Posted: Jul 18, 2017 8:07 am
John Platko wrote:GrahamH wrote:John Platko wrote:
I said:And I wouldn't have to just imagine, I could actually detail the energy changes in the circuit if I had enough reason to.
Yes, you claimed that, but it's just your imagination, not something you can actually do or have done. You didn't offer any method for doing it. But still, your failure does not at all suggest it could not be done. Ditto for brains.
It is in your imagination that I can't do it. It is not difficult to accurately model the electric potential energy changes in a binary adder circuit. But that is very different than showing how the processing of that information is following an energy gradient in the general case as opposed to a specific simple case with a specific implementation.
The original claim was:romansh wrote:felltoearth wrote:The more I read this thread and the more I think about, free will without the capacity to retain or process knowledge would be a pretty poor survival strategy.
So then, does our capacity to retain and process knowledge mean that we possess free will or does our capacity to retain and process knowledge create an illusion of free will?
I think we process information and retain information all the time. The processing of information is the following of an energy gradient. ...
It's not up to me to substantiate that claim, that's for romansh to do. And I certainly have no need to refute wibble - which at the moment is where the claim stands.
A inary adder is merely the simplest instance on what is proposed as a scale of complexity. As I stated, we can handle the deomino logic for simple arithmetic, but somewhere not far down the road we lose the thread. You position amounts to denying that the brain operates in any way comparable to the physics cascade of the dominos or transistor gates and you therefore reject romansh's claim. As I see it his claim is not unreasonable, on the face of it. A more complex cascade for sure and too complex for you or I to wrap our heads around in those terms, but you got nowhere with relating an interaction with Siri about recipes, ingredients, food stocks and where to buy avocados. Just because you can't do that does not invalidate the hypothesis. Given that evident difficulty romansh's inability to demonstrate it also does not invalidate his hypothesis.
I have no problem with you not accepting a hypothesis that cannot be supported empirically, We know brains are physical systems and we have some clues to how they 'process information' Every indication is that they as subject to the laws of thermodynamics as everything else, i.e they follow local energy gradients.
It's a different perspective and perhaps it's not a useful one but there might be something interesting about it.