8 ms·

It's a bit like how Francis Crick, after he left DNA research and went into neuroscience, wrote a book called "The Astonishing Hypothesis" with the premise that

It's a bit like how Francis Crick, after he left DNA research and went into neuroscience, wrote a book called "The Astonishing Hypothesis" with the premise that the mind is nothing magical but simply the product of all those neurons in your brain, even if we don't understand yet exactly how. Lots of people (including me) thought "well, of course, what's so astonishing about that?", but I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology.

haswell 2y ago
> I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing. Depending on one's upbringing, they likely hold deep unexamined beliefs - bedrocks of thinking - that more or less boil down to: the mind feels like some mystical thing. People can believe in the science of biology and conceptually understand that they're the product of long spans of evolution while still feeling like the mind is quite a mystical and mysterious thing. And it can be hard to cut through this feeling without intentionally uprooting those unexamined beliefs. I know this from personal experience. My upbringing involved the deep conditioning of a religious world view that instills these mystical ideas. I left it behind in my late teens. It wasn't until my mid 30s that I started to deeply appreciate how embedded those feelings were, and even though I didn't believe them when examining them rationally, I realized they were still there in my underlying thought processes, influencing my interpretation of everyday things. So I wouldn't say it's just that people "still believe the mind is some mystical thing" (although this group does exist), but that "the default mode of experience for many people is the one that feels mystical".
- gosub100 2y ago
  I'm certain this topic has been addressed many times, but I can't see how to reconcile basic morality with "it's just a calculation". Tell me I should not inflict pain on sentient beings while subscribing to the belief that pain is simply one particular result of a massive mathematical calculation. It's literally just a number/matrix.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Perhaps you're not over-valuing pain, but under-valuing numbers. There's no reason to think that morality can't or shouldn't center around minimizing a pain metric. That would put it in line with any other trajectory-planning-under-constraints problem. Once you've done a bit of work in trajectory optimization, you start to feel the numbers come alive, and develop a visceral feeling for them. I wince when I see a car scrape to the edge of its traction limit as it rounds a corner at high speed. Nature itself plans trajectories to minimize action, the integral of a Lagrangian: it's literally just a number, but it decides the motion of molecules and galaxies. What's wrong with a moral system based around minimizing a pain integral, subject to constraints? Still just a number. But one that can easily take an important position in our decision-making, and find a deep-seated place in our minds as well. Of course, we probably ended up with morals in the first place as a distillation of game-theoretic heuristics, which helped us trust and cooperate with each other, which would have been an evolutionary benefit. But as with anything else, we're accountable to the drives that evolution left us with, not evolution's reasons for putting them there. The morals are in our minds, not in nature, but either way it's numbers all the way down.
    - N0b8ez 2y ago
      Consider whether we should define electrons to be "positive" or "negative": there isn't any fact of the matter, it's merely a convention. But it doesn't seem like experiencing pain works this way: pain feels a particular way. If pain is just a mathematical entity, there shouldn't be any particular way that it feels, since it's just a symbol. Maybe we're deeply wrong about our intuitions, and actually no conscious experience is happening in the brain at all, despite the brain having an incorrect model about itself which predicts this (and causes it to make utterances claiming that it has experiences). That's the school of thought known as eliminitivism. Under this view, all suffering is a myth, in the same way that luckiness and angels are.
      - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        Sign conventions are not arbitrary in trajectory planning, though. You'll get very different results if you solve for a robot trajectory that moves from A to B while minimizing motor energy consumption, than if you solve for maximum energy consumption. You'll notice the difference - it's a mistake you'll only make once! If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  All possible explanations for existence have a 'well okay, but what created that' issue. Whether you start with a God, or with a quantum fluctuation, one is left asking - okay well what created the God, or what created the void in which quantum mechanics (and who created such a system to begin with) burst forth. There is no answer to these questions, because regardless of the story - it always ends (or in this case, begins) in the same very uncompelling way - 'Well it just always was.' In any case, the mystical and physical are not fixed. Imagine explaining the consequences of relativity to a skeptical individual of times past. Think of his response to the notion that time itself is a variable and can move at different rates for different people in different circumstances. It sounds like absurd mystical sci-FI nonsense. Except it's real, so now has been promoted from the mystical to the physical. So what a skeptic of today would label "mystical" will almost certainly change over the centuries and millennia yet to come. Scarcely more than a century ago, state of the art transport was a horse, computers did not exist, quantum physics did not exist, relativity did not exist, human flight was widely believed to be impossible, and so on endlessly. It seems unlikely in just a century that we've even scratched the surface of knowledge yet to come, let alone meaningfully penetrated into it.
- andoando 2y ago
  >There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing. This is exactly my objection. I fully believe were mechanical machines, fully believe in determinism, I think human behavior /thoughts will fully be explained mechanically etc but I cannot find any way to deny consciousness or qualia and reduce them to physical properties (lest we augment our definition of physical to include consciousness as a fundamental property. I also contest the notion that doing so would be "mysticism" or any less scientific than having added "mystical" properties like force/energy and randomness into the standard model of physics). It seems the motivation for this has far more to do with desperately trying to cram everything into materialism than following sense. Until one can give any kind of plausible explanation as to how feeling/qualia can become an emergent property of matter, it is a complete mystery. My thoughts are it is impossible as they are completely orthogonal and complimentary properties. Qualia is the experience of going through the physical process. Pain is the experience of having this mysterious thing called force acted upon pain receptors hooked up to a working neural system. The physical description can explain exactly what happens, but yet it leaves us with an experience that has no physical description. How can that be? Lastly, there will always be unanswered questions or presumptions in science (how did the universe emerge? what makes up energy?), so while the attempt to do is formidable, the presupposition that consciousness must be explained by science is nonsensical. Dennet's eliminative materialism isn't some well accepted philosophical position. In fact, its one the most rejected. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlations?category=Philosophical%20questions&variable=Consciousness%3A%20eliminativism https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlation... We just had a long discussion about this if you're interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234
  - jhickok 2y ago
    I think this (qualia) is certainly the heart of the issue, and I personally go back and forth from some kind of quietism (or some kind of mysterianism), and some kind of illusionism. The latter position I would have found utterly topic-changing for the better part of 2 decades, but now I am finding it more plausible as I lose confidence in first-person reports and a series of related phenomena (documented by people like Eric Schwitzgebel). I'll also add the eliminative materialism is probably not the precise position to describe his views on consciousness. You could be the polar opposite of Dennett, like a Jerry Fodor, and still be a staunch anti-realist about consciousness (a view that I think Fodor even entertained). I take EM to be an assault on folk psychology, which may or may not include qualia, and illusionism is probably the better term for his position on qualia.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Another unstated assumption is that one necessarily exists. After all, every last experience we have ever had has been with ourselves being there, experiencing it. This leads to the idea that we will cease to exist to just be unbelievable, as it's contrary to everything we have ever experienced. From this I think we get the idea of some essence separate from our biology and the idea of its continuation after death.
  - filipezf 2y ago
    I have entertained the idea (if you believe in the quantum many worlds) that everyone will experience themselves as aging to infinitely old age, because in the parallel worlds, well, you don't exist.
    - card_zero 2y ago
      Saying that something will happen across the multiverse is stating a certainty, so long as it's physically and logically possible. Every absurdly unlikely thing will happen in that sense. Everybody will, somewhere (and somewhen) become purple with flashing yellow spots. That's very different from saying "I expect to experience this happening", which is a statement about what's probable.
    - sekh60 2y ago
      If you want a grim take on this looking into the quantum immortality thought experiment. I can't remember who wrote it, I think maybe Chalmers, but the idea is that while the experiencer is immortal, they will still accumulate injuries, old age, etc. It would not be a very pleasant immortality.
adonovan 2y ago
No less a scientist than Roger Penrose is (arguably) in that camp: his excellent “The Emperor’s New Mind” is about the paradox of free will in a mechanistic universe, and the question of where among the laws of physics might consciousness fit. (Spoiler alert: the collapse of the quantum wave function has a different character from all the other laws.)
- tasty_freeze 2y ago
  That is a rather tenuous thing to base an argument (and a book) on. Quantum wave collapse is not understood at all, to the point there are physicists who deny collapsing even happens.
- euroderf 2y ago
  Lee Smolin (a physicist) argues that all this talk of determinism (as opposed to free will) has a real impact on people, leading to fatalism and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and that this has real impact on prospects for public policy responses to the crises we as a species face.
- Animats 2y ago
  Rudy Rucker points out, in one of his SF books, that free will and random number generators are the same thing.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > No less a scientist than Roger Penrose This is argument from authority. In Penrose's case, while his position is mildly interesting, most other scientists and philosophers interested in consciousness and mind/brain questions completely reject it.
  - adonovan 2y ago
    > This is argument from authority. No, it isn't. An argument from authority would be me claiming that X is true because Penrose says so. The parent poster had said "I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology." To which I responded with a data point: a highly respected physicist (indeed, an authority) who professes to be, essentially, a Cartesian dualist. I wasn't even claiming that X is true. HNers do seem to love casually slinging claims of logical fallacies at each other.
Animats 2y ago
People get into philosophical trouble with this because humans have a hard-wired system for what's part of your body and what isn't. That's a survival trait. Problems with that system cause phantom limb syndrome, self-injury, and other body-model disorders.[1] We're looking at a protection system from the inside. Brains are internally interconnected distributed systems, but we're evolved not to feel that way. Trying to reconcile that drives philosophers and theologians into inventing dualism, souls, and other hacks to explain the concept of a unified mind. That goes back at least two millennia and hasn't helped much. Brains are distributed systems. They have features to drive them towards eventual internal consistency. Failures of those features underlay schizophrenia and similar disorders. Has neuroscience explored eventually-consistent system theory yet? That might be useful. [1] https://wolpertlab.neuroscience.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/papers/HagWol04.pdf https://wolpertlab.neuroscience.columbia.edu/sites/default/f...
altruios 2y ago
So this leads down to some interesting consequences. If everything is determined by biology, and biology is determined by chemistry, and chemistry is determined by physics (quantum or classical). The next question is: "from where does 'choice' come from? if the sum of each part contains none to begin with, how can it emerge without 'proto-choice properties'?" The conclusion from this view must be one of two: 1) That 'choice' is an unfounded axiom, an illusion of subjective qualities that we misinterpret as our 'will'. 2) Though if we do have 'will', and ability to exert control via choice, and not be controlled by physically determined processes... perhaps that is this notion of 'chance/random' which we seem to have to deal with. A consequence of point 2 is that if that is our ability to choose, how can we choose better than the baseline 'random' as we apparently do?
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  > The next question is: [ ... ] Dennett has you covered there too. His book "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" is a must-read on this topic.
  - altruios 2y ago
    I've give it a read. But if it's just rehashing John Locke's prisoner dilemma of perceived choice vs actual choice... I'm talking about objective reality, not subjective experience. The free will I'm interested in knowing if it exists or not is one we (in theory) could possible eventually measure (a difference in what physical processes say we should do and what we actually do). I'm interested in 'actual' free will, the ability to do what you would otherwise not. Illusionary free wills are boring to discuss - as they are merely redefining our experiences in terms feed-back systems... which obviously exist - but that's not free will, that's our understanding and knowledge about observable systems. The only free will that matters is: can we defy physics, or are we subjects of physics from now until the end of time. Are we free to choose the actions or is physics determining the actions we take. Are we in control of our lives or is the universe and we just lie to ourselves to keep on keeping on? If everything is run by physics - that make you physics' sweet submissive. edit: reading the back cover - the idea's of control vs freedom and elbow room are familiar, and in my opinion entirely misguided from the point I raise above... a feedback-system that allows you to control results is not a good definition of free will. What free will in that case is: is being able to choose anything in response to that feedback system... which has yet to be shown to be the case... and good arguments argue that it is impossible.
Quailman84 2y ago
I think most of the philosophers Dennett is engaging with aren't suggesting that the mind is magical or mystical, but simply that subjective phenomena (thoughts, perceptions, etc) cannot be fully explained in exclusively physical terms. To give a popular argument, you can imagine a scenario where somebody has completed a perfect and complete explanation of the physical processes of human color perception. Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red? The argument goes that if you can't explain something in purely physical terms, then that thing isn't purely physical in nature. Just because something isn't physical doesn't mean that it is mystical or magical; it is just a different kind of Stuff. The idea that only physical things exist is intuitively pretty compelling to me, but I've found arguments to the contrary to be much more convincing.
- n4r9 2y ago
  > Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red? Suppose that you were to manually fire neurons in this person's brain, so as to exactly simulate the brain's response to red-frequency photons hitting the retina. Would this give them such an understanding? I would guess that most people would say yes. So one can learn subjective experiences without needing the perception to actually occur. In some sense the subjective experience is physically encoded in the details of the neural intervention. The interesting question is where is the line on the spectrum between verbal explanations and direct neural intervention, at which such an understanding becomes impossible to impart?
  - Quailman84 2y ago
    If I'm understanding your thought experiment correctly, you are saying that you could stimulate the right part of the brain to cause the person to have an experience of seeing the color red without actually perceiving something red. I think that it would be right to say that they would have gained a more complete understanding of what it is like to perceive the color red, but that's only because you have caused them to actually perceive the color red—that perception just didn't reflect reality. I think we could argue about the definition of "perception", but the important part is that you are making them experience redness firsthand. If you ask me, there is nothing short of direct firsthand experience that will allow you to understand what it is like to see the color red. Here's some further reading on that argument, if you're interested: https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/ https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/

haswell 2y ago

> I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing. Depending on one's upbringing, they likely hold deep unexamined beliefs - bedrocks of thinking - that more or less boil down to: the mind feels like some mystical thing. People can believe in the science of biology and conceptually understand that they're the product of long spans of evolution while still feeling like the mind is quite a mystical and mysterious thing. And it can be hard to cut through this feeling without intentionally uprooting those unexamined beliefs. I know this from personal experience. My upbringing involved the deep conditioning of a religious world view that instills these mystical ideas. I left it behind in my late teens. It wasn't until my mid 30s that I started to deeply appreciate how embedded those feelings were, and even though I didn't believe them when examining them rationally, I realized they were still there in my underlying thought processes, influencing my interpretation of everyday things. So I wouldn't say it's just that people "still believe the mind is some mystical thing" (although this group does exist), but that "the default mode of experience for many people is the one that feels mystical".

gosub100 2y ago
I'm certain this topic has been addressed many times, but I can't see how to reconcile basic morality with "it's just a calculation". Tell me I should not inflict pain on sentient beings while subscribing to the belief that pain is simply one particular result of a massive mathematical calculation. It's literally just a number/matrix.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Perhaps you're not over-valuing pain, but under-valuing numbers. There's no reason to think that morality can't or shouldn't center around minimizing a pain metric. That would put it in line with any other trajectory-planning-under-constraints problem. Once you've done a bit of work in trajectory optimization, you start to feel the numbers come alive, and develop a visceral feeling for them. I wince when I see a car scrape to the edge of its traction limit as it rounds a corner at high speed. Nature itself plans trajectories to minimize action, the integral of a Lagrangian: it's literally just a number, but it decides the motion of molecules and galaxies. What's wrong with a moral system based around minimizing a pain integral, subject to constraints? Still just a number. But one that can easily take an important position in our decision-making, and find a deep-seated place in our minds as well. Of course, we probably ended up with morals in the first place as a distillation of game-theoretic heuristics, which helped us trust and cooperate with each other, which would have been an evolutionary benefit. But as with anything else, we're accountable to the drives that evolution left us with, not evolution's reasons for putting them there. The morals are in our minds, not in nature, but either way it's numbers all the way down.
  - N0b8ez 2y ago
    Consider whether we should define electrons to be "positive" or "negative": there isn't any fact of the matter, it's merely a convention. But it doesn't seem like experiencing pain works this way: pain feels a particular way. If pain is just a mathematical entity, there shouldn't be any particular way that it feels, since it's just a symbol. Maybe we're deeply wrong about our intuitions, and actually no conscious experience is happening in the brain at all, despite the brain having an incorrect model about itself which predicts this (and causes it to make utterances claiming that it has experiences). That's the school of thought known as eliminitivism. Under this view, all suffering is a myth, in the same way that luckiness and angels are.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      Sign conventions are not arbitrary in trajectory planning, though. You'll get very different results if you solve for a robot trajectory that moves from A to B while minimizing motor energy consumption, than if you solve for maximum energy consumption. You'll notice the difference - it's a mistake you'll only make once! If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.
somenameforme 2y ago
All possible explanations for existence have a 'well okay, but what created that' issue. Whether you start with a God, or with a quantum fluctuation, one is left asking - okay well what created the God, or what created the void in which quantum mechanics (and who created such a system to begin with) burst forth. There is no answer to these questions, because regardless of the story - it always ends (or in this case, begins) in the same very uncompelling way - 'Well it just always was.' In any case, the mystical and physical are not fixed. Imagine explaining the consequences of relativity to a skeptical individual of times past. Think of his response to the notion that time itself is a variable and can move at different rates for different people in different circumstances. It sounds like absurd mystical sci-FI nonsense. Except it's real, so now has been promoted from the mystical to the physical. So what a skeptic of today would label "mystical" will almost certainly change over the centuries and millennia yet to come. Scarcely more than a century ago, state of the art transport was a horse, computers did not exist, quantum physics did not exist, relativity did not exist, human flight was widely believed to be impossible, and so on endlessly. It seems unlikely in just a century that we've even scratched the surface of knowledge yet to come, let alone meaningfully penetrated into it.
andoando 2y ago
>There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing. This is exactly my objection. I fully believe were mechanical machines, fully believe in determinism, I think human behavior /thoughts will fully be explained mechanically etc but I cannot find any way to deny consciousness or qualia and reduce them to physical properties (lest we augment our definition of physical to include consciousness as a fundamental property. I also contest the notion that doing so would be "mysticism" or any less scientific than having added "mystical" properties like force/energy and randomness into the standard model of physics). It seems the motivation for this has far more to do with desperately trying to cram everything into materialism than following sense. Until one can give any kind of plausible explanation as to how feeling/qualia can become an emergent property of matter, it is a complete mystery. My thoughts are it is impossible as they are completely orthogonal and complimentary properties. Qualia is the experience of going through the physical process. Pain is the experience of having this mysterious thing called force acted upon pain receptors hooked up to a working neural system. The physical description can explain exactly what happens, but yet it leaves us with an experience that has no physical description. How can that be? Lastly, there will always be unanswered questions or presumptions in science (how did the universe emerge? what makes up energy?), so while the attempt to do is formidable, the presupposition that consciousness must be explained by science is nonsensical. Dennet's eliminative materialism isn't some well accepted philosophical position. In fact, its one the most rejected. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlations?category=Philosophical%20questions&variable=Consciousness%3A%20eliminativism https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlation... We just had a long discussion about this if you're interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234
- jhickok 2y ago
  I think this (qualia) is certainly the heart of the issue, and I personally go back and forth from some kind of quietism (or some kind of mysterianism), and some kind of illusionism. The latter position I would have found utterly topic-changing for the better part of 2 decades, but now I am finding it more plausible as I lose confidence in first-person reports and a series of related phenomena (documented by people like Eric Schwitzgebel). I'll also add the eliminative materialism is probably not the precise position to describe his views on consciousness. You could be the polar opposite of Dennett, like a Jerry Fodor, and still be a staunch anti-realist about consciousness (a view that I think Fodor even entertained). I take EM to be an assault on folk psychology, which may or may not include qualia, and illusionism is probably the better term for his position on qualia.
pfdietz 2y ago
Another unstated assumption is that one necessarily exists. After all, every last experience we have ever had has been with ourselves being there, experiencing it. This leads to the idea that we will cease to exist to just be unbelievable, as it's contrary to everything we have ever experienced. From this I think we get the idea of some essence separate from our biology and the idea of its continuation after death.
- filipezf 2y ago
  I have entertained the idea (if you believe in the quantum many worlds) that everyone will experience themselves as aging to infinitely old age, because in the parallel worlds, well, you don't exist.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Saying that something will happen across the multiverse is stating a certainty, so long as it's physically and logically possible. Every absurdly unlikely thing will happen in that sense. Everybody will, somewhere (and somewhen) become purple with flashing yellow spots. That's very different from saying "I expect to experience this happening", which is a statement about what's probable.
  - sekh60 2y ago
    If you want a grim take on this looking into the quantum immortality thought experiment. I can't remember who wrote it, I think maybe Chalmers, but the idea is that while the experiencer is immortal, they will still accumulate injuries, old age, etc. It would not be a very pleasant immortality.

adonovan 2y ago

No less a scientist than Roger Penrose is (arguably) in that camp: his excellent “The Emperor’s New Mind” is about the paradox of free will in a mechanistic universe, and the question of where among the laws of physics might consciousness fit. (Spoiler alert: the collapse of the quantum wave function has a different character from all the other laws.)

tasty_freeze 2y ago
That is a rather tenuous thing to base an argument (and a book) on. Quantum wave collapse is not understood at all, to the point there are physicists who deny collapsing even happens.
euroderf 2y ago
Lee Smolin (a physicist) argues that all this talk of determinism (as opposed to free will) has a real impact on people, leading to fatalism and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and that this has real impact on prospects for public policy responses to the crises we as a species face.
Animats 2y ago
Rudy Rucker points out, in one of his SF books, that free will and random number generators are the same thing.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
> No less a scientist than Roger Penrose This is argument from authority. In Penrose's case, while his position is mildly interesting, most other scientists and philosophers interested in consciousness and mind/brain questions completely reject it.
- adonovan 2y ago
  > This is argument from authority. No, it isn't. An argument from authority would be me claiming that X is true because Penrose says so. The parent poster had said "I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology." To which I responded with a data point: a highly respected physicist (indeed, an authority) who professes to be, essentially, a Cartesian dualist. I wasn't even claiming that X is true. HNers do seem to love casually slinging claims of logical fallacies at each other.

Animats 2y ago

People get into philosophical trouble with this because humans have a hard-wired system for what's part of your body and what isn't. That's a survival trait. Problems with that system cause phantom limb syndrome, self-injury, and other body-model disorders.[1] We're looking at a protection system from the inside. Brains are internally interconnected distributed systems, but we're evolved not to feel that way. Trying to reconcile that drives philosophers and theologians into inventing dualism, souls, and other hacks to explain the concept of a unified mind. That goes back at least two millennia and hasn't helped much. Brains are distributed systems. They have features to drive them towards eventual internal consistency. Failures of those features underlay schizophrenia and similar disorders. Has neuroscience explored eventually-consistent system theory yet? That might be useful. [1] https://wolpertlab.neuroscience.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/papers/HagWol04.pdf https://wolpertlab.neuroscience.columbia.edu/sites/default/f...

altruios 2y ago

So this leads down to some interesting consequences. If everything is determined by biology, and biology is determined by chemistry, and chemistry is determined by physics (quantum or classical). The next question is: "from where does 'choice' come from? if the sum of each part contains none to begin with, how can it emerge without 'proto-choice properties'?" The conclusion from this view must be one of two: 1) That 'choice' is an unfounded axiom, an illusion of subjective qualities that we misinterpret as our 'will'. 2) Though if we do have 'will', and ability to exert control via choice, and not be controlled by physically determined processes... perhaps that is this notion of 'chance/random' which we seem to have to deal with. A consequence of point 2 is that if that is our ability to choose, how can we choose better than the baseline 'random' as we apparently do?

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
> The next question is: [ ... ] Dennett has you covered there too. His book "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" is a must-read on this topic.
- altruios 2y ago
  I've give it a read. But if it's just rehashing John Locke's prisoner dilemma of perceived choice vs actual choice... I'm talking about objective reality, not subjective experience. The free will I'm interested in knowing if it exists or not is one we (in theory) could possible eventually measure (a difference in what physical processes say we should do and what we actually do). I'm interested in 'actual' free will, the ability to do what you would otherwise not. Illusionary free wills are boring to discuss - as they are merely redefining our experiences in terms feed-back systems... which obviously exist - but that's not free will, that's our understanding and knowledge about observable systems. The only free will that matters is: can we defy physics, or are we subjects of physics from now until the end of time. Are we free to choose the actions or is physics determining the actions we take. Are we in control of our lives or is the universe and we just lie to ourselves to keep on keeping on? If everything is run by physics - that make you physics' sweet submissive. edit: reading the back cover - the idea's of control vs freedom and elbow room are familiar, and in my opinion entirely misguided from the point I raise above... a feedback-system that allows you to control results is not a good definition of free will. What free will in that case is: is being able to choose anything in response to that feedback system... which has yet to be shown to be the case... and good arguments argue that it is impossible.

Quailman84 2y ago

I think most of the philosophers Dennett is engaging with aren't suggesting that the mind is magical or mystical, but simply that subjective phenomena (thoughts, perceptions, etc) cannot be fully explained in exclusively physical terms. To give a popular argument, you can imagine a scenario where somebody has completed a perfect and complete explanation of the physical processes of human color perception. Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red? The argument goes that if you can't explain something in purely physical terms, then that thing isn't purely physical in nature. Just because something isn't physical doesn't mean that it is mystical or magical; it is just a different kind of Stuff. The idea that only physical things exist is intuitively pretty compelling to me, but I've found arguments to the contrary to be much more convincing.

n4r9 2y ago
> Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red? Suppose that you were to manually fire neurons in this person's brain, so as to exactly simulate the brain's response to red-frequency photons hitting the retina. Would this give them such an understanding? I would guess that most people would say yes. So one can learn subjective experiences without needing the perception to actually occur. In some sense the subjective experience is physically encoded in the details of the neural intervention. The interesting question is where is the line on the spectrum between verbal explanations and direct neural intervention, at which such an understanding becomes impossible to impart?
- Quailman84 2y ago
  If I'm understanding your thought experiment correctly, you are saying that you could stimulate the right part of the brain to cause the person to have an experience of seeing the color red without actually perceiving something red. I think that it would be right to say that they would have gained a more complete understanding of what it is like to perceive the color red, but that's only because you have caused them to actually perceive the color red—that perception just didn't reflect reality. I think we could argue about the definition of "perception", but the important part is that you are making them experience redness firsthand. If you ask me, there is nothing short of direct firsthand experience that will allow you to understand what it is like to see the color red. Here's some further reading on that argument, if you're interested: https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/ https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/