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Go further. All things behave this way. You were compelled to comment given your current circumstance, your particular makeup of cells and electricity sitting i

Go further. All things behave this way. You were compelled to comment given your current circumstance, your particular makeup of cells and electricity sitting in your chair typing, blah blah blah. The beaver knows it's building a dam insasmuch as anyone else knows what they are doing.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
That denies conscious thought to me. You can ask me why I do something. Go ask the beaver, see what it says.
- increment_i 12y ago
  Is verbally relating the reason why one does something a prerequisite to conscious thought? Dams don't get built by beavers all over the world by sheer random chance - there's obviously some deliberate intention there. Its also possible they observe and learn this process from their family members: "When young are born, they spend their first month in the lodge and their mother is the primary caretaker while their father maintains the territory. In the time after they leave the lodge for the first time, yearlings will help their parents build food caches in the fall and repair dams and lodges." (Source: Wikipedia)
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Beaver compulsively place sticks in piles near water until they don't hear the water falling any more. Nothing to do with intent.
    - increment_i 12y ago
      Can we say compulsion is completely different from intent though? Or are we just arguing over semantics? Can we place an arbitrary intelligence threshold on when compulsion can be inferred as intent? For instance, most spiders build webs, and it would seem they do it by no other mechanism than pure genetic instinct. However, there don't seem to be any external 'cues' as to when the web is finished (in contrast to the water falling cue we assume beavers use). The spider builds the web until it's done building the web. Did the spider intend to build a web, or was it compelled to?
- hawleyal 12y ago
  Does the fact you can communicate why you think do something mean you could have changed your decision?
jamestnz 12y ago
>All things behave this way. You were compelled to comment given your current circumstance, your particular makeup of cells and electricity sitting in your chair typing This is an interesting comment I think, because if you take it far enough it ends up having implications for free will. Consider the exercise described in this excerpt from a Sam Harris lecture on free will. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Xp7mvOcVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Xp7mvOcVM (only 14m long and quite fascinating). I'll briefly describe the gist of it for non-video folks. Exercise: Think of any city in the world. That's it, just think of the name of a city. No limits or restrictions, any city from any country in the world, just pick one. Having chosen one, consider WHY you chose the city you did. It might seem like your choice was utterly uncompelled by external factors; you specifically made a reasoned choice, or you engaged your whims, or you just went with the first one that popped into your mind, or whatever. In any case, the city you ultimately chose was completely up to your own free will. Right? Well, we can quickly begin to narrow down the field of possible choices. For one, it's clear that nobody who did the above exercise thought of a city that they'd never heard of. So for each person, the city they chose necessarily came from the set of cities they'd actually heard of. And even then, some filtering or selection "algorithm" is clearly happening behind the scenes, because there exist cities you've heard of, but which didn't happen to occur to you at all just now. So some cities would seem to have a higher or lower chance of coming to mind than others, based on factors unique to the individual. For example, a city someone just mentioned 5 minutes ago and you're now thinking of, a city that's been featuring in the news lately, or the cities you've personally lived in, or you made a memorable trip to once, or which are culturally fascinating to you, etc etc. And then consider the actual process that occurred in your head when you started to choose your city. In general, thoughts and ideas largely just kinda "occur" to you, by some process that's not under your conscious control. So in starting to think of a city, the names of some cities just started popping into your head. But what was controlling which cities were popping into your mind, and which weren't? Obviously you can't have consciously controlled this brainstorming process, because this would require you to have thought of the city before you thought of it. So you wanted to think of a city, and your brain just started conjuring them into your conscious mind somehow. Since you didn't consciously supervise which cities were popping to mind and which weren't, it's as if your brain is doing something like accessing your memories, experiences, prejudices, preferences, etc; and bringing cities into your mind by some automatic process that's not consciously available to you. But, what determines the list of cities that someone has heard of in their lifetime, and which have therefore made it into the brain to be available for this exercise? Well, many things that were never under your control to begin with. An obvious example: many people end up living much of their lives in the same city they were born. Which means at least one city is in your brain merely because your parents happened to give birth/raise you there, and the thought of moving away never occurred to you (or it did, but you stayed anyway). You don't choose where you were born. And as you say, everything works like this. So perhaps you thought of Rome because you had Italian food for lunch yesterday, therefore biasing yourself towards thinking of it. But then why did you make that particular lunch choice? Perhaps a coworker made the lunch decision that day, meaning the reason Rome just occurred to you was because of a decision your coworker made. Where's the free will in that? Or perhaps you did decide lunch on your own that day. How did you go about this? Obviously by wanting to think of lunch options, and your brain started popping ideas into your head somehow....
mod 12y ago
No, not really. GP can reason about what he's doing. He knows that he's commenting on HN. He can come up with a plausible reason why (recreation, perhaps). In a more interesting scenario, say building a dam, GP would cut down logs with the express intention of building a dam to make a pond. The beaver doesn't know what it's doing, literally. It can't tell you why, it doesn't have a greater plan of building a dam, etc. You're really talking about motivation, and I'll agree that the motivation is roughly the same for GP and the beaver--some mix of chemicals in their respective brains influencing behavior.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  >The beaver doesn't know what it's doing, literally. It can't tell you why, That's because beavers don't speak English. > it doesn't have a greater plan of building a dam, etc. Just because you've never seen beavers with little tiny HP calculators poring over pages of drawings and equations does not mean that beavers are mindlessly purposelessly building the dams. You think they just throw stick and through some coincidence, a beaver lodge appears? That's crazy. Beavers build those dams with the intent that it will protect them from predators; they intend to dam up creeks in order to submerge the eventual entrance to their lodge. It is deliberate.
  - Mobiu5 12y ago
    "It is deliberate." Source?
    - fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
      You got me. Do you happen to know of any other critters that construct dwellings by accident, and then I guess live in them by accident too?
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    All animals that build shelters do it 'by accident' if that means through compulsive behaviors that end up with a meaningful construction. Termites. Ants. Birds. Gophers. Beavers.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

That denies conscious thought to me. You can ask me why I do something. Go ask the beaver, see what it says.

increment_i 12y ago
Is verbally relating the reason why one does something a prerequisite to conscious thought? Dams don't get built by beavers all over the world by sheer random chance - there's obviously some deliberate intention there. Its also possible they observe and learn this process from their family members: "When young are born, they spend their first month in the lodge and their mother is the primary caretaker while their father maintains the territory. In the time after they leave the lodge for the first time, yearlings will help their parents build food caches in the fall and repair dams and lodges." (Source: Wikipedia)
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Beaver compulsively place sticks in piles near water until they don't hear the water falling any more. Nothing to do with intent.
  - increment_i 12y ago
    Can we say compulsion is completely different from intent though? Or are we just arguing over semantics? Can we place an arbitrary intelligence threshold on when compulsion can be inferred as intent? For instance, most spiders build webs, and it would seem they do it by no other mechanism than pure genetic instinct. However, there don't seem to be any external 'cues' as to when the web is finished (in contrast to the water falling cue we assume beavers use). The spider builds the web until it's done building the web. Did the spider intend to build a web, or was it compelled to?
hawleyal 12y ago
Does the fact you can communicate why you think do something mean you could have changed your decision?

jamestnz 12y ago

>All things behave this way. You were compelled to comment given your current circumstance, your particular makeup of cells and electricity sitting in your chair typing This is an interesting comment I think, because if you take it far enough it ends up having implications for free will. Consider the exercise described in this excerpt from a Sam Harris lecture on free will. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Xp7mvOcVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Xp7mvOcVM (only 14m long and quite fascinating). I'll briefly describe the gist of it for non-video folks. Exercise: Think of any city in the world. That's it, just think of the name of a city. No limits or restrictions, any city from any country in the world, just pick one. Having chosen one, consider WHY you chose the city you did. It might seem like your choice was utterly uncompelled by external factors; you specifically made a reasoned choice, or you engaged your whims, or you just went with the first one that popped into your mind, or whatever. In any case, the city you ultimately chose was completely up to your own free will. Right? Well, we can quickly begin to narrow down the field of possible choices. For one, it's clear that nobody who did the above exercise thought of a city that they'd never heard of. So for each person, the city they chose necessarily came from the set of cities they'd actually heard of. And even then, some filtering or selection "algorithm" is clearly happening behind the scenes, because there exist cities you've heard of, but which didn't happen to occur to you at all just now. So some cities would seem to have a higher or lower chance of coming to mind than others, based on factors unique to the individual. For example, a city someone just mentioned 5 minutes ago and you're now thinking of, a city that's been featuring in the news lately, or the cities you've personally lived in, or you made a memorable trip to once, or which are culturally fascinating to you, etc etc. And then consider the actual process that occurred in your head when you started to choose your city. In general, thoughts and ideas largely just kinda "occur" to you, by some process that's not under your conscious control. So in starting to think of a city, the names of some cities just started popping into your head. But what was controlling which cities were popping into your mind, and which weren't? Obviously you can't have consciously controlled this brainstorming process, because this would require you to have thought of the city before you thought of it. So you wanted to think of a city, and your brain just started conjuring them into your conscious mind somehow. Since you didn't consciously supervise which cities were popping to mind and which weren't, it's as if your brain is doing something like accessing your memories, experiences, prejudices, preferences, etc; and bringing cities into your mind by some automatic process that's not consciously available to you. But, what determines the list of cities that someone has heard of in their lifetime, and which have therefore made it into the brain to be available for this exercise? Well, many things that were never under your control to begin with. An obvious example: many people end up living much of their lives in the same city they were born. Which means at least one city is in your brain merely because your parents happened to give birth/raise you there, and the thought of moving away never occurred to you (or it did, but you stayed anyway). You don't choose where you were born. And as you say, everything works like this. So perhaps you thought of Rome because you had Italian food for lunch yesterday, therefore biasing yourself towards thinking of it. But then why did you make that particular lunch choice? Perhaps a coworker made the lunch decision that day, meaning the reason Rome just occurred to you was because of a decision your coworker made. Where's the free will in that? Or perhaps you did decide lunch on your own that day. How did you go about this? Obviously by wanting to think of lunch options, and your brain started popping ideas into your head somehow....

mod 12y ago

No, not really. GP can reason about what he's doing. He knows that he's commenting on HN. He can come up with a plausible reason why (recreation, perhaps). In a more interesting scenario, say building a dam, GP would cut down logs with the express intention of building a dam to make a pond. The beaver doesn't know what it's doing, literally. It can't tell you why, it doesn't have a greater plan of building a dam, etc. You're really talking about motivation, and I'll agree that the motivation is roughly the same for GP and the beaver--some mix of chemicals in their respective brains influencing behavior.

fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
>The beaver doesn't know what it's doing, literally. It can't tell you why, That's because beavers don't speak English. > it doesn't have a greater plan of building a dam, etc. Just because you've never seen beavers with little tiny HP calculators poring over pages of drawings and equations does not mean that beavers are mindlessly purposelessly building the dams. You think they just throw stick and through some coincidence, a beaver lodge appears? That's crazy. Beavers build those dams with the intent that it will protect them from predators; they intend to dam up creeks in order to submerge the eventual entrance to their lodge. It is deliberate.
- Mobiu5 12y ago
  "It is deliberate." Source?
  - fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
    You got me. Do you happen to know of any other critters that construct dwellings by accident, and then I guess live in them by accident too?
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  All animals that build shelters do it 'by accident' if that means through compulsive behaviors that end up with a meaningful construction. Termites. Ants. Birds. Gophers. Beavers.