Free Will And Free Choice

[fromderinside]

Determined is not forced it is inevitable. Forced implies something very different from this then that.

 

[fromderinside]

Great. You disagree and will willfully show me why. You care because you are in control and that is what you do, care about stuff.

There is meaning in any response not heard, seen, felt, smelled, tasted before, or otherwise sensed before.

If the response is forced, a reflex as opposed to something freely made based on ideas in the mind, it has no more meaning than a leg kicking when the patellar tendon is struck.

If you are forced to believe you have no free will what is the meaning in you saying you don't have it?

Could you not be forced to say you do have free will?

If a response is forced and not the product of a free mind it has no meaning.

If a response is forced it needn't be determined.

Consider someone who is hungry. One reason to be hungry is because one's blood sugar is low. One may be hungry based on other signals of metabolic need. One may be hungry because one is diabetic. When many causes can lead to the same action or feeling how can one say hunger or satiation are forced. Hunger does not follow from just one signal. Yet the pairing of a cause and an effect pairing is an instance of determination.

When one weighs the costs and benefits of acting on signals, or mechanisms within one nominally lead to a particular action or feeling one is not forced. A result that one responds to such with activity leading to sating is not forced. It can be deferred, rejected based on other factors. Such are normal in humans and most organisms.

One can learn to ignore a patellar tap because one has mechanisms permitting the individual to learn and control such reactions. There are already mechanisms one has that permit 'other than' actions. This is not free will it is system options design. Mostly one doesn't think about, even become conscious of, such processes yet they take place all the time.

Reaction is almost never forced. My answer is not freely made. My answer is based upon years of experience, study, experiment, and consequences.

 

[untermensche]

Great. You disagree and will willfully show me why. You care because you are in control and that is what you do, care about stuff.

There is meaning in any response not heard, seen, felt, smelled, tasted before, or otherwise sensed before.

If the response is forced, a reflex as opposed to something freely made based on ideas in the mind, it has no more meaning than a leg kicking when the patellar tendon is struck.

If you are forced to believe you have no free will what is the meaning in you saying you don't have it?

Could you not be forced to say you do have free will?

If a response is forced and not the product of a free mind it has no meaning.

If a response is forced it needn't be determined.

If the brain has decided to move the finger before the mind moves the finger that implies the decision of the mind was not only forced but determined and the mind made no decision.

If the mind makes any decision it must have the freedom to make it.

Consider someone who is hungry. One reason to be hungry is because one's blood sugar is low. One may be hungry based on other signals of metabolic need. One may be hungry because one is diabetic. When many causes can lead to the same action or feeling how can one say hunger or satiation are forced. Hunger does not follow from just one signal. Yet the pairing of a cause and an effect pairing is an instance of determination.

The mind doesn't decide to experience hunger. The mind doesn't decide to experience the color blue. It doesn't decide to have a sex drive.

It decides to order a pizza.

In the case of anorexia the mind decides to ignore the experience of hunger.

When one weighs the costs and benefits of acting on signals, or mechanisms within one nominally lead to a particular action or feeling one is not forced. A result that one responds to such with activity leading to sating is not forced. It can be deferred, rejected based on other factors. Such are normal in humans and most organisms.

I agree, many things are not forced in the real world.

I am not forced to order a pizza. I am free to order whatever I decide.

I am not forced to paint my house blue.

I am not forced to marry Karen and not Jane.

Free will exists.

One can learn to ignore a patellar tap because one has mechanisms permitting the individual to learn and control such reactions.

You can't ignore a patellar reflex.

Reaction is almost never forced.

Totally agree. Freely made.

My answer is not freely made. My answer is based upon years of experience, study, experiment, and consequences.

Does not follow.

Making decisions based on experience does not make them not free.

They are made using the sum total of all the things you have freely decided are true.

 

[DBT]

I ignore unfounded declarations....in this instance, yours.

Correction: You can't deal with ideas.

How do you know you have truth?

You have no clue what the mind is objectively and are making claims about what it can do.

It is like saying you know what is happening in some other dimension.

Silly nonsense.

That's a perfect summary of your own position and your own claims.

I'm still waiting for you to answer the question: how, in your opinion, does mind achieve autonomy from the brain?

Take your time. Work on it and report back.

 

[fromderinside]

If a response is forced it needn't be determined.

If the brain has decided to move the finger before the mind moves the finger that implies the decision of the mind was not only forced but determined and the mind made no decision.

You make my point. The brain works without need for the mind, consciousness, nor experience.

We insert those terms to give meaning to God and creation.

Way To go.

Checkmate!

 

[untermensche]

I ignore unfounded declarations....in this instance, yours.

Correction: You can't deal with ideas.

How do you know you have truth?

You have no clue what the mind is objectively and are making claims about what it can do.

It is like saying you know what is happening in some other dimension.

Silly nonsense.

That's a perfect summary of your own position and your own claims.

I'm still waiting for you to answer the question: how, in your opinion, does mind achieve autonomy from the brain?

Take your time. Work on it and report back.

I have experience and logic on my side. You have nothing. You refuse to look at the only evidence of mind you have. Your own mind.

You seem to think I must explain dark energy to know it is there.

I do not need to explain mind autonomy to know it is there.

You need to explain how a meaningful set of beliefs could exist without mind autonomy.

Throughout a lifetime a mind is accepting ideas, holding some, and rejecting some and accepting others.

The ideas you believe are a reflection of the freedom of your mind to accept and reject ideas.

Did you freely choose to believe what you believe or are you somehow forced to believe it?

If you think truth can come from science were you forced to believe that? Some people don't. Were they forced to not believe it?

 

[untermensche]

If a response is forced it needn't be determined.

If the brain has decided to move the finger before the mind moves the finger that implies the decision of the mind was not only forced but determined and the mind made no decision.

You make my point. The brain works without need for the mind, consciousness, nor experience.

We insert those terms to give meaning to God and creation.

Way To go.

Checkmate!

I said "IF".

I don't believe for a second the stories invented to explain activity that appears without any knowledge as to why it arose.

The mind is preparing to move is my story. And the mind can shut it down any time it chooses. The mind can refuse to move. At any time.

The brain is just a slave that does as it is told.

A joystick that moves the arm when the mind gives the final command.

These mental commands are the interesting part of brain activity.

And nobody knows where they are.

And some say they don't exist because we have not found them yet. But they have no way to explain any motivation without them.

They ask the SUBJECTS, they ask minds: "When did YOU give the command?"

And sure enough we see a correlation of brain activity to the time the command is given.

Evidence the mind is preparing to move then giving the command.

A delay would not be unexpected in the process of first preparing to move then giving the command to move even if a delay was found.

 

[fromderinside]

The problem with what you write.

A joystick that moves the arm when the mind program gives gives the final command.

'Start' 'Do' and 'go to' are program statements.

 

[untermensche]

The program was something that evolved.

The program creates a "mind". It has no understanding of what exists in that mind nor does it control the actions of that mind.

The program does not understand ideas.

Only minds understand ideas.

Tossing away an idea because you do not find truth in it is an act of the mind.

An act no evolved program understands.

We have minds that make decisions and can act on them because that is so much better for survival than "programs".

A program can't change based on environmental conditions. It can only change if a mutation occurs.

A mind can change then change again. Then change again.... and so on......

 

[DBT]

That's a perfect summary of your own position and your own claims.

I'm still waiting for you to answer the question: how, in your opinion, does mind achieve autonomy from the brain?

Take your time. Work on it and report back.

I have experience and logic on my side. You have nothing. You refuse to look at the only evidence of mind you have. Your own mind.

You seem to think I must explain dark energy to know it is there.

I do not need to explain mind autonomy to know it is there.

You need to explain how a meaningful set of beliefs could exist without mind autonomy.

Throughout a lifetime a mind is accepting ideas, holding some, and rejecting some and accepting others.

The ideas you believe are a reflection of the freedom of your mind to accept and reject ideas.

Did you freely choose to believe what you believe or are you somehow forced to believe it?

If you think truth can come from science were you forced to believe that? Some people don't. Were they forced to not believe it?

You base your claims on your subjective experience of agency......conveniently ignoring the fact of loss of a agency whenever problems arise in the brain....which is the actual agent of your sense of agency, at which point the illusion of your autonomous mind notion is exposed for what it is.

You make baseless claims of autonomy of mind that you can't describe or support with evidence, only make declarations.

 

[fromderinside]

We have minds that make decisions and can act on them because that is so much better for survival than "programs".

Among what evolves are brain programs as well as brain capabilities to process information. As I mentioned in Color Thread the brain is a probabilistic outcome processing system. That is the brain has developed a capacity for selecting the most likely interpretation of information on hand.

That it fails to reflect reality at every turn is because in part there are limits to which reality can be parsed from information available to the brain. That may arise from uniqueness of the information arriving or in the combination of information to be reported as percept or observation. Programs have limitations which means there are limits to which the brain does report percepts.

We call these illusion or misrepresentation. Such serve as a basis for finding new processing rules which I outlined in the color thread.

 

[untermensche]

We have minds that make decisions and can act on them because that is so much better for survival than "programs".

Among what evolves are brain programs as well as brain capabilities to process information. As I mentioned in Color Thread the brain is a probabilistic outcome processing system. That is the brain has developed a capacity for selecting the most likely interpretation of information on hand.

That it fails to reflect reality at every turn is because in part there are limits to which reality can be parsed from information available to the brain. That may arise from uniqueness of the information arriving or in the combination of information to be reported as percept or observation. Programs have limitations which means there are limits to which the brain does report percepts.

We call these illusion or misrepresentation. Such serve as a basis for finding new processing rules which I outlined in the color thread.

You cannot demonstrate that the brain knows what the mind knows.

The mind knows about the housing market and when is a good time to buy.

The brain creates the experience of the house and stores memories.

The brain can in no way assist in the decision.

It can create emotion but the mind can deal with emotion as it wills.

With practice.

If you never stop and control your temper you will never learn how to do it.

 

[fromderinside]

The mind is a man invented construct representing ones beliefs about thought and feelings, a personification of what the brain produces. No thought attributed to mind is other than a product of brain activities and functions, reified by such as sub vocalizations, visions, and feelings produced by the brain through stimulation of speech, vision, touch, olfaction, kinesthetic, and emotive processes of the 'present'.

We account for our ability to experience these manifestations as that of a mind apart form the machines doing the work. We do this as a convenience omitting the effort required to provide every aspect of what the brain is performing every moment we live. Be assured mind, experience, and self are placeholders for aspects of brain processing we don't fully understand. They don't actually exist except as result of belief, in part, as excuse to consider ourselves as unique supernatural and exceptional disposition in each of us as beings.

Philosophy of this sort died at the moment Galileo dropped balls from the tower of Pisa. Most don't admit to that yet, but from that moment on evidence and experiment replaced rationality and reason as the basis for understanding and knowledge.

Sine that time we've developed working models based on evidence and experiment of the physical world that permitted us to climb out of the plow and garden age an into the industrial and information ages. Yet people persist in translating backwards to proposition and argument what is best explained by material understanding of the nature of the world.

More often than not, those of us who are foraging forward must go back and pull the uninformed forward by brute force of material evidence. this discussion is among those.

What we are talking about are what gives substance to these re-enactments, brain processes and functions.

When its pointed out that we no longer hold that man was created by a God. We are evolved through a process called natural selection. Yet the ignorant ask how life came to be. They completely ignore our knowledge of physics and chemistry and material historical evidence supporting the biology of evolution. They grasp hard at any belief suited to their position to reify their unique 'miracle' beliefs transmitted by ancients who hold no understanding of how the material world functions. Instead they depend on handed down tales of this and that.

Look everybody understands the importance of our oral heritage. But the time has come for us to move beyond belief and into the more perilous world where lack of understanding is the enemy that needs overcoming through pursuit of experimental manipulation of knowns to discover unknowns.

Nay saying isn't working. Time to get on with weeding out cherished beliefs in favor of demonstrated findings and integrations.

 

[WAB]

Be assured mind, experience, and self are placeholders for aspects of brain processing we don't fully understand. - FDI

Well said!

 

[DBT]

Not fully understanding doesn't mean that nothing is understood. We understand that Consciousess is made up of a collection of elements, vision, smell, touch, taste, hearing, thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc, and that these key elements of conscious mind are related to sense organs, brain regions and brain information processing activity.

 

[WAB]

Not fully understanding doesn't mean that nothing is understood. We understand that Consciousess is made up of a collection of elements, vision, smell, touch, taste, hearing, thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc, and that these key elements of conscious mind are related to sense organs, brain regions and brain information processing activity.

Si, I agree with you.

But Chalmers, et al, are sometimes compelling with their ideas. Not saying I agree with them, but it's interesting.

https://www.scienceandnonduality.co... most mysterious phenomenon in the universe.”

 

[DBT]

Yes, ideas, beliefs and philosophies: quantum consciousness and mind created reality.

 

[untermensche]

Be assured mind, experience, and self are placeholders for aspects of brain processing we don't fully understand. - FDI

Well said!

You understand your mind. You fully understand that when you experience a red apple there is no doubt you are experiencing a red apple.

The mind is that which both experiences the apple and knows it is experiencing it.

Your mind is not something waiting for science to explain it.

And any explanation has to deal with the actual phenomena of mind.

Not ignorantly deny such a thing exists.

 

[untermensche]

The mind is a man invented construct representing ones beliefs about thought and feelings, a personification of what the brain produces.

If there is a belief there must be something that has the belief.

That is the mind.

And a belief can be the product of child abuse and indoctrination, like a delusional religious belief, and therefore not be a freely acquired belief, but many beliefs are freely chosen and accepted. No "program" forces the acceptance. The ideas themselves drive the decision to accept or reject.

If I can accept or reject an idea based on the idea itself that is the very definition of freedom. It is absolute freedom. Nothing but the idea itself is driving the decision.

The mind is that thing in the Libet experiment that guesses about what time it (the mind) initiates a movement.

It is right there in the middle of the experiment.

The crucial element making guesses about the timing of it's "urges".

The mind is front and center in these experiments.

Yet you don't see it.

Because all you have is prejudice, no understanding.

You ARE a mind that has freely chosen to say it does not exist.

 

[untermensche]

Not fully understanding doesn't mean that nothing is understood. We understand that Consciousess is made up of a collection of elements, vision, smell, touch, taste, hearing, thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc, and that these key elements of conscious mind are related to sense organs, brain regions and brain information processing activity.

We know by having experiences we can experience sights and sounds and smells and thoughts and pain and grief and happiness and hatred and revulsion.....

We know none of this from neuroscience and neuroscience has no clue how we have any of it or what we are that has these experiences.

We are not a brain.

We are not electricity.

We are not Dopamine.

We are the center of experience and the center of the will. That thing that experiences and wills.