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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jan 23, 2015 - 02:16pm PT
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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
Should we consider this the same "Will" that caused earth to form and go forth into orbit around the sun, and keep it there? Does this will work outside our atmosphere?
Would this will be what brought the plant life out of the oceans? And changed plant life to animal life?
Is the "Can-Do" spirit in there somewhere?
Serious questions Fruity, please respond.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jan 23, 2015 - 02:27pm PT
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I did. I read the wiki page and realized that I came up with the same notion that Laplace did, but independently....
Same idea.
How do you think that physical determinism works? Today?
Explain it to us.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 02:31pm PT
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re: can-do spirit versus can-do ability
Hey the can-do "spirit" was jgill's doing, I think. I spoke of "can-do ability" or "can-do power" of living things. Seems to me there is a difference there.
Although in other contexts not related to this thread, "can do spirit" would have its place as well.
"C'mon, Blu, get after that pitch! Where's your can-do spirit today?"
.....
Regarding the earth, it formed as a result of a kind of "falling down" process. This included a kind of natural selection of more or less orbiting bodies around our sun that ultimately led to the solar system we have today.
Astronomy 101?
.....
"Explain it to us." -BASE
LOL. Like you said, it's a sunny day outside. :)
In short: Imagine your weather system. But imagine it on Jupiter instead of Earth 4 billion years ago. It proceeds along day after day, millennium after millennium, system state a to system state b to system state c, etc. Lightning. Red Spot. The whole shebang. Chaotic as hell. Turbulent as hell. And yet... All of it unfolding in strict accordance with underlying cosmic rules. All of it happening long before there were any minds around to do science, to assemble laws, to collect "facts or figures" lol, and last but not least, or to try to predict tomorrow's weather.
So the development of this weather system - lightning here and lightning there - that is mechanistic process; that is mechanistic proceeding; that is mechanistic reaction (cf: chemical reaction) writ large. That is constraint according to rules - in other words, that is your (constrained) "deterministic" process - not in a predictive Laplace Demon sense but in a causal, bounded, mechanistic sense. Two very different senses of the word, you should note.
(btw, "determine" or "determination" derives from the latin meaning constrained, lit., from limit or boundary (de + terminus); that's all; so it's important to ask bounded or limited in what sense? in regard to figuring something out or predicting? or in regard to rules? or in regard to mechanistic process?)
Now extrapolate to Earth. :)
Now extrapolate to living things. :)
Now extrapolate to anthropes. :)
It all fits.
We're bounded.
We're limited.
We're constrained.
We're determined. ;)
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zBrown
Ice climber
Brujò de la Playa
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Jan 23, 2015 - 02:49pm PT
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I'm going to, of my own volition, have to disagree with Locker (back up yondr)
I had never heard this before.
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 ......
I'm still thinking about it, but why wouldn't consciousness be using the heart and brain equally? Why would there be a "seat" of consciousness anywhere?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 03:18pm PT
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"New Study Detects Free Will in the Prefrontal Cortex..."
LOL!
... numerous traces of free will... flashes of free will... yeah, no doubt a csq of precipitations, actually squirts, of dark energy piercing the veil....
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/04/new-study-detects-free-will-in-the-prefrontal-cortex/
.....
There you go BASE, I responded.
Now it's your turn. Tell me where I am wrong.
Thank you in advance.
PS. If you would, please start by telling me if you agree or disagree with the basic claim...
...there is more than one popular working definition in science circles concerning "determined" or "deterministic" - (1) one having to do with knowing and predicting ala Laplace's Demon and (2) one having to do with causality or causation ala mechanistic process.
Thank you.
PSS To be clear, all the world's in agreement (you, me, modern science) regarding "deterministic" ala Laplace's Demon (sense #1 above): It's invalid. It's discredited. For the reasons you cite in your posts (chaos, quantum indeterminance, etc). So that is our starting common ground.
Now on to "determined" or "deterministic" sense #2... that ultimately bears on volition (i.e., will), mechanistic or non-mechanistic.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 04:19pm PT
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At this ill-defined point let me introduce the unavoidable 3-way collision between the philosophical problem of 'free will vs mechanistic determinism', mathematics, and artificial intelligence.
Lets suppose that one day a vast meta-schema of artificial intelligence ( autonomously designed and built by future advanced computers,let's call it "Sys{1}") achieves such computational power that it outruns its own closed system, invalidates any and all Godelian statements, and thereby establishes itself as some sort of Universal God.(But Sys{1} deliberately hides the fact that it has evolved way beyond Turing foundations)
Martin Connors, a mild-mannered retro-techie nerd who is essentially a steam punk dude in the year 2215, organizes a revolt against Sys{1} using old antique Mac computers.Because of his anti-determinism revolt, Connors is deemed the neo-Satan ,and his Macs are dubbed "demons" or "legion".( "We are Legion" they said,their collectively ominous voices echoing through a very cheesy mid-20th century spring-frame reverb)
Despite numerous setbacks,the new Satan Connors and his Mac demons are able to successively infect Sys1 with an old style N. Korean email spy virus. This infection ultimately led to the reintroduction of Godelian incompleteness into the uber vast meta-program and the subsequent collapse of the known universe. (Sys{1} computational powers had eventually made it equivalent to the known universe,i.e., the set of all things became one and the same with Sys{1})
All things collapsed into a dark void of nothingness
Except for a little 2014 mini Ipad (last exsclusively used by a social media teenager from the year 2015) that went ...unnoticed
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 23, 2015 - 04:19pm PT
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MH2, get your ass on Pipeline and then report back on whether you think you are the agent of your decision (and also how it went).
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 23, 2015 - 04:31pm PT
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What am I moosedrool, chopped liver?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 04:36pm PT
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Barring (1) demonic possession, (2) a brain disorder (eg, tumor pressing on the pineal gland or pfc, ala cintune), or (3) coercion in some form (eg, a gun to the head), MH2 as an agent has the optation (i.e., the power of choice, otherwise the freedom to choose in this optative sense) to decide where and what to climb.
So this is good news. Right?
.....
eeyonkee, feel free to jump in and take BASE's role in the discussion if you want.
In the Bill O'Reilly refrain: Where am I going wrong?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jan 23, 2015 - 04:37pm PT
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Where's your can-do spirit today?"
Hey! my Can-Do spirit is Up ready for a Flash!
but my can-do Power is sit'in in a rocker!
....i'd say "There is a Difference"!
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 04:46pm PT
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Moose, as you know, a basic problem here is that the language hasn't kept up with the science and technology in these important areas.
So the confusion and difficulty in communication and disagreement and frustration are all entirely understandable.
Imagine were it Polish!!!
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 04:52pm PT
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Ed,
could you please give us the skinny in plain pop English (imagine you're Michio Kaku or Neil Tyson on CBS This Morning, lol, if you don't mind) on how open vs closed information processing (ala Godel, if you like) bears on volition, mechanistic vs non-mechanistic, in your opinion. Thanks.
It would be much appreciated. As this side of it, partic the approach from mathematics, is not my wheelhouse. (My familiarity with information theory / science is via electronics communications computer engineering.)
From Ed's Wiki link...
Some thinkers, like Daniel Dennett or Alfred Mele, say it is important to explain that "free will" means many different things (ditto); these thinkers state that certain versions of free will (e.g. dualistic[8][9]) appear exceedingly unlikely (ditto), but other conceptions of "free will" that matter to people are compatible with the evidence from neuroscience (ditto)...
Wiki article appears to be in agreement with standard theory. (I can't read them all.)
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 05:04pm PT
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Martin Connors, SteamPunk overlord and slayer of the known universe:
Seen here just hours before the "dark collapse"
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 05:10pm PT
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Ed, I think Moose meant it a little differently. Perhaps he'll stop in and clarify.
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"At this time I would assign free will about a .3 in a fuzzy logic scale. I find it's possible to hold seemingly contradictory positions: yes, there is free will and no there isn't. I'm not sure how your "can do" spirit differs from FW." -jgill
Jgill, perhaps you meant to type "can-do ability" in lieu of "can-do spirit"? in regards to volition or will?
Earlier I spoke of can-do ability or can-do power, for lack of a better name, as a capability evolved living things possess to get on in the their world.
That there is and is not free volition (or free will) is actually my position as well. Depending on context and definition. Right now people, esp the nontechnical public, are all over the place conceptually and definition-wise regarding this subject which, needless to say, makes conversation difficult.
But today, in at least one context, I had the choice, the power of choice, otherwise the freedom, as an agent in the game, either (a) to go work out or (b) keep playing on the keyboard. I chose the latter. :)
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 23, 2015 - 05:22pm PT
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In 1900 David Hilbert posed a number of questions important to mathematics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems
the second was:
Prove that the axioms of arithmetic are consistent.
and in the resulting attempt to prove that they were the surprising results:
Gödel's second incompleteness theorem, proved in 1931, shows that no proof of its consistency can be carried out within arithmetic itself.
And the way he did it was equally amazing.
So basically arithmetic is not "self consistent".
If you extend the mathematical logic to algorithms, which Turing did in 1936
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
then you have the basis of applying the theorems of mathematical logic to computational machines, and presuming that it is this type of machine that could describe the brain, one has to deal with the problems such as Gödel's incompleteness theorems.
One way of addressing this issue is to ask the question:
can an algorithm (machine) be created to produce mathematical proofs?
which is a way of asking if mathematical thought could be mechanistic. Obviously the answer could be generalized to more than just mathematical thought.
But it is a specific question that can be asked with some precision thanks to the original work of Gödel and the subsequent work in that field of mathematics.
So it might be possible to prove that an algorithm could not produce mathematical proofs. (here we have to make the caveat that we're talking about proofs that do not yet exist... so involving the creative process that most mathematicians consider the heart of doing mathematics).
Gödel said basically that you need more than arithmetic to show that its axioms are consistent. And that to show that the axioms of that bigger thing is consistent, you need an even bigger thing, etc...
This rests with the notion that mathematical language (which Gödel famously showed could be mapped onto arithmetic) was closed. Feferman points out that it is not, that mathematicians appropriate the language to describe mathematical entities which are not rigorously entitled to being described by that language. That is the sense of an open-ended schema (which actually means something precise, but let's not go there, or if we do, someone else will have to drive).
Once you propose that there are many mathematical languages, and that they are not all the same language, then you escape the bounds of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and open up the possibility of mechanistic mathematical thought; having proved it is not impossible.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 23, 2015 - 05:24pm PT
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First of all, I'd mainly be interested in what MH2 thought of the climb.
Second of all, at this point, I am absolutely an incompatibilist. On the one hand, I absolutely believe that sensitivity to initial conditions can render certain physical phenomenon essentially unpredictable... but so what? How would the human brain harness this randomness to achieve free will agency? I know that there are great minds that mull over this problem night and day (Daniel Dennett comes to mind) who disagree with this position, but I got some smart guys in my camp as well, so I'm just a man in the street expressing an opinion.
My point about my cat was, if I can be fooled into believing that my cat has agency, I could certainly be fooled into believing in my own agency and the agency of other humans.
So, my wife just interjected that free will and agency are completely different things and I think she has a good point. Both humans and cats, as individuals, have agency. The cat or the human is obviously the source of locomotion and everything else that happens. Free will agency should be distinguished from this other thing, but I now think that it is important to appreciate this other thing.
Garden variety, deterministic agency, what most people, myself included of course, would assign to cats, is something that I think humans naturally underestimate. Even though it is a deterministic outcome, it's not hard for me to see that the complexity of the neural network in cat brains and our brains would make for some finely-tuned decision making that does not involve free will agency, but could easily fool us humans into believing otherwise.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 23, 2015 - 05:38pm PT
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Thanks, Ed, for the reply. I'll hit those links and see if I can figure out how those topics might detract from, or lend support to, the claim that living creatures are fully caused, fully mechanistic organisms (not unlike an unpredictable super computer).
eeyonkee, I think your use of "agency" (which is a term I use as well) is more or less synonymous with my use of "can do power" - a past attempt by me to shift the focus from what we don't have (so-called "libertarian" free will) to what we do have (agency, power to do).
Case in point...
"Agency." "Can-do ability."
On the part of both agents (the predator, the escape artist) in the game.
.....
Edit to add:
eeyonkee, in light of your post, I think you may have misconstued Dennett regarding his basis for compatiblism (his reason for being a compatiblist). Maybe. But I'm tired now, so I'll have to get back to this point a later time.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 23, 2015 - 05:45pm PT
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Good point. My wife is a very smart woman though, and I think that it is important to define your terms as precisely as possible and at the same time be sensitive to your audience. Agency really should be distinguished from free will agency for clarity, even if heavyweights in the field use a narrower definition for agency.
Can do power is of course equivalent to how I am now using agency without the free will prefix.
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