Is free-will an illusion?

@layman,

Me neither.
When he presents the work of others, he often bites the whole sandwich. That's why his jpegs and videos are generally strawmen, IMO.

But when he presents his own thinking, I find him an excellent whetstone.

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

By "one is the other", i mean they are two sides of the same ohenomenon, two aspects of the same stuff.

OK, then. They're tied together, ya mean. Yeah, I agree. Hard to get one without the other. Ya can't have substance without form, and ya can't have form without substance.

Start with a living cell, for example. The cell wall is packed with receptacles for, and processors of, information. Same inside the cell. Same with the nucleus. And it turtles all the way town. Break it up as much as you can, down to the molecular, the atomic, and even the sub-atomic levels. It's information and complexity all the way down. It's doesn't really get "simpler." And all these levels are acting "in concert" to achieve a particular goal.

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@puzzledperson,

Don't underestimate the intelligence of these 'tribesmen', as you are wont to call them. Many have been brought up to 21st century speed quickly as the modern world engulfs them. Alphabets can be developed and written language can be taught. It is happening.

Perhaps it is a shame that some peoples are being forced from their traditions. But their speed of adaptation should teach us that brains are not the special property of us 'civilized' folks.

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@neologist,

They say that even chimps can learn to use sign language, and even make up new words as they go! Symbolic reasoning abilities. Even I have them, to some extent. Maybe not as much as a chimp, but, still....

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@puzzledperson,

puzzledperson wrote:

P.S. A possible source of inconsistencies in my comments is the frame of reference I adopt (for various purposes) in carrying out a discussion. I may sound like a materialist sometimes, because in attempting to point out some logical contradiction in a materialistic model of things it seems more rhetorically effective to demonstrate the flaw while arguing within a less controversial context (even adopting the framework of my opponent in order to demonstrate a flaw in it) than to come at things from such a heterodox perspective that all I can do is reject the broad framework itself.

Even in discussions of historical or current events, I usually write in the spirit of the as-if-ness of things, because to conduct myself as a solipsist would leave me little to say (and to whom?). I'm trying to give myself a mental workout as much as anything else.

Sounds fair, and not so different from my own experiences. So far, I've found it impossible to communicate meaningfully with others without adopting certain conventions, linguistic or ontological, that don't actually reflect my broader perspective.

As for the 'mind creating matter' position, I suppose that pursuing that in this thread would result in a major derail. I'm not quick to rule out the possibility.

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@neologist,

neologist wrote:

Other than my tendency to ignore jpegs, videos, and encyclopedia long posts, I don't ignore anybody.

What benefit do you see in ignoring scholarly research and the like? Or an image that is worth a thousand words, so to speak? I know they're sometimes hard to digest, but when the message is relevant to the discussion, doing so seems akin to sticking one's head in the sand, no? I've come to doubt the intellectual sincerity of those who refuse to avail themselves of the work of relevant experts, especially when it's served up on a platter like that.

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@FBM,

This image, for example, shows either a failure of scholarship or a deliberate deception, because it was taken from within an illustration and does not represent any instruction from Jesus:

http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb192/DinahFyre/12219448_10153739285887558_3927164871714310544_n.jpg

In that same discussion, while pummeling jjj, (who, in reality, asks to be pummeled for his own sloppy scholarship) you posted abut a zillion word compilation of citations from what looks like the KJV. Only one or two examples would be necessary to quiet jjj. I would have my own answers; but it really is a satire thread

You are too intelligent to resort to smoke and mirrors. You have your own legitimate thoughts. I enjoy seeing them and responding to them.

Ahem.

Carry on.

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@neologist,

If those aren't the words of Jesus in the Luke quote, then whose words are they?

Your criticism of my "zillion word compilation of citations" approach to jjj does not address the substance of that post. jjj is a major zealot and I've taken the 'one-or-two citations' approach with him in the past, to no avail. The lenght of that post was a reflection of his capacity for dishonest evasion, obfuscation and denialism.

But my real question was intended for why you might choose to ignore citations from scholarly journals, written and peer-reviewed by relevant experts, and even criticize me for introducing scholarly work into a thread that is otherwise chock full of amateur opinions. Are amateur opinions more valuable than research? I don't see how.

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@layman,

Indeed, though I don't think inanimated matter has "goals". That's something limited to living matter, and even there it's hotly debated.

But it's a detail. The important thing is that information and matter are intertwined all the way down to quark level. It's impossible to separate them.

One of my fav question is whether there is a "ground level" for matter structuration, or whether it's level after level all the way down. Like atoms, one thought unbreakable, are apoarently made of particles, themselves made of quarks, so what are the quarks made of? Etc ad infinitum.

IOW, are we going to reach some sort of bottom in our inspection of matter, or is it infinitely complex?

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@FBM,

FBM wrote:

If those aren't the words of Jesus in the Luke quote, then whose words are they?

Yours I guess.

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An interesting aside related to the Benjamin Libet's experiments: the Bereitschaftspotential or BP (from German, "readiness potential"), a measure of activity in the motor cortex and supplementary motor area of the brain leading up to voluntary muscle movement and first recorded and reported in 1964 by Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Lüder Deecke, has been used to control computers or for the 'mental' steering of artificial limbs in amputees...

So this electric "signal" from the motor cortex, which in Libet experiments builds up half a second before awareness of decision to move, and that Libet interpreted as an unconscious or preconscious decision, that BP can be CONSCIOUSLY WILLED by amputees in order to move a robotic arm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bereitschaftspotential#Applications

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

because of the lack of a solid, unitary and coherent methodological framework as to how to connect neurophysiology and agency—it frequently happens that tentative approaches, bold but very preliminary claims and even clearly flawed interpretations of experimental data are taken for granted.

Taken for granted, eh? What else is new? Flawed? I don't think so!

Quote:

very much has still to be clarified as to what and how neurosciences can tell us about human agency and that, in the meantime, intellectual and methodological caution is to be recommended.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12152-009-9053-9

Lack of a coherent methodological framework? Intellectual caution? The fool. We know what all this neuroscience tells us. There aint no free will. End of story.

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@layman,

layman: " Well, sure, and I expect PP would agree with you on that (but maybe not, who knows). I think he was using "text" as a synonym for "information" or "meaning." That's "carried by" the text, but it aint the same thing. One is a physical object, one aint."

Good paraphrase but I'd go further. Text is a type of symbol, whether ink on paper, carving in wood or stone, or smoke from a skywriting plane; and symbols exist only when someone recognizes them as such. That's true even when convention (agreement between two or more parties) doesn't exist. If I have a sleeping dream and see something that I recognize as a symbol and it means something to me, even though I never learned such a symbol in school, then it's a symbol to me.

If I'm walking along and it looks like somebody has carved initials into a tree I might call that text. If I get closer and see it's moss, I might change my mind and call it coincidence. f I get closer still and find that it's moss but it has been trimmed with a penknife to look like initials, I might change my mind again and call it text. And if I wake up after dreaming this improbable series of events?

What if someone's handwriting or printing is so lazy that it looks like one thing to me but the writer says it's something else; or a letter or digit is so stylistically ambiguous that it could be reasonably regarded as either of two things? What if I wake up after dreaming this and the putative intent of the other person (the writer) evaporates? What did it really say? Was it even text?

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@Olivier5,

Information is not in forms: it is in the mind of an observer who regards certain forms as symbolizing meaning. And the meaning already exists since the form is only a symbolic representation of it. Information is ideas. Forms may be a way to express ideas, or they may not.

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@neologist,

Re tribesmen, I clearly wrote "culturally conditioned"; that has nothing to do with intelligence. If you haven't been taught to read and your culture has no alphabet or pictograms and no communication with outside cultures, you're unlikely to recognize text as such.

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@puzzledperson,

And cars only exist when someone recognise them as such. Otherwise they are heaps of metal where chicken go to lay eggs and dogs go to releive their bladder. Let's not waste time about such banalities. Texts exist, nuf said.

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@puzzledperson,

Form in the broad sense aka structure. Ideas are FORMING in your head. Concepts are types of forms. Etc. Think of Plato's cavemen.

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@puzzledperson,

Quote:

Information is not in forms: it is in the mind of an observer

Information can be "transmitted." For this to occur, there has to be a "sender" and a "receiver" of that information, an "observed" and an "observer, if ya wanna put it that way. So it doesn't really exist only in either one or the other.

Does it also have some independent existence? If I write some down on a piece of paper, is it no longer "information" until someone receives it as such?

I can recall hearing a prominent evolutionary scientist pointing out that (contrary to much usage in both the public and scientific spheres) a "gene" is not a "thing." It is, he noted, "information." Information is not a DNA molecule or some portion of it. It aint no thang.

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Not in response to anything said above:

I was thinking a couple of days ago about how the Abrahamic religions' scriptural emphasis on divine retribution depends so heavily on the belief in free will, and how that has influenced, among other things, modern criminal justice. Imagine if a person's behavior were interpreted purely empirically as an environmentally or biologically induced maladjustment disorder, rather than as a conscious choice to be "bad." Without reference to a putative free will, then it seems likely to me that instead of having so many prisons and such draconian punishments, we might instead have a lot more therapy centers. As it stands, western prisons are essentially universities where inmates get advanced education in how to more smartly commit crimes once they get out.

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@layman,

Quote:

I can recall hearing a prominent evolutionary scientist pointing out that (contrary to much usage in both the public and scientific spheres) a "gene" is not a "thing." It is, he noted, "information." Information is not a DNA molecule or some portion of it. It aint no thang.

IMO, these sorts of discussions on whether stuff exist or not are generally useless. If minds exist and if minds are information, then information exists.

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Is free-will an illusion?

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