The Banana, an Atheist Nightmare (revisited)

[punshhh]

Whatever you decide you want it to be. It is different for every person. If you lack the intellect or capacity or courage to determine your purpose or destination for yourself, don't make the mistake of thinking that all others are like you.

Perhaps you misunderstand my position, this is understandable as my approach to the question in this thread is similar to that of a believer in God. In fact I hold no beliefs and have devoted a lot of ingenuity into increasing my free will. I am probably one of the free-est wills posting on this forum. Which appears to result in posters not knowing where I'm coming from on a regular basis.

As I put in my last post to you with "Yes", I agree with the point you make.

 

[Wolfman]

But we were talking God here, not me determining what you do. Couldn't God design in everything you say? This is the root argument for Calvinism. If you are created to be a certain way, you will be that way. You will make all your choices in light of who you are, but it's the "who you are" that is determined.

I'm quite familiar with what Calvinism says; I am also firmly convinced that it is complete and absolute bunk.

I could just as well argue that aliens control my life, or that I'm an artificial simulation inside someone's elaborate computer program. "What if..." doesn't constitute a logical thesis; one must provide evidence to support that. And in regards to Calvinism (or religion in general), there is no such thing.

Is that the essential element here -- responsibility? I don't see how you can have it both ways, that our choices are a product of who we are and then have us simultaneously responsible for who we are as well. There's something out of order there. Unless you mean you willfully and freely decided who you would be and I don't see when that might have happened or how.

I didn't "willingly and freely" choose to be a white male, born into a particular family in a particular country, etc. But that doesn't define who I am. My choices are what define me. Hell, take a pair of identical twins -- exactly the same genetic codes, born and raised in exactly the same environment -- and yet they'll make different choices, and end up with entirely different lives.

We are responsible for every choice we make. We are responsible for who we are today, and who we will be in the future.

I'm still confused then. What would you think of someone who determined, on their own, that their life's purpose was to follow God's wishes as far as they could understand them?

Well, first, they'd be seeking to "follow the wishes" of an imaginary entity. You might as well ask me what I thought of someone who determined, on their own, that their life's purpose was to follow the Easter Bunny's wishes as far as they could understand them.

Beyond that, my issue isn't directly with what they believe, but with the sentiment expressed by some in this thread that they can't even comprehend how someone could have purpose or direction in their lives without some 'higher power' to tell them what it is. Which is complete, absolute, and utter bunk.

But it's more subtle than that. If I and the universe are deterministic, I can do nothing other than try to convince you; nonsense or not, I'm bound to do it. Further, it may be that you are bound to accept my arguments and change your stance. I can't find out until I make the arguments.

If you want to see your self as some mindless and helpless puppet, feel free. I'm sure that for a certain 'quality' of person, that kind of thinking is quite comforting. Nothing's your fault, you don't have to bear personal responsibility for anything you do, because it's all been dictated by outside, deterministic forces.

To me, I cannot think of a more depressing, pointless, and meaningless existence than one where I believe everything I do is dictated by god, or by destiny.

Are you of the opinion that everyone who thinks determinism is a workable idea started out thinking it so? If not, at least some must have changed their minds along the way. Predetermined doesn't mean the same thing as static.

No, I personally know people who changed their minds to a deterministic view. And it seems just as much nonsense if they believed it their whole lives, as if they changed their minds to believe it.

And I find it just as ridiculous how hard determinists will 'preach' their gospel, and try to convince others.

Seriously.

If I ever decided I actually believed in determinism, here are the only logical conclusions I could draw about the applications to my own life:

1) I should not seek to convince anyone of anything -- whatever they do, whatever they believe, it is predetermined that this is what they will do/believe...and if it is predetermined that they should change, then they will change. What I do/say makes no difference in the deterministic continuum (as it is impossible for me to defy determinism).

2) Neither myself nor anyone else should be held in any way responsible for their actions, because they had absolutely no control or free will in choosing to take those actions. If I rape a woman, that was not my choice, I had to do it. I never had a choice not to rape her. And you cannot punish someone for something over which they had no choice or control.

3) In fact, I pretty much should just kill myself and just get it over with, because nothing I ever do in my entire life will actually represent an accomplishment or have any real value...I am no more than a machine, fulfilling a pre-determined program that tells me what to do. Not only should I not be punished for anything bad I do, but I also cannot take any pride or sense of accomplishment in the good things I do, because they likewise were completely beyond my control, and not due to any personal decision or desire to do so (beyond that dictated by the forces of determinism).

And in regards to the Calvinistic God...what an complete and utter bastard. He creates every human being, telling them that they will go to Hell if they don't follow Him...and then he turns around and pre-chooses the ones who will follow Him, and condemns the vast majority to an eternity in Hell without ever even giving them the opportunity to make a choice.

With or without god, a deterministic viewpoint is the most depressing and pointless perspective possible.

 

[punshhh]

I'm quite familiar with what Calvinism says; I am also firmly convinced that it is complete and absolute bunk.

I could just as well argue that aliens control my life, or that I'm an artificial simulation inside someone's elaborate computer program. "What if..." doesn't constitute a logical thesis; one must provide evidence to support that. And in regards to Calvinism (or religion in general), there is no such thing.
I didn't "willingly and freely" choose to be a white male, born into a particular family in a particular country, etc. But that doesn't define who I am. My choices are what define me. Hell, take a pair of identical twins -- exactly the same genetic codes, born and raised in exactly the same environment -- and yet they'll make different choices, and end up with entirely different lives.

We are responsible for every choice we make. We are responsible for who we are today, and who we will be in the future.
Well, first, they'd be seeking to "follow the wishes" of an imaginary entity. You might as well ask me what I thought of someone who determined, on their own, that their life's purpose was to follow the Easter Bunny's wishes as far as they could understand them.

Beyond that, my issue isn't directly with what they believe, but with the sentiment expressed by some in this thread that they can't even comprehend how someone could have purpose or direction in their lives without some 'higher power' to tell them what it is. Which is complete, absolute, and utter bunk.
If you want to see your self as some mindless and helpless puppet, feel free. I'm sure that for a certain 'quality' of person, that kind of thinking is quite comforting. Nothing's your fault, you don't have to bear personal responsibility for anything you do, because it's all been dictated by outside, deterministic forces.

To me, I cannot think of a more depressing, pointless, and meaningless existence than one where I believe everything I do is dictated by god, or by destiny.
No, I personally know people who changed their minds to a deterministic view. And it seems just as much nonsense if they believed it their whole lives, as if they changed their minds to believe it.

And I find it just as ridiculous how hard determinists will 'preach' their gospel, and try to convince others.

Seriously.

If I ever decided I actually believed in determinism, here are the only logical conclusions I could draw about the applications to my own life:

1) I should not seek to convince anyone of anything -- whatever they do, whatever they believe, it is predetermined that this is what they will do/believe...and if it is predetermined that they should change, then they will change. What I do/say makes no difference in the deterministic continuum (as it is impossible for me to defy determinism).

2) Neither myself nor anyone else should be held in any way responsible for their actions, because they had absolutely no control or free will in choosing to take those actions. If I rape a woman, that was not my choice, I had to do it. I never had a choice not to rape her. And you cannot punish someone for something over which they had no choice or control.

3) In fact, I pretty much should just kill myself and just get it over with, because nothing I ever do in my entire life will actually represent an accomplishment or have any real value...I am no more than a machine, fulfilling a pre-determined program that tells me what to do. Not only should I not be punished for anything bad I do, but I also cannot take any pride or sense of accomplishment in the good things I do, because they likewise were completely beyond my control, and not due to any personal decision or desire to do so (beyond that dictated by the forces of determinism).

And in regards to the Calvinistic God...what an complete and utter bastard. He creates every human being, telling them that they will go to Hell if they don't follow Him...and then he turns around and pre-chooses the ones who will follow Him, and condemns the vast majority to an eternity in Hell without ever even giving them the opportunity to make a choice.

With or without god, a deterministic viewpoint is the most depressing and pointless perspective possible.

Yes you are free to make choices outside your evolutionary programming and the consequences of your choices will be felt eternally.

From this perspective we should all devote all our efforts to ecology and controlling or managing human behavior to that end, should we not?

 

[marplots]

... lots of good stuff snipped...

2) Neither myself nor anyone else should be held in any way responsible for their actions, because they had absolutely no control or free will in choosing to take those actions. If I rape a woman, that was not my choice, I had to do it. I never had a choice not to rape her. And you cannot punish someone for something over which they had no choice or control.

I wanted to address this part instead of just belaboring and repeating the same points over and over again. Your objection here is a common one and something I have thought about, since, as a materialist, I reject free will.

From my perspective, we do not and should not punish someone on the basis of moral responsibility, for, as you point out, without the freedom to do otherwise, how can someone be blamed on a moral basis?

The answer turns out that you punish them because they are defective, not immoral. The definition is the same and based on societal standards, exactly how moral/not moral is determined. It's the blame aspect that is dropped.

To make it plain, I do not throw out a defective part (punish it) because it has the freedom to be other than what it is, I throw it out because it doesn't meet the standards I have set. What then is the demonstration of defect? Why it is the same as it is with moral turpitude, I compare the action committed to what someone else, who wasn't defective, would have done.

In the end, you get the same system of laws and punishments as we have now. The basis is different, defect instead of responsibility, but pragmatically, they are equivalent.

One objection may be that defects can be repaired. If you take the stance that moral missteps cannot -- as in, once a murderer, always a murderer -- then it might just as well be so with some fundamental defect.

And to say that your choices are both the result of who you are and the cause of who you are seems like tautological nonsense to me. At some point, perhaps in the womb, there is no free will involved. Cells do what cells do.

When do you start the chain of free will and the shaping of who I will be? I don't see any reason at all to introduce the spurious concept other than that humans have a feeling of free will. It's the same sort of evidence a believer would tell you they have for God: they feel it.

It is much more likely, from where I sit, that you discover yourself instead of creating it. That is, I respond to an outside world, react to it as I perceive it, and learn both about the world around me and myself. This would parallel other things I learn about myself, like that I am right handed and enjoy sparring in online forums. But discovering who you are is just the opposite of inventing who you are, it is observation instead of creation.

There may be a good experiment on offer. Simply be different for a week or so and then switch back. Test how free your will actually is. If you are an atheist, try believing in God for awhile. If you are heterosexual, try the other team.

I don't see how I could do it without just faking it. When I think about it, it feels like acting instead of an authentic change. Along those lines, I do not think I decided to be an atheist. Rather, I discovered I was.

 

[tsig]

I wanted to address this part instead of just belaboring and repeating the same points over and over again. Your objection here is a common one and something I have thought about, since, as a materialist, I reject free will. From my perspective, we do not and should not punish someone on the basis of moral responsibility, for, as you point out, without the freedom to do otherwise, how can someone be blamed on a moral basis?

The answer turns out that you punish them because they are defective, not immoral. The definition is the same and based on societal standards, exactly how moral/not moral is determined. It's the blame aspect that is dropped.

To make it plain, I do not throw out a defective part (punish it) because it has the freedom to be other than what it is, I throw it out because it doesn't meet the standards I have set. What then is the demonstration of defect? Why it is the same as it is with moral turpitude, I compare the action committed to what someone else, who wasn't defective, would have done.

In the end, you get the same system of laws and punishments as we have now. The basis is different, defect instead of responsibility, but pragmatically, they are equivalent.

One objection may be that defects can be repaired. If you take the stance that moral missteps cannot -- as in, once a murderer, always a murderer -- then it might just as well be so with some fundamental defect.

And to say that your choices are both the result of who you are and the cause of who you are seems like tautological nonsense to me. At some point, perhaps in the womb, there is no free will involved. Cells do what cells do.

When do you start the chain of free will and the shaping of who I will be? I don't see any reason at all to introduce the spurious concept other than that humans have a feeling of free will. It's the same sort of evidence a believer would tell you they have for God: they feel it.

It is much more likely, from where I sit, that you discover yourself instead of creating it. That is, I respond to an outside world, react to it as I perceive it, and learn both about the world around me and myself. This would parallel other things I learn about myself, like that I am right handed and enjoy sparring in online forums. But discovering who you are is just the opposite of inventing who you are, it is observation instead of creation.

There may be a good experiment on offer. Simply be different for a week or so and then switch back. Test how free your will actually is. If you are an atheist, try believing in God for awhile. If you are heterosexual, try the other team.

I don't see how I could do it without just faking it. When I think about it, it feels like acting instead of an authentic change. Along those lines, I do not think I decided to be an atheist. Rather, I discovered I was.

Why does materialism cause you to deny free will?

 

[marplots]

Why does materialism cause you to deny free will?

Well, from Wiki we have: In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter or energy; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance, and reality is identical with the actually occurring states of energy and matter.

In forms of free will that are neither deterministic or stochiastic, I can find no grounding for "will" other than a comment about a registered feeling. In other words, it could have no substance. If I think of it as a conditional, that doesn't work either. I think it's captured in the phrase:

"If it's free, what is willed? And if it's willed, what is free?"

There's an interesting take here: http://www.arnizachariassen.com/ithinkibelieve/what-would-a-free-willed-brain-look-like/

So I look to reductionism to see what I can find. And I find animals that are very basic that evince agency -- down to bacteria -- and believe it is an illusion to think anything other than that is happening at other levels, at least as far as the material elements are concerned. In this light, free will is mapped as a feeling, no more "real" and no less real than whether or not I find myself comfortable in this chair.

In the end I suppose it comes down to which flavor of free will you want and how strict you demand your materialism to be.

If my position needs a better explanation, it can be found here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/ where I find I am an eliminative materialist, so I should use the modifier I suppose.

 

[punshhh]

Well, from Wiki we have: In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter or energy; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance, and reality is identical with the actually occurring states of energy and matter.

In forms of free will that are neither deterministic or stochiastic, I can find no grounding for "will" other than a comment about a registered feeling. In other words, it could have no substance. If I think of it as a conditional, that doesn't work either. I think it's captured in the phrase:

"If it's free, what is willed? And if it's willed, what is free?"

There's an interesting take here: http://www.arnizachariassen.com/ithinkibelieve/what-would-a-free-willed-brain-look-like/

So I look to reductionism to see what I can find. And I find animals that are very basic that evince agency -- down to bacteria -- and believe it is an illusion to think anything other than that is happening at other levels, at least as far as the material elements are concerned. In this light, free will is mapped as a feeling, no more "real" and no less real than whether or not I find myself comfortable in this chair.

In the end I suppose it comes down to which flavor of free will you want and how strict you demand your materialism to be.

If my position needs a better explanation, it can be found here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/ where I find I am an eliminative materialist, so I should use the modifier I suppose.

You're proposing a world of P Zombies, why would such a world include consciousness at all? it simply is not required which ever way you look at it.

 

[punshhh]

I'm not sure it was terribly magnificent. They divorced shortly afterwards.

Ahh, poor hippies. They had such high and pure ideals, unfortunately they rated decadence quite highly as well, which was their undoing.

 

[Resume]

Ahh, poor hippies. They had such high and pure ideals, unfortunately they rated decadence quite highly as well, which was their undoing.

What could be more decadent (and ego-driven) then the search for personal enlightenment?

Make me special!

 

[marplots]

You're proposing a world of P Zombies, why would such a world include consciousness at all? it simply is not required which ever way you look at it.

Required by what? Evolution? Behaviorism? Self knowledge? God?

Why do we think the P zombie argument thing has force for humans but not other creatures? In this light, I'd say consciousness is a broad spectrum with many degrees and that it is a useful description but not a useful explanation in its own right.

In other words, I can spend plenty of time dissecting and trying to tease out the roots of consciousness, but if I start with consciousness, it doesn't really explain anything else to me. As a handy description, it's useful. In the same way I might describe a collection of water vapor far away as a cloud. Clouds exist as long as I don't try anything other than a lay observation. When I want to be more precise, I'd have to delve deeper and explain a lot of other things. In a sense, once I've gone over gas laws, relative humidity, condensation and the like, I've ruined the usefulness of the simple description "cloud."

That's the way I see consciousness. A useful handle used to talk about a suite of other things but not essential or categorically different from other physical processes.

 

[HansMustermann]

You're proposing a world of P Zombies, why would such a world include consciousness at all? it simply is not required which ever way you look at it.

First of all, as far as I can tell, no he's not. There is a difference between materialism or physicalism and a world of P-Zombies. The fact that you even have to ask why his world includes consciousness is what should tell you right there that he's not talking about P-Zombies.

Second, the p-zombie thing is useful for certain mental exercises, much in the same way as an invisible pink unicorn could provide a good excuse for many hours of navel gazing about what is the nature of pink-ness and how something could be both invisible and pink at the same time. Or like you could spend a lifetime contemplating the sound of only one hand clapping. Or an unenlightened Buddha. Or whatever other contradiction. But I wouldn't run too far with it.

There are several kinds of nuances of p-zombies proposed, but most are a mix of begging the question and physical impossibility.

The basic gist is "what if we had something that does't actually feel pain, consciously experiences anything, has any conscious thoughts, etc, but still reacts and speaks and all EXACTLY as if it did?" Which is then used to handwave dualism via some more nonsense. E.g.,

1. It invariably involves some begging the question. E.g., in assuming that a world physically identical to ours wouldn't necessarily have the same neurons forming the same emergent properties, is already assuming that duality it proposes to support. Otherwise it's like trying to imagine a world identical to ours, but where hydrogen can't fuse into helium. Or a world identical to ours where chlorophyll doesn't do photosynthesis. Or a world identical to hours, where animals don't use oxygen, but still work as if they do, including breathe out CO2.

If you can deny the very mechanism X making Y work, and then go "well, I don't see any reason it wouldn't still work", you've already used as an assumption the idea that nope, it's not mechanism X making Y work.

2. It's inherently an argument from ignorance. "I don't see why Y wouldn't work without X" is not proving that indeed Y isn't based on X. It just says the one saying it doesn't know a reason.

3. Or to put it otherwise: It confuses between whatever half baked ideas one can imagine, and that which actually exists or can actually be supported.

Imagine I came up with the following argument:

P1: "Science says the current oxygen partial pressure can't support butterflies larger than about 1 ft (without evolving internal lungs and a circulatory system.)"
P2: "If that's true, then in any identical world, you also wouldn't find butterflies larger than about 1 ft."
P3: "But I can easily imagine a world with mile-sized butterflies, and can't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible."
C: "Therefore science is wrong."

I'll call that the P-Butterfly argument

And since most people aren't as attached to giant butterflies as to silly dualism schemes, it's probably very easy to see why it's a very stupid argument when I put it like that.

It should be very easy to see that something which exists only in my imagination and made possible only by my ignorance, isn't actually making it a valid counter-example. Now if P3 was "But we have an actual example of a 2 ft big butterfly from an age with the same oxygen partial pressure", THAT would be a counter-example right there. But my being able to imagine something and being too ignorant (and possibly stupid) to see why it's impossible, is not.

It should also be possible to see that in P3 essentially I already included, as a hidden premise, that biology is wrong.

 

[marplots]

What could be more decadent (and ego-driven) then the search for personal enlightenment?

Make me special!

Yeah. I'm unique and so are you. We are alike that way.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

.....

*Breathes deeply*

So anyway, lets move on to pineapples...

 

[catsmate]

.....

*Breathes deeply*

So anyway, lets move on to pineapples...

Of the Chicago variety?

 

[annnnoid]

Or...alternatively...

...rather than having our purpose or destination pre-determined by some outside force, we have the freedom to define our purpose and destination for ourselves. Personally, I think it is a terribly sad and pathetic life if you think that the only way to have purpose or destination is for some higher power to define it for you.

…but some ‘higher power’ has most indisputably defined it for you (if nothing else...provided you with the ability to freely define your purpose and destination...and effectively adjudicate the propriety of such a process). You sure as hell didn’t create you…you may be ‘in charge’ of you, but you didn’t create you and you have no idea what did. So, given the all-but incomprehensible complexity of ‘you’, it is, by default, indisputable that a ‘higher power’ is responsible (cause you…are not).

Does this mean that this ‘higher power’ is somehow relevant? Well, that is a question for you to answer. You have obviously decided in the negative. Apparently the higher power does not find this offensive (it might even be reasonable to conclude that the ‘higher power’ is ok with the idea…contrary to what many established ‘higher-power’ narratives proclaim).

…maybe you ought to ask the ‘higher power’ for an opinion on the matter (it’s been known to have one…on occasion [ what is an actual ‘word of God’ anyway?...and how do you know when you’ve met one?]). If you don't give a damn what the 'higher power' thinks...maybe the 'higher power' doesn't either (...give a damn whether you give a damn).

Conclusion….when it comes to ‘you’….there is, by default, a ‘higher power’ involved (so far undefined…again by default…given that there is, at present, no definitive understanding either of how the universe works or how you work). You most indisputably did not and do not create the ‘you’ that you are in charge of. But there is a ‘you’…and it’s gotta come from somewhere. That you are in charge of you though, that is also indisputable.

…a useful quote: ‘…you’re in charge…you’re not in control (that would be the ‘higher power thingy’)…anyone who thinks they’re in control is nuts…’

…and, regarding ‘free will’ and those sad souls who feel some twisted obligation to convince themselves that there is no such thing, we’ll turn to the dynamic duo of….Nelson Mandela….

” I am the captain of my soul, the master of my destiny “

…and PixyMisa:

Free will is a property - or rather, a description - of any information processing system whose dynamic complexity is greater than its output bandwidth to such a degree that its future behaviour can only be predicted from its past behaviour in terms of generalities and likelihoods - even by the information processing system itself. Thus, once you have a brain as complex as ours, you can't not have it.

Maybe.

...'maybe'...??? well, considering how enthusiastically Pixy cheered Argents dismissal off all wills free on the Chaos Magic thread, I suppose 'maybe' is progress.

So maybe 'higher powers' could use a shout out now and then...and maybe some folks authentically connect with them. Then again, maybe just capably exercising your 'higher power' endowed abilities (free will, responsibility, etc.) is the best acknowledgement that any 'higher power' could want.

.
.
.

 

[marplots]

Originally Posted by PixyMisa
Free will is a property - or rather, a description - of any information processing system whose dynamic complexity is greater than its output bandwidth to such a degree that its future behaviour can only be predicted from its past behaviour in terms of generalities and likelihoods - even by the information processing system itself. Thus, once you have a brain as complex as ours, you can't not have it.

I missed this earlier and it deserves a look.

I highlighted the part that shows it a good definition of unpredictibility and the impossibility of determinism, but misses what we are after. At best, it helps explain what is meant by "free," but contradicts what is meant by "will."

The "information system itself" can't will anything there without contradicting the first part. A die that, when rolled, could will a certain result would no longer be random. It would be predictable, if to nothing else, itself.

This is interesting, because I find I cannot predict myself at all. If you were to ask me what I might be thinking five minutes hence, I couldn't accurately say. I can't even do it for a single minute, or even tell you what I will be thinking a moment from now. I am hardly willing anything in that picture.

I can plan and tell you what I will do, whether I'll go to the fridge for some cheese or tie my shoe -- that I can do. What I cannot do is tell you what I will be thinking in any detail when I do those things. For all I know, I may be thinking about fish scales or what shampoo Jesus used.

If I can't will my own thoughts, how can I say those thoughts will anything else? If I could will them, like the die, I'd lose the free element.

 

[punshhh]

I missed this earlier and it deserves a look.

I highlighted the part that shows it a good definition of unpredictibility and the impossibility of determinism, but misses what we are after. At best, it helps explain what is meant by "free," but contradicts what is meant by "will."

The "information system itself" can't will anything there without contradicting the first part. A die that, when rolled, could will a certain result would no longer be random. It would be predictable, if to nothing else, itself.

This is interesting, because I find I cannot predict myself at all. If you were to ask me what I might be thinking five minutes hence, I couldn't accurately say. I can't even do it for a single minute, or even tell you what I will be thinking a moment from now. I am hardly willing anything in that picture.

I can plan and tell you what I will do, whether I'll go to the fridge for some cheese or tie my shoe -- that I can do. What I cannot do is tell you what I will be thinking in any detail when I do those things. For all I know, I may be thinking about fish scales or what shampoo Jesus used.

If I can't will my own thoughts, how can I say those thoughts will anything else? If I could will them, like the die, I'd lose the free element.

Pixy's theory explains free will Ok to me, its basically a computation, if a multi faceted and integrated one.

The will is a choice or a succession of choices and for this to occur, a self is required to make the choice. The self can also be explained approximately with a computation as well, in terms of performance.

What Pixy can't account for is being, which is an aspect of a life.

All Pixy's hypothetical conscious computers are not beings simply because they are not alive. They are automatons.

I haven't mentioned inspiration which also increases free will, in terms of creative activity.

Now in the model you have referred to as eliminative materialism, how do you account for creativity and inspiration?

Going back to P Zombies, I may not be rehearsing classic P Zombie arguments as I am not familiar with them. I am simply pointing out that in a purely material existence, self consciously aware beings are an unexpected development. Physical reality with living things can operate as our world appears to perfectly without any self conscious animals, P Zombies are the logical outcome. Unless self consciousness is just an accident a happy side effect. In which case, what does this say about physical reality?

It says to me that physical reality coexists with conscious intelligence, intelligence which when sufficiently advanced would create aspects of reality, indeed ultimately create reality as it appears to be altogether.

If this is not the case, then is self consciousness just a fleeting accident of physical matter? A momentary glimpse of reality by reality. Is there nobody home?

 

[HansMustermann]

No it's not the logical outcome, if you actually look at what P-Zombies are supposed to be. P-Zombies are supposed to be things which act and talk and everything as if they were self aware, although they're not.

E.g., one could say, "tell me what doctor are you going to, I have this pain in the back that won't go away no matter what I try", although they aren't consciously experiencing the pain or all the other concepts involved. Which is frakking stupid, because it's exactly having those concepts and notions that make one do such abstract conscious thinking and ask for a solution.

Basically as I was saying, it's like trying to imagine the sound of one hand clapping, or someone who attains Nirvana (i.e., IS a buddha) without letting go of the desire to reincarnate. I.e., imagine something that happens in spite of not having the CAUSES that actually make it happen. Sure, the human brain is complex enough to deal with such contradictions as if they were real, but that doesn't actually make it anything else than nonsense.

In the case of "consciousness", all the data we have about the brain points towards a very early evolution towards operating with tokens of information and associations between them.

E.g., vision doesn't mean reacting to the individual pixels on the retina. The image processing starts with the retina itself, which already does edge detection and movement detection. In primates there are apparently even connections for detecting serpent scales. But we already know that such basic processing happens even in frogs (which actually over-emphasize movement detection and tracing edges) or flies before even reaching the brain.

From there we also know that a lot of, basically, parsing the scene into conceptual elements and pruning the uninteresting details happens long before it even reaches the actual higher processing stages. We know because there's stuff you could remember afterwards if you had a photographic memory, like a gorilla doing cartwheels in the background, while you're interested in something in the foreground, but actually can't. You can create a false memory (e.g., make them recall a gorilla where there was none), but can't make someone recall details they should have seen even very recently.

We also know on the topic of those memories that individual details can be changed in a picture, and in fact do get changed all the time. Even using a bad portrait artist to make a picture of the guy who assaulted you, can and routinely results in remembering features from that picture instead of the actual guy who assaulted you. You can mix the crooked nose from such a portrait in a face that doesn't have such a nose shape, without even realizing you do.

Or you can still remember the model of someone's coat, but mis-remember it as being plaid brown, instad of solid navy. You can swap or mix details from two different persons into one, too.

We also know that in certain kinds of hallucinations, e.g., alcohol withdrawal or LSD, a neuron or two mis-firing can insert a whole new thing into the image you see (e.g., a pink flying elephant) or change a thing into another (e.g., you see your arm and hand as a snake.) Which is damn hard to explain if it involved exactly changing all the pixels seen to add an elephant, but is trivially explained if the scene you actually process is a tokenized description of the scene.

Etc.

From a data processing point of view it even makes sense. That's the most efficient way to process data, especially in a massively parallel computer around a high speed central hub, which is what the brain is. You want the information split into tokens that you can process or search for associations for.

Same as when you do a Google search, they're not processing individual letters, but first split it into words and then use those words, those tokens of information, to actually search and run other filters and processing on. E.g., if you search for "the boer hunt", Google might figure out that it could also be a mis-spelled "boar" and search for that too, or also use word derivatives like "hunter" or "hunting".

The most efficient way to do an AI is to deal with basically tokens of information instead of arrays of pixels or raw wave forms for sounds. If you want to search for the associations relevant for how to open a door, you want tokens like "door", "knob", "keyhole" identified in the picture and then you work with those.

The same applies for animals too, as far as we can tell, btw. In fact we can even identify the same stages in buffering the information. That's how we know not only that cats have a short term buffer too, but even how long it is, and actually it turns out that far from having an attention defficit, they actually have a ridiculously oversized short term memory buffer in their brain pipeline compared to humans.

To cut it short, basically to react to a feather on a stick, the most efficient way for the cat is to basically isolate the feather in the image and do its processing based on that. It must be AWARE of the feather as a distinct entity, and of its position and movement as another entity or attribute. To react to such things as that that electric fence hurts, or that the other cat will beat you up if you go near, you must have a bunch more entities you're aware of and associations between them. E.g., messing with that big cat ==> pain.

You can call that consciousness or not, but basically that's the logical result as the brain gets increasingly complex and aware of more and more stuff at the same time. Not only stuff around, but also one's own state. And past a level of complexity, it also helps to be able to remember what you were trying to do, and operate on hypothetical situations to be prepared in advance. E.g., past a point in evolution we started making complex associations like using tools to solve an immediate problem, and then making tools to solve a future problem that exists only as a mental concept. E.g., making a spear to hunt a future boar. All this big ball of entities to juggle with, including where my limbs are, what I need, what I feel, what I HAVE, and what things are they good for (e.g., I have a spear that's good for hunting boars), what things exist in the world even though I don't see them right now (e.g., those boars I'm gonna hunt when I'm done making the flint spear), and the increasing ammount of abtract processing that can be done with it, becomes just what we call "consciousness".

And all reactions are really based on that awareness of the entities that cause those reactions. A kid touching the candle flame and then remembering to never do it again because if frikken hurts, is really just based on the brain processing those tokens of information and making associations between them. You need to be aware in some way at the level that does that processing of entities like "flame" or "pain", or you won't react to them.

The only ways to deny that and end up with stupidities like P-Zombies are to basically believe in magic one way or another. Either you need to believe that there's some magical "consciousness" that is above and beyond that awareness of those entities, or some magical thing that makes those P-Zombies do the same reactions in spite of lacking the very triggers for those reactions.

And the former is silly too, because then that magical "consciousness" does nothing at all and becomes an extra piece of fluff that fails Occam's Razor. If the same brain processes cause the same reactions, and thus the entities you're aware of and ways they're used in coming up with the solution are the same, then you just made that extra "consciousness" entity superfluous.

So yes, a world would exist without it, but then our world exists without whatever mis-conception you call "consciousness" too. It means that whatever higher thing you label "consciousness" is actually just some bogus extra fluff with no relevance to the real consciousness.

 

[punshhh]

No it's not the logical outcome, if you actually look at what P-Zombies are supposed to be. P-Zombies are supposed to be things which act and talk and everything as if they were self aware, although they're not.

E.g., one could say, "tell me what doctor are you going to, I have this pain in the back that won't go away no matter what I try", although they aren't consciously experiencing the pain or all the other concepts involved. Which is frakking stupid, because it's exactly having those concepts and notions that make one do such abstract conscious thinking and ask for a solution.

Basically as I was saying, it's like trying to imagine the sound of one hand clapping, or someone who attains Nirvana (i.e., IS a buddha) without letting go of the desire to reincarnate. I.e., imagine something that happens in spite of not having the CAUSES that actually make it happen. Sure, the human brain is complex enough to deal with such contradictions as if they were real, but that doesn't actually make it anything else than nonsense.

In the case of "consciousness", all the data we have about the brain points towards a very early evolution towards operating with tokens of information and associations between them.

E.g., vision doesn't mean reacting to the individual pixels on the retina. The image processing starts with the retina itself, which already does edge detection and movement detection. In primates there are apparently even connections for detecting serpent scales. But we already know that such basic processing happens even in frogs (which actually over-emphasize movement detection and tracing edges) or flies before even reaching the brain.

From there we also know that a lot of, basically, parsing the scene into conceptual elements and pruning the uninteresting details happens long before it even reaches the actual higher processing stages. We know because there's stuff you could remember afterwards if you had a photographic memory, like a gorilla doing cartwheels in the background, while you're interested in something in the foreground, but actually can't. You can create a false memory (e.g., make them recall a gorilla where there was none), but can't make someone recall details they should have seen even very recently.

We also know on the topic of those memories that individual details can be changed in a picture, and in fact do get changed all the time. Even using a bad portrait artist to make a picture of the guy who assaulted you, can and routinely results in remembering features from that picture instead of the actual guy who assaulted you. You can mix the crooked nose from such a portrait in a face that doesn't have such a nose shape, without even realizing you do.

Or you can still remember the model of someone's coat, but mis-remember it as being plaid brown, instad of solid navy. You can swap or mix details from two different persons into one, too.

We also know that in certain kinds of hallucinations, e.g., alcohol withdrawal or LSD, a neuron or two mis-firing can insert a whole new thing into the image you see (e.g., a pink flying elephant) or change a thing into another (e.g., you see your arm and hand as a snake.) Which is damn hard to explain if it involved exactly changing all the pixels seen to add an elephant, but is trivially explained if the scene you actually process is a tokenized description of the scene.

Etc.

From a data processing point of view it even makes sense. That's the most efficient way to process data, especially in a massively parallel computer around a high speed central hub, which is what the brain is. You want the information split into tokens that you can process or search for associations for.

Same as when you do a Google search, they're not processing individual letters, but first split it into words and then use those words, those tokens of information, to actually search and run other filters and processing on. E.g., if you search for "the boer hunt", Google might figure out that it could also be a mis-spelled "boar" and search for that too, or also use word derivatives like "hunter" or "hunting".

The most efficient way to do an AI is to deal with basically tokens of information instead of arrays of pixels or raw wave forms for sounds. If you want to search for the associations relevant for how to open a door, you want tokens like "door", "knob", "keyhole" identified in the picture and then you work with those.

The same applies for animals too, as far as we can tell, btw. In fact we can even identify the same stages in buffering the information. That's how we know not only that cats have a short term buffer too, but even how long it is, and actually it turns out that far from having an attention defficit, they actually have a ridiculously oversized short term memory buffer in their brain pipeline compared to humans.

To cut it short, basically to react to a feather on a stick, the most efficient way for the cat is to basically isolate the feather in the image and do its processing based on that. It must be AWARE of the feather as a distinct entity, and of its position and movement as another entity or attribute. To react to such things as that that electric fence hurts, or that the other cat will beat you up if you go near, you must have a bunch more entities you're aware of and associations between them. E.g., messing with that big cat ==> pain.

You can call that consciousness or not, but basically that's the logical result as the brain gets increasingly complex and aware of more and more stuff at the same time. Not only stuff around, but also one's own state. And past a level of complexity, it also helps to be able to remember what you were trying to do, and operate on hypothetical situations to be prepared in advance. E.g., past a point in evolution we started making complex associations like using tools to solve an immediate problem, and then making tools to solve a future problem that exists only as a mental concept. E.g., making a spear to hunt a future boar. All this big ball of entities to juggle with, including where my limbs are, what I need, what I feel, what I HAVE, and what things are they good for (e.g., I have a spear that's good for hunting boars), what things exist in the world even though I don't see them right now (e.g., those boars I'm gonna hunt when I'm done making the flint spear), and the increasing ammount of abtract processing that can be done with it, becomes just what we call "consciousness".

And all reactions are really based on that awareness of the entities that cause those reactions. A kid touching the candle flame and then remembering to never do it again because if frikken hurts, is really just based on the brain processing those tokens of information and making associations between them. You need to be aware in some way at the level that does that processing of entities like "flame" or "pain", or you won't react to them.

The only ways to deny that and end up with stupidities like P-Zombies are to basically believe in magic one way or another. Either you need to believe that there's some magical "consciousness" that is above and beyond that awareness of those entities, or some magical thing that makes those P-Zombies do the same reactions in spite of lacking the very triggers for those reactions.

And the former is silly too, because then that magical "consciousness" does nothing at all and becomes an extra piece of fluff that fails Occam's Razor. If the same brain processes cause the same reactions, and thus the entities you're aware of and ways they're used in coming up with the solution are the same, then you just made that extra "consciousness" entity superfluous.

So yes, a world would exist without it, but then our world exists without whatever mis-conception you call "consciousness" too. It means that whatever higher thing you label "consciousness" is actually just some bogus extra fluff with no relevance to the real consciousness.

Thanks for your detailed account of the P Zombie argument, its very interesting.

However what I'm referring to when I say consciousness as we know it is an inherent quality of matter, which for some reason when combined in the form of a living brain generates an animated presence which we know and recognise as consciousness.

Now if for arguments sake an alien form outside our universe discovered matter and extrapolated what forms due to the laws of physics it would take.
It probably wouldn't come up with living things, unless it was extremely intelligent. And if it did come up with living things and even advanced living things which can step out from their evolutionary niche. It would only come up with forms of intelligence, such as you have eloquently laid out in your post. Some basic self referencing is all that would be required to explain all the activities that humans get up to. Consciousness as real as experienced by real humanity would not be required and they would probably not even come up with it even if their intelligence was vast.

My point is the form of matter described in materialist philosophies does not, and would not result in consciousness as we know it. Only a world of barely conscious Zombies.

 

[HansMustermann]

Ok, so explain what IS your version of consciousness, that that "basic" self-awareness, and awareness of the world, and awareness of abstract concepts, etc, doesn't cover.

I mean, take for example a Homo Ergaster, the first which purposefully built rafts to cross rivers on. Imagine one of those guys knapping some flint. Why? To make an axe. Why? To cut a tree with. Why? To make a raft. Why? To cross a river. Why? To hunt boars which seem to be more plentiful on the other side, where nobody is there to hunt them.

It must somehow "know" all those entities, and to follow a plan that involves entities he doesn't actually see. We're not talking a cat chasing a mouse when it sees one. We're talking a guy whose plan involves cutting a tree that exists only as an abstract concept at that point. He's not actually looking at it while making the axe to cut it down. Which in turn is to cross a river which he currently doesn't have in his field of view. And that is to hunt some animals which he also can't see at the moment. He must basically just "know" about those entities as part of the stuff he's aware of.

Better yet, consider the reasoning backwards, from seeing some animals across the river, to "I'll need a raft", to "then I'll need to cut some trees", to "then I'll need an axe." His mind must work through associations with stuff he isn't currently seeing. E.g., he doesn't have an axe to look at and go "oh, yeah, this'll work", or he'd already have one. He must work backwards through stuff that exists only as part of his world model or even just as concepts.

Better yet, these are group animals, so he must have these concepts clear enough so that he can tell someone else about it (e.g., "you go gather some vines so we can tie the trunks together"), and to operate based on such things that he was told.

Once someone is aware of and able to juggle with entities that include not just self and surroundings, but also stuff he just remember existing somewhere else (e.g., the trees on the other side of the hill), and stuff which exists only as intent, and stuff which exists only as abstract notions and instructions received from another H Ergaster, etc... is that guy not already conscious? WTH else would he need to count as conscious?