Free Will 66 Revisited

[untermensche]

If your house cat escapes and breeds and the kittens do not have human exposure they will not be house cats.

Ah, but they remain the same species. You have a problem with your argument, perhaps?

It is not an argument.

It is a statement.

The species has two phenotypes.

The human raised phenotype and the non-human raised phenotype.

 

[DBT]

Ah, but they remain the same species. You have a problem with your argument, perhaps?

It is not an argument.

It is a statement.

The species has two phenotypes.

The human raised phenotype and the non-human raised phenotype.

Interaction with environment as feral doesn't change the genotype of a cat from a litter of domestic cats, for example. Nor is the influence or effects of environment on biology being questioned....I said as much in my original remark. All forms of input acts upon the system.

 

[Speakpigeon]

To continue on the subject, the distinction between subjective and objective is, as I see it, epistemological. To be subjectively conscious is to know something. To be objectively conscious is to believe something.
Subjective consciousness is knowledge of what we usually identify as qualia: colours, pain, impressions.
Objective consciousness are all impressions you believe to be something you think of as being the real physical world, broadly understood as whatever is beyond what you take to be your subjective self.

It’s a fact of my psychology and probably that of other people that I cannot deny that what we call the physical world appears as a coherent whole I can’t fault. Yet, I don’t think I know it in any way, and certainly not in the way that I know my subjective impressions as such (I know blue as blue).

Objective consciousness seems to provide a coherent view of something we call the physical world. Coherent to each of us individually and coherent across different people’s perspective. That in itself seems a good reason to believe it really exists but that doesn’t amount to knowledge that it exists at all. One aspect of that is that we all seem to broadly agree as to what this physical world is.

Since we can’t seem to be able to access other people’s subjective consciousness, we seem stuck into discussing mainly the physical world. Further, we seem to have learned a more profound understanding of the physical world along the centuries, including and largely by apparently cooperating around this objective perspective.
Whereas it seems all I can do with my subjective experience is to have it. Any apparent understanding of it properly belong to objective consciousness, for example whenever I want to relate present impressions to what I take to be memories of past impressions, since past impressions are not subjective. Only my current impression of remembering a past impression is subjective.

Thus, to see "consciousness as somehow a non-physical mind activity that occurs outside the body" is properly an objective claim, i.e. the report of one’s belief in the matter, not actual knowledge. As such, it can only be subject to disagreement among the community of believers.

Still, such objective claims will be assessed as more or less fanciful, so that you will find people agreeing with your claims and other people disagreeing with them. And we’re all reasonably free to choose the people who look the less fanciful!
EB

 

[untermensche]

It is not an argument.

It is a statement.

The species has two phenotypes.

The human raised phenotype and the non-human raised phenotype.

Interaction with environment as feral doesn't change the genotype of a cat from a litter of domestic cats, for example. Nor is the influence or effects of environment on biology being questioned....I said as much in my original remark. All forms of input acts upon the system.

What does that have to do with anything I said?

The human is the interesting factor. Something about the human creates a whole different set of behaviors in unrelated species.

Amazing.

 

[DBT]

Interaction with environment as feral doesn't change the genotype of a cat from a litter of domestic cats, for example. Nor is the influence or effects of environment on biology being questioned....I said as much in my original remark. All forms of input acts upon the system.

What does that have to do with anything I said?

The human is the interesting factor. Something about the human creates a whole different set of behaviors in unrelated species.

Amazing.

It was an example of the role of environment in relation to animal behaviour. The principle applies to all species with a CNS, cats, people, Chimps....it doesn't matter.

 

[untermensche]

What does that have to do with anything I said?

The human is the interesting factor. Something about the human creates a whole different set of behaviors in unrelated species.

Amazing.

It was an example of the role of environment in relation to animal behaviour. The principle applies to all species with a CNS, cats, people, Chimps....it doesn't matter.

Wrong.

It is only interaction with ONE species that results in domestication.

The species directed by ideas.

 

[DBT]

It was an example of the role of environment in relation to animal behaviour. The principle applies to all species with a CNS, cats, people, Chimps....it doesn't matter.

Wrong.

It is only interaction with ONE species that results in domestication.

The species directed by ideas.

You miss the point.....we are a part and parcel of the environment. Or do you think we exist in an alternate dimension?

 

[PyramidHead]

I like your distinction, and I propose that we make a further one: within subjective consciousness, we can talk about what I would call personal existence or selfhood versus its content. Selfhood is, if you like, the immediacy of the first-person perspective. The 'here, mine, now' of phenomenal experience; the sense of being appeared-to by sensations; the locus of subjectivity, even merely on a conceptual level. The content is the history of an individual brain (or brain-like thing) that has the capacity for consciousness. We can speak of these separately without any difficulty: if you had been kidnapped shortly after birth and raised on an island in the south Pacific by pirates, you would have the same selfhood or personal existence, but vastly different content. You would simply be the person who was raised by pirates in the south Pacific. That's the common intuition, anyway. The same whatever-it-is that is experiencing you in your current brain and surroundings (here, mine, now) would be instead experiencing the brain and surroundings of the person who was whisked away as a young child.

However, this leaves the question of what "binds" your subjective selfhood to this particular organism, regardless of its history? The only answer I have encountered that satisfies me is that nothing does. If you believe you would be the same subjective experiencer in the event of your kidnapping as an infant, then you are already conceding that the 'here, mine, now' sensation remains intact despite drastic changes to your content (not just your history, but very likely your entire physiology). Since all of that can change without getting rid of personal existence, why couldn't everything else be different too? What if you were born just as you are, but with different colored eyes? What if you were born the opposite sex? What if "you" were never born at all? The answer that makes most sense is that you (read: your selfhood) would simply be born as someone else. And at this point, it doesn't make sense to call it "your" selfhood anymore, because there's just the one, and it's the same one whenever it is somehow generated by a brain with the right architecture... if I may be objective for just a moment.

The immediate question that gets raised is, why do I only seem to be experiencing THIS brain, if my selfhood/personal existence/subjectivity is the same as everybody else's? Well, there is a thread in Metaphysics about the difference between past, present and future in which I speculate on why that might be. Basically, one way of interpreting time is to think of the universe as a 4-dimensional object where time does not "flow" as we perceive it to. Rather, every moment in time is just like a location in space, and if we could see things from a higher dimensional perspective, it would be clear that the past (and perhaps the future) has a concrete existence. At every point in the past, the conscious inhabitants of that point believed they were in the 'now'. Yet, as you read this, you are unable to summon the sensation of being in that 'now'; you are only able to experience THIS 'now.' But you are not a different person from the one who started reading this sentence, despite that inability. If time does not actually flow, then you ARE 'currently' in the past, as your previous self, experiencing THAT 'now'; it's just a quirk of your brain (or brains generally) that time is perceived as inexorably moving into the future, only experiencing one moment at a time.

I think that personal existence is just like that, only on the scale of brains rather than time-slices. Every conscious inhabitant of a given moment has its own 'here, mine, now' that is by all appearances internal and private, and is unable to summon the sensation of being another conscious being with its own internality. However, if time is no different from space, then this is a familiar problem. In the same sense that past time-slices of you can be said to exist from a higher dimensional perspective, and you exist as those time-slices just as much as you are your present self, the exact same can be said of other individual consciousness-producing brains. In other words, you ARE 'currently' Jeb Bush, Elon Musk, your neighbor's dog, Napoleon Bonaparte, and me, experiencing THOSE 'here, mine, now's; it's just a quirk of brains generally that they can only experience being one person at a time.

The only reason you can't remember being anybody else is because that content is not physically accessible across brains, which can only access their own temporal history--in other words, memories. If multiple brains could be wired together with yours while preserving the unique characteristics of each, it would be plain as day that you had lived all of those lives, experienced everything that those brains had, and there would be no way to sort out which one you experienced 'first' even though they were all going on simultaneously.

To bring this back to the topic of the thread, it becomes clear that neither the subjective experience of existence nor its historical content can be said to possess free will. In a 4-dimensional "block" universe where all experience of duration is illusory, there is no room for robust, responsibility-endowing freedom anyway. But this notion of a singular selfhood raises the possibility that we are all in some sense living one another's lives in succession, experiencing the same events over and over from multiple perspectives, with no variation and no unpredictability. For us, though, it is fresh and new, because our brains have a constantly renewing 'now' and cannot see beyond its horizons.

 

[untermensche]

Wrong.

It is only interaction with ONE species that results in domestication.

The species directed by ideas.

You miss the point.....we are a part and parcel of the environment. Or do you think we exist in an alternate dimension?

It is really a comment on humans.

Humans like the house cat go through a process of domestication and adopt a set of behaviors they could not have without that domestication.

The human mind is constructed through the interaction of a consciousness with the environment.

 

[fromderinside]

What a mess. I told you that carrying marbles in an imaginary container would get you in trouble. Now you have to pick them all up off the floor.

 

[Treedbear]

I like your distinction, and I propose that we make a further one: within subjective consciousness, we can talk about what I would call personal existence or selfhood versus its content. Selfhood is, if you like, the immediacy of the first-person perspective. The 'here, mine, now' of phenomenal experience; the sense of being appeared-to by sensations; the locus of subjectivity, even merely on a conceptual level. The content is the history of an individual brain (or brain-like thing) that has the capacity for consciousness. We can speak of these separately without any difficulty: if you had been kidnapped shortly after birth and raised on an island in the south Pacific by pirates, you would have the same selfhood or personal existence, but vastly different content. You would simply be the person who was raised by pirates in the south Pacific. That's the common intuition, anyway. The same whatever-it-is that is experiencing you in your current brain and surroundings (here, mine, now) would be instead experiencing the brain and surroundings of the person who was whisked away as a young child.

I don't consider the self, or selfhood as you say, the same as subjective consciousness. Consciousness is one component of the self because, I believe, when at times I loose consciousness the self continues to exist. Consciousness is merely a transitory state of being that, I admit, I can't explain and can only superficially describe. Yes, it is very much a matter of 'here, mine, now' but it is nevertheless contingient on 'there, mine, then'. In other words I believe existence is only a rational concept in as far it is contiguous with the past. The only thing that makes the you who experiences the now the same you who was hypothetically kidnapped when an infant is the experiences you had before that event. From then on the two are separate and therefore different. Different selves with separate conscious states. And so I don't see the point of inventing all of your quasi-relationships with every other living thing that ever existed or ever will exist. The paradox is avoided by simply accepting the rationale that existence is contingient on continuity.

...

To bring this back to the topic of the thread, it becomes clear that neither the subjective experience of existence nor its historical content can be said to possess free will. In a 4-dimensional "block" universe where all experience of duration is illusory, there is no room for robust, responsibility-endowing freedom anyway. But this notion of a singular selfhood raises the possibility that we are all in some sense living one another's lives in succession, experiencing the same events over and over from multiple perspectives, with no variation and no unpredictability. For us, though, it is fresh and new, because our brains have a constantly renewing 'now' and cannot see beyond its horizons.

Free will only gets confusing when we look for it in some absolute sense, rather than within a specific context. Freedom of any kind is always defined by its boundaries. Otherwise it's meaningless. When used in that very rational sense it does endow us with responcibilities. I can say that as a determinist because responsibility is how we identify the need for corrective action, rather than vindictive forms of punishment. Determinism allows one to deal with probabilities rather than the illusion of certainty. For instance, a society lacking the ability to administer justice would very probably disintegrate into chaos. But I don't share your view on the existence of spacetime. It provides no mechanism to explain why time flows in one direction only. I see time as progressing in the direction it does because there are simply more possiblities for events - called adjacent possibilites - in that direction than the other. Again, it comes down to what is most probable.

 

[blastula]

People often mix up two very different things, namely, what I call objective consciousness and subjective consciousness.

'Objective consciousness' refers to something we believe exists based on our interpretation of our (assumed) perceptions of the material world. We observe what we think of as other people and infer the cognitive capabilities we assume as necessary to navigate (what we think of as) the world. If there is indeed such a thing, then it must be highly selectable by evolution. But then, the question of its purpose doesn't make sense. It's just a fact of the world and it works, which has to be good enough as a justification for its observed existence.

But there's a second sense of consciousness which is subjective consciousness, often called 'subjective experience', if only to emphasise the distinction with objective consciousness. Subjective consciousness is the brute fact that I am subjectively aware of something. The 'I' here doesn't even refer to me as a person, a human being. Rather, it's the thing that is aware. This species of consciousness can be freely considered independently of any notion of its origin, cause, reason. It's just a brut fact. In my case, and I will guess that of many people, it includes something that the 'I' takes to be its self, its mind, its memories etc. We could speculate why that is, but that question properly belongs to the problem of objective consciousness in the sense that any answer would require going beyond subjective consciousness into the metaphysical realm of some theory of the human mind and of the physical world.

The question of free will does not even make sense in the context of subjective consciousness. And then it only makes sense in the context of objective consciousness if you interpret it away from the usual way it is done. Thus, if free will is defined as just the degree of autonomy of any objectively conscious being that can be regarded as a reasonably well-defined part of reality, then it's really obvious that human beings have free will, just as any ordinary car has it's own impetus relatively to the rest of the universe and each material body has its own weight relative to the Earth. You can try it, it works and it saves time.

Of course, you need to be reasonable. Free will in this sense belongs to the problem of objective consciousness and as such can only be something we believe exists rather than something we know exists.
EB

Interesting, but shouldn't it be Free Will 61 Revisited.

 

[DBT]

You miss the point.....we are a part and parcel of the environment. Or do you think we exist in an alternate dimension?

It is really a comment on humans.

Humans like the house cat go through a process of domestication and adopt a set of behaviors they could not have without that domestication.

The human mind is constructed through the interaction of a consciousness with the environment.

Humans are a part of the world and do not perceive, think, decide or act in isolation. Humans are shaped and formed by conditions in the world, which includes human society.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I like your distinction, and I propose that we make a further one: within subjective consciousness, we can talk about what I would call personal existence or selfhood versus its content. Selfhood is, if you like, the immediacy of the first-person perspective. The 'here, mine, now' of phenomenal experience; the sense of being appeared-to by sensations; the locus of subjectivity, even merely on a conceptual level. The content is the history of an individual brain (or brain-like thing) that has the capacity for consciousness. We can speak of these separately without any difficulty: if you had been kidnapped shortly after birth and raised on an island in the south Pacific by pirates, you would have the same selfhood or personal existence, but vastly different content. You would simply be the person who was raised by pirates in the south Pacific. That's the common intuition, anyway. The same whatever-it-is that is experiencing you in your current brain and surroundings (here, mine, now) would be instead experiencing the brain and surroundings of the person who was whisked away as a young child.

As soon as you try to explain the contents of our subjective experience in terms of some relation across physical time or physical space, or both, then the perspective becomes objective, if only because you need to refer to something physical, (physical time, physical space, matter, energy etc.) to express you idea.

However, that would still be the case without any reference to the physical world. As soon as you try to explain a relation across time or space, the perspective becomes objective, just because you need to explain. Explaining our subjective contents by God is just as objective in nature as explaining it by atoms and energy is.

Still, our subjective experience is indeed experience of some content and even without trying to explain anything of the content it is a fact that we do experience a sense of selfhood as part of this content. This aspect of selfhood is subjective and we know it as such, without any mediation.

Yet, it remains legitimate to try to explain how this content comes about.
For example, we can try to explain this by assuming that beyond our subjective experience there is a physical organism, with a brain, and a capacity for memory and therefore the ability to build a mental representation of what we call the self. However, this explanation remains objectivist in nature, even though it is about some subjective content, i.e. facts of our subjective experience. It is objectivist in nature because it's an explanation and explanations cannot but draw relations across time and space, i.e. beyond the here and now of the subjective space. Subjectivity doesn't do explanations (although we do experience our own explanatory effort subjectively).

So there is a sense in which everything is indeed "within" our subjective experience. That's because, for all we know, we don't have a direct subjective access to physical reality, at least as we think of it. We experience subjective contents that says there is such a physical world but all we can do is believe it's true or not. We won't ever know (at least it seems so as far as we know now). The confusion then comes from the complication that our objective representation of the physical world includes the idea that our subjective experience is in fact somehow caused by the physical world, even if nobody has proved this to be true so far. So, there is this situation where our concepts of the subjective and the objective are somehow nested into one another and we are unable to prove which comes first, hence all these debates about which came first of the hen or the egg.

I would rather think there's a larger 'realm' that could explain both, if only we could have access to it!
Nah, not likely!
EB

 

[untermensche]

It is really a comment on humans.

Humans like the house cat go through a process of domestication and adopt a set of behaviors they could not have without that domestication.

The human mind is constructed through the interaction of a consciousness with the environment.

Humans are a part of the world and do not perceive, think, decide or act in isolation. Humans are shaped and formed by conditions in the world, which includes human society.

Thanks.

The point is they are the only species that can domesticate anything.

Without humans in the picture nothing is domesticated.

There is something unique about humans.

They are something different from all other species.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I like your distinction, and I propose that we make a further one: within subjective consciousness, we can talk about what I would call personal existence or selfhood versus its content. Selfhood is, if you like, the immediacy of the first-person perspective. The 'here, mine, now' of phenomenal experience; the sense of being appeared-to by sensations; the locus of subjectivity, even merely on a conceptual level. The content is the history of an individual brain (or brain-like thing) that has the capacity for consciousness. We can speak of these separately without any difficulty: if you had been kidnapped shortly after birth and raised on an island in the south Pacific by pirates, you would have the same selfhood or personal existence, but vastly different content. You would simply be the person who was raised by pirates in the south Pacific. That's the common intuition, anyway. The same whatever-it-is that is experiencing you in your current brain and surroundings (here, mine, now) would be instead experiencing the brain and surroundings of the person who was whisked away as a young child.

I'm coming back to that because I probably misunderstood a lot of what you said.


So, yes, in fact, I think I agree with your further distinction.

As I see it, this distinction is already properly expressed in the expression "subjective experience", although the terminology may not help very much. Still, it's what we mean that matters here. So subjective experience is the suggestion that there is something (a subject) that is somehow aware, and something else (the experience) that are the contents being experienced, i.e. known without any mediation.

The question of the here, the now, and the mine, seems more difficult to unpack.

As I see it, it's the contents, or parts of the contents, that give the sense of the here, now and mine. So, strictly speaking, the subject is selfless. "Now" only really makes sense in contrast with the past and the future, and both notions come with objective considerations, not subjective ones. Obviously, experience does include contents seemingly about the past, the present and the future, but the experiencing occurs as a now without contrasting with the past or the future, except through the mediation of objective considerations.

Subjective consciousness is therefore somewhat boring as a topic of conversation. All that you can say is that you have it, and then even that is somewhat misleading.

I believe this is essentially because the purpose of language is to exchange, with other people, through necessarily objectivist terms, not to converse privately with our inner self, something we can do best without using words. So, basically, we have no language to discuss subjective consciousness even though we essentially talk about the contents of our subjective experience in objectivist terms (again, this hen and egg problem).

However, this leaves the question of what "binds" your subjective selfhood to this particular organism, regardless of its history? The only answer I have encountered that satisfies me is that nothing does. If you believe you would be the same subjective experiencer in the event of your kidnapping as an infant, then you are already conceding that the 'here, mine, now' sensation remains intact despite drastic changes to your content (not just your history, but very likely your entire physiology). Since all of that can change without getting rid of personal existence, why couldn't everything else be different too? What if you were born just as you are, but with different colored eyes? What if you were born the opposite sex? What if "you" were never born at all? The answer that makes most sense is that you (read: your selfhood) would simply be born as someone else. And at this point, it doesn't make sense to call it "your" selfhood anymore, because there's just the one, and it's the same one whenever it is somehow generated by a brain with the right architecture... if I may be objective for just a moment.

I think we have no way to know so we are free to consider all ideas, if only for the beauty of them.

The immediate question that gets raised is, why do I only seem to be experiencing THIS brain, if my selfhood/personal existence/subjectivity is the same as everybody else's? Well, there is a thread in Metaphysics about the difference between past, present and future in which I speculate on why that might be. Basically, one way of interpreting time is to think of the universe as a 4-dimensional object where time does not "flow" as we perceive it to. Rather, every moment in time is just like a location in space, and if we could see things from a higher dimensional perspective, it would be clear that the past (and perhaps the future) has a concrete existence. At every point in the past, the conscious inhabitants of that point believed they were in the 'now'. Yet, as you read this, you are unable to summon the sensation of being in that 'now'; you are only able to experience THIS 'now.' But you are not a different person from the one who started reading this sentence, despite that inability. If time does not actually flow, then you ARE 'currently' in the past, as your previous self, experiencing THAT 'now'; it's just a quirk of your brain (or brains generally) that time is perceived as inexorably moving into the future, only experiencing one moment at a time.

There is another possible model, i.e. space.

The "subject" might be the local consciousness, as opposed to the entire field of consciousness. Consciousness as a field would experience a particular brain locally, as a local property of the consciousness field. Each brain would produce the local contents experienced by consciousness. There might be nothing to experience outside brains or, if there is something, then our brains would be unable to provide us with this experience, and if so, then this something outside brains would be experienced but there would still be no local brain to talk about it. The fundamental locality of physical organisation would impose a local perspective to consciousness, even if it covered in fact the entire universe, or even more.

Although that's just one possible model.
EB

 

[Treedbear]

...
I think we have no way to know so we are free to consider all ideas, if only for the beauty of them.
...

Ahhh. That je ne sais quoi! I forgot about the je ne sais quoi.

...
I would rather think there's a larger 'realm' that could explain both, if only we could have access to it!
Nah, not likely!
EB

Noooo SP! Noooooo! It's a trap!

 

[Speakpigeon]

Interesting, but shouldn't it be Free Will 61 Revisited.

Yeah, that's the thing, exactly. Thanks.
Funny that the one word 'revisited' should do it, at least for you.
It was definitely a long time ago and a good time for music.
And now I'm getting all emotional. Ah!

Highway 61
The road later gave its name to Minnesota native Bob Dylan's album Highway 61 Revisited, and in the song of the same name, which imagines all sorts of fantastical events (including World War III) occurring alongside it.

Released August 30, 1965...
EB

 

[DBT]

Humans are a part of the world and do not perceive, think, decide or act in isolation. Humans are shaped and formed by conditions in the world, which includes human society.

Thanks.

The point is they are the only species that can domesticate anything.

Without humans in the picture nothing is domesticated.

There is something unique about humans.

They are something different from all other species.

All species are different, to state the obvious. Each and every member of the same species is slightly different to other members of the same species because of its own unique experiences and genetic diversity.

 

[bilby]

People often mix up two very different things, namely, what I call objective consciousness and subjective consciousness.

'Objective consciousness' refers to something we believe exists based on our interpretation of our (assumed) perceptions of the material world. We observe what we think of as other people and infer the cognitive capabilities we assume as necessary to navigate (what we think of as) the world. If there is indeed such a thing, then it must be highly selectable by evolution. But then, the question of its purpose doesn't make sense. It's just a fact of the world and it works, which has to be good enough as a justification for its observed existence.

But there's a second sense of consciousness which is subjective consciousness, often called 'subjective experience', if only to emphasise the distinction with objective consciousness. Subjective consciousness is the brute fact that I am subjectively aware of something. The 'I' here doesn't even refer to me as a person, a human being. Rather, it's the thing that is aware. This species of consciousness can be freely considered independently of any notion of its origin, cause, reason. It's just a brut fact. In my case, and I will guess that of many people, it includes something that the 'I' takes to be its self, its mind, its memories etc. We could speculate why that is, but that question properly belongs to the problem of objective consciousness in the sense that any answer would require going beyond subjective consciousness into the metaphysical realm of some theory of the human mind and of the physical world.

The question of free will does not even make sense in the context of subjective consciousness. And then it only makes sense in the context of objective consciousness if you interpret it away from the usual way it is done. Thus, if free will is defined as just the degree of autonomy of any objectively conscious being that can be regarded as a reasonably well-defined part of reality, then it's really obvious that human beings have free will, just as any ordinary car has it's own impetus relatively to the rest of the universe and each material body has its own weight relative to the Earth. You can try it, it works and it saves time.

Of course, you need to be reasonable. Free will in this sense belongs to the problem of objective consciousness and as such can only be something we believe exists rather than something we know exists.
EB

Interesting, but shouldn't it be Free Will 61 Revisited.

Yeah, Free Will 66 is where you get your kicks.