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jstan
climber
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Years ago, now, I posted that this thread and it progenitor were "a waste of time." Furthermore, It was wasting the time of very knowledgeable people. I said one of the reasons for this failure was the imprecise use of language. Later there was the admission that some positions were being taken "to stir people up."
By admission, intellectual integrity was also a problem. By admission, the thread is theater.
It need not be.
These problems are not confined to this or any other group of people. Language and logic are things one often has to cut at many times before you get it right, But intellectual integrity must always be present.
On another topic allow me to take a cut at the "free will" discussion. The neurological data indicates decisions are made in our processing system before it is known at the conscious level. Here I am taking the conscious level as being that moment when the subject blinks to tell the experimenter that some sort of decision has been sensed.
The whole debate on free will exists because of an unstated assumption. The assumption that decisions made below the conscious level, ARE NOT OUR DECISIONS. That we are not responsible for decisions prior to the conscious level,
We are responsible for everything that we do no matter when we became conscious of it.
It think the whole free will question, goes away.
As a postscript:
Homo sapiens is dogged by what may prove to be a mortal flaw. We are narcissistically devoted to our importance. So it is we need grand purpose, life forever, and the importance of our consciousness. We live in our heads.
jstan, I normally like your posts. This one stinks of not being aware of what you could be aware of.
Having said that, free will is something that I have been struggling with for many years.
Might you expand on what I could be aware of?
Nothing happens without the light, not in cosmology,
There is a lot that happens without the light. Light is generally electromagnetic radiation.
But as per usual I can't be sure of what you take your words to mean.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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jstan, I normally like your posts. This one stinks of not being aware of what you could be aware of.
Having said that, free will is something that I have been struggling with for many years.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Like everything else, free will appears to occur within consciousness, but we don’t know what consciousness is.
Be a scientist. Try not to lead with principles or concepts. Lead with data. Data are observations. What is observation?
Bereft of content, what would you say what the quality of “observation” is? Rather than what light shines upon, what does light show itself to be? You see, taste, touch, hear, feel, think the images of objects in front of you, but what “en-lightens” them? What brings them up for you? Quit looking at the screen and look at the projector, and more—the light projecting the images.
There’s nothing intellectual about any of this, Jstan. The so-called intellectualism you refer to is due to an identity called “you” creating the objects you see . . . language, integrity, logic, processing system, assumptions not withstanding. All fall before what might be best described by the light. Nothing happens without the light, not in cosmology, not in the Bible, not in telescopes or microscopes, and not in you. What’s the light?
I’d say it’s beaming right now from what you think is you.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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For me, jstan describes the free will issue clearly and succinctly. To subscribe to it, you would need to accept the premise that our brain and mind are a collective of neurons. We could look on them as a big corporation with many employees, organized into a hierarchy with labourers, supervisors, middle management, and a CEO. The CEO is the one (the group of neurons) who decides (causes your eye to blink) in response to a question from the experimenter.
When there is a problem, it may not have begun with the CEO but that is who should take the blame. If we subscribe to the idea of blame.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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It's clear to me that the science doubters on this thread (and elsewhere) lack imagination -- imagination with respect to what a relatively simple algorithm together with chaos can create out of seemingly nothingness.
i don't think it's due to the lack of imagination on the doubters side, as it is as much a denial by scientist to go on precluding something happens from nothing.
And for your imagination, i'd grade yours a "D"! i mean COME'ON, "Life follows a linear algorithm steadfastly, until chaos intervenes requiring the need for the randomly mutant mutation that's been sitting there awaiting displacement."
i've never heard anyone here retort science's wisdom, JUST the lack there of.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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MH2:
I’m surprised at your writing. Hierarchical structures are theoretically under attack in cognition as much as they are in businesses. The idea that a CEO can make all the decisions or orchestrate all the needs to be done in an enterprise is old, tired, and non-functional. Democracy has not only spread across the world politically, it has also shown itself in almost every scientific discipline I am aware of. The hierarchical organization of anything is not very adaptive, flexible, improvisational, or holds the requisite variety to suit any complex environment. The best “organisms” (as you want to measure it) appear to be self-organizing, and in that, there is no real center, top, or bottom.
As for blame, there’s plenty to go around for everyone. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
EDIT:
To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things. To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barriers between one's self and others.
(Dogen)
***
Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself. (Miles Davis)
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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All fall before what might be best described by the light. Nothing happens without the light . . . (MikeL)
And that's what disturbs me about serious Zen meditators: What they say sounds so much like religious dogma that it is hard to say it isn't. This empty awareness or light or whatever one wishes to call it is assumed to, in some way, exceed all other mental states - those being defective because there is a residual "I" consciousness. Jan has commented on this strong bias - enforced by succeeding generations of Zen practitioners - against other modes of meditation or other kinds of mental experiences.
This is What is Mind?. So, what does the experience of shining the light of consciousness upon nothing tell us, other than we are shining the light of awareness on an empty stage? It seems to me that one gains nothing from this practice, other than a religious epiphany and a springboard into metaphysics.
But I could be wrong.
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WBraun
climber
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They don't study their selves.
They project their own defects onto everything else ......
(Duck)
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jstan
climber
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denial by scientist to go on precluding something happens from nothing.
BB:
You should consider clicking on youtubes of Lawrence Krauss talking about Universes coming from nothing. Nothing is presently a very hot topic, at least on youtubes.
Feynman's four lectures in the Robb Memorial Series is another benchmark. Since 1948 ninety percent of the phenomena you observe every day are best explained by weird concepts in Quantum Field Theory. Out to nine or ten decimal places.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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It's clear to me that the science doubters on this thread (and elsewhere) lack imagination -- imagination with respect to what a relatively simple algorithm together with chaos can create out of seemingly nothingness (eey)
Voila . . .
An approximate image of an infinite composition of (different) complex functions in the complex plane, over [-20,20]. Not elementary normal iteration like that giving rise to fractals.
Fairly simple to program, but its symmetry shows little if any chaotic structure. More an example of weak emergence - unpredictable imagery, but mechanistic nevertheless.
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jstan
climber
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Hierarchical structures are theoretically under attack in cognition as much as they are in businesses.
Au Contraire. Hawkins gives a very interesting discussion of temporal hierarchical neurological processes. But then what do I know about Andy's field.
What do you know?
Try this.
http://www.google.com/patents/US20070192264
Enjoy.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Fairly simple to program, but its symmetry shows little if any chaotic structure. More an example of weak emergence - unpredictable imagery, but mechanistic nevertheless.
nothing in your picture resembles anything of a chaotic structure, don't you need a infinite universe for that? yours is stricken within a small mainframe. Finite. To me that looks more like randomness.. but those words are being sooo stretched out. i wonder how much difference there is in your picture and a game of Texas Hold'em?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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a process that serves no known evolutionary purpose to the machine.
Nonsense. It's just a behavioral extension of self-awareness which can be [evolutionarily] traced back to predator/prey interactions where success was dependent on being able to self-locate in the environment and relative to another.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jstan:
re: hierarchical structures and the citation you pointed to.
(Ugh, . . . another model driven by a metaphor of computation.)
Might I suggest looking up in the literature on grounded cognition or embodied cognition. (If you need citations, let me know.) Basically the notion is that much of cognition must reside outside the brain in the body, in the experiences the body goes through. (I’ve posted my own summaries about these ideas in the past on this thread. Search in this very thread on “embodied cognition.”) Some researchers are going so far as to argue that cognition resides in objects outside of the body. (Think, a piece of paper with your notes written on it, for example.) One problem with models that rely upon a computer model is the following (as I wrote in a paper some time ago):
. . . [the] long-standing view of cognition [is] a system of arbitrary symbols, computation, predicate calculus, and semantic nets operating in rule-based systems . . . requires transductions of stimuli into higher representational languages that are inherently non-perceptual. Arbitrary symbols in rule-based systems may provide computer-like explanations for human intelligence, but they are independent of body. [That is,] the body serves no significant purpose in accounting for cognition (Pecher and Zwaan, 2005). However, research threads from various fields of study provide increasing support for a new-old empiricist view of cognition (Goldstone, Feng, and Rogosky, 2005). They argue that feeling, emotion, and concepts arise (i) through the senses, (ii) through the sense of bodily movement (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), and / or (iii) through introspection about physical perceptions (Barsalou, 1999). That is, knowledge representations correspond to the very perceptual states that produce them (Prinz, 2002). Without direct experience in domains, concepts will not have direct perceptual grounding. Without perceptual grounding, concepts cannot adequately point to or represent referents in the mind or the world (Barsalou and Wiemer-Hastings, 2005).
In addition, another problem with a computer model of cognition is: how does one take the first step, a start, in development of cognition in the first place? How does a blank system learn the very first thing to begin with? (People refer to this as the Chinese language dictionary mind experiment.) How could one learn Chinese from an English-Chinese dictionary if one does not know English? Chomsky argued that symbolic language is inherently intrinsic to the human species. (Viola, “a miracle happens.”)
As a model of mind, computation feels familiar because computers are something we think we know and understand. But that dog won’t hunt. That explanation of cognition essentially exposes the problem of duality—the notion that there is an independent being and independent objects external to a being. All these theories appear to be misinterpretations and just ways of talking about mind and cognition.
Be well.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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The idea that a CEO can make all the decisions or orchestrate all the needs to be done in an enterprise is old, tired, and non-functional.
That is not the idea. The idea is that those people (or neurons) lower in the hierarchy mostly make their own decisions so that the CEO (probably an ever-shifting group of neurons depending on the type of decision required) does not need to make all the decisions.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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MH2:
More recent and forward thinking conceptualization in organization has begun to argue that different levels have different functions—the old idea being that as one moves up the ladder in organizing, one simply gets more authority and responsibility (the Russian Egg Model). Instead, the more recent conceptualization is that different units have different functions.
If that is a valid observation, then the idea of hierarchy loses its meaning and power. Instead of hierarchy, one simply sees differentiated specialization. Then the idea that seems to dominate is the importance of integration . . . that is, how parts fit together. And if integration and parts fitting together most matter, then what one is seeing is some kind of nondual oneness. Not really parts, but just one “thing” that is forever morphing, a constant impermanence.
Talking about what parts are and what the whole really is becomes a useless exercise. It’s not something that one can get one’s head around. Imagine one of Jgill’s beautiful images and imagine it never solidifying into any thing in particular but always shifting and changing.
It’s kinda like that.
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jstan
climber
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MikeL:
Concerning your post above. One of the most attractive concepts in Hawkins' Temporal Hierarchival model is just the fact that the outputs are taken to be the output averaged over many identical units. Doing this allows organisms to be robust even though failure rates for each unit can be high. We are biological constructs facing great limitations on the energy available to us. So , no, I don't expect our designs are based upon each unit uniquely satisfying a critical function.
A personal note.
Thank you for your "be well." comment. Because you write in an environment foreign to myself I am unable to read you. That said it is always good to hear that there is no personal animus. I certainly feel none toward you. We all have no choice but to respond to the external forces acting upon us.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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The whole debate on free will exists because of an unstated assumption. The assumption that decisions made below the conscious level, ARE NOT OUR DECISIONS. That we are not responsible for decisions prior to the conscious level,
We are responsible for everything that we do no matter when we became conscious of it.
It think the whole free will question, goes away.
Thank you jstan! You will probably surprised to hear that this is what the meditation masters say as well.
In their terminology, the propensity toward certain actions rather than others comes from one's skandas ( from Sanskrit -heaps, aggregates, collections, groupings). These skandas are based on what we were born with (in modern terms our genetics) and the mindless repetition of certain behavior patterns. Blinking one's eyes when an object flies toward them comes from evolutionary survival mechanisms. Getting angry or depressed over the behavior of others, comes from one's own unique combination of genes, habitual responses, and our tendency to put the responsibility on someone other than ourselves.
If we could admit that everything from how fast we blink our eyes and run to how fast we strike out in anger, to the idea that the long term choices we make are our propensities and choices, no one else's, we would be a long way down the path toward enlightenment.
In this scheme of things, a crime of passion is no excuse, nor "the devil made me do it". We are responsible for all that is in our mind and body and they would say, the energy field surrounding ourselves. To understand what we are responsible for it is necessary to look within ourselves at all our skandas, helpful and unhelpful, to become self aware at a much deeper level. This is not an escapist pursuit nor for the faint hearted. To accept responsibility for all of oneself, is to finally be grown up in the universe. To decide to take that difficult journey with no promise of success, is the ultimate act of free will. It is the choice of being fully awake and aware, or giving in to one's skandas and succumbing to the victimhood of one's karma.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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I don't agree we are responsible for our actions. There is no free will.
Then who is responsible for your actions? What directs will if not the self? What is the source of will free or otherwise? Seems this becomes a kind of "first cause" question. Evolution itself seems based on this notion of the will to life, a continuance acquiring complexity based on that will. As I said before, if you abdicate responsibility you infer another responsible party or entity.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Healyje said
Nonsense. It's just a behavioral extension of self-awareness which can be [evolutionarily] traced back to predator/prey interactions where success was dependent on being able to self-locate in the environment and relative to another Exactly my thoughts (based on a ton of reading on the subject)!
By the way, if you can get you hands on it, read The Gene by Siddhartha __. Holy crap, I feel like I understand the gene like I have never understood it! It is the atomic unit of life, after all. David Goeddel, the founder of the Poway Mountaineers, was the first person in history to create insulin in a test tube and figures prominently in one of the middle chapters.
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