The Illusion of Self

[fromderinside]

What bilby wrote.

 

[untermensche]

What a shame you have no ability to deal with any of this yourself.

But it is philosophy of course.

That requires a free mind.

 

[fromderinside]

I'm pretty sure that if one looks carefully one will find scientific method arose from failure of philosophy to deal with reality foundations. One just can't point to the sun and noon and say "it is self evident they are orbiting the earth" can they.

I think you'll find I'm coming from the philosophical perspective things are determined which kind of banishes such as free will. Your problem is explaining things with free will which, by the way, you've been doing a bang up job failing to provide a logical basis. Declarations are not philosophical statements. They more closely resemble religious beliefs.

 

[untermensche]

I'm pretty sure that if one looks carefully one will find scientific method arose from failure of philosophy to deal with reality foundations. One just can't point to the sun and noon and say "it is self evident they are orbiting the earth" can they.

I think you'll find I'm coming from the philosophical perspective things are determined which kind of banishes such as free will. Your problem is explaining things with free will which, by the way, you've been doing a bang up job failing to provide a logical basis. Declarations are not philosophical statements. They more closely resemble religious beliefs.

The scientific method arose randomly due to the random appearance of rare geniuses that set the blind herd straight.

But humans have writing and young humans can easily learn what only geniuses could discover, with education.

We know the earth rotates around the sun and not the other way around because of rare geniuses. Not because we discovered it ourselves or could have.

In this manner human knowledge grows and changes.

 

[fromderinside]

Knowledge as humans measure it is a culturally aggregated thing. We are almost alone among living things on earth that have collective memory across generations, most certainly now with the evolution of language and transcription. Previously, among protohumans and early humans, knowledge accrued through learning to repeat what works by learning from those who practiced such as using fire and working with materials to fashion living and working environments thus living better than others.

Some primates and other social beings imitate and repeat parental practices such as washing, still others are built to do certain things within their groups by genetic and nutritional mechanisms. There are jumps caused by culture and individual capabilities for sure, but what we've become is generally produced through evolving into what works beings the old fashioned way by surviving preferentially for for success, the ability to stay alive and reproduce better than others.

Both paragraphs say the same thing, just point out differences in how that same thing accomplished what became us.

There is some genius and some catastrophic good fortune genetic accidents in all evolution, yet evolution is dominated by gradual change rather than punctate change. That is because, just as does good fortune produce jumps so occurs bad fortune stymying or ending this or that line. It is pretty clear that the brain evolve over a long long process taking several hundred million years. That result takes in to account events like ice earth, and meteor catastrophes. I'm a fan of conservation of energy as basis for most everything from the beginning 'til now.

Magic just doesn't factor in ergo my conclusion for self as illusion.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Claim: Self is an illusion.

An illusion is not something that is not there, it is only something that is not what it seems to be.

View attachment 26166

Humans generally seem to find it easy and natural to locate their centre of conscuiosness.

Of 59 participants in an experiment, 90% identified a location in their bodies for the centre of their consciousness, where their self was felt to be.

83% identified that location to be in their head, between and behind the eyes, as per the dots on the diagram above. That is also where I would have chosen.

There is nothing located in any particular part of the body (or outside of it) where there is a self.

Therefore, self is an illusion, or if you prefer, a subjective sense of self, when it is present (it isn't always or fully) generally seems to involve an illusion, at least the illusion that it has or acts through a centre.

Point Zero: A Phenomenological Inquiry into the subjective Physical Location of Consciousness
http://en.asia.it/adon.pl?act=doc&doc=787

The self is that which experiences both reality and illusions. The self is not an illusion, but it is capable of having illusions about itself.

 

[fromderinside]

Wrong. But, if you have evidence bring it. Be happy to demolish it.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Wrong. But, if you have evidence bring it. Be happy to demolish it.

You might find Michael Graziano's "Consciousness and the Social Brain" enlightening. He discusses some of the data that the brain gathers to construct the notion of self. For example, there is the self's location. During operations people have had the illusion that they are located above their body looking down upon the procedure.

The brain organizes sensory data into a model of reality, consisting of things like objects and events. When the model is accurate enough to be useful, as when we navigate our bodies through a doorway, then we call that "reality", because the model is our only access to reality. It is only when the model is inaccurate enough to cause problems, like when we walk into a glass doorway thinking it is open, that we call it an "illusion".

 

[DBT]

The illusion of self refers to the impillusion that the self, which the brain shapes, forms, generates, is actually running the show. The brain is the sole agent of perception, thought and response acting through the medium of conscious mind and self identity, a mental map of one's place in the world.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

The illusion of self refers to the impillusion that the self, which the brain shapes, forms, generates, is actually running the show. The brain is the sole agent of perception, thought and response acting through the medium of conscious mind and self identity, a mental map of one's place in the world.

Yes. The self is how the brain experiences itself. The brain experiences itself exercising control over the behavior of the body. It uses special functional areas to provide conscious awareness, other areas to store memories, other areas to process visual and auditory data, other areas to perform other tasks.

 

[DBT]

The illusion of self refers to the impillusion that the self, which the brain shapes, forms, generates, is actually running the show. The brain is the sole agent of perception, thought and response acting through the medium of conscious mind and self identity, a mental map of one's place in the world.

Yes. The self is how the brain experiences itself. The brain experiences itself exercising control over the behavior of the body. It uses special functional areas to provide conscious awareness, other areas to store memories, other areas to process visual and auditory data, other areas to perform other tasks.

Doesn't 'exercising control' imply some degree of separation between the controller and the controlled? The brain regulates body functions and responds to its inputs. Not as a single entity but a collection of structures with functions of their own. Sometimes causing conflicting messages and overrides, the desire to eat, the desire to slim down and the conflict that results from opposing drives because there is no single undivided controller..

 

[fromderinside]

You might find Michael Graziano's "Consciousness and the Social Brain" enlightening. He discusses some of the data that the brain gathers to construct the notion of self. For example, there is the self's location. During operations people have had the illusion that they are located above their body looking down upon the procedure. The brain organizes sensory data into a model of reality, consisting of things like objects and events. When the model is accurate enough to be useful, as when we navigate our bodies through a doorway, then we call that "reality", because the model is our only access to reality. It is only when the model is inaccurate enough to cause problems, like when we walk into a glass doorway thinking it is open, that we call it an "illusion".

My problems with Graziano are primarily bound up in the construct of emergence. Things evolve they don't emerge. The fact that empiricism uses rationalistic principles to some extent does not mean it emerged from rationalism. It is a completely different way of seeing the world based on more precise indicators of relations among things. The need for something other than just observation coincident with the ability to make tools drove the development of both language and historical memory in man. These did not just emerge. They evolved over a lot of time across many generations and in many places. Language, vocalization, is a mechanism, like handwaving and brow furrowing, supporting communication.

I point to Emergence https://iep.utm.edu/emergenc/ particularly section threeObjections to Emergentism https://iep.utm.edu/emergenc/#H3

The most usually cited objection to strong emergence, initially formulated by Pepper (1926) and championed today by Jaegwon Kim (1999, 2005), concerns the novel (and downward) causal powers of emergent properties.Kim’s formulation is based on three basic physicalist assumptions: (1) the principle of causal closure which Kim defines as the principle that if a physical event has a cause at t, then it has a physical cause at t, (2) the principle of causal exclusion according to which if an event e has a sufficient cause c at t, no event at t distinct from c can be the cause of e (unless this is a genuine case of causal over-determination), and (3) supervenience. Kim defines mind/body supervenience as follows: mental properties strongly supervene on physical/biological properties, that is, if any system s instantiates a mental property M at t, there necessarily exists a physical property P such that s instantiates P at t, and necessarily anything instantiating P at any time instantiates M at any time.The gist of the problem is the following. In order for emergent mental properties to have causal powers (and thus to exist, according to what Kim has coined “Alexander’s dictum”) there must be some form of mental causation. However, if this is the case, the principle of causal closure is violated and emergence is in danger of becoming an incoherent position. If mental (and therefore downward) causation is denied and thus causal closure retained, emergent properties become merely epiphenomenal and in this case their existence is threatened.More specifically, the argument is as follows. According to mind-body supervenience, every time a mental property M is instantiated it supervenes on a physical property P. Now suppose M appears to cause another mental property M¹, the question arises whether the cause of M¹ is indeed M or whether it is M¹’s subvenient/subjacent base P¹ (since according to supervenience M¹ is instantiated by a physical property P¹). Given causal exclusion, it cannot be both, and so, given the supervenience relation, it seems that M¹ occurs because P¹ occurred. Therefore, Kim argues, it seems that M actually causes M¹ by causing the subjacent P¹ and that mental to mental (same level) causation presupposes mental to physical (downward) causation. [Another, more direct, way to put this problem is whether the effect of M is really M¹ or M¹’s subjacent base P¹. I chose an alternative formulation in order for the problem to be more clear to the non-expert reader.] However, Kim continues, given causal closure, P¹ must have a sufficient physical cause P. But given exclusion again, P¹ cannot have two sufficient causes, M and P, and so P is the real cause of P¹ because, if M were the real cause then causal closure would be violated again. Therefore, given supervenience, causal closure and causal exclusion, mental properties are merely epiphenomenal. The tension here for the emergentist, the objection goes, is in the double requirement of supervenience and downward causation in that, on the one hand, we have upward determination and the principle of causal closure of the physical domain, and, on the other hand, we have causally efficacious emergent phenomena. In other words, Kim claims that what seem to be cases of emergent causation are just epiphenomena because ultimately the only way to instantiate an emergent property is to instantiate its base. So, saying that higher level properties are causally efficacious renders any form of non-reductive physicalism, under which Kim includes emergentism, at least implausible and at most incoherent.

In effect support for the existence of consciousness as an emergent property, not just the result of a physical adaptation and evolution of uttered subvocal articulation, is "implausible and at most incoherent." Speech does not emerge from fingers typing.

Man invents a lot of thing he presumes are mental states and capabilities when they are just outcomes of neurophysiological processing transduced to others as actions. My second criticism is his use of selected species in selected ways to produce 'results'. It takes a much broader approach than a few electrodes either initiating or reporting to tell a story.

I'm encouraged by his tactic of concentrating on likely sites where transactions might be being generated but by doing such one cannot conclude from that that something has emerged.

Those transactions need be taken together with a variety of other neurophysiological information to reflect what is actually transpiring.

As far as I'm concerned Emergence is just another attempt to reinstate abstraction ladders.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

You might find Michael Graziano's "Consciousness and the Social Brain" enlightening. He discusses some of the data that the brain gathers to construct the notion of self. For example, there is the self's location. During operations people have had the illusion that they are located above their body looking down upon the procedure. The brain organizes sensory data into a model of reality, consisting of things like objects and events. When the model is accurate enough to be useful, as when we navigate our bodies through a doorway, then we call that "reality", because the model is our only access to reality. It is only when the model is inaccurate enough to cause problems, like when we walk into a glass doorway thinking it is open, that we call it an "illusion".

My problems with Graziano are primarily bound up in the construct of emergence. Things evolve they don't emerge. The fact that empiricism uses rationalistic principles to some extent does not mean it emerged from rationalism. It is a completely different way of seeing the world based on more precise indicators of relations among things. The need for something other than just observation coincident with the ability to make tools drove the development of both language and historical memory in man. These did not just emerge. They evolved over a lot of time across many generations and in many places. Language, vocalization, is a mechanism, like handwaving and brow furrowing, supporting communication.

I point to Emergence https://iep.utm.edu/emergenc/ particularly section threeObjections to Emergentism https://iep.utm.edu/emergenc/#H3

The most usually cited objection to strong emergence, initially formulated by Pepper (1926) and championed today by Jaegwon Kim (1999, 2005), concerns the novel (and downward) causal powers of emergent properties.Kim’s formulation is based on three basic physicalist assumptions: (1) the principle of causal closure which Kim defines as the principle that if a physical event has a cause at t, then it has a physical cause at t, (2) the principle of causal exclusion according to which if an event e has a sufficient cause c at t, no event at t distinct from c can be the cause of e (unless this is a genuine case of causal over-determination), and (3) supervenience. Kim defines mind/body supervenience as follows: mental properties strongly supervene on physical/biological properties, that is, if any system s instantiates a mental property M at t, there necessarily exists a physical property P such that s instantiates P at t, and necessarily anything instantiating P at any time instantiates M at any time.The gist of the problem is the following. In order for emergent mental properties to have causal powers (and thus to exist, according to what Kim has coined “Alexander’s dictum”) there must be some form of mental causation. However, if this is the case, the principle of causal closure is violated and emergence is in danger of becoming an incoherent position. If mental (and therefore downward) causation is denied and thus causal closure retained, emergent properties become merely epiphenomenal and in this case their existence is threatened.More specifically, the argument is as follows. According to mind-body supervenience, every time a mental property M is instantiated it supervenes on a physical property P. Now suppose M appears to cause another mental property M¹, the question arises whether the cause of M¹ is indeed M or whether it is M¹’s subvenient/subjacent base P¹ (since according to supervenience M¹ is instantiated by a physical property P¹). Given causal exclusion, it cannot be both, and so, given the supervenience relation, it seems that M¹ occurs because P¹ occurred. Therefore, Kim argues, it seems that M actually causes M¹ by causing the subjacent P¹ and that mental to mental (same level) causation presupposes mental to physical (downward) causation. [Another, more direct, way to put this problem is whether the effect of M is really M¹ or M¹’s subjacent base P¹. I chose an alternative formulation in order for the problem to be more clear to the non-expert reader.] However, Kim continues, given causal closure, P¹ must have a sufficient physical cause P. But given exclusion again, P¹ cannot have two sufficient causes, M and P, and so P is the real cause of P¹ because, if M were the real cause then causal closure would be violated again. Therefore, given supervenience, causal closure and causal exclusion, mental properties are merely epiphenomenal. The tension here for the emergentist, the objection goes, is in the double requirement of supervenience and downward causation in that, on the one hand, we have upward determination and the principle of causal closure of the physical domain, and, on the other hand, we have causally efficacious emergent phenomena. In other words, Kim claims that what seem to be cases of emergent causation are just epiphenomena because ultimately the only way to instantiate an emergent property is to instantiate its base. So, saying that higher level properties are causally efficacious renders any form of non-reductive physicalism, under which Kim includes emergentism, at least implausible and at most incoherent.

In effect support for the existence of consciousness as an emergent property, not just the result of a physical adaptation and evolution of uttered subvocal articulation, is "implausible and at most incoherent." Speech does not emerge from fingers typing.

Man invents a lot of thing he presumes are mental states and capabilities when they are just outcomes of neurophysiological processing transduced to others as actions. My second criticism is his use of selected species in selected ways to produce 'results'. It takes a much broader approach than a few electrodes either initiating or reporting to tell a story.

I'm encouraged by his tactic of concentrating on likely sites where transactions might be being generated but by doing such one cannot conclude from that that something has emerged.

Those transactions need be taken together with a variety of other neurophysiological information to reflect what is actually transpiring.

As far as I'm concerned Emergence is just another attempt to reinstate abstraction ladders.

Well, that may be a bit over my head. But the Campbell Biology textbook discusses emergent properties in chapter 1, the same chapter where it introduces evolution. It didn't seem to find the incompatibility you are suggesting.

I was reading through the text you quoted and ran into the term "supervenience". I had researched this word in an earlier discussion at a different site, and found it frustratingly counter-intuitive. If A supervenes upon B, then B comes first and causes A. But the roots "super" and "veni" suggest that A comes before B. This led to some head-banging-against-the-wall for me. And it caused me to break out laughing when I read the author's comment, "I chose an alternative formulation in order for the problem to be more clear to the non-expert reader."

The brain, as marvelous as it is, cannot track the atoms that make up a ball and a bat. It models reality with "objects" and "events" and many other larger concepts that make its job easier. It learns to "swing" the bat to "hit" the ball, and then "run" to first base (U.S. Baseball). The body kicks control upstairs to this modeling center when decision-making is required.

So, while the brain evolved bottom-up, it still exercises top-down control of deliberate behavior.

For example, a coed is invited to a party, but she knows she has a chemistry exam in the morning. So, she decides to study instead. This conscious intent then motivates and directs her subsequent actions. She reviews the textbook and her lecture notes, and perhaps uses flash cards. Note that she is deliberately modifying the neural pathways in her brain, by going over the material, in order to make the information come to conscious awareness when triggered by the questions on the test tomorrow. That's top-down causation. It is literally mental control of the physical infrastructure.

Of course, even that mental control will have corresponding physical events. But the individual neurons are incapable of providing this control. It is rather a function being performed by a machine evolved in structure to provide such functioning.

Thinking, like walking, evolved due to the survivability they added to the organism.

Oh, and when I use the term "empirical", I'm suggesting events that can actually be observed and scientifically explained. I do not know the philosophical background around this term. To me, empiricism means simply, "What you see is what you get."

 

[fromderinside]

So, while the brain evolved bottom-up, it still exercises top-down control of deliberate behavior.

That's like saying the scum on a pond is what the pond is doing.

A very strong BS rating on that sentiment.

 

[WAB]

My problems with Graziano are primarily bound up in the construct of emergence. Things evolve they don't emerge. The fact that empiricism uses rationalistic principles to some extent does not mean it emerged from rationalism. It is a completely different way of seeing the world based on more precise indicators of relations among things. The need for something other than just observation coincident with the ability to make tools drove the development of both language and historical memory in man. These did not just emerge. They evolved over a lot of time across many generations and in many places. Language, vocalization, is a mechanism, like handwaving and brow furrowing, supporting communication.

I point to Emergence https://iep.utm.edu/emergenc/ particularly section threeObjections to Emergentism https://iep.utm.edu/emergenc/#H3



In effect support for the existence of consciousness as an emergent property, not just the result of a physical adaptation and evolution of uttered subvocal articulation, is "implausible and at most incoherent." Speech does not emerge from fingers typing.

Man invents a lot of thing he presumes are mental states and capabilities when they are just outcomes of neurophysiological processing transduced to others as actions. My second criticism is his use of selected species in selected ways to produce 'results'. It takes a much broader approach than a few electrodes either initiating or reporting to tell a story.

I'm encouraged by his tactic of concentrating on likely sites where transactions might be being generated but by doing such one cannot conclude from that that something has emerged.

Those transactions need be taken together with a variety of other neurophysiological information to reflect what is actually transpiring.

As far as I'm concerned Emergence is just another attempt to reinstate abstraction ladders.

Well, that may be a bit over my head. But the Campbell Biology textbook discusses emergent properties in chapter 1, the same chapter where it introduces evolution. It didn't seem to find the incompatibility you are suggesting.

I was reading through the text you quoted and ran into the term "supervenience". I had researched this word in an earlier discussion at a different site, and found it frustratingly counter-intuitive. If A supervenes upon B, then B comes first and causes A. But the roots "super" and "veni" suggest that A comes before B. This led to some head-banging-against-the-wall for me. And it caused me to break out laughing when I read the author's comment, "I chose an alternative formulation in order for the problem to be more clear to the non-expert reader."

The brain, as marvelous as it is, cannot track the atoms that make up a ball and a bat. It models reality with "objects" and "events" and many other larger concepts that make its job easier. It learns to "swing" the bat to "hit" the ball, and then "run" to first base (U.S. Baseball). The body kicks control upstairs to this modeling center when decision-making is required.

So, while the brain evolved bottom-up, it still exercises top-down control of deliberate behavior.

For example, a coed is invited to a party, but she knows she has a chemistry exam in the morning. So, she decides to study instead. This conscious intent then motivates and directs her subsequent actions. She reviews the textbook and her lecture notes, and perhaps uses flash cards. Note that she is deliberately modifying the neural pathways in her brain, by going over the material, in order to make the information come to conscious awareness when triggered by the questions on the test tomorrow. That's top-down causation. It is literally mental control of the physical infrastructure.

Of course, even that mental control will have corresponding physical events. But the individual neurons are incapable of providing this control. It is rather a function being performed by a machine evolved in structure to provide such functioning.

Thinking, like walking, evolved due to the survivability they added to the organism.

Oh, and when I use the term "empirical", I'm suggesting events that can actually be observed and scientifically explained. I do not know the philosophical background around this term. To me, empiricism means simply, "What you see is what you get."

Below are some exerpts from a longer post I have on one of my blogs. The blog (and a large proportion of the text I copy below, was copy/pasted from several different sites, FRDB and Text Freethought mainly, from 2004 up unti the time I compliled material about determinism,free will/theology, cosmology, politics, neuroscience, etc and made one big post in 2018, which is here:

http://floofqlbar.blogspot.com/2018/06/free-will-versus-determinism-articles.html

It's pretty long, but I have the Cliffs Notes version below, which I cordially invite you to ignore. Pro-ceed. (I promise, no jokes in the hide tags, I am getting exhausted, and quite frankly, played out.)

Show

All text in [] added to original text, not included here.

Text in [] and emphasized (italics & underlined) are copied from original text, usernames omitted save for first initial of first name.

Freewill, if it exists at all, is in full swing throughout virtually every waking moment of a person's life, given that we are talking about a normal, intelligent, rational, healthy individual. Life is an ongoing process of action and reaction, of thinking and deciding, of planning, reflecting, speculating, shifting perspectives, changing one's mind, reexamining things, evaluating and reevaluating situations, all the time, on a major or minor scale. Freewill is the ability to consciously choose a course of action from among two or more realizable alternatives. This applies to each and every situation, each and every event, however minute, in a person's conscious, waking life. It does not suddenly cease to exist when a person is in a crisis situation. In fact, it exists even more so, since a crisis situation requires - to a much greater degree than watching a movie or eating a bowl of ice cream - clear thinking and careful decision making. What some are suggesting is precisely the opposite, that when a person is compelled to make a decision (or forced to do something he would rather not do and which he would not have done had not the circumstance necessitated it) in a moment of crisis is exactly the time that that person is not acting of their own freewill. This position makes no sense.

Imagine trying to convince a soldier or a policeman, for instance, that they are not acting of their own freewill as they go about their jobs on a daily basis, because their jobs put them in situations of crisis as a matter of routine, situations which require intense training and extraordinary decision making skills? Is the couch potato thumbing through channels on TV acting of his own freewill? Yes? He is, but the man who dives from a bridge into icy water to save a drowning victim is not? If this is the case, then the words free and will are bereft of any meaning they could possibly have. At least for me.

As for the mugging victim [analogy in archived thread], the facts are simple: Y forces X to make a decision. X can literally do any number of things, depending on what X is capable of. He can fight Y, he can take the gun and shove it up Y's fundament, he can run off (many muggers will not shoot if a victim runs, they are thieves, not killers), or he can try to talk Y out of it. This is one of those moments of crisis that require clear thinking and careful decision making. This is one of those moments where freewill comes into play, in a major way, not a minor one. This is a moment where the ability to chose wisely from various options is most crucial. Freewill is far more intensely in operation and is far more vital to one's survival here than when one is at a restaurant wondering which entree to go for.

In this situation X is compelled to act, but is not compelled to any particular action. In other words, I do not see compulsion and freewill as being mutually exclusive. One can be compelled to act and yet free to act. As in my mountainside/boulder/tree/man analogy [different analogy, also in the archived thread]. The tree is not an agent, it is not free to move away from the boulder, it cannot be compelled to move away; the man is an agent, he is free to move. You can say he was free to move or he was compelled to move, it amounts to the same thing: the ability to move. Freewill is the ability to choose and act, whether under compulsion or not. Compulsion is irrelevant to the issue, unless we are talking about acting freely in a political and not a metaphysical sense.

I'm reminded of Sartre's expression, "condemned to be free." I suppose some people do feel that way, because being a free individual confers upon a person an enormous responsibility, a lifetime of action and decision making. Many people choose to opt out of this responsibility and escape into determinism: I couldn't help it. It's not my fault. It wasn't to be. It wasn't in the cards. Others do not. They take their freedom as a rare and precious opportunity to do something extraordinary. I wish I were more like them.

***
Determinists seem fixated on illustrating that there is no point at any time prior to making a decision wherein I am completely uninfluenced by any of the factors which contribute to how I decide, and that a "free" choice must be completely divested of anything resembling a reason for choosing what I choose; but in such an instance nothing resembling a decision would or could be made, "freely" or otherwise (which neither party involved in this argument is arguing for), since making a choice presupposes a set of options with forseeable consequences, negative or positive, better or worse.

We can only be said to decide something if we are conscious of two or more courses of action and if there occurs a mental process of weighing alternatives . Obviously we can't weigh alternatives or make any considerations without being cognizant of what we want or intend, and being cognizant of what we want or intend presupposes that our decision must somehow be in accordance with that, and therefore influenced by that.

What I believe the free-willers are saying is that, certainly, my decisions are influenced by any number of factors, but as far as which influences prove to be stronger-- at any point in time and in any circumstance whatsoever-- there is never a point, at any time prior to the choice being made,-- and I mean the precise, exact moment,-- at which the "state of affairs" is static enough for whatever choice we arrive at to have been in any true sense "determined". A choice is never truly determined until it's been made, because there's an incomprehensibly complex and enormous array of variables constantly at play across every instant in time. In my opinion it's far too disrespectful of all of these variables to sit back, after the fact, and declare that any choice whatsoever, however trivial, was the only choice that was truly available at any or all points prior to choosing.

This isn't to say that there is anything "random" among all these variables. Whatever happens, happens as a result of a prior state, or states, of affairs, -- for lack of a better term (more on that later). This seems like common sense to me and yet it's this self-evident and obvious fact which is sometimes palmed off as sufficient grounds for siding with determinism. Free-willers aren't saying that any of their actions are uncaused, only that their actions, though caused, have causative power themselves. That isn't to say that because their actions have causative power they can be thought of as "first causes", or that they somehow enter the flow of events by some magical intervention having no connection or relation to prior events. What they are arguing is that there is no predetermination. Nothing is fixed absolutely, except the laws of nature themselves. Anything can happen, as long as we understand that "anything" means within the confines of physical laws, laws which don't "determine" what happens so much as establish and underlie the limited context in which things happen, and which, more specifically, happen to us.

Every conscious entity that is capable of self-generated (and thinking of "self-generated" in strictly mechanical, materialistic terms is fine with me for the time being) motion is therefore capable, to widely varying degrees, of molding the course of events in a manner which might not have occured were it not for its involvement. This involvement might be so trivial as to be to all intents and purposes negligible, or it might be vastly significant and impact events worldwide, as in the case of a world leader like Hitler. That isn't to say that someone like Hitler came out of a vacuum and acted without desire, reason, influence or motivation. It just means that the course his life took contributed vastly (not to mention horrendously, the little shit) to the course of events in general, a course of events which would not have transpired were it not for his involvement; or, at the very least, that the course of events that would have transpired without his involvement would probably have been significantly different.

If we are saying that Hitler's birth and career (or anyone's, for that matter), was "determined" from day one because of the fixed laws of the universe, that strikes me as pure nonsense; but it doesn't seem to me that many people are arguing for predetermination. What I get from determinists is that any state of affairs is entirely the result of a prior state (or states) of affairs. What I think the free-willers are saying is that while this is no doubt true, the phrase itself, "state of affairs" is misleading since it seems to refer to something individuated or "static", something which is somehow measurable at every single instant, perpetually quanitifiable by intermittent observers.

I think this is the point from which stems a great deal of the disagreement among free-willers and determinists. I would gladly agree to throw the word "free" out the window [but ONLY with respect to its use in relation to scientific research and in-lab experimentation] since it's also midleading, and in much the same way. In the same way that nothing can be literally "free", as in unbounded, unrestrained, unlimited, there can't be anything like a literal "state" of affairs, since time is perpetually forward-moving and sweeps everything along with it.

Only if time could be stopped could there be an actual "state" of affairs. It isn't that one "state" affects the next, in some sort of one-on-one linear relationship that can in any way be accurately referred to as a "chain; and "affairs" occur in an inconceivably vast, inter-related, and convoluted manner, making "causal chain" yet another misleading term which ought to be dispensed with, in my unprofessional opinion.

I think some form of compatibilism is what I'm pushing for, one which recognizes the fact that nothing happens without a cause but which also recognizes the fact that the actions of living organisms are themselves causative. And one which rejects the idea that making a choice is somehow proof that no choice was possible, which doesn't make a lick of sense [this last paragraph, and the last sentence in particular, must have been written before I had read much of Hume or Berkeley; and almost certainly before I read Thomas Reid's critique of both.]

***
The reason I argue that the denial of free will is dangerous in a secular context (the real world), is because: Vast groups of people can be controlled only if they allow themselves to be controlled, or if they are controlled by brute force.

Absent brute force, a really useful (and oftentimes awful) philosophical and political ideology must be introduced if one intends to control the masses. History is full of such attempts. Religion is the biggest and most successful extant means of keeping people in order. All religious doctrines are devised as a means of encouraging good behavior and discouraging naughtiness without the cudgel; or at least as much as possible without it.
It worked before and it's still working for a good number of people. Note the posters in certain threads who admit that without God's command and God's morality they would do any number of nasty things. We must take such people at their word, if you ask me.

Another ideology (or ideologies) is statism, or collectivism, or socialism. And in the case of WW2 Japan, extreme militarism. None of these methods of socialization could possibly be set in motion without the consent of the people being governed (and this is not to say that the stick is never used: it is, as is the mere threat of the stick; but it can easily observed that a bad idea is just as dangerous and has equal if not greater motivating force than a stick or a gun). The best way to get this consent is to convince people that individuality, selfhood, ego, and all those other good things, are actually bad things (or falsehoods).

Convince people today that the really smart folks have figured out that consciousness and selfhood aren't real, that what we think is going on in our own minds is a fiction, an illusion; that we are nothing more than biological, organic machines (some of us "arrogantly-programmed" to boot), and you are well on your way to installing your tyrant of choice. It can happen as long as people choose to let the three wise old bald men sitting at the top of the Ivory Tower in Academia decide what is true and what is not.

Every living human being has a right to philosophy, to big ideas, to reasoning and thinking. I'll close with something Frank Zappa said, "If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to a library."

***
While it is certainly true that consciousness and behavior, and brain-function in general, is far more complex than most people realize, I don't think even the brightest people in neuroscience and neuropsychology have a good enough handle on the brain to be able to justify the hypothesis that the subjective sensation and intuition of conscious autonomy is an illusion.

There have been many studies over the past few decades, most notably by Benjamin Libet, which indicate that the sensation of being conscious of making a choice actually occurs after the brain has already made the decision: that the sense of autonomy is a sort of constantly updated narrative conducted by the brain to afford a feeling of self-control and free agency when in fact there is no control or free agency (freewill). Despite the seemingly overwhelming data giving credence to this idea, I don't buy it. And there are still plenty of well-credited scientists and psychologists who don't buy it either.

I'm with thinkers like David Chalmers ("The Hard Problem") when it comes to consciousness and behavior: I think what causes consciousness in the brain's mechanism is not yet understood, in fact I think we are far from grasping it. This is what keeps the field of A.I. in a sort of limbo: the inability to manufacture anything like sentience or consciousness in a machine. I believe nature's technology is many orders of magnitude more advanced than man's technology, and it's sheer arrogance to think that since we can't fully understand how consciousness, high intelligence, and free agency arises in humans, then the normal (not to mention manifestly common across generations, nations, and cultures) sensation of autonomy and self-generated action, as well as the ego and sense of self and identity, is "an illusion".

***
In prior posts I've given my position in regard to the words "free" and "determined". I'll admit that my position could be all screwy, but bear with me. I don't think 'free' means free from all those causes you [specific poster I was responding to] mentioned, as far as the term freewill is concerned. In the reading I've done I haven't seen anyone suggest that this is so. Free, in the context of freewill, means not forced to one option and one option only, it means having options: real options, not the illusion of options. But any and all options as they pertain to choices and decisions are limited to reality, and by the impositions and boundaries of the natural world. We can't talk out of our bellybuttons, we can't turn into horses at will, we can't do anything magical. It just means that given option X and option Y, we are literally at liberty to choose either one.

'At liberty' doesn't mean that all those causes you [person I was responding to specifically] mentioned are suddenly out of the picture, or don't factor in somehow. It just means that those causes will no doubt contribute to and influence the choices we make, in some cases very powerfully so, so powerfully perhaps that there is virtually no decision process going on. But the bottom line is that, in fact, it is in our power as creatures of volitional consciousness to choose X or Y, and that contingent on this power is the fact that choices have consequences. If it makes it sound any better, freewill is the ability to make truly disastrous decisions.

The way I see it, freewill is the belief that choices are influenced, but not determined - determined connoting that something is fixed conclusively, set, ordained, decided - by their causes; whereas determinism (or at least it as I understand it, and as it pretty much says in most definitions) is the belief that choices (and everything else) are absolutely determined by their causes.

As I see it, free-willers aren't arguing against the fact that the universe acts deterministically, just that consciousness creates a degree of causal agency within it, the wherewithal to move at will as an example, whereas inanimate objects can only move as they are acted upon; and, in the case of human intelligence, freedom of choice and freedom of action, neither of which exempts us from having to obey natural laws and processes but which merely gives us the capacity to control our environment, and those laws and processes, at least to the degree that our interests and desires are served. No magical powers, no carte blanche to do whatever we damn well please, just leeway ["elbow room"].

What it boils down to is that I don't think freewill cancels out determinism. I believe the two co-exist and cooperate a good deal of the time, at least in intelligent human beings. I do believe that higher intelligence means more control, less susceptibility to internal and external influences, more will.l
l
***

N** wrote: The term [free will] is somewhat co-opted by arguments over determinism. In this case it seems to be used mostly to mean "a choice not traceable to a cause".

I would say a "free" choice is one which is influenced by a cause or causes, but not absolutely fixed and determined by a cause or causes. A choice "not traceable to a cause" would be meaningless. For instance, if someone holds out a bunch of playing cards to me and says "pick a card, any card", and if they're evenly spaced and all appear identical, there will be a definite degree of randomness as to which card I select. Let's say for the sake of argument that there either is no real "cause" for picking one card over another, or that we just don't know what it is. We still wouldn't be able to say that my choice was not traceable to a cause. The action of picking a card was dependent on many factors: being at this boring party, sitting on a sofa beside the annoying aspiring magician, lying and saying I enjoyed card tricks, etc.

So, even though all of those prior causes were necessary for me to pick a card at that particular time, when it came time to actually pick a card that particular choice at that particular time was not "determined" by those other "causes", which means that while the fact that I'm now sitting here looking at a group of playing cards was dependent on prior causes, none of those causes have anything to do with which card I actually pick. If I pick card X, that choice is traceable to a set of causes; if I pick card Y, that choice is traceable to the same set of causes, and so on.

N wrote: If we can prove that all of our choices derive from an indentifiable causal chain, then we do not have free will.

That sounds like 20-20 hindsight to me. The reverse would be true: if we could predict a causal chain going a fair ways into the future and get good results, that might help to cast doubt on free will; but humans, completely unaware that they are being observed or that they are involved in an experiment, must be present in such a chain or it wouldn't indicate anything except what we already know, which is that the universe runs according to certain fixed laws.

***

 

[Marvin Edwards]

The illusion of self refers to the impillusion that the self, which the brain shapes, forms, generates, is actually running the show. The brain is the sole agent of perception, thought and response acting through the medium of conscious mind and self identity, a mental map of one's place in the world.

Yes. The self is how the brain experiences itself. The brain experiences itself exercising control over the behavior of the body. It uses special functional areas to provide conscious awareness, other areas to store memories, other areas to process visual and auditory data, other areas to perform other tasks.

Doesn't 'exercising control' imply some degree of separation between the controller and the controlled? The brain regulates body functions and responds to its inputs. Not as a single entity but a collection of structures with functions of their own. Sometimes causing conflicting messages and overrides, the desire to eat, the desire to slim down and the conflict that results from opposing drives because there is no single undivided controller..

The self is a function of the brain. There is no dualism. However, within the issues that the self/brain must deal with, there are multiple desires, sometimes conflicting, which the self/brain resolves through the choosing process. The self/body will either eat or not eat. It cannot do both. So, the self/brain is controlling what the self/body will do by choosing what it will do. In the end, there is no dualism.

 

[DBT]

Doesn't 'exercising control' imply some degree of separation between the controller and the controlled? The brain regulates body functions and responds to its inputs. Not as a single entity but a collection of structures with functions of their own. Sometimes causing conflicting messages and overrides, the desire to eat, the desire to slim down and the conflict that results from opposing drives because there is no single undivided controller..

The self is a function of the brain. There is no dualism. However, within the issues that the self/brain must deal with, there are multiple desires, sometimes conflicting, which the self/brain resolves through the choosing process. The self/body will either eat or not eat. It cannot do both. So, the self/brain is controlling what the self/body will do by choosing what it will do. In the end, there is no dualism.

There are issues with both identity and control. Conscious experience/self-awareness (generated by the brain) being the brain's 'map' of the world and self - a kind of interface or avatar - having no awareness or access of the underlying processes that generate conscious mind, gives conscious mind the impression that it - I, myself, me - is the Captain of the brain, the Head Executive, the controller (my brain, my thoughts, my feelings) when in fact the brain and the brain alone is the agent.

To say the self is all these things is true, yet ignores the disconnect between conscious mind and the unconscious mechanisms that run the show.

Control is an issue in determinism because 'control' implies that an alternative is possible rather than apparent. Apparent alternatives exist for other people, each their own. Determinism, as we understand it, doesn't allow anyone an alternative in any given instance. You are not free to do something else, something other than is determined.....

 

[fromderinside]

Yes there is a significant advantage conveyed by integrating hearing, feeling, detecting and lung and heart processing activity, articulations, motor movement initiations, sensed shapes and motions, chemical releases and detections, in near real time. I think I've done a pretty good job of pointing to things that validate there are available physical traces, complexity, and integration of nervous system to being these processes together systematically.

One needn't attribute something, self, not connected to physicalist basis of behavior as emergent.

No. It just is part and parcel of what the brain and body of a being does. And I predict it's engine is just as physical as is subvoclization of something being said that is heard.

Please note the difference between what I wrote and what you labeled. Mine include sources actually used by the person yours is unattached to any material basis for being. It's just a big glorious word, without substance, used to encompass the activities I wrote.

I've made m point?

Naturally.

 

[Marvin Edwards]

Yes there is a significant advantage conveyed by integrating hearing, feeling, detecting and lung and heart processing activity, articulations, motor movement initiations, sensed shapes and motions, chemical releases and detections, in near real time. I think I've done a pretty good job of pointing to things that validate there are available physical traces, complexity, and integration of nervous system to being these processes together systematically.

One needn't attribute something, self, not connected to physicalist basis of behavior as emergent.

No. It just is part and parcel of what the brain and body of a being does. And I predict it's engine is just as physical as is subvoclization of something being said that is heard.

Please note the difference between what I wrote and what you labeled. Mine include sources actually used by the person yours is unattached to any material basis for being. It's just a big glorious word, without substance, used to encompass the activities I wrote.

I've made m point?

Naturally.

We all know what we mean by our "selves". I want other "selves" to wear a mask and get vaccinated. Neuroscience is free to thoroughly research and explain in detail how our mental selves are produced by physical brain processes. This does not make the "self" disappear. It only explains the "self" in scientific detail. And there is no need to embrace any sort of dualism (well, aside from the two hemispheres).

I call it the "reductionist fallacy", where we think that, having explained something, we have somehow magically explained it away.

 

[WAB]

Yes there is a significant advantage conveyed by integrating hearing, feeling, detecting and lung and heart processing activity, articulations, motor movement initiations, sensed shapes and motions, chemical releases and detections, in near real time. I think I've done a pretty good job of pointing to things that validate there are available physical traces, complexity, and integration of nervous system to being these processes together systematically.

One needn't attribute something, self, not connected to physicalist basis of behavior as emergent.

No. It just is part and parcel of what the brain and body of a being does. And I predict it's engine is just as physical as is subvoclization of something being said that is heard.

Please note the difference between what I wrote and what you labeled. Mine include sources actually used by the person yours is unattached to any material basis for being. It's just a big glorious word, without substance, used to encompass the activities I wrote.

I've made m point?

Naturally.

We all know what we mean by our "selves". I want other "selves" to wear a mask and get vaccinated. Neuroscience is free to thoroughly research and explain in detail how our mental selves are produced by physical brain processes. This does not make the "self" disappear. It only explains the "self" in scientific detail. And there is no need to embrace any sort of dualism (well, aside from the two hemispheres).

I call it the "reductionist fallacy", where we think that, having explained something, we have somehow magically explained it away.

It's all yours, Marvin. You will not convince FDI that there is any reason at all not try and make words like "self" disappear.

Note: He does not just want to make it disappear from the lexicon. He thinks it's fine for us dummies, the "Great Unwashed" herd who do not belong in sophisticated discussions. He wants it to disappear from any serious research, in any field, particularly in psychiatry and neuroscience.

He reduces everything in human nature and biology to "Twitches and squirts". I once argued with him intensely because he believes that the individual (another word scientism doesn't care for) does NOT understand their OWN pain as well as a person in a lab coat doing research on them. He does NOT think their "reportage", or their description of what they themselves are literally feeling, somaticallly, not just emotionally or mentally, is "reliable" and can be tossed out. Only the researchers' data matters, NOT the subject/patient's expression of their pain.

Ask him (or DBT) about the ethics and/or morality of Dr. Jose Delgado, a deceased neuroscientist famous for his research and experimentation into the brain. Hell of a nice guy, with moral qualms - at first, or at least ostensibly. But in the 1970's he gave a speech and his notoriously ethically bankrupt statements about the future of neuroscience, and, most importantly, its application to the betterment of society, are on the internet if you should want to look him up. His books, or at least one of them, caused a great deal of controversy, but it has since been swept away.