Is Human Nature Determined by Our Material Conditions?

[ryan]

The question was not about your constituent parts but regulative control, the ability to have chosen otherwise within the conditions you were in. But as it appears, the ability to consciously choose does not extend to the level of cellular activity yet alone molecular, atomic or subatomic scales.

A neuron is a cell, so are you saying that the ability to choose does not extend to neural activity. And the theory is that the neurons may be entangled, not just molecules.

You're committing a linguistic fallacy here and you must be well aware of it at this point. A neuron is a cell, yes, and the ability to consciously choose does not extend to neurons. Whether it extends to neural activity (the coordinated behavior of billions of neurons!) is another concept entirely (and the answer is also no).

If not neural activity, then what do you think is responsible for decision making? There is SO MUCH good information I can link claiming otherwise. Are you sure you meant what you said?

 

[DBT]

This issue is related to the conscious activity of networks of cells/the brain, and conscious regulative control....whether conscious activity has the ability or autonomy to alter the course of quantum activity, or even the information condition of cells and networks in order to interupt or alter normal causality in favour of will, thereby qualifying as freewill, the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions by exercising willful regulative control.

Which does not appear to be the way our brain functions, or how the world works.

Just because things don't appear one way to you doesn't mean that they aren't that way.

It's not that it appears that way to me, but that this is the way the brain appears to work according to the evidence, case studies, pathologies, memory loss, etc, conditions which effect the brain in specific ways, and in turn, the ability to think, decide and act.

 

[ryan]

This issue is related to the conscious activity of networks of cells/the brain, and conscious regulative control....whether conscious activity has the ability or autonomy to alter the course of quantum activity, or even the information condition of cells and networks in order to interupt or alter normal causality in favour of will, thereby qualifying as freewill, the ability to have done otherwise under the same conditions by exercising willful regulative control.

Which does not appear to be the way our brain functions, or how the world works.

Just because things don't appear one way to you doesn't mean that they aren't that way.

It's not that it appears that way to me, but that this is the way the brain appears to work according to the evidence, case studies, pathologies, memory loss, etc, conditions which effect the brain in specific ways, and in turn, the ability to think, decide and act.

You are not considering new theoretical models. You are just claiming that they are false by not letting them have a chance.

 

[DBT]

It's not that it appears that way to me, but that this is the way the brain appears to work according to the evidence, case studies, pathologies, memory loss, etc, conditions which effect the brain in specific ways, and in turn, the ability to think, decide and act.

You are not considering new theoretical models. You are just claiming that they are false by not letting them have a chance.

Which new theoretical model do you favour? Why not post a summary?

 

[fromderinside]

The degree of separation between macro and quantum behavior probably explains failure of continuous function being featured in individual incidents of decay at the quantum level. So why should one expect quantum behavior to be featured in any macro behavior? Macro behavior pretty reliably follows deterministic description.

Mathew Fisher explains this in the link that I keep posting https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2018/018840/are-we-quantum-computers

In the article there's an explanation why quantum effects are washed out:

In the quantum computers we are trying to build, these effects are generated and maintained in highly controlled and isolated environments and at low temperatures. So the warm, wet brain is not considered a conducive environment to exhibit quantum effects as they should be easily “washed out” by the thermal motion of atoms and molecules.

So it makes little sense in pursuing the topic further.

Of course he ignores everything he's just said and provides a following hand wave in the article ...

Extremely well-isolated nuclear spins can store — and perhaps process — quantum information on human time scales of hours or longer,” he said. Fisher posits that phosphorus atoms — one of the most abundant elements in the body — have the requisite nuclear spin that could serve as a biochemical qubit

... upon you can hang your wishful thinking all the time not addressing why stable will overcome thermal environment of brain which still having no evidence of macro overcoming the determination enforced by the probabilities required for macro behavior.

Damn. That determined (averaged over many incidents) requirement for macro behavior is such a bitch, especially since phosphorus in the brain is a molecule subject to that washing out effect. Even if spin could be maintained it can't be communicated. Islands in the storm.

 

[ryan]

It's not that it appears that way to me, but that this is the way the brain appears to work according to the evidence, case studies, pathologies, memory loss, etc, conditions which effect the brain in specific ways, and in turn, the ability to think, decide and act.

You are not considering new theoretical models. You are just claiming that they are false by not letting them have a chance.

Which new theoretical model do you favour? Why not post a summary?

I just did. Then there is the Penrose and Hameroff paper. It actually supports free will using quantum mechanics.

 

[ryan]

Extremely well-isolated nuclear spins can store — and perhaps process — quantum information on human time scales of hours or longer,” he said. Fisher posits that phosphorus atoms — one of the most abundant elements in the body — have the requisite nuclear spin that could serve as a biochemical qubit

... upon you can hang your wishful thinking all the time not addressing why stable will overcome thermal environment of brain which still having no evidence of macro overcoming the determination enforced by the probabilities required for macro behavior.

You would save his team time and the university a lot of money by telling them what you know.

 

[fromderinside]

I don't need to do that. Their obvious goal is to advance toward production of a quantum computer not to explain the brain.

Just as it wasn't my goal to explain perception of moving sounds through our ability to exploit doppler as a possible mechanism underlying motion discrimination. It just worked as a good route to a publishable paper which actually did advance knowledge. Nor was my goal to determine learning engarm using time of arrival techniques mapping upward and downward communication within various sensory and corresponding motor tracts about determining how ascending and descending processes lead to a paradigm shift to neural tuning being the primary basis underlying learning.


All I'm trying to say is that scientists will use every path available to them to find funding for their areas of research, the more sustainable the better.

 

[ryan]

I don't need to do that. Their obvious goal is to advance toward production of a quantum computer not to explain the brain.

Just as it wasn't my goal to explain perception of moving sounds through our ability to exploit doppler as a possible mechanism underlying motion discrimination. It just worked as a good route to a publishable paper which actually did advance knowledge. Nor was my goal to determine learning engarm using time of arrival techniques mapping upward and downward communication within various sensory and corresponding motor tracts about determining how ascending and descending processes lead to a paradigm shift to neural tuning being the primary basis underlying learning.


All I'm trying to say is that scientists will use every path available to them to find funding for their areas of research, the more sustainable the better.

Wow! This is shocking B.S. even for the internet.

 

[DBT]

Which new theoretical model do you favour? Why not post a summary?

I just did. Then there is the Penrose and Hameroff paper. It actually supports free will using quantum mechanics.

I don't see where or why or in what way these model actually support the idea of free will given the flaws that have already been pointed out. You need to provide something more specific than just posting links and mentioning this or that article.

 

[fromderinside]

Really? Maybe this will help. Back in a 1977 dissertation at FSU a student found movement of sound was examined using pink noise from a single source in an anechoic chamber in a study where device movement was masked. It was found that observers used two cues to determine whether sound, Traveling under 8 degrees per second, was moving in a forced choice discrimination experiment. Those cues were pinna effects for vertical movement and frequency differences for lateral movement. Both cues were the result of detecting relative change in apparent frequency IAC time-distance (doppler effect).

In the other study conducted by the same student as a postdoc while at CalTech in 1980 recorded single and multiple cell response in rats to sound, visual, and somatosensory stimuli at various levels of hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain along appropriate sensory and motor tracts. Expectation was that at some point in these processing channels a new signal would be detected that predicted altered behavior as the rat performed in a multiple choice lever pressing experiment.

Instead experimenters found electrical activity for ascending and descending was changing with repetitions at every level in every tract IAC information gains related to number of trials. IOW instead of a place for learning the neural substrate was generating differential activity IAC with practice up and down the sensory motor tracts. This fits with other studies which show similar neural practice and repetition effects for a variety of activities.

Really just firmer confirmations of the universality of neural optimistic evolution. Using existing substrates within and across modalities to achieve similar neural solutions appropriate to physical dimensions and the existence of neural plasticity underlying behavior.

Also, if you don't think successful researchers are survivors you are naive.

If I were an actual BSer I would have claimed to be the scientist that destroyed multidimensional pilot workload estimating as appropriate for most theoretical models of workload published in Edwards AF publication in 1982, a primary designer of primary flight displays for MD-11 in 1989, proved the value of embedding measurements into images and video in support of distance R&M in 1997, Developed on the fly machine vision validation for C-17 in fuselage assembly in 1999, and retired here to happy rainforest in 2002.

I actually did all those things but wasn't really given much credit for them except by my bride for finding our rainforest on the lake with an ocean view.

 

[ryan]

Which new theoretical model do you favour? Why not post a summary?

I just did. Then there is the Penrose and Hameroff paper. It actually supports free will using quantum mechanics.

I don't see where or why or in what way these model actually support the idea of free will given the flaws that have already been pointed out. You need to provide something more specific than just posting links and mentioning this or that article.

I have already explained.

 

[DBT]

I don't see where or why or in what way these model actually support the idea of free will given the flaws that have already been pointed out. You need to provide something more specific than just posting links and mentioning this or that article.

I have already explained.

The problems that were pointed were ignored. Basically, if you can't access or regulate quantum activity or what your cells are doing while they are forming your experience of the world and self, thoughts, decisions, you have no regulative control of your underlying condition, hence no ability to have done otherwise in any given instance in time, therefore your definition of free will fails.

 

[PyramidHead]

Two scenarios, ryan:

1. A quantum particle encased in a box is connected to a radio transmitter. When it randomly decays, it sets off the transmitter, which sends a message to a special receiver wired to my brain, causing me to lift my arm.

2. A quantum particle residing in my brain somewhere undergoes a random event, setting off a cascade of events that in clusters of neurons that causes me to lift my arm.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you would say that 2 is what free will means, but it sounds an awful lot like 1 except for the location of the quantum particle. In both cases, there's essentially a train of causality interrupted by an unpredictable zap from a phenomenon originating outside (1) or inside (2) the brain. Functionally the two scenarios are actually identical, if we assume the receiver in the first case exactly replicates all the functions of the neurons in the second case.

One could picture a guy wandering around with a receiver in his head, and at random moments, a decaying particle in a box somewhere would cause him to do things like lift his arm, turn his head to the right, or wiggle his toes. That seems like a clear case of someone being manipulated by a force beyond his willpower. Yet, replace the receiver with his actual neurons, and have the decaying particle do its thing inside his brain, and suddenly it becomes a person exercising his free will?

 

[fromderinside]

Since most neurons in primary sensory tracts are know to receive communication from higher processes and lower processes that pretty much excludes a neuron from being The Decider. It may permit that cell adapting it's output from responding to lower processes information to what has taken place at some previous time what has resulted at pentultimate processes. Unfortunately that can be said for most any neuron in the ascending and descending process.

A more plausible conclusion would be that whatever information being processed is the result of both more recent and previous input. This seems to be what fMRI studies suggest. Activity at some time at some process corresponds to what will be the organism's overall response prior to any action being taken by the organism. Not exactly promising data for those who suggest 'choice' is optional at some level.

A reasonable conclusion from the above is that our nature is determined by Material conditions. There is no evidence of divine chimes other than what other animals are known to to be subject. There is no support to be drawn for any 'free' choice hypothesis from examination of organization or behavior.

 

[jab]

https://isreview.org/issue/82/marxism-morality-and-human-nature

In another thread, someone posted a picture of Engels holding his book, The origin of the family, private property and the state, and pointing out that what we view as human nature depends on our material conditions. I was intrigued and had never considered this. I always assumed that what we meant by human nature was something eternal that exists across different societies. So I googled the issue and found this article from a socialist website. I found it an interesting article and thought I would throw this out for criticism and discussion. Is what we think of as human nature then not really set, but is it dependent on how society is organized and what our material conditions are?

One of the criticisms of Marxism I’ve seen from others is that it contradicts human nature. But if human nature is not so set, then the question becomes whether human nature could thus be altered in a way that socialism becomes feasible. If human nature is malleable, then do we always need a profit motive to be productive? By socialism, I mean the ownership of the means of production by society as a whole, rather than by shares of stock by individuals who thereby benefit from the profits of the enterprise. In true socialism there’d be no profits and all would share equally in work and what is produced. I’m not sure how human nature could be altered so that ideal would work. I think the article does have a point that in our distant past, we were probably very socialist in our organization. But our society is no longer a hunter gatherer society and we are not going back to that. (See my post in Nature and Science about Agriculture which also spun off from reading this article.)

Still the basic question remains, is human nature truly malleable, set by our material conditions? Or is it something more eternal?

SLD

It is human nature that humans' behaviour is very much affected by external circumstances.

 

[fromderinside]

It is also very much human nature that it is social which can color external circumstances.

 

[rousseau]

I would argue that human nature is not determined by our material conditions, but our behavior very much is.

- Evolution moves slowly. Over broad swaths of time our DNA can be considered a constant, and genetics account for the brunt of our behavior. Meaning there should be something of an unchanging core to our nature and culture.

- Where environmental conditions are constant we see similar cultures arise, and even when environmental conditions vary the cultures have more similarities than they do differences.

- While it is true that we're able to adapt to the cultures we're born into, under normal circumstances our nature gives rise to the culture in the first place

This is why socialism in the vein of Marx was such a failure, because it tried to create an artificial society too quickly, and reality bit it in the nads. Turns out Marx had elements of good intent, but for the most part was pseudo-scientific nonsense.

 

[DBT]

Or perhaps humans are socialists on a small scale, family, friends, tribe, but not identifying with "the other" see an opportunity to profit from trade, war, etc....

 

[rousseau]

The word socialism has been so politicized I'm not sure most of the people who use it know what it means. Marx had the right idea - capitalism has inherent problems - but his theory on how it would evolve created more problems than it solved. That's not a knock at his intent, that's where he was on the right track. The problem came when people disrupted the natural order of things too quickly.

But toward your point charity has always been a part of most societies, counter-balanced with our tendency to.. capitalize. But now what we call socialism really has nothing to do with Marx, and when both Conservatives or Liberals use the term, they're usually either disingenous or misinformed.