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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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During an earlier discussion of one approach involving the question of free will I made the point that in order for an action to be logically valid as having been the outcome of a complex series of antecedents then all those antecedents must be listed. If they cannot be catalogued in such a way then the declaration based upon an assumption that all actions have logical antecedents is more a provisional theoretical assumption and not a proved fact.
If George throwing a ball cannot be demonstrated as having been preceded by nearly innumerable accurately documented antecedents,going back to the origins of the universe ,which it cannot, at least not presently, then the possibility that something like the existence of free will, which, if anything is (in this connection) defined as having no clearly apparent antecedents-- is greatly enhanced.
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Little article on giant slime molds making relatively complex decisions. These organisms contain no brain and hence absolutely zero neurons. From the article:
The slime mold's decision-making algorithm can be mathematically described as a tendency to exploit environments in proportion to their reward experienced through past sampling. The algorithm is intermediate in computational complexity between simple, reactionary heuristics and calculation-intensive optimal performance algorithms, yet it has very good relative performance.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160608112930.htm
These molds are no doubt calculating in their response to their environment. An orchestration of thousands of chemical reactions every second, much like our own cells. These reactions are capable of determining decision making processes in a way that informs the molds in making optimal strategies for their survival in a constantly changing environment.
These things don't have brains or neurons but can figure out how to navigate a maze.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face
He walked the streets looking at people. He used the underground railway where passengers faced each other in rows and could be examined without seeming to stare.
Folk near the river were usually gaunter, half a head shorter, and had cheaper clothes than people in the suburbs. He had not seen the connection between physical work, poverty, and bad feeding before because he came from Riddrie, an in-between district where tradesmen and petty clerks like his father lived.
He noticed too that the sleek office faces and roughened workshop ones had the same tight mouths. Nearly everyone looked anxious, smug, or grimly determined. Such faces would suit the disciples, who had been chosen from labourers and clerks, but they wouldn’t suit Jesus.
He began looking for harmonious faces whose mouths closed serenely. Most children had these when they sat still, but the people who kept them after adolescence were usually women with a mild, mysterious, knowing look. For a while he thought this might be the incarnate God’s expression, for Leonardo and the carvers of oriental Buddhas had thought so.
One morning he found it on the face of a three-inch embryo in the university medical museum. The huge little head nodding over the bent-up knees, the great closed eyes and subtly smiling mouth seemed dreaming of a satisfying secret as big as the universe.
And he saw such an expression could not belong to Christ, who had looked steadily at the people around him.
He needed the face of a mature, sane, outward-looking man whose love abolished all advantage over whom he beheld, a face without triumph or blame in it because triumph is smug and blame is the Devil’s work.
from Lanark by Alasdair Gray
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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. . . nothing in your picture resembles anything of a chaotic structure, don't you need a infinite universe for that? (Blue)
No, Blue. Lots of chaotic structures exist in small bounded regions. Here's one arising from cellular automata. Note the regularity in the top part that presumably gives way to chaos in the bottom. But maybe a close analysis would show some regularity even there. Who knows?
It's weak emergence again.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Lots of chaotic structures exist in small bounded regions
Ok, so ilooked up chaotic, and it = Disorderly . and i still wouldn't see your computer generated picture being disorderly. i'm looking into it as if it's the forest tho ,and not only as a tree,
So if chaotic/ disorderly conduct happens in small bounded regions, isn't chaoticism just an "effect" sourced from a material "cause"? It's not a Law then, it's an environmental provoketion?
So to speak, there isn't a law of Chaoticy, like there 's a law of gravity in Nature, right?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Mh2, i don't know what to say about that "Gray"
OMG
how revealing words can be!
your the most sensationable.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/B2c2C55Pn10]
edit; alright, i meant sensational.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Ward: Little article on giant slime molds making relatively complex decisions.
Some of us make significant distinctions between what is complex and what is complicated. What’s complicated, we think, is something that’s tractable. What’s complex is something that is highly faceted, nonlinear, with interdependent parts (mutually causative). What is complex leads to emergent characteristics / properties / results that tend to be unpredictable.
This might seem to be a pedantic distinction to some, but for some of us (especially, Buddhists), most everything looks complex.
Here’s a nice little primer I found if you’re interested. (Engineers might take note.)
http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/the-difference-between-complicated-and-complex-matters/
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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MikeL: Like everything else, free will appears to occur within consciousness, but we don’t know what consciousness is.
Since we are communicating in a written manner, I can just look up the definition of consciousness. At the very least, it will be a convenient position to argue from.
Webster's defines consciousness thus:
Con´scious`ness
//n. 1. The state of being conscious; knowledge of one's own existence, condition, sensations, mental operations, acts, etc.
Consciousness is thus, on the one hand, the recognition by the mind or "ego" of its acts and affections; - in other words, the self-affirmation that certain modifications are known by me, and that these modifications are mine.//
- Sir W. Hamilton.
2. Immediate knowledge or perception of the presence of any object, state, or sensation. See the Note under Attention.
Annihilate the consciousness of the object, you annihilate the consciousness of the operation.
- Sir W. Hamilton.
And, when the steam
Which overflowed the soul had passed away,
A consciousness remained that it had left.
// . . . images and precious thoughts
That shall not die, and can not be destroyed.
- Wordsworth.
//The consciousness of wrong brought with it the consciousness of weakness.
Froude.//
3. Feeling, persuasion, or expectation; esp., inward sense of guilt or innocence.
An honest mind is not in the power of a dishonest: to break its peace there must be some guilt or consciousness.
Mike, I think that we typically use the word consciousness to mean awareness. If you are conscious, you are most likely aware. If you are unconscious, you are unaware.
Awareness has its own definition as well:
n. 1. conscious knowledge; as, he had no awareness of his mistakes.
2. a state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness; as, the crash intruded on his awareness.
You see? Webster's definitions of awareness all include the word conscious.
If we admit that awareness is a part of consciousness, then most animals must be conscious to some degree or other. This has always puzzled me. Some of you guys get very weird about consciousness. To me it is a quality shared by even simple animals. Humans have sentience, but I doubt that even that is exclusively human.
Is there any mental quality that is exclusively human? We excel mentally, but to me, it seems only in degree. We share much with other species.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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JG said "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."
I would re-word this to say "So, what does the experience of shining the light of consciousness upon everything tell us, other than we are shining the light of awareness on a full stage? It seems to me that one would gain insight from this practice, not just a religious epiphany and a springboard into metaphysics.
But I could be wrong; so I will pay attention to the results to help guide me
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 9, 2016 - 10:48am PT
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It's curious to step back a few paces and look at all this, especially the business of free will, and what angles people take to define the question relative to their backgrounds.
If you are a materialist, your basic mode of inquiry is to try and define an external object or phenomenon in an objective, or mind-independent manner using measurements that supposedly are beyond the influence of any consciousness. Quite naturally, when using this tact one will look at the brain in the same way, finding no consciousness therein. Only a machine operating on auto-pilot. Perhaps one might accord awareness as a kind of mechanical blow-back, but even this "function" is strictly a mechanical and impotent brain by-product with no actual agency in the material world.
A hallucination, as some believe.
And the idea that this bystander might have some hegemony or influence on behavior is also a non-starter owing to a linear causal model that forms the foundation of the mechanistic model. Sure, as mentioned, the world is too chaotic and random to PREDICT what might happen in the future, but if we only had sufficient data, any behavior could be reverse-engineered to antecedent physical/mechanical causes. You can define "cause" with spectacular nuance, but we all get the idea.
Any way you shake it, behavior in this regards is considered the outcome of purely physical factors in much the same Xs and Os churn computational output on a computer. The brain encounters a situation or task and compares and contrasts all the known data from the past, computes the likelihood of various outcomes, and automatically selects the best action, all done on auto-pilot. The idea of free will contradicts this model because it implies that an action was based on something other than the Xs and Os, basically drawing water from a non-existing well. And this, mechanically, is clearly impossible. Where would an action come from, since all that real is physical? In this way materialists simply confirm their original philosophical position: What isn't physical?
Obviously, when you use a mind-independent model to look at mind - an absurd position to begin with - you will only find mechanical processes. And when you use a version of a dynamic filesharing / probability model to try and explain behavior, you will find no instance where an action was ever initiated by a phenomenon not found in the file. This all makes perfect sense per the model used.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Nice post, John.
Some of us make significant distinctions between what is complex and what is complicated
Interesting comment, Mike. I had never thought of that. I am in agreement.
So if chaotic [or] disorderly conduct happens in small bounded regions, isn't chaoticism just an "effect" sourced from a material "cause"?
I would think so, even in the instance of chaotic mental states.
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WBraun
climber
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Looks like someones carpet is unraveling ..... :-)
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Carpet chaos. A new mathematical specialty!
;>)
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Carpet chaos -- I feel special being there at the moment of creation of the term.
By the way, jGill, I do love those pictures. Chaos, with respect to things like fracture patterns was an emerging discipline in Geology when I graduated in the early '80s. But it wasn't until I read James Gleick's, Chaos (read it three times now) that I developed an appreciation for chaos. Mandelbrot Sets are introduced in the book -- similar to the pictures that you have been showing. The structure that underlies randomness is beautiful in a really mysterious way IMO.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Most of the fractals you see are generated by simple iteration of a quadratic complex function in the complex plane. That is to say, start with z then compute F(z), then compute F(F(z)), and so on. Usually F(z)=az^2 +b. By sticking to simple iteration and using a relatively simple function a number of results about the distribution of iterates are attainable by exploring and developing theory.
I deal with a different sort of animal. I take a sequence of complex functions that are far more complicated than the one described above and compose them in either the form f1(f2(f3(...)))fn(z) or gn(...g2(g1(z)) Infinite Compositions . . .
Apart from a few convergence theorems very little is known of this area.
The images are almost always a surprise. However, the Carpet Chaos seen above was generated by cellular automata, line by line, from the top. Each succeeding row is determined by a formula wherein two "ancestors" above that row are combined by a simple mathematical formula to produce an "offspring" below in the next row. Very simple, but it leads to chaotic displays.
;>)
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WBraun
climber
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The images are almost always a surprise.
Yes this shows that we do not have full control, only limited.
There's a higher power over riding all ......
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Any way you shake it, behavior in this regards is considered the outcome of purely physical factors in much the same Xs and Os churn computational output on a computer.
Again, complete nonsense and, per usual, you have no alternative, cogent or otherwise, to present.
Obviously, when you use a mind-independent model to look at mind - an absurd position to begin with - you will only find mechanical processes.
More nonsense. Behavior has evolved with the brain and both the brain and behavior can be traced all the way back down the evolutionary tree to single celled organisms. It's really as if you can't grasp any but the simplest model analogies for biological processes. You rely so heavily on a philosophical Geppetto's 'mechanical processes' device to then play the tired reductionist card - over and over like an organ grinder with one tune - dude, do you have anything whatsoever new to say or to add to the conversation?
10k posts and you still can't state your case in simple, clear language. In fact, trying to pin down your point, if in fact you actually have one, is clearly the philosophical equivalent of determining the exact location of an electron - I'm sure it's in here somewhere, but the more you look for it the more it looks like a deliberate, as opposed to a statistical, fog.
Again, panpsychism? Yes? No? Simple question. Magic? Yes? No? Emergent from other co-resident woo? Yes? No? Universal consciousness? Yes? No? And just where on the taxonomy of species is some poor organism 'visited' with said consciousness? Genus and species if you could be so kind (and, god, we can only hope fido isn't just another mechanical fur process...). Should I tell the jumping spider that keeps coming over to check me out to buzz off? No doubt another case of mechanical curiosity I can ignore - or can I? Which is it? And how much and how complex does living tissue have to be before it can have behavior you'd recognize as a mind?
Crikey, do use another 10k posts to tell us what's absurd, what absolutely positively can't be happening and what doesn't make any sense at all. Or, gasp, as an alternative, feel free at any time to make actual statement about what IS happening and 'where' consciousness does reside or come from.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Base: Since we are communicating in a written manner, I can just look up the definition of consciousness. At the very least, it will be a convenient position to argue from.
I can’t tell you how much I disagree with this approach.
First of all, language is alive and organic. Like everything else in the universe, language has a life all its own that no one controls. Language changes regularly, and mainly colloquially. What common beliefs are about one thing or another tend to be imprecise, intuitive, and without much experience. What people think constitutes geology or climbing, I’d argue, is just about dead wrong except for the most general understanding. In a couple of fields, I’ve looked at how people understand one subject or another, and most of their understanding tends to be loosely metaphorical. (Anthropologists might have a few say a few things about this.) I would argue that it would be far better, at least, to read wiki’s rather than dictionaries just to get a start.
Dictionaries concern only the definitions of words. Words point to ideas or concepts, and ideas or concepts point to referents. What referents are is really what we’re trying to pin down here, I believe.
I understand how definitions might be a place to get things started, but we’re smarter than that. Definitions certainly constitute no reliable proof of anything. They might illustrate, however, (if one has some expertise in an area) just how much the masses know almost nothing definitive or complete about anything other than their own thoughts and feelings.
For the most part, people are just shooting off their mouths without making sure their brains are loaded. They’re just talking.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Hey, Healyje:
So, . . . what’s wrong with panpsychism? You spit the word out as though there were something wrong with it. I mean, what do you know about it?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Absolutely nothing whatsoever. A clear statement like: "I believe in panpsychism" would be a veritable breath of fresh air and a giant leap forward for this conversation.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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I understand how definitions might be a place to get things started, but we’re smarter than that
Philosophical discussions that begin with poorly articulated or conceived definitions lead to hundreds of pages of inconclusive babbling. If you jump into the middle of a discourse without laying the groundwork it's probable that very little of anything worthwhile will emerge. But if one wants to just talk, then jump right in. It's claimed that's the smart thing to do.
Panpsychism? I think ectoplasm is more interesting, especially if it is ill-defined.
;>)
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