Is free-will an illusion?

@Olivier5,

Just in case you thought dualism was "unscientific", John C. Eccles, who wrote "The Mind and its Brain" with Karl Popper, was an Australian neurophysiologist who got the Nobel for his work on the synapse, and a dualist.

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@Olivier5,

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Even the sense of sight is not completely passive or unidirectional. Eg if I use a torch or a candle to see in the night, i in effect decide to emit light in order to be able to see.

Olivier, that does not represent your sight functioning by going from your eye to the light. Your behavior producing effects on the environment that you can detect does not change the directionality of the stimulus to the sense organ. The examples also do not explain the activity of your sense organs with respect to all the environmental stimulation that occurs in the absence of your direct activity.

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The feeling of the color red does not exist out there, it's only a set of wavelengths that your brain codes through that hue.

I've made no argument for the existence of feelings of the color red.

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Well, I can imagine quite a few things that I can't do, like fly or run faster than husein bolt, or see through walls...

He's talking about perceptual behavior; not fantasy thinking. People can do both of course.

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@layman,

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You appear to want to treat sense perception as "strictly passive:"

I don't know that physiologists generally regard sensory nerves as anything other than passive.

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@Briancrc,

Information is never passively collected; you always have to actively seek it. You can close your eyes, or open them; you can direct your gaze to a particular area; your eyes can adjust for different distances and for different intensity of light, etc. That doesn't look passive to me.

Not only do your senses actively seek information, your brain is also taking into consideration the biases and imperfections introduced by your senses. For instance, it corrects for the blind spot in our eyes. or if you touch your own nose with your own finger, you will have a sense of simultaneity of the contact, which cannot be true at the sensation level since your nose is closer to your brain than your hand, hence the nerve lengths are different, hence the finger sensation should come slightly after the nose sensation. These are corrections made by the brain of imperfect data collection systems, for the sake of correcting their imperfections.

The image you get from all these actions is based on data that is actively collected, treated, analysed, edited and displayed. Nothing passive there.

But anyway, even if we agreed, for the sake of the argument, that perception is purely passive (which we know it is not), it wouldn't follow that all the other things that a human being can do are purely passive. It's a non sequitur.

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He's talking about perceptual behavior; not fantasy thinking.

He doesn't know what he is talking about. I can imagine new senses; piece of cake... Read any superman comic book. I tell you, that guys lacks imagination.

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@Briancrc,

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I don't know that physiologists generally regard sensory nerves as anything other than passive.

You don't seem to know much... No part of the body is "passive", unless we're talking of a dead body. Nerves do a lot of work.

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Algotithms that filter information "noise" accordingly with the state of affairs of a computing system don't strike as any sort of proof of free will. Complex systems are not a "free will" wild card....

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Nobody is saying they are. Brian made a simplistic argument that, since our senses are passive, then it must follow that the rest of our nervous system is passive and thus, we have no free will... I was just showing the many holes in this argument, that all.

You can go back to sleep now.

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@Olivier5,

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The idea of a Darwinian mind was put forth by Karl Popper:

Yeah, and ironically, he also said this about natural selection, which is what I complained about:

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The unsatifactoriness of the explanation lies in the fact that we can explain too much with this kind of assumption: almost everything that can happen, and even things that cannot happen.

It can explain EVERYTHING, so I guess it's convenient to explain the mind too, eh?

He was really just making an analogy when talking about the mind, though. He wasn't using natural selection to "explain" it.

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@layman,

Yes, he flunk it there, in his youth I think, but he later realized his mistake.

Datwinian systems have broad application to immunology, economy (capitalism) and other fields. In this sense it is truly Universal.

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@Olivier5,

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Yes, he flunk it there, in his youth I think, but he later realized his mistake.

You might be interested in looking at this thread, Ollie:

http://able2know.org/topic/300225-2#post-6059256

I made several posts there pertaining to Popper, including one's addressing his (mature) views on falsifiability, natural selection, and his putative "recantation" of his views about Darwinism.

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@Olivier5,

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Datwinian systems have broad application to immunology, economy (capitalism) and other fields. In this sense it is truly Universal.

And that "universal application" contains the seeds of it's own self-refutation, I figure. Look at the thread I posted for details (especially his conversation with Adler).

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@Olivier5,

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But anyway, even if we agreed, for the sake of the argument, that perception is purely passive (which we know it is not)

You'll have to show me where I wrote that. The argument was directionality; not passiveness.

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@Briancrc,

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You'll have to show me where I wrote that. The argument was directionality; not passiveness.

No, Brian, your argument, implicitly, was about passiveness, not direction.

Some interaction between subject and object has to occur. Then the question is NOT about which "direction" it came from. The question is "then what?" If two cars hit head-on, it really doesn't make any difference which one came from the north, and which one came from the south. It is the resulting collision that is important.

And other factors are then important, while direction is insignificant. It makes a huge difference, for example, whether each car was going 10 mph before the collision or if each was going 120 mph. It makes a difference if one car was stopped and it's passengers had left the car to go for a walk, etc.

Your argument was about what happens when they collide. You might think that the direction they came from is what's important, but it isn't. Your statement was that the properties of the object of perception unilaterally cause changes in (impose changes upon) the subject of perception. You said:

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I would point out that those properties come to control our responses...

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@layman,

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I would point out that those properties come to control our responses...

That's the reason why I asked you what "properties" you thought were "in" the object (as opposed to in the subject).

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@layman,

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No, Brian, your argument, implicitly, was about passiveness, not direction

Well...if that isn't the height of arrogance. You know so much you even know better than me the point I am making.

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@Briancrc,

I know that the statement you made indicated an assumption about passiveness. I did say "implicitly." Call that "arrogance" if you want.

Do you want to retract or modify your statement (the one I quoted)?

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I opened my eyes and chose to see the sunlight. However, I chose not to see the curtains it came through. I drank some coffee and chose to taste it. However, it has sugar in it, and I chose to not like sweetened coffee, so I chose not to taste the sugar in the coffee. Rolling Eyes

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@Briancrc,

Except in an indirect way (i.e., fundamental ontological assumptions), the topic of sense perception doesn't really have much to do with arguments about free will.

That said, we are constantly being bombarded by a multitude of sensations, whether visual, auditory, tactile, or whatever. We have to ignore most of these. If we didn't our perceptions would present us with little more than utter chaos.

Either way, our "perception" is quite different from the "raw data." I'm told, for example, and every single image we perceive enters our retina "upside down" and have to be inverted for us to "make sense" of them. Perception is not a one-way street.

I will repeat an excerpt from an earlier quote I posted:

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The central principle of gestalt psychology is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies

This proposition (about "self-organization" of sense perception) has been repeatedly demonstrated (see, for example, the "slide show" I cited you to, but which you refused to look at).

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@layman,

Not really. The demise of communism comes to mind. Capitalism Works better than communism because it works in Darwinian ways.

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@Briancrc,

Briancrc wrote:

You'll have to show me where I wrote that. The argument was directionality; not passiveness.

Briancrc wrote:

I don't know that physiologists generally regard sensory nerves as anything other than passive.

Your argunent about directionality seems very weak. Consider that motor nerves are wired in the opposite direction compared to sensory nerves: From the center (spinal chord) to the periphery. Consider also the meaning of the behaviorist term "response", wich implies a change in direction.

The world is complicated.

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Is free-will an illusion?

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