fundamental then of course one can’t expect to analyse it, unlike atoms or microwave ovens. So that can’t be held against it.
It’s a fact? Some people disagree with you. I think the folk phenomenology is muddled here, so I don’t have a firm position on the issue.
That specific value has to be self-recognized via qualia. Maybe there’s a smaller satellite beyond the dark side of the moon right now, but assignment of belief on its presence requires some experiential content i.e. qualia, either positive content such as a photograph or other EM imagery, or negative content, like, say, a deviation in orbit of nearby objects from that predicted, as has happened with discoveries of planets in our solar system. Similarly, if you’re angry, you don’t need to punch anyone, but some dispositive quale need occur, including but not limited to clenching of teeth, arousal, rapid thoughts, negative thoughts…etc and then those dispositive qualia have to be tagged as indicia of the concept of mental state “anger”. So, when one feels hungry, and then observes chips on the table, and if there is no specific intermediate quale experienced (relevant to eating/chips) and the chips aren’t eaten, then it is folk psychology to say that one didn’t feel like eating chips. The lay case for no-free-will simply imbues this after-the-fact assignment with causative powers.
What is this mental process? That use of that term seems to imply self-passivity, but that isn’t denoted by the term.
Agreed, and I never claimed that. I just claim that perception is not the same as reality, and the way something appears may or may not accurately reflect reality, and that any stance which says that something is or is not real is a mental output. So saying that objects exist is “really, really obvious” is an empty argument.
You’re changing the environment of the quark. That’s not directly relevant to emergence. If you had three quarks instead of two in a region, then their behavior would be different than otherwise. But re: emergence, if you have two ensembles of quark, identically arranged at time t1, what physical facts relevant to any individual quark would have to be changed so that emergence does or does not occur subsequently?
P.S. here’s a philosophy professor who presents the argument against emergence. I differ from his presentation, in holding that selves also exist, besides elementary particles.
And your argument relies on us just accepting what you say with no reason to do so at all. You are not offering any positive support whatsoever for your position. You are, in essence, making an argument from ignorance. “We don’t know what makes minds, so it must be soul particles because I say so - which are fundamental, inscurable, and ineffable because I say so!”
The destruction of any argument from ignorance is the eradication of the ignorance. We’re fairly sure that lightning is caused by an imbalance of electrical charge in the atmosphere; that knowledge destroyed the theory that Goddidit. Similarly, a successful argument that the mind is most likely the result of deterministic and random processes in the brain would destroy your argument.
Except, we obviously can analyse the self. I have analysed myself and found that I dislike crowds. I could not know this without self analysis. Ergo, I can analyse my self.
Using your own argument in this quoted section, this proves beyond doubt that the self is not fundamental. Ergo, the self is not fundamental.
In other news, we analyze quarks. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t know about them at all. Perhaps you’d better work on your definitions a bit, or you’ll find that you’ve proved that nothing is “fundamental”.
They aren’t arguing our minds are in an uncertain ‘quantum state’, ergo, they don’t disagree with my point at all. As far as aI can tell they might argue that our fixed and at-any-instant-determined mental state has a few different things in it than I think it does, but that’s irrelevent to my point and not at all damaging to my position.
I don’t know about you, but I can have the quale of ‘anger’ directly. It doesn’t have to have side effects for me to have qualia about in order for me to detect it. I’m self-aware, you see - that means that I’m aware of my self (with all the analysis of my self that that implies).
And if there is a specific intermediate quale experienced relevant to eating/chips, then I did want to eat chips. However this is rather obviously NOT an after-the-fact assignment, since at the time, I either did, or did not, want to eat the chips.
I don’t have to be able to explain in precise detail how every aspect of thought works in order to make it a more believable option than you totally-unsupported argument from ignorance. And no, I don’t know the precise mechanics from quark to atom to neuron to electron to electrical pattern to operating system to self awareness. Nobody knows every detail of it. However, everything we do know about it indicates that there is a physical process that operates in a manner something like an organic computer. Do you know how computers work? It’s probably something like that, but juicier.
Now, how does your argument-from-ignorance work? Oh, right, I forgot: it doesn’t. You offer no explanations and claim that you can’t be asked to explain anything, because frankly, your model can’t accomplish what you claim it does anyway. Free-will particles that aren’t interacting with anything can do nothing.
Given that it’s a true statement, how it is an empty argument? In fact, belief that objects exist would seem to be the default position. You have not successfully argued that they don’t, as far as I can tell. Ergo, their really, really obvious existence would seem to be the best evidence available onthe subject. Regardless of how many things you can find to point to that aren’t real objects (or at least not in the way they appear to be).
If there are three quarks instead of two, then the quarks are in a different environment.
And of course the environment and state of the quark are absolutely relevent to emergence. Those of us who recognize that objects exist recognize that if all our quarks were torn apart and scattered to the winds, you’d by and large cease to exist. What with there being no fundamental ‘arm’ and ‘leg’ and ‘body’ and ‘head’ particles around to fill in once all our matter is gone.
Are you seriously asking me to detail every possible way that every possible quarks’ set of all possible actions, and every possible effect that each of those every possible modifications of position or behavior could possibly have?
You’re just a wee bit demanding, aren’t you?
I concede that you can make ridiculously unanswerable demands. There. Does that make you feel better? 'Cause it doesn’t support your position any.
So you’re saying, he disagrees with you too. Funny how that doesn’t faze you.
Of course not. It’s based on the sense of self and agency i.e. the most direct raw input there is. The emergence idea says that these senses are illusory. If we can appeal to things being true because they are obvious, then free will is true and the self truly exists. But I don’t think you’ll accept that.
That’s pattern-noting. Read the primary definition of analysis again i.e. the study of the whole via its constituents. If you are hungry, and eat chips 34% of the time, eat a sandwich 26% of the time and nothing the rest, that’s pattern-noting. It is at most a record of history and a premise for inductive use.
Here’s your factual claim: It’s a fact that we have an internal mental ‘state’. We have moods, thoughts, emotions, inclinations - and at any given time, they’re not in some sort of shroedinger’s cat-like flux. (emphasis added)
Here’s the eliminativism position: Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist. (emphasis added)
You are claiming two things - 1)moods, among other things, exist 2)there is a specific mood at any given time. They are not arguing that moods exist but are uncertain. They’re arguing that moods do not exist, hence contradicting your pt 1.
Furthermore, you claim you are self-aware and and can sense anger directly. But now you concede that “they might argue our fixed and at-any-instant-determined mental state has a few different things in it than I think it does”. So, you may not be self-aware?
The symptoms I listed aren’t “side-effects”. There is no unique anger modality. Anger is a term applied to when some or all from a certain cluster of qualia are experienced.
It’s not about “every” aspect. There’s a hard problem of consciousness, still extant, which maintains a chasm between physicalism and consciousness. It’s not just a matter about laying planks. There’s no idea how to build a bridge.
An argument that something is “really obvious” is an appeal to perceptual clarity. But with perception not being the same as reality, that is a claim, not evidence. That I have free will is obvious as well, but you won’t accept it on that basis.
Of course. The same is true for free will. But you are arguing the latter is illusory. Nothing is sacred about the former, given the atomistic model of science.
No, I’m asking you to elucidate those physical facts that are directly necessary and sufficient for emergence. The whole point of emergence as you said is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In an ensemble of quarks, from which something emerges, the parts refers to the behavior of each individual quark. But what is the physical factor that adds to the sum, above and beyond the contributions of the parts?
No, he doesn’t take any position. He outlines the argument against emergence and hints at two possible “solutions” - 1)claiming that elementary particles don’t compose the world 2)claiming that objects do exist. Both of these are claims by fiat and not arguments. In other words, the answer to the self-as-fundamental argument itself relies on support by fiat.
Emergence doesn’t say that the sense of self or the sense of agency are illusory; where do you get that idea? It and I fully accept that the senses of self and agency obviously exist. The emergence idea merely says, indirectly, that since it seems that our self and agency emerge from the actions of deterministic and possibly random elements, our agency, which we have, apparently is not libertarian free will-style agengy. Try to get a handle on what you’re arguing against, please.
(In case you’re going to try to play swap-the-definitions on me or something, i figure that ‘agency’ is just the state of being an agent - something that acts and reacts to its environment based on its internal state. This would include purely deterministic agents, such as video game characters.)
The mind has conscious and unconsious parts, then. I’d also say that your memory is a separate subcomponent. And your instincts.
Are we playing some kind of silly definition game here? If we are, I don’t care about it. Clearly the mind and its behaviors can be observed (albeit inderectly) and studied. That you’ve found a definition of the word I chose that irks you doesn’t matter to me - the main point is, that the mind is not some ineffable thing.
Were you aware that “some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist” means that some might exist?
Also, I’m, wondering why I should care about this cite. It looked more like philosophical speculation (like most philosophy is) rather than anything which had been shown to be true through observation and experimentation. Is there something I missed about it that raises it to that level, that I should think it describes reality?
I’m arguing that you might not be perfectly and completely aware of your mental state. As anybody who’s heard of the subconscious mind knows is true.
You can be aware of some but not all of your mental states. So, the two statements are not contradictory. Nice try, though.
I think this is false. Prove it or lose it.
There are a range of mental states all of which we call “anger”. To that degree, there is no ‘unique’ anger modality. However, each of the mental states in that range can individually be detected directly, in real-time as the qualia itself, not as a post-facto assignment based on other qualia being observed.
I think it works kind of like an organic computer. The evidence that I know of seems to support my claim. We have overt evidence of high-level forms with complex behaviors and properties being created out of electrical patterns supported by ‘hardware’ that does not model those patterns in its own form. (That is, computer programs.) We know the brain is hardware that supports patterns, and we know that the mind seems to be a result of the brain. The jump to the idea that the patterns are the mind seems to be a pretty small and simple one.
I just don’t see the chasm. Perphaps it’s that I make bridges of this general type myself as an occupation, so I just don’t see what’s so spectacular about them.
Tell me, what do you know about how computers work? The relation of hardware and software?
We accept the obvious at face value until there is evidence against. Then we need evidence for, and preferably some possible conceptual avenue by which the obvious could be working as it does. Sometimes there is evidence for and ways it could work, such as in the case of objects and observant properties and behaviors; sometimes there is no evidence for, and no way it could work, such as souls and free will properties. In general it’s best to accept what the evidence shows. (Until further evidence is discovered, anyway.)
Right. Belief in free will was the default position. Until we began to discover that our brains seem to work like computers. (Including the physicality thereof.)
Of course, unlike the evidence that the mind is in the brain, there’s no evidence whatsoever for the nonexistence of objects. Philosophical musing, of course, is not evidence; it can make arguments, but where those arguments are not supported by the evidence (or in this case, where they’re overtly contradicted by the evidence) then they’re not relevent to our understanding of reality.
It’s the pattern and state that the components are in that determines the higher-level effects of the collected group. So, the real physical factor here is the physical positions of their components, which places them in the correct relationships with one another to have greater effects.
If you have a bunch of dominoes all lined up in a row, then pushing one will have an effect that spreads out down the row, knocking them all down - a larger effect than you could normally expect from pushing one domino; an emergent reaction. However, the act of carrying out this action changes the positional relationships such that there is no longer a usable emergent relationship - once they’ve fallen, you can keep tapping that first domino all day and nothing much of interest will happen.
Various other things, of course, tend to stay in relationships that allow their effects to keep on emerging. Your car’s gas pedal continues to work on successive pushes; it doesn’t explode the case into pieces after the first attempt. (Not usually, anyway.) Your muscles continue to pull on and successfully move your limbs (usually), and our minds keep emerging from the electrical patterns and such that are the position and state of the elecrons and other particles in our brains, giving us minds that continue to exist and work over time. (Usually)
If you refuse to recognize that position is a fundamental part of emergence, then there’s not much that can be done for you. You won’t haven’t disproved emergence; you’ll just have failed to understand how it works. It’d be like trying to understand the economy while denying the existence of money; you won’t have disproved the existence of the economy. You’ll just be confused and wrong.
Well, there’s lots of evidence available that objects exist, so even if he doesn’t himself state such an arguement or cite such evidence, I don’t see that as a problem, by the way you paint his position*.
No, I haven’t read the link more than a cursory glancing at it; feel free to summarize his argument here if you wish me to argue against it. Not that philosophical arguments usually have much to do with reality anyway in my experience, but what the hey.
Speaking of arguments, what is your argument in favor of your ineffable particle thingy theory? If you don’t have one, then you’re just wasting everyone’s time. (Well, yours and my time anyway. Perhaps everyone else has found better things to do.)
This isn’t a debate over whether the sense of self and agency exist. It’s about whether they are illusory i.e. other than what they seem. Like an optical illusion. Emergence says that the self is a construction of neural activity, hence not the fundamental unity that it seems, hence illusory.
Actions are undertaken by actors. As per no free will, humans don’t act. “A person decides” → that’s just a notional description of phenomenal events. Just like describing the dynamics of pixels i.e. a blob moving in a video.
If it isn’t, then it should be possible to directly observe the minds of others. It isn’t.
Were you aware that if something is treated as a fact, then there’s no uncertainty over its truth value, and hence no countenance of ‘might’ and ‘might not’?
Science doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There’s an implicit philosophy of science adopted behind scientific data collection and inference-making. There’s no philosophy-free pure science to lead the way.
If there’s a deficit in your awareness, then you are only partially self-aware. And if there’s the possibility of being mistaken in your awareness, then you are not really aware in the first place. (aware adj - Having knowledge or cognizance). If I can’t identify an optical illusion, then I’m not aware of what it is.
None of this demonstrates any providence for consciousness, only countenance of unlike patterns at different scales. There’s no scope for qualia here.
a)What’s the evidence that emergent properties are of the object rather than being a mental stance undertaken towards a group of primitives?
b)there’s no divine definition of evidence. Again, there’s an implicit philosophy that treats a certain piece of data as evidence or not.
There’s no emergence involved here. It’s just a linear cascade, albeit at possibly time scales below perceptual threshold.
What does the ‘position’ attribute - fuzzy or precise, depending on QM considerations - do? It’s a property belonging to each individual quark. Each quark is only concerned with the net forces impressed upon it, and not the relations to other quarks except in so far as they affect the net force upon it. The emergence link explains the complaint simply. Give it a full read.
First of all, I’m not arguing for any particle thingy. I’m arguing for a true self, and that’s based on the sense of self and failure of physicalism to explain qualia and binding.