IATIA,
No. I do not have a preconception. I have direct personal experience of having free will, and so does everybody around me. They are not shy about telling me so.
From Article 1 - How Your Brain is Like an Ant Colony
"... a team of researchers in Spain suggests there aren’t even leader neurons regulating the pulses in your brain architecture. Instead, they assert, individual randomly firing neurons give off waves, which urge other neurons to fire as well, amplifying the signal through 'noise focusing', 'an implosive concentration of spontaneous activity.'”
bolding mine
So, some researchers assert that neurons fire randomly, but that assertion is not supported by the analogy that the article draws with the purposeful and goal-oriented behavior of ants, which do not in any way act randomly.
From Article 2 - Ants Swarm Like Brains Think
"The behavior of each individual in the group is set by the rate at which it meets other ants and a set of basic rules. Its behavior alters that of its neighbors, which in turn affects the original ant, in a classic example of feedback."
“As I watched films of these ant colonies, it looked like what was happening at the synapse of neurons. Both of these systems accumulate evidence about their inputs—returning ants or incoming voltage pulses—to make their decisions about whether to generate an output—an outgoing forager or a packet of neurotransmitter,”
So, the behavior of ants in their colonies may be analogous to neuron activity in the human brain, and the behavior of ants is both purposeful and goal-oriented, taking into account information gained from other ants and from the world around them.
The very articles you cite demonstrate the exact opposite of your claim that our will is random. Like humans, ants make decisions based on input from the world around them in informed and purposeful ways. Ant behavior is not random, and by analogy, neither is ours.
Regards,
Shadow_Man
IATIA Wrote:You are observing "free will" in action with the preconception that it does exist.
No. I do not have a preconception. I have direct personal experience of having free will, and so does everybody around me. They are not shy about telling me so.
IATIA Wrote:Show me then. How do you test for free will?My entire life is a constant test and verification of my own free will. Everybody around me reports the same results in the ongoing test that is their lives.
IATIA Wrote:The following two links shed light on how our "free will" may work. Random, not free.
From Article 1 - How Your Brain is Like an Ant Colony
"... a team of researchers in Spain suggests there aren’t even leader neurons regulating the pulses in your brain architecture. Instead, they assert, individual randomly firing neurons give off waves, which urge other neurons to fire as well, amplifying the signal through 'noise focusing', 'an implosive concentration of spontaneous activity.'”
bolding mine
So, some researchers assert that neurons fire randomly, but that assertion is not supported by the analogy that the article draws with the purposeful and goal-oriented behavior of ants, which do not in any way act randomly.
From Article 2 - Ants Swarm Like Brains Think
"The behavior of each individual in the group is set by the rate at which it meets other ants and a set of basic rules. Its behavior alters that of its neighbors, which in turn affects the original ant, in a classic example of feedback."
“As I watched films of these ant colonies, it looked like what was happening at the synapse of neurons. Both of these systems accumulate evidence about their inputs—returning ants or incoming voltage pulses—to make their decisions about whether to generate an output—an outgoing forager or a packet of neurotransmitter,”
So, the behavior of ants in their colonies may be analogous to neuron activity in the human brain, and the behavior of ants is both purposeful and goal-oriented, taking into account information gained from other ants and from the world around them.
The very articles you cite demonstrate the exact opposite of your claim that our will is random. Like humans, ants make decisions based on input from the world around them in informed and purposeful ways. Ant behavior is not random, and by analogy, neither is ours.
Regards,
Shadow_Man
