One of the leading theories is that consciousness is simply the brain's model of all the competing stimuli-respone actions going on that it uses to keep track of everything.
The advantage of being able to 'watch over' these responses is (rather ironically) that illusory stimuli can be more easily identified as such because they do not concur with other stimuli. The only way the brain can do this (so goes the theory) is to 'expect' all received stimuli to concur. That feeling is what we describe as consciousness.
David SolmanJanuary 08, 2018 at 17:49#1413060 likes
Reply to bahman i think what is most interesting about this is, who is making decisions? if every decision that is made is just a product of sub conscious that's very odd because everything that you have done up until this point has been chosen by something that you're not even aware of. the sub conscious is what acts first but it acts without your contribution and so what does this mean for us? are we even able to make a choice? does the brain create the illusion that we're making the decisions when in fact we play no part at all? and more importantly, who is pulling the strings? if all this true then what about the bigger picture, the population of the entire world experiences the same as i do and all of those decisions made by everyone to bring us to this point in human evolution has just been a product of zero conscious thought? is everyone is just riding a train to experience what our inner conscious feels is the right and wrong way to act?
One of the leading theories is that consciousness is simply the brain's model of all the competing stimuli-respone actions going on that it uses to keep track of everything.
The advantage of being able to 'watch over' these responses is (rather ironically) that illusory stimuli can be more easily identified as such because they do not concur with other stimuli. The only way the brain can do this (so goes the theory) is to 'expect' all received stimuli to concur. That feeling is what we describe as consciousness.
So you believe that the feeling of free will is an illusion but it exists just because there is a stimuli for it?
The importance of this question comes to my mind after the discussion in this comment.
It does seem utterly wasteful and counter-evolutionary to claim that consciousness and free-will are illusions. For this to work in evolutionary terms, then consciousness and the awareness of free-will must have a physical effect, which means that the illusions must be causal.
So, we have certain illusions, that must be caused by something physical, that must cause something physical, that must render the illuded fitter for survival. Very odd indeed!
i think what is most interesting about this is, who is making decisions? if every decision that is made is just a product of sub conscious that's very odd because everything that you have done up until this point has been chosen by something that you're not even aware of.
I think we need consciousness for adopting our subconscious mind to a stimuli so subconscious mind can perform a specific task automatically and properly. Think of deriving.
the sub conscious is what acts first but it acts without your contribution and so what does this mean for us? are we even able to make a choice? does the brain create the illusion that we're making the decisions when in fact we play no part at all? and more importantly, who is pulling the strings? if all this true then what about the bigger picture, the population of the entire world experiences the same as i do and all of those decisions made by everyone to bring us to this point in human evolution has just been a product of zero conscious thought?
It does seem utterly wasteful and counter-evolutionary to claim that consciousness and free-will are illusions. For this to work in evolutionary terms, then consciousness and the awareness of free-will must have a physical effect, which means that the illusions must be causal.
Yes, I agree. But you then have the tension between body and consciousness which this leads to improbable situation. This was subject of another thread. Please see the link in OP for further discussion.
So, we have certain illusions, that must be caused by something physical, that must cause something physical, that must render the illuded fitter for survival. Very odd indeed!
Yes, I agree. But you then have the tension between body and consciousness which this leads to improbable situation. This was subject of another thread. Please see the link in OP for further discussion.
Why, when there is such a straight forward resolution?
Yes, I agree. But you then have the tension between body and consciousness which this leads to improbable situation. This was subject of another thread. Please see the link in OP for further discussion.
— bahman
Why, when there is such a straight forward resolution?
I don't understand what you are trying to say. Do you agree or disagree with my comment?
I don't understand your comment. Do you mind to rephrase?
According to known physics, the brain is a universal computing device. All such devices are equivalent. So, the program running on your brain (or any other universal computer) is the entity that creates consciousness as a feature. Consciousness, and free-will are software features, not hardware features.
Playing chess, is no more a feature of the computer hardware than consciousness is a feature of the brain.
Reply to bahman I don't know the answer to this question, but I'll speculate and say that not everything evolution produces has to be functional and positive for the organism's persistence. There are some things that have evolved that are detrimental to the survival of an organism/species but not so much that it actually purges them. Or it takes many generations for the extinction to actually happen. There are also some traits that evolve that are completely accidental and neutral in functionality, that exist by chance and have no bearing on the survival of the organism.
The experience of free will may be an instance of a neutral trait. Though I'm also speculating that it may have arisen through a complex mental evolution, which might have taken many generations of fragile mental instability where many members of the species went insane, mad or otherwise "broke" mentally. I think it might be reasonable to say that the proliferation of mental illnesses today is only a fraction of what it would have been thousands of years ago, when the mind was still developing. Back then the mind may literally have been a chaotic maelstrom. Or the appearance of a "free will" experience may have come accidentally and only after the appearance of failed "free will" experiences.
It can be difficult to wrap one's head around the amount of time that took place in the evolution of biological life on Earth. It's a ton of time, with plenty of opportunities for accidental developments, most of which would have resulted in failure.
So you believe that the feeling of free will is an illusion but it exists just because there is a stimuli for it?
No, that's not quite what I'm saying. The theory is that conciousness is the effect of the brain monitoring the stimuli it has received from all the different sources and expecting them to be coherent. That expectation is the sensation that we are one entity, aware of all our actions and responses. The evidence pretty clearly shows that we are not. Scientists can tell you 'you' are going to move your arm before you actually decide to move your arm, it's pretty irrefutable, it doesn't matter how hard it is for anyone to understand or get how such a thing might have evolved. 'You' are not in charge.
Reply to bahman Look at how animals behave. They're driven by what could be called emotions or, perhaps better, base desires. They're behavior consists of feeding and mating. Everything animals do can be reduced to the two activities I've mentioned. One might say that animals exercise choice in the type of food or mate but these two are modulated through the senses which are nothing more than chemical receptors. We don't attribute free will to an ameba whose activities are entirely controlled through chemicals do we? So, animals, clearly, lack freedom of will. Their choices are determined through signals that have never enter the light of consciousness.
Humans are animals too. If so then how can it be that we should be so different, invested as it were, with free will? We do engage in mating and feeding and in that we're the same as animals - driven by visual cues, taste, smell, etc.
Point to note is mating and feeding are pro-life i.e. preserves, nurtures, and propagates life. We engage in mating and feeding to prolong life or to bring new life into the world. So far so good.
However, humans have a distinct ability, not found in animals - we can do things that are detrimental to life. We can harm ourselves or choose a course in our lives that is painful and dangerous. This type of behavior is absent in animals. Does this mean we truly have free will? After all we can do something that is not driven by our base instincts. Surely this must mean something!
According to known physics, the brain is a universal computing device. All such devices are equivalent. So, the program running on your brain (or any other universal computer) is the entity that creates consciousness as a feature. Consciousness, and free-will are software features, not hardware features.
Playing chess, is no more a feature of the computer hardware than consciousness is a feature of the brain.
Well, the another software is laws of nature. If we accept that then we see that there is either tension between laws of nature and conscious decision or not depending on whether consciousness is active or passive. We cannot act in the first case and we observe deviation from what we expect. Both of these cases we have never observed. So we are dealing with a problem.
Evolution doesn't care.
It allows an infinite possible number of traits. Evolution is the result of a process in which useful traits are promoted by successful reproduction, but more exactly the elimination of traits that are actively injurious to successful reproduction.
Evolution is not a process which creates or selects traits at all. Evolution is the end result of living things having viable progeny. Between the two extremes of positively useful and negative traits there exists a whole host of traits that, not impeding the result of viable progeny confer not particular advantage or disadvantage of viable progeny.
Natural selection, does not select FOR traits in any sense. It is the result of the selection of living things that have useful traits and neutral traits.
In the matter of conscious sexual selection by humans of their mates it can be argued that those that believe in free-will are likely to select a mate who also has such a belief. In this way free will is adaptive in that it is attractive.
This argument can also be offered for a range of myths, beliefs and other cultural artefacts. That they persist in culture passed to children through knowledge.
Reply to darthbarracuda
I think that the probability for a neutral trait drops by time and become insignificant in a course million years for such complex phenomena, illusion of free will.
Harry HinduJanuary 09, 2018 at 13:40#1418790 likes
i think what is most interesting about this is, who is making decisions? if every decision that is made is just a product of sub conscious that's very odd because everything that you have done up until this point has been chosen by something that you're not even aware of. the sub conscious is what acts first but it acts without your contribution and so what does this mean for us? are we even able to make a choice?
I find it very strange to say that you aren't making decisions, when YOUR subconscious is making decisions.
I think we do make conscious decisions as well as sub- or, unconscious, ones. I think one of the reasons consciousness evolved in humans was because it provides fault tolerance for those sub- and/or unconscious decisions (instincts). There are often times where those instinctive decisions would produce dire consequences in complex social environments. Conscious decisions provides that extra layer of fault tolerance and reasoning, allowing one to override some of those instinctive responses, and to be able to fine-tune one's responses to it's environment.
This also provides the feeling of turning one's awareness back on yourself - of observing one's own behavioral responses for the purpose of fine-tuning the decision-making process.
No, that's not quite what I'm saying. The theory is that conciousness is the effect of the brain monitoring the stimuli it has received from all the different sources and expecting them to be coherent. That expectation is the sensation that we are one entity, aware of all our actions and responses. The evidence pretty clearly shows that we are not. Scientists can tell you 'you' are going to move your arm before you actually decide to move your arm, it's pretty irrefutable, it doesn't matter how hard it is for anyone to understand or get how such a thing might have evolved. 'You' are not in charge.
So you entirely believe that conscious activities have no role in our lives?
Look at how animals behave. They're driven by what could be called emotions or, perhaps better, base desires. They're behavior consists of feeding and mating. Everything animals do can be reduced to the two activities I've mentioned. One might say that animals exercise choice in the type of food or mate but these two are modulated through the senses which are nothing more than chemical receptors. We don't attribute free will to an ameba whose activities are entirely controlled through chemicals do we? So, animals, clearly, lack freedom of will. Their choices are determined through signals that have never enter the light of consciousness.
Humans are animals too. If so then how can it be that we should be so different, invested as it were, with free will? We do engage in mating and feeding and in that we're the same as animals - driven by visual cues, taste, smell, etc.
Point to note is mating and feeding are pro-life i.e. preserves, nurtures, and propagates life. We engage in mating and feeding to prolong life or to bring new life into the world. So far so good.
However, humans have a distinct ability, not found in animals - we can do things that are detrimental to life. We can harm ourselves or choose a course in our lives that is painful and dangerous. This type of behavior is absent in animals. Does this mean we truly have free will? After all we can do something that is not driven by our base instincts. Surely this must mean something!
Well, I have to say that I am amused and confused.
So you entirely believe that conscious activities have no role in our lives?
No, I believe that conscious activities do not exist. Deciding on a course of action is not something that a single unified process does and it's certainly not the process that we're aware of.
Deciding on a course of action is done by several competing parts of the brain, some of which we are aware of, others we're not. After the resultant message is sent to the muscles, the bit of the brain responsible for the sensation we call consciousness tells us a story about how 'we' decided to do it, as if 'we' was some unified thing.
Read Bruce Hood's The Self Illusion, it's a real eye-opener.
As I said above, the point is to highlight potential discrepancies in stimuli. If we're expecting all our stimuli to be coherent then we are more able to spot when one might be in error. It allows us to shortcut thought processes that might otherwise consume too much energy "what shall 'I' do next?" is quicker than "let's just consult all the various influences that might have a view on what this body should do next". Being able to predict other people's behaviour is also useful and much quicker if we think of people as individuals. There's loads of potential advantages, but they're all just using the conscious self as a shorthand sketch of what's really going on, it's not accurate.
As I said above, the point is to highlight potential discrepancies in stimuli. If we're expecting all our stimuli to be coherent then we are more able to spot when one might be in error. It allows us to shortcut thought processes that might otherwise consume too much energy "what shall 'I' do next?" is quicker than "let's just consult all the various influences that might have a view on what this body should do next". Being able to predict other people's behaviour is also useful and much quicker if we think of people as individuals. There's loads of potential advantages, but they're all just using the conscious self as a shorthand sketch of what's really going on, it's not accurate.
But all you mentioned is not possible to be done with single conscious process. For example, what is error and how we could distinguish it consciously if there is nothing to compare?
I really don't understand what you're unhappy about with the explanation I've given. If my fingers tell me there's a rock there but my memory tells me there isn't, that is a discrepancy. In order to produce the response to the rock that my cells have evolved to produce it is advantageous to act as if the rock were either there or not, not as if the rock were both there and not there. In reality, we just have two signals and no reason why they shouldn't be different, the illusion of self speeds up decision making by presuming they shouldn't be.
First of all you are doing a fantastic job of avoiding that taboo word, but unfortunately you are not out of the woods yet.
Cells have all like these wonderful interests and capabilities such as creating illusions and looking to optimize by searching for discrepancies? How? Rocks can't. Or can they?
Cells can, rocks can't, I really don't understand what the problem is. Aeroplanes can fly, cars can't; batteries can turn chemicals into electricity, postage stamps can't. What is special about creating illusions or seeking to optimize reproduction that makes you so convinced a collection of cells can't do it?
?darthbarracuda
I think that the probability for a neutral trait drops by time and become insignificant in a course million years for such complex phenomena, illusion of free will.
Why would you say that?
Free will is not a concept carried by the genes. It's a conclusion drawn from experience and expressed and reproduced by logical logic. Such concepts are more like memes that genes, and like god or fairies do not have to confer any specific advantage, but can evolve through culture without any reference to somatic evolution or reproduction. Such "memes" can persist and move into other cultures like viruses move across species.
It's a conclusion drawn from experience and expressed and reproduced by logical logic. Such concepts are more like memes that genes, and like god or fairies do not have to confer any specific advantage, but can evolve through culture without any reference to somatic evolution or reproduction. Such "memes" can persist and move into other cultures like viruses move across species.
Illusion of free will is not like a meme. You experience it.
Could consciousness be causally efficacious? It is mere illusion.
No. That's pretty much what this whole thread's been about isn't it? Consciousness clearly doesn't 'cause' the arm to move. If it did, the subject would be aware of the intention before the computer wired to the subject's brain, but the evidence shows that they are not.
That doesn't mean it's not useful. The artist's 3D rendition is useful (it helps us imagine the object in real life) but it's an illusion, it's not actually 3D.
Reply to Pseudonym Action comes before awareness. Someone's I decide which way to move and then I move. Both most times it is formed habit. The brain is nothing more than a central receiving/transmission network.
JustSomeGuyJanuary 09, 2018 at 19:53#1419900 likes
Action comes before awareness. Someone's I decide which way to move and then I move. Both most times it is formed habit. The brain is nothing more than a central receiving/transmission network.
Who is taking action and who is becoming aware of action?
Who is taking action and who is becoming aware of action?
The Mind? Your mind. My mind. Everyone's mind. That which peers out though the eyes and made up the story that it can't make a choice. It's not all that wierd actually. The Mind loves making up stories. It's a pastime.
JustSomeGuyJanuary 09, 2018 at 20:26#1419970 likes
Entity: a thing with distinct and independent existence
This is a very simple question, and your dancing around it makes you seem dishonest.
You said "action comes before awareness". If this is the case, logically there must be one entity acting, and another entity becoming aware of the action. Two entities. All I'm asking you to do is confirm that this is what you are claiming, and make explicit what these two entities are.
The statement you just made implies that there are multiple "things", aka entities. You're being logically inconsistent.
Can you stop trying to distract from the original question, though?
What is taking action, and what is becoming aware of the action? Since you don't like the term entity, yet you yourself used the term "thing", I'll use your term. Logically, there must be two different things in this scenario. What are these two things?
The statement you just made implies that there are multiple "things", aka entities. You're being logically inconsistent.
It's like waves in an ocean. Entangled forms.
To understand life one must jettison logic and imagine patterns. Art brings one much closer to understand nature am be life. Logic is only symbolic and this intrinsically incapable of grasping the whole.
JustSomeGuyJanuary 09, 2018 at 21:29#1420260 likes
To understand life one must jettison logic and imagine patterns. Art brings one much closer to understand nature am be life. Logic is only symbolic and this intrinsically incapable of grasping the whole.
Then go post on an art forum. This is a philosophy forum. Logic is the foundation of philosophy. You yourself just admitted that you aren't using logic, which means you aren't doing philosophy, which means you shouldn't be posting any of this here.
Please answer the perfectly valid question I have asked you multiple times. If you don't answer this time,I will take that as an indication that you don't know what you're taking about and stop asking.
Reply to JustSomeGuy I answered your question. Your belief system doesn't allow you to comprehend.
Now back to my question? How does a cell do all of the things you claim it can do? What's the theory that explains these exceptional capabilities such as optimization? I suppose you have some powerful logic ready. You can start with your proposition.
JustSomeGuyJanuary 09, 2018 at 21:58#1420340 likes
How does a cell do all of the things you claim it can do? What's the theory that explains these exceptional capabilities such as optimization? I suppose you have some powerful logic ready. You can start with your proposition
I haven't made any claims about the capability of cells, so I have no idea why you're asking me that. Regardless, I'm done engaging with you. I've given you many opportunities to have a rational conversation, and you have denied every one of them. I'm here to discuss philosophy, and you apparently have no interest in that.
Illusion of free will is not like a meme. You experience it.
Get back to basics. The sense of self is a perceptual contrast the brain has to construct so as to be able to perceive ... "the world". Even our immune and digestive systems have to encode some sense of what is self so as to know what is "other" - either other organisms that shouldn't be there, or the food the gut wants to break down. And so too, the brain has to form a sense of what is self to know that the world is other.
A second basic of the evolved brain is that it is needs to rely on forward modelling the world. You probably think the brain is some kind of computer, taking in sensory data, doing some processing, then throwing up a conscious display. Awareness is an output. But brains are slow devices. It takes a fifth of a second to emit a well learnt habitual response to the world, and half a second to reach an attentional level of understanding and decision making. We couldn't even safely climb the stairs if we had to wait that long to process the state of the world.
So instead, the brain relies on anticipation or prediction. It imagines how the world is likely to be in the next moment or so. So it is "conscious" of the world ahead of time. It has an "illusion" of the next split second just about to happen. That creates a feeling of zero lag - to the degree the predictions turn out right.
And this forward modelling is necessary just to allow for a continual perceptual construction of our "self". We have to be able to tell that it is our turning head that causes the world to spin, and not the other way round. So when we are just about to shift our eyes or move our hand, a copy of that motor instruction is broadcast in a way that it can be subtracted from the sensory inputs that then follow. The self is created in that moment because it is the part we are subtracting from the flow of impressions. The world is then whatever stayed stable despite our actions.
It is not hard to look at the cognitive architecture of brains and see the necessary evolutionary logic of its processing structure. And a running sense of self is just the flipside of constructing a running sense of the world.
Then on top of that, brains have to deal with an actual processing lag. And the best way to deal with that is to forward-model the shit out of the world.
Then on top of that, it is efficient to have a division of labour. The brain wants to do as much as it can out of learnt habit, and that then leaves slower responding attention to mop up whatever turns out to be novel, surprising or significant during some moment.
That leads to consciousness having a logical temporal structure. You have some kind of conscious or attention-level set of expectations and plans at least several seconds out from a moment. About half a second out, attention is done and learnt, well-briefed, habit has to take over. It does detailed subconscious predicting and reacting. If someone steps into the road while you are driving, you hit the brakes automatically in about a fifth of a second. After that, attention level processing comes back into it. You can consciously note that thank god you are so quick on the brakes, and what was that crazy guy thinking, and why now is he looking angry at me, etc.
This is all proven by psychological experiment. The whole issue of reaction times and processing times is what got experimental psychology started in the late 1800s.
Where does human freewill come into it? Well what I've outlined is the evolution of the cognitive neurobiology. The basic logic is the same for all anmals with large brains. They all need to construct a running sense of self so as to have a running sense of what then constitutes "the world". They all have a division of labour where they can act out of fast learnt habit or slower voluntary attention.
But humans are different in that we have evolved language and are essentially social creatures mentally organised by cultural evolution. Yes, memes.
So now our perceptual sense of self takes on a social dimension. We learn to think of "ourselves" in terms of a wider social world that we are representing. We learn to "other" our biological selves - this running perceptual self with all its grubby biological intentionality - and see it from an imagined social point of view. We learn to be disembodied from our own bodies and take an introspective or third person stance on the fact we can make choices that our societies might have something strong to say about.
So freewill is a social meme. It is the cultural idea that being a human self involves being able to perceive a difference between the "unthinking" selfish or biologocally instinctual level of action and a "thinking", socially informed, level of self-less action.
An animal is a self in a simple direct fashion - a self only so far as needed to then perceive "a world". A human, through language, learns to perceive a world that has themselves in it as moral agent making individual choices. That then requires the individual to take "conscious responsibility" for their actions. Every action must be judged in terms of the contrast between "what I want to do" and "what I ought to do".
So the idea of freewill is an ideal we strive to live up to. And yet the temporal structure of actual brain processes gives us plenty of dilemmas. We do have to rely on "subconscious" habit just for the sake of speed and efficiency. The gold standard of self-control is attention-level processing. But that is slow and effortful. However - as human culture has evolved - it has set the bar ever higher on that score. As a society, we give people less and less latitude for sloppy self-control, while also making their daily lives fantastically more complex.
A hunter/gather level of decision making is pretty cruisey by comparison. You go with the flow of the group. Your personal identity is largely a tribal identity. You get away with what you can get away with.
But then came institutionalised religion, stratified society, the complex demands of being a "self-actualising" being. A literal cult of freewill developed. The paradoxical cultural demand - in the modern Western tradition - is that we be "self-made".
So sure, there must be some evolutionary logic to this. There must be a reason why the freewill meme is culturally productive. But the point also is that it is a psychologically unrealistic construct. It runs roughshod over the actual cognitive logic of the brain.
We just shouldn't beat ourselves up for not being literally in charge of our actions at all times. We are designed to be in some kind of flow of action where we let well-drilled habit do its thing. And of course our minds will wander when we are being expected to consciously attend to the execution of stuff we can handle just as well out of habit. The idea that we can switch our concentration off and on "at will" just cuts against the grain of how the brain naturally wants to be. Attention is there for when things get surprising, dangerous, difficult, not for taking charge of the execution of the routine.
So "freewill" sits at the centre of so much cultural hogwash. There is good cultural reasons for it as a meme. It is really to modern society's advantage to have us think about our "selves" in this disembodied fashion. It allows society to claim control over our most inadvertent or reflexive actions.
But it is also a demonstrably unhealthy way to frame human psychology. If we just recognise that we have slower voluntary level planning and faster drilled habitual responses, then this unconscious vs conscious dilemma would not create so much existential angst.
We are not a conscious ego in possible conflict with an unconscious id (and also under the yoke of a social super-ego). Our "self" is the skilled totality of everything the brain does to created a well-adapted flow of responses to the continually varying demands of living in the world - a world that is both a physical one and a social one for us as naturally social creatures.
The actual freewill dilemma arose because Newtonian determinism appeared to make it paradoxical. If we are just meat machines, then how could we be selves that make our own rational or emotional choices?
But physics has gone past such determinism. And the very fact that the brain has to forward model to keep up with the world means that it is not being neurally determined anyway. Its knowledge of how the world was an instant or two ago is certainly a constraint on the expectations it forms. But the very fact it has to start every moment with its best guess of the future, and act on that, already means we couldn't be completely deterministic devices even if we tried.
Universal computation is logically deterministic. A programme - some structure of set rules and definite data - has to mechanically proceed from an input state, its initial conditions, to an output state.
But the brain is not that kind of computer. So it is neither physically deterministic (as no physics is that in the LaPlacean sense), nor is it computationally deterministic.
Thus "freewill" just isn't a real ontological problem. There is no metaphysical conflict. (Unless you are a dualist who believes "mind" to be a separate substance or spirit-stuff. And of course there are many who take that essentially religious view still. But for psychological science, there just isn't an ontological-strength problem.)
I'm here to discuss philosophy, and you apparently have no interest in that.
Rich is here to represent the new age loopies - part of the site's diversity initiative. Just ask him about holographic quantum mind projection and see what he actually endorses. :)
Reply to JustSomeGuy You think this is some grade school class where you the teacher are going to keep asking me the same question until you get the answer you want?
Right, it says it ain't so, so Determinists, the determined ones that they are, just reinvent their God. If I remember correctly, your small contribution was the magical Thermodynamic Imperative. Did I remember correctly. I remember it because it was so totally .... magical and creative. A true artist.
the question is, why did 'evolution' result in the ability to, oh I don't know, understand the age and size of the Universe? Amazing the things you pick up, chasing wildebeest, considering. And then it comes to the point of trying to work out what kind of animal can do this, and wonders what is odd about the question.
the question is, why did 'evolution' result in the ability to, oh I don't know, understand the age and size of the Universe?
My own personal question, which others may or may not share with me, is where is the evolutionary advantage in eating Big Macs it watching (and enjoying!) The Real Housewives of New Jersey? I am sure the Thermodynamic Imperative saw something that I am missing.
Reply to bahman I don't have time just right now to read the whole thread, but I want to add this, in case it hasn't been raised.
The brain where consciousness and subconsciousness reside is a system. It does a lot of things, everything from triggering heart beats, breaths, putting you to sleep and waking you up, to imagining the plots of novels, and deciding what kind of canned tomatoes to buy. The various facilities of what we call "the mind" aren't discrete parts as much as they are the products of this "system".
We probably over-rate the conscious mind. I don't know what exactly consciousness is, but I am pretty sure it is supported by a much more extensive not-conscious part of the brain that not only does a lot of heavy lifting, but also, in a very real sense, runs the conscious mind. Since we can't access what is going on second by second in the subconscious, non-conscious 'mind', we think the conscious mind dominates. It is a subtle process to tease out what the non-conscious mind is doing.
You are your conscious and non-conscious mind. There isn't "something else" or "somebody else" between your ears: It's all you, all the time.
JustSomeGuyJanuary 09, 2018 at 22:43#1420510 likes
You think this is some grade school class where you the teacher are going to keep asking me the same question until you get the answer you want?
Well in that scenario you're a grade school child, so I suppose it isn't entirely inaccurate.
Jokes aside, though, I already explained myself. This is a forum for discussing for philosophy, and that's not what you're doing. I'm very open to discussing things that are illogical and without scientific or philosophical basis, but this is not the place to do so.
?batman The question I have is: "How much of our mental structure (conscious, unconscious) was evolved and is present in other animals?" I am quite sure that we were not the first draft of consciousness, or sub-consciousness. I suspect many animals evolved features that are present in our minds, only to a lesser degree, and in many cases, a lot lesser degree.
So a dog's mind obviously has less capacity to think than we do, but people have observed the outcome of "dog thought". Dog thought isn't very elegant, as far as I can tell. A lot of what they think about seems to be how to get us to do things they want us to do. Or, how to circumvent limitations (like fences) that we have placed on them.
We didn't evolve from dogs, but we have common ancestors and a lot of animals display varying levels of mental activity, sometimes fairly complex. Not just dogs; think of parrots and crows; primates, of course. And other animals.
Reply to JustSomeGuy What, you think that you know how to discuss philosophy? You have barely scratched the surface. Read about world philosophy so you can go beyond your narrow If .. Than logic, which explains nothing but is a cute academic game. I grew out of it as fast as I grew into it.
Illusion of free will is not like a meme. You experience it.
Rubbish. It's concept. Without the concept there would be no experience of it.
Even if you could prove that, it would not make any difference since evolution allows selectively neutral traits to come and go.
Thanks for the credit. But that's just mainstream science really
It's not mainstream anything. It is just your biased view. Determinists pull out stuff and just present it as "science". Now let's look at the origin of this cute little story:
"The term "thermodynamic imperative" was introduced in the lectures of American physicist Robert Lindsay in his physics classes at Brown University prior to 1959 and later popularized in his1963 book The Role of Science in Civilization. [2] Lindsay's version of the imperative states, based on the oft-reasoned generalized tendency that the universe (or systems) tend towards disorder, as embodied in second law, that one should fight the law as vigorously as possible “to increase the degree of order in their environment so as to combat the natural tendency for order in the universe to be transformed into disorder.” [1] In short, Lindsay's thermodynamic imperative is a type of ethics based on reducing entropy to the minimum or, in other words, increasing negentropy to the maximum, and for his theories on how humans should have guidelines on how to live and behave based on the laws of thermodynamics and what he called the entropy concept of human consumption. [3] His generalized living principle is what he called the thermodynamic imperative states that: [2] "
Besides the rather puzzling view that "we" should be constantly fighting the Law, (this is embarrassing even to repeat), one must fully understand that this beautiful story began as an exercise is some sort of philosophical theory of ethics. Then it slowly evolves into some sort of theory of evolution, as evolutionists desperately searched for their new version of Cause. Full credit should be given to Kant for putting the story in motion.
Reply to apokrisis No one is too blame. You are just playing out your role as an Apostle proclaiming Truths of Science. But how does it feel being a desciple of Kant? Rather amusing I would say.
And why would you imply that Kant might have to be either accepted or rejected in his entirety. Wouldn't that be a rather religious approach on your part?
Reply to apokrisis He would have to be accepted as part of the Thermodynamic Imperative. An apostle no less. But less we forget, that Disorder (the Devil) exists in all of us and we should never succumb but instead continue our ceaseless fight against it.
And so goes modem evolutionary science. Quite iterally Calvinism reincarnate. And Determinists eat it up.
Reply to apokrisis Read the article as it traces the origin story. Pretty fascinating with all of the religious overtones (not surprising).
Have you been able to figure out why Apostle Lindsay suggests that we all fight against the Imperative. Why would the Imperative be urging its offsprings to fight against itself? Reminds me of the age old Christian debate about God vs the Devil.
Is the Imperative Good or Evil?
While we are at it, is it Natural Selection or the Thermodynamic Imperative that is determining evolution? What we have here is clear evidence of how a philosophical musing is morphed into a science because Natural Selection was in big trouble explaining things. Science just invented something bigger and better.
In the case of the 3D image, the purpose is to help our imagination get a more accurate picture. In the case of conciousness it would be to help our cells reproduce, but I don't think it's valuable on a philosophy forum to get tied up in exactly what conciousness might have evolved to do.
One can never establish what a feature evolved to do. The Black Crane uses it's wings primarily as a cowl to lure fish into the shade, but it would be ludicrous to suggest it evolved them for this purpose.
The point, from a philosophical perspective, is the the arm movement experiments give us a question to answer about concious decision, we know the answer can't be that we (the concious self) decide to do something and then instruct the rest of our body to carry out that something. We speculate that conciousness might well be an illusion. A counter argument to that theory would be if illusion served no purpose in evolution.
We've demonstrated that it could serve a purpose, and so removed that particular counter argument. What that purpose actually is is a matter for evolutionary biologists, not philosophers. Philosophically, it is sufficient that such a purpose could exist.
Get back to basics. The sense of self is a perceptual contrast the brain has to construct so as to be able to perceive ... "the world". Even our immune and digestive systems have to encode some sense of what is self so as to know what is "other" - either other organisms that shouldn't be there, or the food the gut wants to break down. And so too, the brain has to form a sense of what is self to know that the world is other.
I don't think that the sense of self is create in order to allows us to perceive the world. That is off topic so lets please put it aside.
A second basic of the evolved brain is that it is needs to rely on forward modelling the world. You probably think the brain is some kind of computer, taking in sensory data, doing some processing, then throwing up a conscious display. Awareness is an output. But brains are slow devices. It takes a fifth of a second to emit a well learnt habitual response to the world, and half a second to reach an attentional level of understanding and decision making. We couldn't even safely climb the stairs if we had to wait that long to process the state of the world.
So instead, the brain relies on anticipation or prediction. It imagines how the world is likely to be in the next moment or so. So it is "conscious" of the world ahead of time. It has an "illusion" of the next split second just about to happen. That creates a feeling of zero lag - to the degree the predictions turn out right.
I agree with what you stated but these are off topic.
And this forward modelling is necessary just to allow for a continual perceptual construction of our "self". We have to be able to tell that it is our turning head that causes the world to spin, and not the other way round. So when we are just about to shift our eyes or move our hand, a copy of that motor instruction is broadcast in a way that it can be subtracted from the sensory inputs that then follow. The self is created in that moment because it is the part we are subtracting from the flow of impressions. The world is then whatever stayed stable despite our actions.
It is not hard to look at the cognitive architecture of brains and see the necessary evolutionary logic of its processing structure. And a running sense of self is just the flipside of constructing a running sense of the world.
Then on top of that, brains have to deal with an actual processing lag. And the best way to deal with that is to forward-model the shit out of the world.
Then on top of that, it is efficient to have a division of labour. The brain wants to do as much as it can out of learnt habit, and that then leaves slower responding attention to mop up whatever turns out to be novel, surprising or significant during some moment.
That leads to consciousness having a logical temporal structure. You have some kind of conscious or attention-level set of expectations and plans at least several seconds out from a moment. About half a second out, attention is done and learnt, well-briefed, habit has to take over. It does detailed subconscious predicting and reacting. If someone steps into the road while you are driving, you hit the brakes automatically in about a fifth of a second. After that, attention level processing comes back into it. You can consciously note that thank god you are so quick on the brakes, and what was that crazy guy thinking, and why now is he looking angry at me, etc.
This is all proven by psychological experiment. The whole issue of reaction times and processing times is what got experimental psychology started in the late 1800s.
Where does human freewill come into it? Well what I've outlined is the evolution of the cognitive neurobiology. The basic logic is the same for all animals with large brains. They all need to construct a running sense of self so as to have a running sense of what then constitutes "the world". They all have a division of labour where they can act out of fast learnt habit or slower voluntary attention.
But humans are different in that we have evolved language and are essentially social creatures mentally organised by cultural evolution. Yes, memes.
So now our perceptual sense of self takes on a social dimension. We learn to think of "ourselves" in terms of a wider social world that we are representing. We learn to "other" our biological selves - this running perceptual self with all its grubby biological intentionality - and see it from an imagined social point of view. We learn to be disembodied from our own bodies and take an introspective or third person stance on the fact we can make choices that our societies might have something strong to say about.
So freewill is a social meme. It is the cultural idea that being a human self involves being able to perceive a difference between the "unthinking" selfish or biologocally instinctual level of action and a "thinking", socially informed, level of self-less action.
An animal is a self in a simple direct fashion - a self only so far as needed to then perceive "a world". A human, through language, learns to perceive a world that has themselves in it as moral agent making individual choices. That then requires the individual to take "conscious responsibility" for their actions. Every action must be judged in terms of the contrast between "what I want to do" and "what I ought to do".
So the idea of freewill is an ideal we strive to live up to. And yet the temporal structure of actual brain processes gives us plenty of dilemmas. We do have to rely on "subconscious" habit just for the sake of speed and efficiency. The gold standard of self-control is attention-level processing. But that is slow and effortful. However - as human culture has evolved - it has set the bar ever higher on that score. As a society, we give people less and less latitude for sloppy self-control, while also making their daily lives fantastically more complex.
A hunter/gather level of decision making is pretty cruisey by comparison. You go with the flow of the group. Your personal identity is largely a tribal identity. You get away with what you can get away with.
But then came institutionalised religion, stratified society, the complex demands of being a "self-actualising" being. A literal cult of freewill developed. The paradoxical cultural demand - in the modern Western tradition - is that we be "self-made".
So sure, there must be some evolutionary logic to this. There must be a reason why the freewill meme is culturally productive. But the point also is that it is a psychologically unrealistic construct. It runs roughshod over the actual cognitive logic of the brain.
That is the key point. What is the use of free will?
We just shouldn't beat ourselves up for not being literally in charge of our actions at all times. We are designed to be in some kind of flow of action where we let well-drilled habit do its thing. And of course our minds will wander when we are being expected to consciously attend to the execution of stuff we can handle just as well out of habit. The idea that we can switch our concentration off and on "at will" just cuts against the grain of how the brain naturally wants to be. Attention is there for when things get surprising, dangerous, difficult, not for taking charge of the execution of the routine.
How could we deliberately switch on and off our attention if there is no free will?
So "freewill" sits at the centre of so much cultural hogwash. There is good cultural reasons for it as a meme. It is really to modern society's advantage to have us think about our "selves" in this disembodied fashion. It allows society to claim control over our most inadvertent or reflexive actions.
But it is also a demonstrably unhealthy way to frame human psychology. If we just recognise that we have slower voluntary level planning and faster drilled habitual responses, then this unconscious vs conscious dilemma would not create so much existential angst.
We are not a conscious ego in possible conflict with an unconscious id (and also under the yoke of a social super-ego). Our "self" is the skilled totality of everything the brain does to created a well-adapted flow of responses to the continually varying demands of living in the world - a world that is both a physical one and a social one for us as naturally social creatures.
The actual freewill dilemma arose because Newtonian determinism appeared to make it paradoxical. If we are just meat machines, then how could we be selves that make our own rational or emotional choices?
But physics has gone past such determinism. And the very fact that the brain has to forward model to keep up with the world means that it is not being neurally determined anyway. Its knowledge of how the world was an instant or two ago is certainly a constraint on the expectations it forms. But the very fact it has to start every moment with its best guess of the future, and act on that, already means we couldn't be completely deterministic devices even if we tried.
Universal computation is logically deterministic. A programme - some structure of set rules and definite data - has to mechanically proceed from an input state, its initial conditions, to an output state.
But the brain is not that kind of computer. So it is neither physically deterministic (as no physics is that in the LaPlacean sense), nor is it computationally deterministic.
Thus "freewill" just isn't a real ontological problem. There is no metaphysical conflict. (Unless you are a dualist who believes "mind" to be a separate substance or spirit-stuff. And of course there are many who take that essentially religious view still. But for psychological science, there just isn't an ontological-strength problem.)
So you believe that free will is a meme for cultural control.
the question is, why did 'evolution' result in the ability to, oh I don't know, understand the age and size of the Universe? Amazing the things you pick up, chasing wildebeest, considering. And then it comes to the point of trying to work out what kind of animal can do this, and wonders what is odd about the question.
That is also an interesting question. Perhaps we needed very high level of intelligence to live in poor condition that we used to live. Now we are rich and that intelligence is used for something else.
I don't have time just right now to read the whole thread, but I want to add this, in case it hasn't been raised.
The brain where consciousness and subconsciousness reside is a system. It does a lot of things, everything from triggering heart beats, breaths, putting you to sleep and waking you up, to imagining the plots of novels, and deciding what kind of canned tomatoes to buy. The various facilities of what we call "the mind" aren't discrete parts as much as they are the products of this "system".
We probably over-rate the conscious mind. I don't know what exactly consciousness is, but I am pretty sure it is supported by a much more extensive not-conscious part of the brain that not only does a lot of heavy lifting, but also, in a very real sense, runs the conscious mind. Since we can't access what is going on second by second in the subconscious, non-conscious 'mind', we think the conscious mind dominates. It is a subtle process to tease out what the non-conscious mind is doing.
You are your conscious and non-conscious mind. There isn't "something else" or "somebody else" between your ears: It's all you, all the time.
I agree with what you stated. That however is not a answer to question of this thread.
The question I have is: "How much of our mental structure (conscious, unconscious) was evolved and is present in other animals?" I am quite sure that we were not the first draft of consciousness, or sub-consciousness. I suspect many animals evolved features that are present in our minds, only to a lesser degree, and in many cases, a lot lesser degree.
So a dog's mind obviously has less capacity to think than we do, but people have observed the outcome of "dog thought". Dog thought isn't very elegant, as far as I can tell. A lot of what they think about seems to be how to get us to do things they want us to do. Or, how to circumvent limitations (like fences) that we have placed on them.
We didn't evolve from dogs, but we have common ancestors and a lot of animals display varying levels of mental activity, sometimes fairly complex. Not just dogs; think of parrots and crows; primates, of course. And other animals.
In the case of the 3D image, the purpose is to help our imagination get a more accurate picture. In the case of conciousness it would be to help our cells reproduce, but I don't think it's valuable on a philosophy forum to get tied up in exactly what conciousness might have evolved to do.
One can never establish what a feature evolved to do. The Black Crane uses it's wings primarily as a cowl to lure fish into the shade, but it would be ludicrous to suggest it evolved them for this purpose.
The point, from a philosophical perspective, is the the arm movement experiments give us a question to answer about concious decision, we know the answer can't be that we (the concious self) decide to do something and then instruct the rest of our body to carry out that something. We speculate that conciousness might well be an illusion. A counter argument to that theory would be if illusion served no purpose in evolution.
We've demonstrated that it could serve a purpose, and so removed that particular counter argument. What that purpose actually is is a matter for evolutionary biologists, not philosophers. Philosophically, it is sufficient that such a purpose could exist.
Purpose, useful, etc... Consciousness does something. It cause something.
Purpose, useful, etc... Consciousness does something. It cause something.
Does the 3D image cause something, just because it is useful? If I hallucinate a bridge where there is none and plunge down the chasm, does the hallucination become real just because it caused something?
Does the 3D image cause something, just because it is useful? If I hallucinate a bridge where there is none and plunge down the chasm, does the hallucination become real just because it caused something?
Could we learn about 3D image without sensing it? Everything becomes indifferent if there was no shape to experience.
CosmicWandererJanuary 11, 2018 at 04:09#1424600 likes
The point of consciousness is to keep us with the illusion of "self", so we can function 'normally' with everyday acts of survival. For example, self preservation would be a difficult thing without consciousness for animals like us. More primitive lifeforms like bacteria reacts according to what's written into the genetic code in terms of their self preservation. I am thinking, animals like humans and similar animals with sophisticated central nervous system would need a very strong illusion, hence the consciousness.
Freewill is a complex subject I would imagine. In biological sense, freewill looks like a sure illusion, then we get into the quantum stuff, the debate gets bizarre. One thing is certain for me though. We need the feeling of having freewill, regardless of whether it is a complete illusion or not.
Comments (82)
One of the leading theories is that consciousness is simply the brain's model of all the competing stimuli-respone actions going on that it uses to keep track of everything.
The advantage of being able to 'watch over' these responses is (rather ironically) that illusory stimuli can be more easily identified as such because they do not concur with other stimuli. The only way the brain can do this (so goes the theory) is to 'expect' all received stimuli to concur. That feeling is what we describe as consciousness.
So you believe that the feeling of free will is an illusion but it exists just because there is a stimuli for it?
It does seem utterly wasteful and counter-evolutionary to claim that consciousness and free-will are illusions. For this to work in evolutionary terms, then consciousness and the awareness of free-will must have a physical effect, which means that the illusions must be causal.
So, we have certain illusions, that must be caused by something physical, that must cause something physical, that must render the illuded fitter for survival. Very odd indeed!
Perhaps illusion is the wrong descriptor?
I think we need consciousness for adopting our subconscious mind to a stimuli so subconscious mind can perform a specific task automatically and properly. Think of deriving.
Quoting David Solman
Yes. That seems odd.
Quoting David Solman
Yes. Sometimes we are even blindly follow our feeling regardless if they are right or wrong.
Yes, I agree. But you then have the tension between body and consciousness which this leads to improbable situation. This was subject of another thread. Please see the link in OP for further discussion.
Quoting tom
Yes.
Quoting tom
I cannot resolve the problem which stated in this thread and the other thread if I accept that the mind is byproduct of brain activity.
Why, when there is such a straight forward resolution?
Quoting bahman
The mind is a byproduct of brain activity in the same way playing Go is a byproduct of computer activity.
I don't understand what you are trying to say. Do you agree or disagree with my comment?
Quoting tom
I don't understand your comment. Do you mind to rephrase?
According to known physics, the brain is a universal computing device. All such devices are equivalent. So, the program running on your brain (or any other universal computer) is the entity that creates consciousness as a feature. Consciousness, and free-will are software features, not hardware features.
Playing chess, is no more a feature of the computer hardware than consciousness is a feature of the brain.
The experience of free will may be an instance of a neutral trait. Though I'm also speculating that it may have arisen through a complex mental evolution, which might have taken many generations of fragile mental instability where many members of the species went insane, mad or otherwise "broke" mentally. I think it might be reasonable to say that the proliferation of mental illnesses today is only a fraction of what it would have been thousands of years ago, when the mind was still developing. Back then the mind may literally have been a chaotic maelstrom. Or the appearance of a "free will" experience may have come accidentally and only after the appearance of failed "free will" experiences.
It can be difficult to wrap one's head around the amount of time that took place in the evolution of biological life on Earth. It's a ton of time, with plenty of opportunities for accidental developments, most of which would have resulted in failure.
No, that's not quite what I'm saying. The theory is that conciousness is the effect of the brain monitoring the stimuli it has received from all the different sources and expecting them to be coherent. That expectation is the sensation that we are one entity, aware of all our actions and responses. The evidence pretty clearly shows that we are not. Scientists can tell you 'you' are going to move your arm before you actually decide to move your arm, it's pretty irrefutable, it doesn't matter how hard it is for anyone to understand or get how such a thing might have evolved. 'You' are not in charge.
Humans are animals too. If so then how can it be that we should be so different, invested as it were, with free will? We do engage in mating and feeding and in that we're the same as animals - driven by visual cues, taste, smell, etc.
Point to note is mating and feeding are pro-life i.e. preserves, nurtures, and propagates life. We engage in mating and feeding to prolong life or to bring new life into the world. So far so good.
However, humans have a distinct ability, not found in animals - we can do things that are detrimental to life. We can harm ourselves or choose a course in our lives that is painful and dangerous. This type of behavior is absent in animals. Does this mean we truly have free will? After all we can do something that is not driven by our base instincts. Surely this must mean something!
Well, the another software is laws of nature. If we accept that then we see that there is either tension between laws of nature and conscious decision or not depending on whether consciousness is active or passive. We cannot act in the first case and we observe deviation from what we expect. Both of these cases we have never observed. So we are dealing with a problem.
It allows an infinite possible number of traits. Evolution is the result of a process in which useful traits are promoted by successful reproduction, but more exactly the elimination of traits that are actively injurious to successful reproduction.
Evolution is not a process which creates or selects traits at all. Evolution is the end result of living things having viable progeny. Between the two extremes of positively useful and negative traits there exists a whole host of traits that, not impeding the result of viable progeny confer not particular advantage or disadvantage of viable progeny.
Natural selection, does not select FOR traits in any sense. It is the result of the selection of living things that have useful traits and neutral traits.
In the matter of conscious sexual selection by humans of their mates it can be argued that those that believe in free-will are likely to select a mate who also has such a belief. In this way free will is adaptive in that it is attractive.
This argument can also be offered for a range of myths, beliefs and other cultural artefacts. That they persist in culture passed to children through knowledge.
I think that the probability for a neutral trait drops by time and become insignificant in a course million years for such complex phenomena, illusion of free will.
I find it very strange to say that you aren't making decisions, when YOUR subconscious is making decisions.
I think we do make conscious decisions as well as sub- or, unconscious, ones. I think one of the reasons consciousness evolved in humans was because it provides fault tolerance for those sub- and/or unconscious decisions (instincts). There are often times where those instinctive decisions would produce dire consequences in complex social environments. Conscious decisions provides that extra layer of fault tolerance and reasoning, allowing one to override some of those instinctive responses, and to be able to fine-tune one's responses to it's environment.
This also provides the feeling of turning one's awareness back on yourself - of observing one's own behavioral responses for the purpose of fine-tuning the decision-making process.
So you entirely believe that conscious activities have no role in our lives?
Well, I have to say that I am amused and confused.
No, I believe that conscious activities do not exist. Deciding on a course of action is not something that a single unified process does and it's certainly not the process that we're aware of.
Deciding on a course of action is done by several competing parts of the brain, some of which we are aware of, others we're not. After the resultant message is sent to the muscles, the bit of the brain responsible for the sensation we call consciousness tells us a story about how 'we' decided to do it, as if 'we' was some unified thing.
Read Bruce Hood's The Self Illusion, it's a real eye-opener.
So what is the point of consciousness?
As I said above, the point is to highlight potential discrepancies in stimuli. If we're expecting all our stimuli to be coherent then we are more able to spot when one might be in error. It allows us to shortcut thought processes that might otherwise consume too much energy "what shall 'I' do next?" is quicker than "let's just consult all the various influences that might have a view on what this body should do next". Being able to predict other people's behaviour is also useful and much quicker if we think of people as individuals. There's loads of potential advantages, but they're all just using the conscious self as a shorthand sketch of what's really going on, it's not accurate.
Exactly what (it is not a whom) is interested in the concept of discrepancies?
Nothing is 'interested', any more than the rock is 'intetested' in getting wet when it rains, it just does.
So what exactly is a discrepancy? How does a discrepancy exist without an interest in it?
But all you mentioned is not possible to be done with single conscious process. For example, what is error and how we could distinguish it consciously if there is nothing to compare?
I really don't understand what you're unhappy about with the explanation I've given. If my fingers tell me there's a rock there but my memory tells me there isn't, that is a discrepancy. In order to produce the response to the rock that my cells have evolved to produce it is advantageous to act as if the rock were either there or not, not as if the rock were both there and not there. In reality, we just have two signals and no reason why they shouldn't be different, the illusion of self speeds up decision making by presuming they shouldn't be.
What is creating the illusions?
What is trying to speed things up?
What is presuming?
What is trying to optimize?
What word are You trying to avoid using?
Cells
First of all you are doing a fantastic job of avoiding that taboo word, but unfortunately you are not out of the woods yet.
Cells have all like these wonderful interests and capabilities such as creating illusions and looking to optimize by searching for discrepancies? How? Rocks can't. Or can they?
Cells can, rocks can't, I really don't understand what the problem is. Aeroplanes can fly, cars can't; batteries can turn chemicals into electricity, postage stamps can't. What is special about creating illusions or seeking to optimize reproduction that makes you so convinced a collection of cells can't do it?
Illusion cannot have any functioning.
Sorry, I have no idea what that even means.
Could consciousness be causally efficacious? It is mere illusion.
Why would you say that?
Free will is not a concept carried by the genes. It's a conclusion drawn from experience and expressed and reproduced by logical logic. Such concepts are more like memes that genes, and like god or fairies do not have to confer any specific advantage, but can evolve through culture without any reference to somatic evolution or reproduction. Such "memes" can persist and move into other cultures like viruses move across species.
Because I think there are many mutations are needed in order that we have illusion of free will.
Quoting charleton
The illusion of free will is carried by genes because we experience it.
Quoting charleton
Illusion of free will is not like a meme. You experience it.
No. That's pretty much what this whole thread's been about isn't it? Consciousness clearly doesn't 'cause' the arm to move. If it did, the subject would be aware of the intention before the computer wired to the subject's brain, but the evidence shows that they are not.
That doesn't mean it's not useful. The artist's 3D rendition is useful (it helps us imagine the object in real life) but it's an illusion, it's not actually 3D.
What do you mean with useful?
Cells can and rocks can't? Why? What is the meaning of "can".
Who is taking action and who is becoming aware of action?
The Mind? Your mind. My mind. Everyone's mind. That which peers out though the eyes and made up the story that it can't make a choice. It's not all that wierd actually. The Mind loves making up stories. It's a pastime.
So the mind and the brain are two different entities?
They are the same stuff just different forms analogous to vapor, water, ice.
That doesn't answer my question. Are they the same entity?
Such silliness.
No, you didn't.
Quoting Rich
Entity: a thing with distinct and independent existence
This is a very simple question, and your dancing around it makes you seem dishonest.
You said "action comes before awareness". If this is the case, logically there must be one entity acting, and another entity becoming aware of the action. Two entities. All I'm asking you to do is confirm that this is what you are claiming, and make explicit what these two entities are.
No such thing. Everything is well entangled.
The statement you just made implies that there are multiple "things", aka entities. You're being logically inconsistent.
Can you stop trying to distract from the original question, though?
What is taking action, and what is becoming aware of the action? Since you don't like the term entity, yet you yourself used the term "thing", I'll use your term. Logically, there must be two different things in this scenario. What are these two things?
It's like waves in an ocean. Entangled forms.
To understand life one must jettison logic and imagine patterns. Art brings one much closer to understand nature am be life. Logic is only symbolic and this intrinsically incapable of grasping the whole.
Then go post on an art forum. This is a philosophy forum. Logic is the foundation of philosophy. You yourself just admitted that you aren't using logic, which means you aren't doing philosophy, which means you shouldn't be posting any of this here.
Please answer the perfectly valid question I have asked you multiple times. If you don't answer this time,I will take that as an indication that you don't know what you're taking about and stop asking.
Now back to my question? How does a cell do all of the things you claim it can do? What's the theory that explains these exceptional capabilities such as optimization? I suppose you have some powerful logic ready. You can start with your proposition.
You have, inadvertently.
Quoting Rich
I haven't made any claims about the capability of cells, so I have no idea why you're asking me that. Regardless, I'm done engaging with you. I've given you many opportunities to have a rational conversation, and you have denied every one of them. I'm here to discuss philosophy, and you apparently have no interest in that.
Get back to basics. The sense of self is a perceptual contrast the brain has to construct so as to be able to perceive ... "the world". Even our immune and digestive systems have to encode some sense of what is self so as to know what is "other" - either other organisms that shouldn't be there, or the food the gut wants to break down. And so too, the brain has to form a sense of what is self to know that the world is other.
A second basic of the evolved brain is that it is needs to rely on forward modelling the world. You probably think the brain is some kind of computer, taking in sensory data, doing some processing, then throwing up a conscious display. Awareness is an output. But brains are slow devices. It takes a fifth of a second to emit a well learnt habitual response to the world, and half a second to reach an attentional level of understanding and decision making. We couldn't even safely climb the stairs if we had to wait that long to process the state of the world.
So instead, the brain relies on anticipation or prediction. It imagines how the world is likely to be in the next moment or so. So it is "conscious" of the world ahead of time. It has an "illusion" of the next split second just about to happen. That creates a feeling of zero lag - to the degree the predictions turn out right.
And this forward modelling is necessary just to allow for a continual perceptual construction of our "self". We have to be able to tell that it is our turning head that causes the world to spin, and not the other way round. So when we are just about to shift our eyes or move our hand, a copy of that motor instruction is broadcast in a way that it can be subtracted from the sensory inputs that then follow. The self is created in that moment because it is the part we are subtracting from the flow of impressions. The world is then whatever stayed stable despite our actions.
It is not hard to look at the cognitive architecture of brains and see the necessary evolutionary logic of its processing structure. And a running sense of self is just the flipside of constructing a running sense of the world.
Then on top of that, brains have to deal with an actual processing lag. And the best way to deal with that is to forward-model the shit out of the world.
Then on top of that, it is efficient to have a division of labour. The brain wants to do as much as it can out of learnt habit, and that then leaves slower responding attention to mop up whatever turns out to be novel, surprising or significant during some moment.
That leads to consciousness having a logical temporal structure. You have some kind of conscious or attention-level set of expectations and plans at least several seconds out from a moment. About half a second out, attention is done and learnt, well-briefed, habit has to take over. It does detailed subconscious predicting and reacting. If someone steps into the road while you are driving, you hit the brakes automatically in about a fifth of a second. After that, attention level processing comes back into it. You can consciously note that thank god you are so quick on the brakes, and what was that crazy guy thinking, and why now is he looking angry at me, etc.
So [conscious prediction [subconscious prediction [the moment] subconscious reaction] conscious reaction].
This is all proven by psychological experiment. The whole issue of reaction times and processing times is what got experimental psychology started in the late 1800s.
Where does human freewill come into it? Well what I've outlined is the evolution of the cognitive neurobiology. The basic logic is the same for all anmals with large brains. They all need to construct a running sense of self so as to have a running sense of what then constitutes "the world". They all have a division of labour where they can act out of fast learnt habit or slower voluntary attention.
But humans are different in that we have evolved language and are essentially social creatures mentally organised by cultural evolution. Yes, memes.
So now our perceptual sense of self takes on a social dimension. We learn to think of "ourselves" in terms of a wider social world that we are representing. We learn to "other" our biological selves - this running perceptual self with all its grubby biological intentionality - and see it from an imagined social point of view. We learn to be disembodied from our own bodies and take an introspective or third person stance on the fact we can make choices that our societies might have something strong to say about.
So freewill is a social meme. It is the cultural idea that being a human self involves being able to perceive a difference between the "unthinking" selfish or biologocally instinctual level of action and a "thinking", socially informed, level of self-less action.
An animal is a self in a simple direct fashion - a self only so far as needed to then perceive "a world". A human, through language, learns to perceive a world that has themselves in it as moral agent making individual choices. That then requires the individual to take "conscious responsibility" for their actions. Every action must be judged in terms of the contrast between "what I want to do" and "what I ought to do".
So the idea of freewill is an ideal we strive to live up to. And yet the temporal structure of actual brain processes gives us plenty of dilemmas. We do have to rely on "subconscious" habit just for the sake of speed and efficiency. The gold standard of self-control is attention-level processing. But that is slow and effortful. However - as human culture has evolved - it has set the bar ever higher on that score. As a society, we give people less and less latitude for sloppy self-control, while also making their daily lives fantastically more complex.
A hunter/gather level of decision making is pretty cruisey by comparison. You go with the flow of the group. Your personal identity is largely a tribal identity. You get away with what you can get away with.
But then came institutionalised religion, stratified society, the complex demands of being a "self-actualising" being. A literal cult of freewill developed. The paradoxical cultural demand - in the modern Western tradition - is that we be "self-made".
So sure, there must be some evolutionary logic to this. There must be a reason why the freewill meme is culturally productive. But the point also is that it is a psychologically unrealistic construct. It runs roughshod over the actual cognitive logic of the brain.
We just shouldn't beat ourselves up for not being literally in charge of our actions at all times. We are designed to be in some kind of flow of action where we let well-drilled habit do its thing. And of course our minds will wander when we are being expected to consciously attend to the execution of stuff we can handle just as well out of habit. The idea that we can switch our concentration off and on "at will" just cuts against the grain of how the brain naturally wants to be. Attention is there for when things get surprising, dangerous, difficult, not for taking charge of the execution of the routine.
So "freewill" sits at the centre of so much cultural hogwash. There is good cultural reasons for it as a meme. It is really to modern society's advantage to have us think about our "selves" in this disembodied fashion. It allows society to claim control over our most inadvertent or reflexive actions.
But it is also a demonstrably unhealthy way to frame human psychology. If we just recognise that we have slower voluntary level planning and faster drilled habitual responses, then this unconscious vs conscious dilemma would not create so much existential angst.
We are not a conscious ego in possible conflict with an unconscious id (and also under the yoke of a social super-ego). Our "self" is the skilled totality of everything the brain does to created a well-adapted flow of responses to the continually varying demands of living in the world - a world that is both a physical one and a social one for us as naturally social creatures.
The actual freewill dilemma arose because Newtonian determinism appeared to make it paradoxical. If we are just meat machines, then how could we be selves that make our own rational or emotional choices?
But physics has gone past such determinism. And the very fact that the brain has to forward model to keep up with the world means that it is not being neurally determined anyway. Its knowledge of how the world was an instant or two ago is certainly a constraint on the expectations it forms. But the very fact it has to start every moment with its best guess of the future, and act on that, already means we couldn't be completely deterministic devices even if we tried.
Universal computation is logically deterministic. A programme - some structure of set rules and definite data - has to mechanically proceed from an input state, its initial conditions, to an output state.
But the brain is not that kind of computer. So it is neither physically deterministic (as no physics is that in the LaPlacean sense), nor is it computationally deterministic.
Thus "freewill" just isn't a real ontological problem. There is no metaphysical conflict. (Unless you are a dualist who believes "mind" to be a separate substance or spirit-stuff. And of course there are many who take that essentially religious view still. But for psychological science, there just isn't an ontological-strength problem.)
Rich is here to represent the new age loopies - part of the site's diversity initiative. Just ask him about holographic quantum mind projection and see what he actually endorses. :)
Right, it says it ain't so, so Determinists, the determined ones that they are, just reinvent their God. If I remember correctly, your small contribution was the magical Thermodynamic Imperative. Did I remember correctly. I remember it because it was so totally .... magical and creative. A true artist.
My own personal question, which others may or may not share with me, is where is the evolutionary advantage in eating Big Macs it watching (and enjoying!) The Real Housewives of New Jersey? I am sure the Thermodynamic Imperative saw something that I am missing.
The brain where consciousness and subconsciousness reside is a system. It does a lot of things, everything from triggering heart beats, breaths, putting you to sleep and waking you up, to imagining the plots of novels, and deciding what kind of canned tomatoes to buy. The various facilities of what we call "the mind" aren't discrete parts as much as they are the products of this "system".
We probably over-rate the conscious mind. I don't know what exactly consciousness is, but I am pretty sure it is supported by a much more extensive not-conscious part of the brain that not only does a lot of heavy lifting, but also, in a very real sense, runs the conscious mind. Since we can't access what is going on second by second in the subconscious, non-conscious 'mind', we think the conscious mind dominates. It is a subtle process to tease out what the non-conscious mind is doing.
You are your conscious and non-conscious mind. There isn't "something else" or "somebody else" between your ears: It's all you, all the time.
That made me chuckle.
Quoting Rich
Well in that scenario you're a grade school child, so I suppose it isn't entirely inaccurate.
Jokes aside, though, I already explained myself. This is a forum for discussing for philosophy, and that's not what you're doing. I'm very open to discussing things that are illogical and without scientific or philosophical basis, but this is not the place to do so.
So a dog's mind obviously has less capacity to think than we do, but people have observed the outcome of "dog thought". Dog thought isn't very elegant, as far as I can tell. A lot of what they think about seems to be how to get us to do things they want us to do. Or, how to circumvent limitations (like fences) that we have placed on them.
We didn't evolve from dogs, but we have common ancestors and a lot of animals display varying levels of mental activity, sometimes fairly complex. Not just dogs; think of parrots and crows; primates, of course. And other animals.
Rubbish. It's concept. Without the concept there would be no experience of it.
Even if you could prove that, it would not make any difference since evolution allows selectively neutral traits to come and go.
Thanks for the credit. But that's just mainstream science really. The stuff you "grew out of" once you took up astral transportation and whatnot.
Out of curiosity, why aren't you assailing folk with your quantum holographic mind projection theories so much these days? Too "sciency"?
It's not mainstream anything. It is just your biased view. Determinists pull out stuff and just present it as "science". Now let's look at the origin of this cute little story:
http://www.eoht.info/m/page/Thermodynamic+imperative
"The term "thermodynamic imperative" was introduced in the lectures of American physicist Robert Lindsay in his physics classes at Brown University prior to 1959 and later popularized in his1963 book The Role of Science in Civilization. [2] Lindsay's version of the imperative states, based on the oft-reasoned generalized tendency that the universe (or systems) tend towards disorder, as embodied in second law, that one should fight the law as vigorously as possible “to increase the degree of order in their environment so as to combat the natural tendency for order in the universe to be transformed into disorder.” [1] In short, Lindsay's thermodynamic imperative is a type of ethics based on reducing entropy to the minimum or, in other words, increasing negentropy to the maximum, and for his theories on how humans should have guidelines on how to live and behave based on the laws of thermodynamics and what he called the entropy concept of human consumption. [3] His generalized living principle is what he called the thermodynamic imperative states that: [2] "
Besides the rather puzzling view that "we" should be constantly fighting the Law, (this is embarrassing even to repeat), one must fully understand that this beautiful story began as an exercise is some sort of philosophical theory of ethics. Then it slowly evolves into some sort of theory of evolution, as evolutionists desperately searched for their new version of Cause. Full credit should be given to Kant for putting the story in motion.
Quoting Rich
So it is either just me or just Kant now?
Let me know when you decide who to blame. >:O
And why would you imply that Kant might have to be either accepted or rejected in his entirety. Wouldn't that be a rather religious approach on your part?
And so goes modem evolutionary science. Quite iterally Calvinism reincarnate. And Determinists eat it up.
Have you been able to figure out why Apostle Lindsay suggests that we all fight against the Imperative. Why would the Imperative be urging its offsprings to fight against itself? Reminds me of the age old Christian debate about God vs the Devil.
Is the Imperative Good or Evil?
While we are at it, is it Natural Selection or the Thermodynamic Imperative that is determining evolution? What we have here is clear evidence of how a philosophical musing is morphed into a science because Natural Selection was in big trouble explaining things. Science just invented something bigger and better.
Right. An anti-life, thus anti-evolutionary, ability suggests free will.
Serves some purpose.
In the case of the 3D image, the purpose is to help our imagination get a more accurate picture. In the case of conciousness it would be to help our cells reproduce, but I don't think it's valuable on a philosophy forum to get tied up in exactly what conciousness might have evolved to do.
One can never establish what a feature evolved to do. The Black Crane uses it's wings primarily as a cowl to lure fish into the shade, but it would be ludicrous to suggest it evolved them for this purpose.
The point, from a philosophical perspective, is the the arm movement experiments give us a question to answer about concious decision, we know the answer can't be that we (the concious self) decide to do something and then instruct the rest of our body to carry out that something. We speculate that conciousness might well be an illusion. A counter argument to that theory would be if illusion served no purpose in evolution.
We've demonstrated that it could serve a purpose, and so removed that particular counter argument. What that purpose actually is is a matter for evolutionary biologists, not philosophers. Philosophically, it is sufficient that such a purpose could exist.
I don't think that the sense of self is create in order to allows us to perceive the world. That is off topic so lets please put it aside.
Quoting apokrisis
I agree with what you stated but these are off topic.
Quoting apokrisis
Thanks for illustration.
Quoting apokrisis
That is the key point. What is the use of free will?
Quoting apokrisis
How could we deliberately switch on and off our attention if there is no free will?
Quoting apokrisis
So you believe that free will is a meme for cultural control.
That is also an interesting question. Perhaps we needed very high level of intelligence to live in poor condition that we used to live. Now we are rich and that intelligence is used for something else.
I agree with what you stated. That however is not a answer to question of this thread.
I agree.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I agree.
Purpose, useful, etc... Consciousness does something. It cause something.
Does the 3D image cause something, just because it is useful? If I hallucinate a bridge where there is none and plunge down the chasm, does the hallucination become real just because it caused something?
Could we learn about 3D image without sensing it? Everything becomes indifferent if there was no shape to experience.
The point of consciousness is to keep us with the illusion of "self", so we can function 'normally' with everyday acts of survival. For example, self preservation would be a difficult thing without consciousness for animals like us. More primitive lifeforms like bacteria reacts according to what's written into the genetic code in terms of their self preservation. I am thinking, animals like humans and similar animals with sophisticated central nervous system would need a very strong illusion, hence the consciousness.
Freewill is a complex subject I would imagine. In biological sense, freewill looks like a sure illusion, then we get into the quantum stuff, the debate gets bizarre. One thing is certain for me though. We need the feeling of having freewill, regardless of whether it is a complete illusion or not.