I’m not seeing the contradiction. 
I conceded that scenario 1 from the OP would in fact invalidate my philosophy.
~Max
Okay, now I see it. You aren’t saying your novel square root algorithm is indeterministic and non-random (it is clearly a deterministic algorithm), you are saying the mental process you used to make the algorithm is indeterministic and non-random; a “generalization”.
Right?
~Max
With the split brain example - when you ask the subject why their left hand is pointing at a chicken, and they say it is because they were hungry, the consciousness-as-interpreter model has a very simple explanation: the subject saw the chicken, interpreted the information in the right side of their brain, and their left hand and right brain communicated easily and pointed at the picture of a chicken.
The speech processing left brain, unable to explain why the left hand pointed at a picture of a chicken but unwilling to abandon the “free willed” model of consciousness it creates internally, invents an explanation, nonsensical or incorrect as it may be.
Is the “soul” able to see the chicken? If so, why doesn’t it know why it was pointing at the picture of a chicken? If not, why?
Yep, that’s it.
Pardon me for the delay in replying; I’m officially at work trying to correct some sql that accesses a relational database.
Computers can, and do, quite a lot more than you might think. The vast majority of processes you can imagine can be described in steps. If you can describe it in steps, those steps can be encoded as instructions.
Note that doing all this can be very, very complicated and I certainly don’t hold it against a person if they are unable to imagine how it all works. However most people have played a video game in their lifetimes, one with colors and action and reactive environment and enemies with rudimentary AI - there’s little excuse for thinking that computers can only deal with plain numbers.
Yes, the ‘god in the gaps’ argument, as you referred to it. (Which is term usually used to highlight the poor quality of the argument; odd that you picked it.)
The thing about this ‘god in the gaps’ thing is that the gaps are supposed to represent places where this soul can exert influence. Which is all well and good until you consider the extent of things that we know aren’t in the gaps: memory, personality, emotions, consciousness. (We know this because you can mess with all this with drugs and physical damage - and no the “looking through dirty glasses” argument doesn’t explain how you can experience a change in mood thanks to the direct effect of chemicals.)
Honestly, even if I was going to give the greatest possible credence to the ‘soul’ theory, the ‘god in the gaps’ argument paints the picture less as “the soul is puppeting the body” and more as “the soul occasionally reaches in and messes with the fully self-contained process that we are personally experiencing and which is housed in the body”.
Which, if we reach alllll the way back to what the “free will” debate was when the possibility of supernatural forces messing with our behavior was seriously considered, is the opposite of free will. “God hardened Pharoahs heart” kind of business.
I’m guessing the soul had nothing to do with the immediate decision to point at the chicken. This was my general read of the article, too. And I have some background of the consciousness-as-interpreter model with quick decisions that involve no cognition, like “quick, what is the first thing that comes to mind…”
You can absolutely make subconscious decisions without invoking a soul.
~Max
Drinking through a dirty straw can make you sick.
There’s certainly a balance there, and if it is shown that the majority of decisions we think of as deliberated turn out to be fully determined (or even highly predictable) by physics, I’ll back off. There’s no point in arguing for free will if it is not exercised to any significant degree.
~Max
So is the soul making up the “I was hungry” excuse? If so, why is the soul lying to itself? If not, who/what is?
I’m quite aware of that. I’ve been programming digital computers since 1957. Spent 3 years with analog computers before that. Recent work with numerical computer learning algorithms is impressive. but, no matter how good they get, numerical computers aren’t human.
My question was, what might the brain architecture actually look like.
I would say post hoc rationalization, like all thinking, is in the soul/mind’s domain. But if you were to construct some hypothetical where the subject is trained to say “I was hungry” as a knee-jerk response, pavlov-style, that might be done without involving the soul. Or it might be done with the soul.
I think if you reinforce any stimulus-behavior enough it becomes a reflex.
~Max
Uh huh - because it’s a physical interaction which physically alters the part of you that’s getting sick.
We can knock somebody clean out with drugs. A complete shutdown of consciousness, only to resume later with the intervening chunk of time not having been experienced. If the soul is a separate, external (eternal, indestructible) thing, then the most we could do would be to turn off the inputs to it - it would be treated to a period of black, not a time skip.
Don’t you feel sick sometimes? Why can’t your mind experience being stoned?
~Max
Well, I was going submit this to the nobel prize committee, but…
Did you even read what I wrote? The words are right there. We’re talking about forcing the consciousness to shut down via the application of chemicals.
First you mentioned mood changes, so I thought you meant something like a zombie state. Now I think you mean blackouts - real unconsciousness. I don’t see why blackouts are anything to get worked up about, after all people go to sleep every night.
~Max
What is your soul doing while the body is asleep and dreaming? What is your soul doing while you are unconscious with no brain activity?
I’m serious. Since you are steeped in the field, haven’t you entertained conjecture on how the architecture might work?
Probably dreaming, in the second case, probably nothing. If you grant the existence of a mental substance, it is clear that physical actions have a causal effect on the mental. This extends to cutting off the mental connection; think severing of limbs, numbness, and paralysis.
~Max
By this do you mean some kind of ethereal soulstuff from which our souls are formed, that interacts with matter only through thought/the brain?
No, sort of… substance is sort of like a philosophical term for “realm”. I just didn’t want to write “souls” again and again.
~Max