Subjective experience v. Self-awareness

[Speakpigeon]

... I don't think there's anything fundamental about consciousness that we could get to know beyond what we already know.
EB

Dunno. There is the prospect of understanding the neural correlates better.

Sure, but we already know a lot about that and I don't see how that tells us anything fundamental about consciousness beyond the fact that there's a correlation.

In a sense, we've always known the main fact in that respect, which is that there's a correlation between consciousness and the human body.

To see how little we've progressed on that, we can't even say which other animal species experience any degree of the kind of consciousness we enjoy.
EB

 

[Subsymbolic]

... I don't think there's anything fundamental about consciousness that we could get to know beyond what we already know.
EB

Dunno. There is the prospect of understanding the neural correlates better.

Sure, but we already know a lot about that and I don't see how that tells us anything fundamental about consciousness beyond the fact that there's a correlation.

In a sense, we've always known the main fact in that respect, which is that there's a correlation between consciousness and the human body.

To see how little we've progressed on that, we can't even say which other animal species experience any degree of the kind of consciousness we enjoy.
EB

http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf

 

[Speakpigeon]

Yes, nothing that I don't believe myself.

I at least understand that believing is nothing like knowing.
EB

 

[Subsymbolic]

Yes, nothing that I don't believe myself.

I at least understand that believing is nothing like knowing.
EB

Well, you believe that anyway. Most accounts of declarative knowledge, because you sure as shit are not talking about procedural knowledge, are some sort of variation on Justified True Belief, making knowledge a special case of belief: a belief that is justified and true. Of course if you have a different account of knowledge that makes it not a special sort of belief then I'd say you have a job of explanation on your hands.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I'm a free worker.
EB

 

[Subsymbolic]

I'm a free worker.
EB

Sorry, I don't understand Irish spoonerisms, but I'm sure you are quite tall.

 

[fromderinside]

Sorry, I'm lost. I don't see from where this "central control" could possibly come.

EB

Well, if you can't think of a possible mechanism for central control we agree. That leaves choice without an actor emitting those willful acts. Again you've made my point.

 

[ruby sparks]

I used to like gravity more, but since the confirmation of Higgs' it's closer to magnetism for me.

Yeah but doesn't 'magnetism' just swop one oddity for another?

 

[ruby sparks]

I'd say we are right in the middle of a revolution in the way that we think about the direction(s) of travel in the head. The idea of afferent, afferent, afferent, mystery, efferent, efferent, efferent are dead as a dodo. I'm not convinced the the obituary been taken on board yet.

Then there's the possibility, raised by the Churchlands, among others, that the very conceptualisation of conscious experience and pretty well every other part of our mental life is simply wrong.

That's quite a lot of quite fundamental going on right there.

In a way, it's good that there are still things we don't know. If we ever run out of those, we'll be stumped for what to be curious apes about next.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Sorry, I'm lost. I don't see from where this "central control" could possibly come.

EB

Well, if you can't think of a possible mechanism for central control we agree. That leaves choice without an actor emitting those willful acts. Again you've made my point.

I don't believe in the central control of God and yet I assume that the universe is doing fine without it.

So, what about you? Do you think the universe works because there is some kind of central control? Or, maybe, you think that since there isn't such, then the universe just doesn't work?

I guess it's the same old fallacy all over again.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

Sorry, I'm lost. I don't see from where this "central control" could possibly come.

EB

Well, if you can't think of a possible mechanism for central control we agree. That leaves choice without an actor emitting those willful acts. Again you've made my point.

I don't believe in the central control of God and yet I assume that the universe is doing fine without it.

So, what about you? Do you think the universe works because there is some kind of central control? Or, maybe, you think that since there isn't such, then the universe just doesn't work?

I guess it's the same old fallacy all over again.
EB

I think you both agree that there is no central control.

 

[Subsymbolic]

I don't believe in the central control of God and yet I assume that the universe is doing fine without it.

So, what about you? Do you think the universe works because there is some kind of central control? Or, maybe, you think that since there isn't such, then the universe just doesn't work?

I guess it's the same old fallacy all over again.
EB

I think you both agree that there is no central control.

But there is clearly an illusion of central control and, from a strategic perspective, the question is, is the illusion a real enough pattern? Perhaps a tactical smear with the effective (in both senses) illusion of a strategic executive.

 

[fromderinside]

Perhaps rather than wasting energy on explaining waggle dance, actually a combination of attack and retreat reflectring fight or flight, as fighting fish had evolved evolved to ritualize those tendencies for mating, humans gained several more viscera, increased and different partitioning of active and passive base autonomic guided behaviors which could be modulated further by associative learned behavior systems to feign both consciousness and central control.

If this is too cryptic imagine how long it took for me to get here by way of neuro-system evolution and function study. Or one could have independently read  T. C. Schneirla on  Autonomic nervous system,  E. O. Wilson on social evolution, and others like  Steven Pinker,  John Searle, .... and arrived at a similarly cryptic explanation, or way, evolution could be tortured into support ancients' invention of free will and seventeenth century invention of consciousness by wild eyed philosophers.

Simple answer: will and conscious are made up notions proping up human divinity.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I don't believe in the central control of God and yet I assume that the universe is doing fine without it.

So, what about you? Do you think the universe works because there is some kind of central control? Or, maybe, you think that since there isn't such, then the universe just doesn't work?

I guess it's the same old fallacy all over again.
EB

I think you both agree that there is no central control.

Oh sure, but I always knew that while it's clear he didn't.

More importantly, it's a matter of whether he is paying attention to what other people say.

I take bare consciousness to be more fundamental than whatever we may come to be conscious of, including free will. Yet FDI just missed this aspect of my recent posts, including those he himself replied to. And then, like a few others here, he has this fallacious view of free will as some kind of God-like superpower some people claim we have. Because of these two basic mistakes, he came to infer wrongly that I must be supporting this idiotic idea of "central control", idiotic because so obviously wrong. This shows he isn't paying attention to what people actually say, and that can only be a pain in the ass to everybody.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Perhaps rather than wasting energy on explaining waggle dance, actually a combination of attack and retreat reflectring fight or flight, as fighting fish had evolved evolved to ritualize those tendencies for mating, humans gained several more viscera, increased and different partitioning of active and passive base autonomic guided behaviors which could be modulated further by associative learned behavior systems to feign both consciousness and central control.

If this is too cryptic imagine how long it took for me to get here by way of neuro-system evolution and function study. Or one could have independently read  T. C. Schneirla on  Autonomic nervous system,  E. O. Wilson on social evolution, and others like  Steven Pinker,  John Searle, .... and arrived at a similarly cryptic explanation, or way, evolution could be tortured into support ancients' invention of free will and seventeenth century invention of consciousness by wild eyed philosophers.

Simple answer: will and conscious are made up notions proping up human divinity.

Thanks for those links, most of them useless.


Still, it's nice to see how the Steven Pinker you referred to in your post does agree with me:

http://www.amirapress.com/video/t_VQxJi0COTBo
Question: What is free will?
Steven Pinker: I don't believe there's such a thing as free will in the sense of a ghost and a machine, a spirit or a soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls the levers of behavior. There's no sense that we can make of that. I think we are . . . Our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain. On the other hand, when you have a brain that consists of one hundred billion neurons connected by one hundred trillion synopses, there is a vast amount of complexity. That means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that I've hinged on beforehand. We also know that that brain is set up so that there are at least two kinds of behavior. There's what happens when I shine a light in your eye and your iris contracts, or I hit your knee with a hammer and your leg jerks upward. We also know that there's a part of the brain that does things like choose what to have for dinner; whether to order chocolate or vanilla ice cream; how to move the next chess people; whether to pick up the paper or put it down. That is very different from your iris closing when I shine a light in your eye. It's that second kind of behavior -- one that engages vast amounts of the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, that incorporates an enormous amount of information in the causation of the behavior that has some mental model of the world that can predict the consequences of possible behavior and select them on the basis of those consequences. All of those things carve out the realm of behavior that we call free will, which is useful to distinguish from brute involuntary reflexes, but which doesn't necessarily have to involve some mysterious soul.

I think I could almost have said it like that.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

And Steven Pinker apparently is not the only scientist to have understood what it is most people call free will.

There's also social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister:

How Evolution Explains the Emergence of Freewill in Humans
by Orion Jones
http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/how-evolution-explains-the-emergence-of-freewill-in-humans

Much of today's debate over freewill hinges on a couple semantic distinctions concerning the nature of causality, according to eminent social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister. This is unfortunate because while philosophers may be much confounded by freewill, it forms an essential part of our scientific worldview. "Free will is just another kind of cause. The causal process by which a person decides whether to marry is simply different from the processes that cause balls to roll downhill, ice to melt in the hot sun, a magnet to attract nails, or a stock price to rise and fall."

The emergence of freewill in the human species is a result of evolution, not a brute fact. Highlighting a common misconception about freewill, which states that it is the ability to do whatever you'd like, demonstrates that the emergence of human culture requires us to exercise our freewill by obeying cultural norms. "The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it. The most recently evolved parts of the human brain have an extensive mechanism for overriding those impulses... Self-control furnishes the possibility of acting from rational principles rather than acting on impulse."

Yeah, I could also have said it like that.

So Baumeister too certainly seems to agree with me on what is free will.
EB

 

[fromderinside]

Perhaps rather than wasting energy on explaining waggle dance, actually a combination of attack and retreat reflectring fight or flight, as fighting fish had evolved evolved to ritualize those tendencies for mating, humans gained several more viscera, increased and different partitioning of active and passive base autonomic guided behaviors which could be modulated further by associative learned behavior systems to feign both consciousness and central control.

If this is too cryptic imagine how long it took for me to get here by way of neuro-system evolution and function study. Or one could have independently read  T. C. Schneirla on  Autonomic nervous system,  E. O. Wilson on social evolution, and others like  Steven Pinker,  John Searle, .... and arrived at a similarly cryptic explanation, or way, evolution could be tortured into support ancients' invention of free will and seventeenth century invention of consciousness by wild eyed philosophers.

Simple answer: will and conscious are made up notions proping up human divinity.

Thanks for those links <snip>.


Still, it's nice to see how the Steven Pinker you referred to in your post does agree with me:

http://www.amirapress.com/video/t_VQxJi0COTBo
Question: What is free will?
Steven Pinker: I don't believe there's such a thing as free will in the sense of a ghost and a machine, a spirit or a soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls the levers of behavior. There's no sense that we can make of that. I think we are . . . Our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain. On the other hand, when you have a brain that consists of one hundred billion neurons connected by one hundred trillion synopses, there is a vast amount of complexity. That means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that I've hinged on beforehand. We also know that that brain is set up so that there are at least two kinds of behavior. There's what happens when I shine a light in your eye and your iris contracts, or I hit your knee with a hammer and your leg jerks upward. We also know that there's a part of the brain that does things like choose what to have for dinner; whether to order chocolate or vanilla ice cream; how to move the next chess people; whether to pick up the paper or put it down. That is very different from your iris closing when I shine a light in your eye. It's that second kind of behavior -- one that engages vast amounts of the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, that incorporates an enormous amount of information in the causation of the behavior that has some mental model of the world that can predict the consequences of possible behavior and select them on the basis of those consequences. All of those things carve out the realm of behavior that we call free will, which is useful to distinguish from brute involuntary reflexes, but which doesn't necessarily have to involve some mysterious soul.

I think I could almost have said it like that.
EB

I think I already did before you erroneously made 'central control' my view.

To wit:

I subscribe to the notion that vertebrates have located and demonstrated multilevel systems underlying sonmelence, wakefulness, arousal, attention, awareness, and self states that are elicited while almost never demonstrated as emitted I find it quaint that one would suppose one has some directive or assertive control of these conditions.

Rather, it is in the selection of that which is received for use and articulation that one finds some sliver of possibility for central motivation. Central control, if it were to exist, seems a poor choice for a behavioral model underlying any basis for fitness based consequent actions beyond the false image portrayal I described describe above.

I did, just before write a sentence about a hypothetical mention central motivation. That is the thing for which I provided Autonomic NS and some background on evolutionary thinking as reference. There is no sense where a reasonable reader of the post in contention could conclude I support any central control or Maiezel, or other central mediating mechanism unless you are so naive as to believe motivation is mediation.

I suggest you don't put words or notions in my mouth. I can bollex those up myself thank you very much.

I'm glad you agree Pinker's view on that complexity of NS leaves it possible to the ghost in brain zombies 'support' possible just so will and control views. I believe this is what you did when you read my post. That is you took my view as a just so justification for will or control even when I noted it not plausible.

If you had even glanced at the general citations you would know they were featuring ANS neural chemical processes usually referred to as 'base motivation' pathways'. Very important to distinguish squirts from twitches.

Why do I have correctly read your posts while you can mess with mine? If this is one up it's not really moving anything forward sir.

As for any emergent explanation one needs to understand emergent isn't a real thing. It's a place holder for those who have inclinations or just so aspirations to present explanations. Its as lethal for free will justifications to put free will as other than a past tense feature.

If something is presented as emergent by scientists it is always with the knowledge that understanding of a process or system is not complete. If knowledge were complete what 'emerges' is explained as determined by attributes of those things upon which the assertion is based.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Your post doesn't make sense to me. I really can't make sense of it. Any of it.

I think you need to rest a little.

Go for a walk, talk to some real people, and perhaps put me on 'ignore'. I'll do the same.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

Still, it's nice to see how the Steven Pinker you referred to in your post does agree with me:

http://www.amirapress.com/video/t_VQxJi0COTBo
Question: What is free will?
Steven Pinker: I don't believe there's such a thing as free will in the sense of a ghost and a machine, a spirit or a soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls the levers of behavior. There's no sense that we can make of that. I think we are . . . Our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain. On the other hand, when you have a brain that consists of one hundred billion neurons connected by one hundred trillion synopses, there is a vast amount of complexity. That means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that I've hinged on beforehand. We also know that that brain is set up so that there are at least two kinds of behavior. There's what happens when I shine a light in your eye and your iris contracts, or I hit your knee with a hammer and your leg jerks upward. We also know that there's a part of the brain that does things like choose what to have for dinner; whether to order chocolate or vanilla ice cream; how to move the next chess people; whether to pick up the paper or put it down. That is very different from your iris closing when I shine a light in your eye. It's that second kind of behavior -- one that engages vast amounts of the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, that incorporates an enormous amount of information in the causation of the behavior that has some mental model of the world that can predict the consequences of possible behavior and select them on the basis of those consequences. All of those things carve out the realm of behavior that we call free will, which is useful to distinguish from brute involuntary reflexes, but which doesn't necessarily have to involve some mysterious soul.

I think I could almost have said it like that.
EB

To some people (me) Pinker is merely happy to call something free will when it isn't really free, there are just some freedoms.

There is no point in disagreeing about whether we do or don't have free will when we are talking about different things. Imo, it's most likely that there is much more agreement here than disagreement.

- - - Updated - - -

And Steven Pinker apparently is not the only scientist to have understood what it is most people call free will.

Careful. What do most people think of as free will?

It's not clear. It's a mess. It's a bit of everything, perceived differently in different scenarios (free will being granted more for punishment than praise for example).

Imo, there is very little doubt that for many people, there are aspects of what they call 'free will' that they probably don't have.

Pinker and others (most compatibilists) prefer to redefine, as a way out of the problem. Whether their redefinitions are appreciated or understood by 'most people' or ever will be is debatable. Tell the average person in the street that they do have free will and it is entirely possible, maybe even likely, that they will misconstrue, because imo there are, commonly, illusory aspects to what many if not most people think of as their free will.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Pinker and others (most compatibilists) prefer to redefine, as a way out of the problem. Whether their redefinitions are appreciated or understood by 'most people' or ever will be is debatable.

No. They don't "redefine".

Their use of the term 'free will' seems in line with not only my own perception of what free will means for most people, but also with the definition given by my Collins dictionary:

Free will
a. The apparent human ability to make choices that are not externally determined.
Collins Dictionary, 3rd Edition - 1991

In my experience, most people think they have free will and most don't assume that this would somehow allow them to circumvent the laws of nature, if any. If anything, it's very easy to check you can't do whatever you want and most people are not idiotic.

There's no doubt that there is also a small number of intellectuals, philosophers and religiously minded people, who have peddled a sense of free will that would be contrary to the scientific view of nature. I believe this is what is so exercising some of the people on the other side. Both sides are in the minority, though. They're just hijacking the debate and polluting the discussion.
EB