ughaibu wrote:

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 agree with you that assumptions such as the distinction between subjective thoughts and an objective external world, which underlie the methodology of science as well as the rest of our social lives, are in practice dependent on a prior assumption that people have free will. Unlike you, I also think that those social assumptions and practices are likely to be thoroughly disrupted if science succeeds in predicting people better than we already predict each other. We have evolved to be social in ways that depend on an intermediate level of predicting each other.

Determinism conflicts with some of the assumptions behind the current methodology of science, but that could mean that those assumptions are wrong. I think they probably are wrong, and the distinction between thoughts and an external world is not ultimately correct. So some of the foundations of the working practices of science are shaky, and are likely to be revised in future. I think science can live with that; science, like the rest of our social organisation, is a ship that is repaired at sea; the findings of science are not automatically invalidated by foundational uncertainties.

zoon wrote:I also think that those social assumptions and practices are likely to be thoroughly disrupted if science succeeds in predicting people better than we already predict each other.

This seems to be a misunderstanding of what science is, a human activity. It is also logically impossible for all human behaviour to be entailed by laws of any empirical science. It's also quite implausible that human behaviour is entailed by laws of any science.
Imagine that some species of scientific determinism is correct, in that case, all your future actions are entailed by these laws. Of course we don't know what the laws are and we haven't the computational power to calculate what they entail, however, you can assert an arbitrary set of options, map them to numbers, then roll dice and enact the option matching the result. This means that you can correctly calculate what is entailed by laws of science by choosing your options as you like and rolling dice. Personally, I think that is absurd, so I reject the claim that there can be any laws of science entailing all human behaviour. Notice also that enacting the options as indicated by the dice is equivalent to recording the results of rolling the dice, so, as the practice of empirical science requires that we can reliably and correctly record our observations, we cannot have any empirical science unless the consequences of the claim that some science entails all our actions is absurd.

zoon wrote:Determinism conflicts with some of the assumptions behind the current methodology of science

Determinism conflicts with continuous ontologies, that means pretty much all science since Pythagoras, and it conflicts with the requirements for replicable and controlled experiments.

zoon wrote:I think they probably are wrong

Well, it's difficult to see how there could be meaningful science with neither replicable nor controlled experiments, and I know of no serious reason to think that determinism might be correct. So, what is your reasoning?

Just for the hell of it, and to show I'm being fair and considerate and all that, I'm going to help ughaibu's side of the argument by posting a link to this interesting article:

Testing the methods of neuroscience on computer chips suggests they are wanting
http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... ng-methods

LucidFlight wrote:Just for the hell of it, and to show I'm being fair and considerate and all that, I'm going to help ughaibu's side of the argument by posting a link to this interesting article:

Testing the methods of neuroscience on computer chips suggests they are wanting
http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... ng-methods

Computer chips want stuff. Who knew?

LucidFlight wrote:I'm going to help ughaibu's side of the argument by posting a link to this interesting article:
Testing the methods of neuroscience on computer chips suggests they are wanting
http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... ng-methods

Thanks, but I don't see how the article favours either side.

ughaibu wrote:

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.

The comedy continues. Despite the meaning being perfectly clear you manage to confuse the way the physical world works with a human description of how it works. Why would you do that? To out-do jamest at obfuscation? Observed A is not A itself and it's not the law of gravity that causes apples to fall from trees, but so fucking what?
If something "follows the law of physics" it means it works like the rest of the physical world and could, in principle be described at some level with "laws of physics", that there is no special sauce something else making it happen like spirit mind or consciousnessnessness or free will pixies.

Cito di Pense wrote:

LucidFlight wrote:Just for the hell of it, and to show I'm being fair and considerate and all that, I'm going to help ughaibu's side of the argument by posting a link to this interesting article:

Testing the methods of neuroscience on computer chips suggests they are wanting
http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... ng-methods

Computer chips want stuff. Who knew?

When the chips are down, they need a jolt of positive energy. Lord knows they receive too much negative input negativity during their lives.

ughaibu wrote:... you can assert an arbitrary set of options, map them to numbers, then roll dice and enact the option matching the result. This means that you can correctly calculate what is entailed by laws of science by choosing your options as you like and rolling dice. Personally, I think that is absurd, so I reject the claim that there can be any laws of science entailing all human behaviour. Notice also that enacting the options as indicated by the dice is equivalent to recording the results of rolling the dice, so, as the practice of empirical science requires that we can reliably and correctly record our observations, we cannot have any empirical science unless the consequences of the claim that some science entails all our actions is absurd.

That is absurd. Just nonsense. Science requires that results recorded are determined by the physical experiment. It's an example of some degree of human behaviour being determined by physical reality.

It's a post which meets the requirements of 'so wayward it's not even wrong'.

ughaibu wrote:

LucidFlight wrote:I'm going to help ughaibu's side of the argument by posting a link to this interesting article:
Testing the methods of neuroscience on computer chips suggests they are wanting
http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... ng-methods

Thanks, but I don't see how the article favours either side.

Roughly, I was thinking along the lines of, if empirical science cannot properly map the behaviour of a computer chip (something perceived as being deterministic in its behaviour), how can any science meaningfully address or describe the rather more unpredictable behaviour of a human being? And, my guess is that the unpredictable behaviour of humans it in part to do with their exercising of free will. If I've got that wrong, I'm open to suggestions on the more correct presentation of said ideas.

I think another way to connect the article to this discussion might be to illustrate how empirical science might not necessarily be able to describe the working of an potentially indeterministic system that is influenced by free will. Am I wrong or am I wrong?

LucidFlight wrote:....my guess is that the unpredictable behaviour of humans it in part to do with their exercising of free will.

We can't predict the weather. Does the weather exercise free will?

LucidFlight wrote:Just for the hell of it, and to show I'm being fair and considerate and all that, I'm going to help ughaibu's side of the argument by posting a link to this interesting article:

Testing the methods of neuroscience on computer chips suggests they are wanting
http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... ng-methods

Interesting, to a point.

The basic premis looks dubious

Eric Jonas of the University of California, Berkeley, and Konrad Kording of Northwestern University, in Chicago, who both have backgrounds in neuroscience and electronic engineering, reasoned that a computer was therefore a good way to test the analytical toolkit used by modern neuroscience.

It might be if there was comparable architectiure and functional parallels, but there isn't. A more appropriate test might be at the functional level of an ANN e,g Deep Mind playing Mario perhaps.

The approach is rather like the idea of grandfather neurons, it may not be sensible to ty to tie things to smallest bits of hardware.

The critique at the end seems fair:

Gaël Varoquaux, a machine-learning specialist at the Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, in France, says that the 6502 in particular is about as different from a brain as it could be. Such primitive chips process information sequentially. Brains (and modern microprocessors) juggle many computations at once. And he points out that, for all its limitations, neuroscience has made real progress. The ins-and-outs of parts of the visual system, for instance, such as how it categorises features like lines and shapes, are reasonably well understood.

If the game of Mario was distributed over many modules with specialised functions then those techniques would indeed reveal some valid understanding.

I agree with Ughaibu that it's not relevant.

archibald wrote:

LucidFlight wrote:And, my guess is that the unpredictable behaviour of humans it in part to do with their exercising of free will.

We can't predict the weather. Has the weather got free will?

No, because it's not conscious. To be unpredictable under the terms of free will, one needs to consciously decide to not follow predictable behaviour. Right?

LucidFlight wrote:

ughaibu wrote:

LucidFlight wrote:I'm going to help ughaibu's side of the argument by posting a link to this interesting article:
Testing the methods of neuroscience on computer chips suggests they are wanting
http://www.economist.com/news/science-a ... ng-methods

Thanks, but I don't see how the article favours either side.

Roughly, I was thinking along the lines of, if empirical science cannot properly map the behaviour of a computer chip (something perceived as being deterministic in its behaviour), how can any science meaningfully address or describe the rather more unpredictable behaviour of a human being? And, my guess is that the unpredictable behaviour of humans it in part to do with their exercising of free will. If I've got that wrong, I'm open to suggestions on the more correct presentation of said ideas.

I think another way to connect the article to this discussion might be to illustrate how empirical science might not necessarily be able to describe the working of an potentially indeterministic system that is influenced by free will. Am I wrong or am I wrong?

:dopey:

Okay, thanks for the explication.

GrahamH wrote:I agree with Ughaibu that it's not relevant.

Fair enough. I thought I'd give it a whirl anyway.

LucidFlight wrote:To be unpredictable under the terms of free will, one needs to consciously decide to not follow predictable behaviour. Right?

Assuming the conclusion.

Or to put it another way, no.

archibald wrote:

LucidFlight wrote:....my guess is that the unpredictable behaviour of humans it in part to do with their exercising of free will.

We can't predict the weather. Does the weather exercise free will?

We predict the weather all the time. The accuracy gets worse the longer the forecast period. We are free to not forecast the weather a year in advance.

ughaibu wrote:

zoon wrote:I also think that those social assumptions and practices are likely to be thoroughly disrupted if science succeeds in predicting people better than we already predict each other.

This seems to be a misunderstanding of what science is, a human activity. It is also logically impossible for all human behaviour to be entailed by laws of any empirical science. It's also quite implausible that human behaviour is entailed by laws of any science.
Imagine that some species of scientific determinism is correct, in that case, all your future actions are entailed by these laws. Of course we don't know what the laws are and we haven't the computational power to calculate what they entail, however, you can assert an arbitrary set of options, map them to numbers, then roll dice and enact the option matching the result. This means that you can correctly calculate what is entailed by laws of science by choosing your options as you like and rolling dice.

I haven't followed your argument here. You appear to me to be saying that if determinism is correct, and if we don't know what the laws of science are, then we would be able to predict what will happen by inventing some arbitrary set of laws. Have I understood you correctly?

archibald wrote:

LucidFlight wrote:To be unpredictable under the terms of free will, one needs to consciously decide to not follow predictable behaviour. Right?

Assuming the conclusion.

Or to put it another way, no.

How about... we consciously decide (thanks to free will) to be unpredictable, whereas the weather does not. Different systems of indeterminability!

newolder wrote:We predict the weather all the time. The accuracy gets worse the longer the forecast period. We are free to not forecast the weather a year in advance.

We also predict human behaviour all the time. The point is that a level of unpredictability has nothing necessarily to do with free will.