Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:Do you actually know anyone who teaches their children that they are not responsible for their actions and merely warns them that some people out their will hold them responsible for their actions?

See, you actually contend there's a difference. I don't know if you really believe it, or are just trolling in earnest, now. At any rate, you imply you're convinced that people will hold you responsible for what you teach your children. Including your children. Do you care? I doubt it. More fun to troll, I guess.

John Platko wrote: I am) looking for ways to influence the unconscious processes that have been scientifically demonstrated to be making some of our decisions. Any ideas on how to go about that?

Oh, yeah, John. You're looking for control. My advice to God-botherers? Let go and let God.

John Platko wrote:
It seems to me, that the way I am, presents me with several choices, and then I choose what to do. And if I don't like those choices, or what I did, or even what I wanted to do, I have other choices that can change me. And I find this to be a useful model. Perhaps imperfect but useful.

Looking for control, are we? Who beat that into you? That's just a crude way of informing you that other people will hold you responsible for your actions.

John Platko wrote:
I think the focus should be on toning up - figuring out how to get more free will.

Ah, the Protestant work ethic. What the fuck kind of Catholic are you, anyway?

Interesting, very very interesting. You used the phrase "Looking for control" twice, yet I never mentioned the word "control" the most I said was "influence". I wonder what was afoot in your mysterious mechanisms that chose: Looking for control" very very interesting.

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:
What happens when a group of no free willers get together? Do groups of no free willers get together?

What happens when you stop obsessing about labels, John? Is there an awkward lull in the conversation at your end?

I didn't mean to strike a nerve. I just thought I was being descriptive. I need some way of distinguishing the vast majority of humanity that ever was and likely ever will be: i.e. "the free willers" from the smaller set of "no free willers". But if you have better terms of description then by all means propose them.

John Platko wrote:I need

Say no more, John. We're here to help.

John Platko wrote:But if you have better terms of description then by all means propose them.

No thanks. Derail somebody else with that crap. Better terms are not what you need; this isn't a working group trying to solve a well-characterized problem.

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:I need

Say no more, John. We're here to help.

Interesting, very very interesting. Do your mysterious mechanisms of non free will choice also have "issues" with the phrase: "I need"? Very very interesting.

John Platko wrote:But if you have better terms of description then by all means propose them.

No thanks. Derail somebody else with that crap. Better terms are not what you need; this isn't a working group trying to solve a well-characterized problem.

Are you sure about that?

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:But if you have better terms of description then by all means propose them.

No thanks. Derail somebody else with that crap. Better terms are not what you need; this isn't a working group trying to solve a well-characterized problem.

Are you sure about that?

It's definitely not a well characterised problem, it's barely coherent at all, and there is no solution in evidence (and no evidence either). Still, so long as you can laugh about it it can't be all bad, can it?

GrahamH wrote:

John Platko wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

John Platko wrote:But if you have better terms of description then by all means propose them.

No thanks. Derail somebody else with that crap. Better terms are not what you need; this isn't a working group trying to solve a well-characterized problem.

Are you sure about that?

It's definitely not a well characterised problem, it's barely coherent at all, and there is no solution in evidence (and no evidence either). Still, so long as you can laugh about it it can't be all bad, can it?

It can if I have no free choice about my laughter.

I feel certain that the 1960s TV show, The Prisoner sorted this all out once and for all.

Ah, the free will to choose to be amused. There's a thing that doesn't happen.

This guy has some interesting thoughts on free will:

"As the above-linked article points out, Japan is one of the countries where a small percentage of people believe in the Western notion of God. China is another. I'd argue that most Japanese and Chinese also have a different notion of free will than people in the United States do.

We are much more individualistic, by and large.

Yet does our indvidualism and belief in free will lead to lower crime rates and a greater concern for the welfare of others? No. This country lags behind many, if not most, industrialized nations in many indicators of social well-being."

http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_t ... -will.html

He's a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

"Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) is a philosophical organization based on the spiritual teachings of all religions, dedicated to a process of inner development under the guidance of a spiritual teacher......

Radha Soami is a Hindi expression meaning ‘Lord of the Soul’ in English. Satsang means 'association with Truth' and describes a group that seeks truth....

The philosophy teaches a personal path of spiritual development which includes a vegetarian diet, abstinence from intoxicants, a moral way of life and the practice of daily meditation......"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha_Soami_Satsang_Beas

How meditation helped Yuval Harari write "Sapiens," a terrific book
http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_t ... editation/

archibald wrote:He's a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

"Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) is a philosophical organization based on the spiritual teachings of all religions, dedicated to a process of inner development under the guidance of a spiritual teacher......

Radha Soami is a Hindi expression meaning ‘Lord of the Soul’ in English. Satsang means 'association with Truth' and describes a group that seeks truth....

The philosophy teaches a personal path of spiritual development which includes a vegetarian diet, abstinence from intoxicants, a moral way of life and the practice of daily meditation......"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha_Soami_Satsang_Beas

How meditation helped Yuval Harari write "Sapiens," a terrific book
http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_t ... editation/

Sounds like a good way to work on sub constructors to enhance "free will"jp to me.

archibald wrote:This guy has some interesting thoughts on free will:

"As the above-linked article points out, Japan is one of the countries where a small percentage of people believe in the Western notion of God. China is another. I'd argue that most Japanese and Chinese also have a different notion of free will than people in the United States do.

We are much more individualistic, by and large.

Yet does our indvidualism and belief in free will lead to lower crime rates and a greater concern for the welfare of others? No. This country lags behind many, if not most, industrialized nations in many indicators of social well-being."

http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_t ... -will.html

I like this a lot but I think I can improve on the last bit.

All of us are connected. No man or woman is an island. We're all parts of an interconnected whole -- the universe -- that collectively determines what happens in every part of itself. To me this is a beautiful way of looking at the world, one that offers way more meaning than an illusory embrace of free will and that should be factored into our notion of free will.

Good to see you coming around, JP. The only mystery now is why you want to call something so impersonal, unconscious and lacking forethought "free will".

John Platko wrote:

archibald wrote:He's a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

"Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) is a philosophical organization based on the spiritual teachings of all religions, dedicated to a process of inner development under the guidance of a spiritual teacher......

Radha Soami is a Hindi expression meaning ‘Lord of the Soul’ in English. Satsang means 'association with Truth' and describes a group that seeks truth....

The philosophy teaches a personal path of spiritual development which includes a vegetarian diet, abstinence from intoxicants, a moral way of life and the practice of daily meditation......"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha_Soami_Satsang_Beas

How meditation helped Yuval Harari write "Sapiens," a terrific book
http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_t ... editation/

Sounds like a good way to work on sub constructors to enhance "free will"jp to me.

I might not use the word constructor or the term free will, but yes.

Interestingly, a lot of meditation seems to involve temporarily letting go of certain basic ideas, such as self and will.

John Platko wrote:
I like this a lot but I think I can improve on the last bit.

All of us are connected. No man or woman is an island. We're all parts of an interconnected whole -- the universe -- that collectively determines what happens in every part of itself. To me this is a beautiful way of looking at the world, one that offers way more meaning than an illusory embrace of free will and that should be factored into our notion of free will.

That's your personal preference. I don't think the writer would fully agree with you that it's an improvement.

I agree with you partly. There is utility in spreading this on our daily bread:



Whether there is more, or less utility than taking the view of Brian Hines (the writer of that blog) is something we don't know yet. Personally, I'm pretty much with Brian in the meantime, in that I factor my (probable) lack of Free Will into the way I philosophically and scientifically understand myself to be, partly because it seems to add something to my knowledge about the world and my place in it. I find it quite an amazing and mind-blowing possibility actually, and a very humbling one, in a Buddhist sort of way.

That's when I think about it. I don't pretend to have it at the front of my mind day to day. Perhaps I should. I might be a 'better' person. All is vanity. Perhaps like Yuval Harari, Mr Ecclesiastes also dabbled in meditation before writing his terrific book.

GrahamH wrote:Good to see you coming around, JP. The only mystery now is why you want to call something so impersonal, unconscious and lacking forethought "free will".

I reckon that my unfree will can be (even if is not always) personal, conscious and involve forethought (and hindsight).

SpeedOfSound wrote:

archibald wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:How are you imagining free will?

The common or garden variety, the sort that even compatibilists agree we don't have.

I have always been confused about this FW thing. What is that garden variety again? How are you different to the plant willing his stem to bend to the light?

The common or sort of free will? For me it would be the sort where there is an intrinsic self going around making decisions and generally doing stuff that is somehow independent of the environment and the universe at large I suppose.

archibald wrote:

GrahamH wrote:Good to see you coming around, JP. The only mystery now is why you want to call something so impersonal, unconscious and lacking forethought "free will".

I reckon that my unfree will can be (even if is not always) personal, conscious and involve forethought (and hindsight).

But if you throw in enough unfree constructors then your unfree will becomes free.

romansh wrote:

archibald wrote:

GrahamH wrote:Good to see you coming around, JP. The only mystery now is why you want to call something so impersonal, unconscious and lacking forethought "free will".

I reckon that my unfree will can be (even if is not always) personal, conscious and involve forethought (and hindsight).

But if you throw in enough unfree constructors then your unfree will becomes free.

We could say that it becomes so obscured that you can get away with thinking it's free. Or we could suppose that the more constraints you can identify the better you are able to sind your way. I wouldn't call that free will, but I think JP would, as, perhaps, would David McC. It's a somewhat odd idea that free will is optimisation or error minimisation.

GrahamH wrote:
We could say that it becomes so obscured that you can get away with thinking it's free. Or we could suppose that the more constraints you can identify the better you are able to sind your way. I wouldn't call that free will, but I think JP would, as, perhaps, would David McC. It's a somewhat odd idea that free will is optimisation or error minimisation.

I don't think we have any disagreement that is substantive.

And I understand we can have any phenomena defined. Now personally I find it really annoying that common words like souls, angels and even knowledge get redefined and as a consequence any discussion is mired between common and specialist uses. The problem is JP does this ... I don't know whether he realizes how annoying it is (at least to me).

The question that JP and to be fair others avoid is can this error minimization or optimization happened otherwise? And again I am not asking whether we can envisage other error minima or optima ... because plainly we can at times.

This is a question many if not a large majority of compatibilists do not answer.

romansh wrote:

GrahamH wrote:
We could say that it becomes so obscured that you can get away with thinking it's free. Or we could suppose that the more constraints you can identify the better you are able to sind your way. I wouldn't call that free will, but I think JP would, as, perhaps, would David McC. It's a somewhat odd idea that free will is optimisation or error minimisation.

I don't think we have any disagreement that is substantive.

And I understand we can have any phenomena defined. Now personally I find it really annoying that common words like souls, angels and even knowledge get redefined and as a consequence any discussion is mired between common and specialist uses. The problem is JP does this ... I don't know whether he realizes how annoying it is (at least to me).

The question that JP and to be fair others avoid is can this error minimization or optimization happened otherwise? And again I am not asking whether we can envisage other error minima or optima ... because plainly we can at times.

This is a question many if not a large majority of compatibilists do not answer.

Happened otherwise? As in could I have acted otherwise? Any optimisation can be seen as finding a peak, or trough that is the best result in the given condition. It is defined by the conditions and what counts as "best". If time and resources allowed we can imagine a exhaustive search for the optimum being as inevitable as a ball rolling down hill. In practice exhaustive search is not possible. It takes too long to be useful, so we can get stuck in local minima. So we could say that which of several possible minima are found depends on the conditions and how they are searched, which is all initial conditions. Given identical conditions we should expect the same minima to be found every time. JP likes to imagine his program is generating creative output, but it's search for minima in the input data. Given the same input it will produce the same output every time, just like the PRNG. What it "creates" is determined by what's there in the input code and data.