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Or you can just accept that reductive materialism is not an adequate description of the world.

by JackFr 5y ago

tsimionescu 5y ago
If only any other system of thought could make any kind of verifiable prediction, it would be wise to reject materialism. As it is though, you either have magical systems of thought, that reject the very framework of science; or ones which amount to materialism plus some handwaving.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Oh I accept that, but I'm also wary of theories that seem to handwave material reality. I've found Dione Fortune's writings the most useful in that regard, though she can be... obscure. Quite influential all the same.
astrange 5y ago
Does your non-materialist theory involve true randomness (which is not really making a decision), or is it just more mind-stuff behaving deterministically in another dimension (which is not really free will)? I'm not sure there are alternatives to these.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  I think the standard position of free will non-compatibilists is that there is some dimension of mind whose future at any time T is not uniquely determined by its state at time T-1 (but it is influenced by that state, it's also not purely random). In this model, each agent possessing free will has a series of possible choices with "weights" for each choice pre-determined by the prior state of the agent (their history, their racial instincts etc). Which choice the agent will select cannot be known in advance. Usually it is implied that the agent has a resource of "will" that they must expend more of to select one of the choices with higher "weight". After the agent selects one particular choice, the universe proceeds deterministically (or probabilistically) until the next moment when an agent must make a choice. Whether this phenomenon is happening directly in material reality (the agent can influence wave function collapse or some other such idea) or it is happening in a separate world of mind/spirit and then there is some miraculous reconciliation of the two worlds is somewhat irrelevant.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Well, I model cognition and decision as energy in architecture. The Architecture dictates what adjacent states are available and what the default likelihood is of each. The more the energy expands itself because of its preferences, the more it can nudge the outcome towards one of the less likely adjacent states. Any outcome changes the state of the architecture and the architecture changes the state of the energy, so the two engage in a kind of coevolution. Here's why I believe in free will: The preferences of the energy are subjective, not objective[1]. Its inputs are dictated by the architecture it resides in, but the meaning it attaches to them are determined internally and infinitely[2] more complex. So for example, someone who loves exercising gets very much the same nerve signals as someone who hates it. The difference is in the meaning each attaches to the experience, and meaning is not objective. [1] AKA 'the hard problem of consciousness' [2] Insofar as internal communication happens across a higher-dimensional manifold than its communication with the architecture. For ease of visualization I imagine a three-dimensional gas interacting with the two-dimensional surface of a building, but I am working on a model that properly accounts for time.

Or you can just accept that reductive materialism is not an adequate description of the world.

by JackFr 5y ago

Or you can just accept that reductive materialism is not an adequate description of the world.

If only any other system of thought could make any kind of verifiable prediction, it would be wise to reject materialism. As it is though, you either have magical systems of thought, that reject the very framework of science; or ones which amount to materialism plus some handwaving.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

Oh I accept that, but I'm also wary of theories that seem to handwave material reality. I've found Dione Fortune's writings the most useful in that regard, though she can be... obscure. Quite influential all the same.

astrange 5y ago

Does your non-materialist theory involve true randomness (which is not really making a decision), or is it just more mind-stuff behaving deterministically in another dimension (which is not really free will)? I'm not sure there are alternatives to these.

tsimionescu 5y ago
I think the standard position of free will non-compatibilists is that there is some dimension of mind whose future at any time T is not uniquely determined by its state at time T-1 (but it is influenced by that state, it's also not purely random). In this model, each agent possessing free will has a series of possible choices with "weights" for each choice pre-determined by the prior state of the agent (their history, their racial instincts etc). Which choice the agent will select cannot be known in advance. Usually it is implied that the agent has a resource of "will" that they must expend more of to select one of the choices with higher "weight". After the agent selects one particular choice, the universe proceeds deterministically (or probabilistically) until the next moment when an agent must make a choice. Whether this phenomenon is happening directly in material reality (the agent can influence wave function collapse or some other such idea) or it is happening in a separate world of mind/spirit and then there is some miraculous reconciliation of the two worlds is somewhat irrelevant.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Well, I model cognition and decision as energy in architecture. The Architecture dictates what adjacent states are available and what the default likelihood is of each. The more the energy expands itself because of its preferences, the more it can nudge the outcome towards one of the less likely adjacent states. Any outcome changes the state of the architecture and the architecture changes the state of the energy, so the two engage in a kind of coevolution. Here's why I believe in free will: The preferences of the energy are subjective, not objective[1]. Its inputs are dictated by the architecture it resides in, but the meaning it attaches to them are determined internally and infinitely[2] more complex. So for example, someone who loves exercising gets very much the same nerve signals as someone who hates it. The difference is in the meaning each attaches to the experience, and meaning is not objective. [1] AKA 'the hard problem of consciousness' [2] Insofar as internal communication happens across a higher-dimensional manifold than its communication with the architecture. For ease of visualization I imagine a three-dimensional gas interacting with the two-dimensional surface of a building, but I am working on a model that properly accounts for time.