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zBrown
Ice climber
Brujò de la Playa
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Jan 23, 2015 - 08:27am PT
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Is it time to vote yet?
Apparently not.
The best argument against democracy is a five minute talk with the average voter
-W. Churchill-
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 23, 2015 - 08:42am PT
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On a different tack, it seems strange that evolution has resulted in a species where some individuals kill themselves. it doesn't feel quite right to me to view suicide as an act where we don't exercise something like free will. Perhaps the decision is made by the subconscious, but surely there must then follow some debate with the conscious mind. I don't remember hearing that animals commit suicide when the act has no benefit to the survival of kin.
Humans are aware of death in a way that animals probably are not. Of course, animals may be aware of death and even capable of committing suicide but never choose to do it.
In The Malay Archipelago, Alfred Russel Wallace describes the custom of amok among the natives of Lombok. He says that men who suffered severe injustice and found no other recourse would pull out their dagger, the kris, and begin stabbing anyone in their path until they themselves were killed. He says that these incidents were uncommon but created great excitement in the population when they did occur and that, as a response to an intolerable situation, were considered, "almost honorable."
Wallace contrasts amok to the Englishman blowing out his brains with a pistol, a "cold-blooded" act which may require at least a bit of free will. With amok we are back to impulse which may come from subconscious activity building force and sweeping the weaker conscious mind before it.
He rushes madly forward, kills all he can - men, women, and children - and dies overwhelmed by numbers amid all the excitement of a battle. And what that excitement is, those who have been in one best know, but all who have ever given way to violent passions, or even indulged in violent and exciting exercises, may form a very good idea. It is a delirious intoxication, a temporary madness that absorbs every thought and every energy.
Chapter XI
Lombock: Manners and Customs of the People
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WBraun
climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 08:52am PT
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Free will is beyond cause and effect.
It's not material.
Suicide falls under cause and effect.
You are NOT the owner of your material body.
You're not completely free to do anything you want with it.
There's limitations.
It will be taken away from you even though you protest.
Stupid people think they own their own bodies.
You are only a renter until you behave.
Then you get your nice original eternal house (body) back .....
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WBraun
climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 09:21am PT
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The seat of consciousness is within the heart never the brain.
The brain is just another material instrument of the body that consciousness uses.
Consciousness is the true life force that animates and drives the gross material body of the living entity within it's material body covering ......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 23, 2015 - 10:58am PT
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Unpredictability does not equal free will, right?
how do you tell the difference?
especially since you only have partial access to understanding your own actions, and no direct access to anyone else's.
As has been demonstrated (empirically) your active response to a stimuli precedes your perception of that action.
If that is true, than the thing you call "volition" isn't.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 11:06am PT
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If that is true, than the thing you call "volition" isn't.
Isn't what? I think you need to clarify.
especially since you only have partial access to understanding your own actions, and no direct access to anyone else's.
This is always the escape hatch for those seeking one on this topic.
The facts remain. You can use a computer analogy in the form of two chess engines for illustration purposes. Note the game is entirely mechanistic. Note the computers are entirely mechanistic. On-board are chaotic random number generators. The system is unpredictable. Still entirely mechanistic. Thus no freedom in the sense that's relevant, that is, in the modern philosophical sense of being "above the rules" as depicted by the "natural laws" of physics and causation. Further, let's say one computer can "think" much more deeply than the other and wins the game 99 out of 100 times. It has a can-do power that the other doesn't. Language what it is, this "can-do power" can be conceived as a kind of "freedom". Now back to humans: Note Caldwell/Jorgeson as climbers have a can-do power / freedom to climb the Dawn Wall that other climbers (let alone avg joes) don't have, this despite the fact that as "agents" or "player-participants" they are entirely mechanistic and lack freedom in the old ghost-in-the-machine sense that is maintained by and popular with religions and religious people.
ref: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-kings-of-chess-are-computers-1420827071
Claim: All lines of evidence (direct and circumstantial) increasingly point to all living things as entirely mechanistic.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jan 23, 2015 - 11:23am PT
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Driving a car = threatening the social cohesion of the nation = act of terrorism
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 11:25am PT
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Nice to see you paying more attention to this. That is on the "international community" level. At least expressed here. :)
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 23, 2015 - 11:32am PT
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in my opinion, your are very restrictive with the chess example... as we would all agree, our experiences tell us that we do not operate in an environment of a closed set of rules.
While we might speculate that it is ultimately closed, we might never reach a point for that to be a factor.
That is why the discussion of mathematical thought is so interesting. From an intellectual point of view, I would presume that you consider mathematics to be a "closed rule set" but as Feferman points out above, there are multiple "languages" that describe the mathematics, and that they are "open ended."
So from a strictly mathematical point of view, they are not limited by "incompleteness" theorems.
Similarly, we do not live in a world of chess, but far outside of that, and dealing with unexpected stimuli is a part of what the mechanism does.
The discussion of analogy is an important one for the issue of "free will" because it is essentially how we learn to be moral, that is, by told examples which we can analogize into practical responses. The language of morality is not closed, either, as we all can hypothesize many difficult moral decisions.
What Feferman does is to point out that expanding the "rule set" to be open-ended (and not at all determined) we do not rule out a mechanical (in his argument this is the Turing machine) process.
I don't view advancing our physics knowledge as "uncovering the ground truth," but as developing a schema for explaining our observations, the most interesting of which are completely unexpected. The frontier of knowledge expands, but we have no idea of what it expands into or what the limits of that expansion are... while we propose the ultimate limit to be at the Planck scale, that is a boundary so far away as to provide essentially no constraint on our understanding, or the physically possible phenomena between where we are and that ultimate limit.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 12:15pm PT
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I'm afraid in part we might be having a language problem.
Do you agree scholars / students in these subjects use "deterministic" in two important senses?* namely... the first concerning predictability and or computability of a future event or output (based on scientifically derived laws or models), the second concerning mechanistic process, obeyance or conformity thereof.
**and most disconcertingly, often interchangeably, when in fact they are distinct concepts.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jan 23, 2015 - 12:17pm PT
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I don't mean to imply that randomness or noise or chaos have any strong connection to the notion of Free Will.
Pure physical determinism just doesn't smell right to me, and I work with physical data all day long while working.
We know that many systems rely heavily on the state of initial conditions. A slight nudge in intitial conditions will give you radically different results as time increases. Weather is the most obvious example, and one that I spent many spring seasons measuring (truly one of the coolest jobs on Earth). It is impossible to know the exact conditions of every molecule and particle just from a practical standpoint. The data that gets fed into weather models comes from fairly widely scattered balloon soundings that go up around the world at 0Z and 12Z. Surface observations and satellite data also contribute to the initial data. It is acknowledgely incomplete. It would be way too expensive to reduce the node distribution by half. This is one of the reasons that weather models tend to break down after a few days.
There are a number of numerical models that forecasters use. I remember when they were fairly crude. Everyone had their favorite. Some were short range, some were long range, but if you change the intitial conditions only slightly, the solutions will diverge with time. Given enough time, they diverge wildly.
Can you, even in principle, know the state of every particle and every force, with absolute precision? Even if you did know this, could you use it to predict the future with total precision?
This assumption is the basis of physical determinism. Cause and effect are perfect.
If there is any randomness, predictions will diverge as time goes by.
Is there any physical randomness in the universe? It is an important thing to know, if you are going to stick your neck out and say that there isn't. You must say that cause and effect are absolutely precise, down to the Brownian Motion of every atom, or the path of every photon.
Take the path of a photon. We know that light does not travel in a perfectly straight line, like classical physics tells us. You have to use Feynman's Path Integral to come up with a statistical amplitude.
There are many natural systems that are affected by Stochastic processes, Brownian Movement and particle behavior among them.
If initial conditions vary only slightly, models diverge with time. If the underlying conditions are not perfectly knowable, then determinism falls apart. Your solutions begin to diverge wildly.
We are all surrounded by random processes. I've named 2 of them.
The big one is the probabilistic nature of matter itself. Quantum Mechanics is statistical in nature.
For pure physical determinism to work, you have to show that these probabilistic phenomena have no effect on your solution.
I am one of the least spiritist persons on this thread, but the nature of matter itself has a high degree of randomness in it. Yes, it is very small, but it IS there. The question is, "Does this randomness affect the future?"
Everyone has heard of the butterfly effect. Most haven't heard about probability distribution. I say that there is a probability problem that sticks its nose into the idea of absolute physical determinism.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jan 23, 2015 - 12:26pm PT
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Soooo, what is dark matter and dark energy, anyway? What could they be?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 12:33pm PT
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BASE,
With all due respect, you keep repeating yourself. (Maybe you don't realize it because you don't read others' posts? my posts?)
Like the Moose response to Jan's post...
you are missing the point.
AGAIN, ONE LAST TIME -
The "deterministic" that relates to freedom of volition (will) has nothing to do with "knowing" or predictability or even minds and everything to do with straight-up mechanistic process or mechanistic reaction (cf: chemical process or chemical reaction). Seriously you should get off that hobbyhorse of yours (it's so 19th century, see Laplace's Demon) and put it away. :)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 23, 2015 - 12:43pm PT
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Even our "conscious debate" could be nothing else but a sensation in the brain, IMO.
I feel confident that if Free Will exists we could only become aware of it as a sensation in the brain.
However, I don't think we are at a stage to talk about prove or disprove, not for the philosophical debate, anyway.
Another more personally applicable case of Free Will may be in choosing whether or not to do a particular climb. My subconscious often urges me to climb Pipeline, for example, but my conscious mind weighs the pros and cons and so far has said "no." I have a strong sense, though, that the choice could go either way and that there is nothing we would ordinarily think of as mechanical about the choice. There may be a stomach-al input, but since we still haven't fully characterized the behavior of the lobster stomatogastric ganglion, I can't regard the stomach as a simple deterministic system.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 12:48pm PT
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mh2, you and BASE ought to get together. :)
Where is that "free" "contracausal" or "supercausal" part of the brain again?
Is it actually attached to the brain? Or does it just float nearby? lol
Whether it's attached or it floats, is it only in us humans?
What about eeyonkee's cat?
.....
In my experience, there are no better teachers for instilling a "sense" of mechanistic process or mechanistic reaction than chemistry and electronics. The more years the better, imo.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 01:44pm PT
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"Mechanisms of self control are predetermined by our biology therefore we have no free will even while exerting control? Sounds circular to me." -Jan
Jan, you are missing the point. -Moose
Jan, that's a lot of question marks in your post!
The fact is, you're not going to be able to cut through all the public confusion regarding the freedom of the will (esp the different types thereof w respect to which are valid and which are invalid) from a systems perspective (and that's the relevant sort being argued here) without a lot of hardware and software experience in your background.
At base, the claim is: Insofar as living creatures (anthropes not exempt) are a build up of mechanistic systems (thoroughly constrained by, otherwise obedient to, underlying "cosmic" rules and reflected in scientific laws and models) there is no room for freedom of the "ghost" type or "spiritual" type handed down by (and promoted by and maintained by) the world's religious traditions.
The discredit of that type of freedom (of the will) - discredited in large part by the revelations of modern science but popular with just about everybody and on which so many of our cultures and institutions were built - is what has everybody's panties in a bunch.
People don't cotton to being marionettes. Even if organic ones. Even if very adaptive, versatile ones steeped in can-do power.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jan 23, 2015 - 01:50pm PT
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HFCS, I typed that, and it was amazing. You jumped on it in less than an hour. You worship Sam Harris too much. I watched a lecture of his on free will as well as several of his cohorts.
Do some of you people live on this forum? Geez, sunny day outside.
edit: I read about Laplace's Demon. What do you say about it?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 01:53pm PT
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You worship Sam Harris too much. -BASE
Hey, you should review Laplace's Demon (it's got an entry at wiki even), review it, then realize two things. (1) The world has moved past that 19th century form of determinism. (2) It's not the sort being talked about nowadays as the viable valid type (to which the mind-brain is obedient). (By Sam Harris and great many others.)
Truth is, Harris is a much better communicator than me (I mean I), but also he was a undergrad dropout playing around in India when I was at school being all serious-like - drilling down on and wrestling through these many related subjects to decision-making points.
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