RE: Do you believe in free will?
March 28, 2012 at 3:12 am
(This post was last modified: March 28, 2012 at 4:10 am by Angrboda.)
(March 27, 2012 at 7:20 am)tackattack Wrote: My statement does need a little rephrasing as it was inaccurate so allow me to re attempt.(emphasis added)
This perception of phenomena, effect of noumena, desire, introspection and reasoning, all filtered through identity, and acted upon are what encompass free- will to me.
[Not sure which usage you're referring to here; if you are simply using noumena in place of say, 'mental contents', why that usage — what is your specific meaning. I responded to the more contemporary meaning, and since it's already typed, I'll simply leave it in place.]
Noumena do not have effects. If it has effects, it is phenomena. An example straddling the line might be dark energy and dark matter. Currently, afaik, they have not been able to detect such matter or energy directly, presumably because its interactions with ordinary matter are extremely weak (like neutrinos which can travel through an entire planet without collision). However, dark matter and dark energy are hypothesized to exist because, despite our inability to detect it through interaction with normal matter, it has an effect on the overall system via gravity, such that if it didn't exist, something would have to take its place, because there are gravitational sums which don't agree with observation without it. Now noumena would be something that has no effect at all, and is thus not knowable even in principle. An example is the distinction between empirical results, experience, and reality. There could be thousands of universes, all essentially existing in the same 'universe-space', but, because the laws governing the behavior of stuff in one universe don't interact with our normal universe, they are essentially invisible. Such universes would be noumenal, as we couldn't know them by any means, as they don't have effects that can be detected in our 'universe-stuff'.
(March 27, 2012 at 4:36 am)genkaus Wrote:(March 27, 2012 at 2:51 am)apophenia Wrote: I ask that you keep the ad hominems to a minimum, s'il vous plait. Unless of course it was your intent to imply that I have no common sense, in which case I suggest that you go fuck a rake, or the nearest painfully pointed object in your vicinity.
Unless you hold that in goal-directed behavior all the constituent actions are not chosen with priori consideration with their applicability to the goal, instead automatically and rationalized afterwards - no, the implication is not applicable to you.
The question is what is meant here by "consideration". If this implies participation with conscious awareness of participation and direction, I would say that both the neuroscience (and philosophy) are not decided on this point. What has traditionally been termed the subconcious or unconscious shows abilities to "consider" and cognate that are as powerful as conscious processes. This is why I got in the big furball with Rhythm as the very concepts used — conscious, subconscious, decision, belief — many of which, when fully understood, will be unlikely to carve nature at her joints. I think you misunderstand NMF's point largely to mock him, and I got sprayed in the process. I don't know whose neuroscience you are relying on with regard to this point, but if it's as settled as you think it is, I'd like some citations of the literature so I can read about it firsthand. No offense, but I don't trust your summaries, which appear to be derived more from first principles than scientific evidence.
ETA: There's also the question of privileged observers. If your consciously introspected observations are just confabulations to achieve some end, say harmonizing memory narratives; if the "you" is unaware that the "you" that you are is just making up bollocks interpretations that some other part of you decided, which "you" has the power to detect that fact? Certainly not the "you" that is simply a puppet of the subconscious. I'm reminded of my mother who used to talk about how she had read that some depression (I have a history of depresion) was caused by "bad air". Of course, she was simply confabulating that she'd "read it somewhere" and that it made sense — there's no part of her that is "left over", a central scrutinizer who watches from the sidelines and says, aha, we're confabulating! (That leads to a vicious, infinite regress. As a psychiatric patient, throughout the last 20 years I have repeatedly had to retell my personal history. There were quite a few times when I'd be telling my story, and I'd suddenly realize, I was making shit up! Not that I created fictional events, but I would confabulate the connections between different events, weaving them into a narrative for which, the base events were constraining, but nothing else — there are a million and one ways to string together a (vague) set of items that make sense, and if the person who is supposed to be making sense of them isn't aware that it's simply fabricating the story, where does the disinterested yet truthful observer come from? [This is also a side issue with tack. Our memories are not perceptions from a different time. The memories have a different structure, the "stuff" of memories and the stuff of perception diverge considerably (ignoring gross properties, such as heirarchical nesting of the qualia properties of perception, and that memories may exhibit similar nesting, but the causes and mechanisms are completely different. Despite the popular analogy, memory is not like videotape. There is no "whole and complete record" to go back to in memory. Memory is construction — not even re-construction — it's putting pieces of knowledge derived from internal and internal percepts, and creating something entirely new.)]