archibald wrote:He's citing uncaused events in my brain. That's for sure.

I'm not citing anything in your brain, archi, only original ideas in my brain.

DavidMcC wrote:

archibald wrote:He's citing uncaused events in my brain. That's for sure.

I'm not citing anything in your brain, archi, only original ideas in my brain.

Ok, so you're citing uncaused events in your brain. Go for it. How can any of them be uncaused? How could that be?

Haven't you ever heard of "false memory"? Sometimes random neural spiking can create an apparently uncaused event. Of course, you could say that the spiking was the cause, but there was no cause for the spiking in the first place - just a random event, not related to any cause.

archibald wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:

archibald wrote:He's citing uncaused events in my brain. That's for sure.

I'm not citing anything in your brain, archi, only original ideas in my brain.

Ok, so you're citing uncaused events in your brain. Go for it. How can any of them be uncaused? How could that be?

Random neural spiking (which may or may not lead to false memory).

EDIT: I suspect that these can be important \when you're asleep and dreaming, as there is much less normal brain activity then.

The causation thing is a bit of a sideshow. What matters for free will is whether there is a conscious agent in control. David already conceded that ieas come into consciousness from "the unconscious". Ughaibu offers no defence of a conscious agent in control. Deterministic physics casts huge doubt on the idea that consciousness literally has ultimate control, since it seems to be entirely dependent on the functioning of the brain and the underlying physical processes.

A few people have suggested that complex feedback loops (Hofstadter strange loop) lead to a sort of complexity / chaos that we might liken to free will. Considering consciousness as a predictive model / simulation or of the organism itself opens up system behaviour vastly more complex than what we usually think of as "automatic".

DavidMcC wrote:

archibald wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:

archibald wrote:He's citing uncaused events in my brain. That's for sure.

I'm not citing anything in your brain, archi, only original ideas in my brain.

Ok, so you're citing uncaused events in your brain. Go for it. How can any of them be uncaused? How could that be?

Random neural spiking (which may or may not lead to false memory).

EDIT: I suspect that these can be important \when you're asleep and dreaming, as there is much less normal brain activity then.

Don't you see the problem with that? Suppose a random cosmic ray triggers a spike in your brain that just happens to be in a state to precipitate a cascade of spikes and you get an idea of, say "blue fox" come to mind. Now suppose that you find some use for that phrase. Maybe a product brand, as thus a new product is launches into the world. Was Blue Fox a product of your free will or was it some sense imposed upon you?

Take any decision point and suppose that what tips you one way of the other is a random event. Is that your free will in control or not?

GrahamH wrote:
...
Take any decision point and suppose that what tips you one way of the other is a random event. Is that your free will in control or not?

I never said that free will was "in control" in that situation, but that such random spiking can give you otherwise uncaused ideas that feed the conscious mind (dreaming being a state of consciousness in which the mind is disonnected from the outside world, and hence has the opportiunity to get input from internal sources.

EDIT: Also, I'm not sure that all random spiking is caused by cosmic rays.

Question for Graham: If I had used the word, "unpredictable" instead of "random" right at the start, would that still have been an issue for you.

DavidMcC wrote:

GrahamH wrote:
...
Take any decision point and suppose that what tips you one way of the other is a random event. Is that your free will in control or not?

I never said that free will was "in control" in that situation

That is basically the free will debate. Are we free to choose for ourselves? Are we in control?

See that Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy link I posted earlier.

DavidMcC wrote:, but that such random spiking can give you otherwise uncaused ideas that feed the conscious mind (dreaming being a state of consciousness in which the mind is disonnected from the outside world, and hence has the opportiunity to get input from internal sources.

Yes, that fine, a bit of noise can shake things up a bit. No problem with that, but it doesn't look like conscious will in control.

GrahamH wrote:...
That is basically the free will debate. Are we free to choose for ourselves? Are we in control?
...

Just what does Stanford think we are supposed to be in control of if we have free will? To me it is only control of actions when we have the time and can be bothered.

DavidMcC wrote:, but that such random spiking can give you otherwise uncaused ideas that feed the conscious mind (dreaming being a state of consciousness in which the mind is disonnected from the outside world, and hence has the opportiunity to get input from internal sources.

Yes, that fine, a bit of noise can shake things up a bit. No problem with that, but it doesn't look like conscious will in control.

Maybe not in a dream, but as I said before, if we get an idea "out of the blue" while we are awake, then we can take control of actions that may arise from that.

It is extremely doubtful whether any apparently random event, even spontaneous neural spiking, is actually random, never mind uncaused. Nice try.

And of course, randomness would not give any control whatsoever in any case.

DavidMcC wrote:..... but as I said before, if we get an idea "out of the blue" while we are awake, then we can take control of actions that may arise from that.

Yes. You do keep saying it. Here, I'll say it too. We can take control. We can take control. We can take control. Gosh, it really was easy to explain after all. It just didn't occur to me that all that had to be done was to keep saying it enough times.

GrahamH wrote:Yes, that fine, a bit of noise can shake things up a bit. No problem with that, but it doesn't look like conscious will in control.

Exactly.

GrahamH wrote: Considering consciousness as a predictive model / simulation or of the organism itself opens up system behaviour vastly more complex than what we usually think of as "automatic".

Yes, but it's still automatic. Greek: automatos (acting of itself).

archibald wrote:

GrahamH wrote: Considering consciousness as a predictive model / simulation or of the organism itself opens up system behaviour vastly more complex than what we usually think of as "automatic".

Yes, but it's still automatic. Greek: automatos (acting of itself).

That works, meaning it doesn't manufacture a bunch of conclusions to form its assumptions.

The behavior of the organism is structurally determined; complex organisms have a variety of responses they can make, that is, that are physically realizable by the organism, but they are determined by the organism's structure, the processes realized by that structure. Humans have less behavior that is divorced from any learning. People used to call it 'instinctive' but that's a colloquial term now.

Your goal as a student of this kind of stuff is to find a middle ground between solipsism, where the world the organism inhabits is all mental, of its own making, and the dreary case of representationalism, where the organism constructs a representation of the external world that it has to do a good job of or die trying.

Doing that will help you answer the question about why the responses you make are commensurate with something you didn't make up from scratch. They're not perfectly determined by these externalities, because you have many kinds of responses in many cases. The response of trying to fly out of an upper-storey window during a psychotic episode is at the limit of the commensurability of responses, in that it requires recognizing that the window isn't a wall. But it's certainly not the only one that can happen. If you're still confused about organisms and their cognition, read your Maturana and Varela, whence I get much of the above perspective. If you like philosophy, and therefore think it's worth bothering with, M & V give an interesting, if not completely original, treatment.

GrahamH wrote:Ughaibu offers no defence of a conscious agent in control.

You can't be serious.

ughaibu wrote:

GrahamH wrote:I don't know what you think 'mental activity' is if not a series of experiences of thoughts fed from the 'unconscious source'.

All healthy human adults unavoidably assume the reality of free will. In other words, at the unconscious level, all healthy human adults are free will affirmers, not deniers. Let's suppose the denialist scenario that all decisions are algorithmically completed unconsciously and then viewed, without input, consciously, before being enacted. In such a case, for all decidable questions, the answer held unconsciously would be the answer held consciously. But in that case, as all healthy human beings unconsciously hold free will to be real, all healthy human beings would also consciously hold free will to be real.
By observation we know that there are free will deniers. So, there are healthy human adults who hold two incompatible positions, one unconsciously and the other consciously. Accordingly, it is not possible that all conscious thought is algorithmically decided unconsciously.

The above was addressed to you and answered by you. It is a reductio against the claim that there is no conscious control. So of course it's a defence, it's a proof for fucks sake.

GrahamH wrote:Deterministic physics casts huge doubt on the idea that consciousness literally has ultimate control, since it seems to be entirely dependent on the functioning of the brain and the underlying physical processes.

But physics doesn't talk about the brain, physics can't even get consciousness from the underlying processes, never mind decision making, and realism about all mainstream physics is incompatible with determinism by virtue of continuity in the ontologies. In any case, it has also been explained, at tedious length, how the conduct of any empirical science, and there's nothing special about physics, in this respect, requires the assumption that its researchers have free will.

All of this stuff has been explained to you, many times and in many ways, over the years and repeated in the past few days. Either you are incapable of understanding these things or you are engaging in second stage denial and denying facts that can be checked by anyone who can be bothered to peruse this thread. Regardless of which, you cannot be considered to be presently contributing to the discussion. Your behaviour is either dishonest or pathological.

Your 'proof' is garbled nonsense.

ughaibu wrote:

GrahamH wrote:Ughaibu offers no defence of a conscious agent in control.

You can't be serious.

ughaibu wrote:

GrahamH wrote:I don't know what you think 'mental activity' is if not a series of experiences of thoughts fed from the 'unconscious source'.

All healthy human adults unavoidably assume the reality of free will. In other words, at the unconscious level, all healthy human adults are free will affirmers, not deniers. Let's suppose the denialist scenario that all decisions are algorithmically completed unconsciously and then viewed, without input, consciously, before being enacted. In such a case, for all decidable questions, the answer held unconsciously would be the answer held consciously. But in that case, as all healthy human beings unconsciously hold free will to be real, all healthy human beings would also consciously hold free will to be real.
By observation we know that there are free will deniers. So, there are hea fromlthy human adults who hold two incompatible positions, one unconsciously and the other consciously. Accordingly, it is not possible that all conscious thought is algorithmically decided unconsciously.

The above was addressed to you and answered by you. It is a reductio against the claim that there is no conscious control. So of course it's a defence, it's a proof for fucks sake.

GrahamH wrote:Deterministic physics casts huge doubt on the idea that consciousness literally has ultimate control, since it seems to be entirely dependent on the functioning of the brain and the underlying physical processes.

But physics doesn't talk about the brain, physics can't even get consciousness from the underlying processes, never mind decision making, and realism about all mainstream physics is incompatible with determinism by virtue of continuity in the ontologies. In any case, it has also been explained, at tedious length, how the conduct of any empirical science, and there's nothing special about physics, in this respect, requires the assumption that its researchers have free will.

The kind of free will which is central to human social life, for example when scientists collaborate, could be a social construction, like citizenship. A person who is held by the rest of their society to have free will has considerable privileges by default, they are allowed to move around as they wish, what they say is likely to be acted on. These privileges may be lost, for example, if that person becomes seriously mentally ill, and is no longer held to be acting of their own free will. It seems to me that this kind of free will is real, it has real social consequences. It is also compatible with humans being merely ignorant, as we currently are, of the workings of our brains, which are likely to follow the laws of physics.

zoon wrote:the workings of our brains, which are likely to follow the laws of physics.

But this view is irrational. If our brains are following laws of physics, then laws of physics, which are things generated by brains, are just consequences entailed by laws of physics. But if that's the case, we have no reason to think that those laws are in any sense correct. Besides, if it were the case that our brains were following laws of physics, then in principle we could exactly predict our future behaviour entailed by those laws. But as pointed out earlier, this conflicts with the requirements of empirical science. So no empirical science, and again, there is nothing special about physics here, can ever both be consistent and have laws that correctly entail all human behaviour.

I think we need to alert Science HQ about this immediately. It's nothing less than a dire emergency.