okay so where do they break the laws of physics? Or in the case of groups where is the neuro-misfire. Remember there's a difference between being holistic and being chaotic.
I think you mean "dualistic", not "holistic". There's nothing supernatural about holistic systems.
The known (or I believed) laws of physics are reductionist. They only talk about parts. If there's something additional beyond the parts theories that don't account for them will give inaccurate predictions. For example a brain that had its mind stuff taken out (or a simulated brain that just didn't include them from the start), leaving the matter alone would stop acting normally because the effect of the mind stuff would be gone. A brain where the parts mind their own buissness and just do physics won't think the same thoughts as one where the mind can just reach in and cause things, without any apparent chain of causation.
Anger for example most do something the particles wouldn't otherwise do, or our anger wouldn't be able to drive our actions.
Also irreducibly mental is basically what supernatural means.
Hmm, I suspect you have an inaccurate understanding of what scientific reductionism is. Science does break things down into interacting units of measurement to test how they operate, but theory puts it all back together again. I assure you there is nothing unscientific in the notion that anger is the result of patterns of neural activity in the brain, or that the outcome of different parts of the brain working together is different than each part working independently. Psychology has long regarded the brain as a fully integrated whole.
I'm not sure what you mean by "mind stuff"- are you referring to self-awareness? The latest theories regarding the role of self-awareness treat it as a kind of cognitive simulation that your brain creates so that your brain doesn't have to search through the entire long term memory store to keep track of relationships between yourself and other objects nearby. It's a picture that acts as a shortcut. Which implies that the self-awareness. It's not clear whether or not the self makes decisions itself, or whether decisions are made by cognitive processes outside of the self and then only processed after the fact (yet being experienced as an "I" which is making the decision- in that sense the self would be an illusion). In any case, I know of no reason to suppose that awareness isnt a product of the physical brain, perhaps a product of the extremely high complexity of some neural interactions.
"Emergent behavior" is precisely the term I was looking for. I cant believe I blocked on it! Thanks.
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I'm having a feeling you folks may want to be really specific about your definitions here if you're not to get confused between material and semantic arguments. You're doing some of that, but maybe be explicit. There's a difference between a 'holistic' approach to medicine that is Western and modern but treats the patient as a whole entity including emotions rather than focusing on, say, the respiratory system or immune system, and one which is supernaturally holistic.
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Good idea. I dont have the time right now, but I'll try to add a more detailed explanation later tonight.
@Meklar Things like what you describe are special cases of a more fundamental rule. You can examine a biological system with chemistry and it will be more accurate, it will just take more time then its worth.
The word emergence is pretty useless since it doesn't tell you anything new. The sentences "The mind is the emergent result of neurons firing" and "The mind is the result of neurons firing" tell you the exact same thing.
When life gives you lemons, burn life's house down with the lemons.
Heh, no it actually doesnt, but I dont have the time right now, maybe in a couple of hours.
@De Marquis Who are you replying to?
When life gives you lemons, burn life's house down with the lemons.
@De Marquis I am asking because I can't make any sense out of what you said in your post.
When life gives you lemons, burn life's house down with the lemons.
The idea of reductionism is that you only need to know about the parts and how they fit together. That something is a brain isn't an additional fact on top of the physical information. Just like how once you have all the molecular information, learning about the temperature doesn't tell you anything new.
So first, reductionism. The idea behind scientific reductionism is that you can take a complex process, break it down into it's constituent parts, and study those in order to understand how they work together. For example, you can measure the temperature, and barometric pressure and the wind direction and speed to understand how the weather changes. But you have to put these different things back together and observe how they interact with's each other in order to understand the system's behavior. This means that the "parts", when interacting with one another, can produce an outcome that isn't predictable ahead of time by examining the parts by themselves. That is the only sense in which I meant "holism".
When you apply this to the brain, it means that you have to look at the whole brain as an integrated system to understand how it produces it's outputs, including consciousness. Nowhere did I mean to imply that something was operating on anything other than the physical processes and their interactions, and if that was confusing then I apologize.
When you say "just the sum of their parts", taken literally that really isn't true. Parts interact in ways that are not predictable even knowing how those parts work together. But that isnt outside the realm of physics, it's just the emergent property of a complex, dynamic system. A dynamic system is a process that is "iterative" in nature- that is it can be described as an algorthym or an equation that takes an input, calculates an output, and then uses that output as the input for the next iteration of the system. The iterations could be taking place over microseconds or years, depending on what the system is.
The behavior of such a system can be described as a path through a "state space"- a multi dimensional matrix that has two or more variables as the axes. As the equation produces a new output, that output is a value that tells you where the system is within the matrix of all possible outputs. The changes the system goes through over time is it's path through this matrix. The exact path a system will take into the future may not be predictable ahead of time, even if we know precisely what the equation is. For example, there is a famous equation that describes the changing relationship of temperature and pressure within a cloud- yet we cant use it to predict the weather more than a few days out. That's because the system is so sensitive to small changes in the system's state that a small change at time one can produce a huge change at time two. It's these huge changes that cannot be predicted. To call a system's path through state space "emergent" means that it corresponds in a mathematical way to a non-linear dynamic system. It can be very precisely defined. You can read more here
(a "non-linear" system is another word for what I am calling a "dynamic" system).
If the human brain is a dynamic non-linear system, then the pattern of activated neurons over time may have emergent properties (one of which could be the self-consciousness). Anyway, the main point I am trying to make is that the brain may very well be far more than just the "sum of it's parts" in that you have to look at the non-linear way in which its different processes interact to understand their outputs. Read more here.
Then the word you're looking for is chaotic.
I moving this to this thread because it was off topic.
@demarquis The present creates the future without any additional input from the past. Of course the the past was once the presnt and the present the future. The laws of physics are local with respect to time.
As for physics deciding things for you, you are physics.
"as a source of input which is independent of previous casual events, do not exist. If this worldview is correct, then the self must be an illusion."
Only if you attach pointless requirements. It doesn't help anything for your original will to have come from nowhere. The point is we are in control now, not what put us in control.
"Chaotic" is the term used in the popular literature, yes.
As for the determinism discussion we are having, you should link back to the thread you are moving the discussion from. Quote Supermerlin: "Determinism isn't a problem for free will. It's more of a requirement. Your will determines your actions and future will rather then something else. The free part comes from picking between multiple paths, but you are picking according to your will. You just don't perfectly know your will, and can't make a perfect modal of your decision process."
I have been disagreeing with this statement.
It appears that you are simply taking that portion of cause and effect which occurs within our brain, and labeling that our "will". But if our "will" is nothing more than the predictable outcomes of a chain of cause and effect, which began when an environmental stimulus affected a sensory organ, then I dont understand how that could be seen as "free". Where does the freedom come from? Under strict determinism, our experience of making a choice is an illusion because our choice itself is the predictable outcome of a previous chain of events that began outside of our brains. That isnt what most people mean by "free".
edited 25th Feb '14 5:40:15 AM by DeMarquis
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What do most people mean by "free"? It's obvious to me that our will is formed and inlfuenced from input from the world. With no input there would not be a will.
I guess the real test would be to see if two people with the same genes subjected to identical stimuli their whole lives would be capable of disagreeing on what to do.
Not sure how you would ever pull that off, but...
edited 25th Feb '14 6:51:27 AM by Elfive
@Meklar What I mean by special case is that Biology is a specific form of chemistry. You just add extra details to narrow down what matters at moment.
@De Marquis
Saying that your decision is caused by physics is a pretty meaningless statement since everything is within physics, so you really have to talk about what causes what inside physics. Also if the world was random and not determined then what happens would never follow from your will.
Cause and effect is local so you only need the immediate past to determined the present. There is no meaningful way that the distant past just determines the future. The question of freewill is push backwards into your brain that triggers action based on things you would probably call your "will".
When life gives you lemons, burn life's house down with the lemons.
@Antitielchen: That depends on which school of thought you belong to. "Incompatiblists" (who hold that strict determinism isnt compatible with free will) define free will as being at least to some degree free of outside influence (no one argues that a free will isnt influenced by outside causal factors, just that there is some source of decision making within us that is free). It should be clear that if one believes that all phenomena in the universe are caused by prior materialistic effects then there can be no free will in this sense (where would a "source of decision making free of outside influence" come from?).
Compatibilists tend to re-define free will so that it can be constrained yet still appear free. In other words, "Incompatiblists" and "Compatiblists" arent actually arguing two different position on the same issue, they are arguing two different issues. "Modern compatibilists make a distinction between freedom of will and freedom of action, that is, separating freedom of choice from the freedom to enact it." But that isnt "Free Will" it's "Freedom of Action" a different thing.
What I'm saying here is that if you want to argue in favor of the hypothesis that we in our selves can control our own actions, then you have to propose where that control comes from, and if it comes from something that itself is entirely determined by a previous chain of cause and effect, then it isnt really free.
As you point out, a will that is free of outside influence doesn't strictly make logical sense. Lots of people still argue in favor of it, though.
Elfive's test would be a good one, if we could ever pull it off. Perhaps if we ever invent fully sapient AI's...
"Saying that your decision is caused by physics is a pretty meaningless statement since everything is within physics, so you really have to talk about what causes what inside physics. Also if the world was random and not determined then what happens would never follow from your will. Cause and effect is local so you only need the immediate past to determined the present. There is no meaningful way that the distant past just determines the future. The question of freewill is push backwards into your brain that triggers action based on things you would probably call your "will".
This raises a lot of issues for me. First, a nitpick, I havnt said anything about "physics", I'm talking about strict determinism. If you are implying that "everything is within determinism" then that's a philosophical position that not everyone agrees with.
You are correct that an arbitrarily random universe is just as incompatible with free will as a fully determined one. That's why quantum indeterminency doesnt offer us an out.
By strict determinism, immediate cause and effect is local, but local effects were themselves presumably caused by prior events, going all the way back to the Big Bang with no indeterminancy involved (above the level of quantum effects). In theory, if you could collect all the data there is (the position and direction of every moving particle since the beginning) you would see that the current state of the entire universe was inevitable. That's what "strict determinism" means. One is of course free to disagree that the universe is strictly determined, but then one is left with the problem of how "uncaused effects" fit within our understanding of science.
Of course, it's also true that we can call our self-consciousness our "will" if we want to, but that is just a semantic argument unless one explains how that "will" could be the origin of a choice of some kind.
@De Marquis
It is true that if you start from the big-bang and continue forward you will reach the present and then future at some point. However you can't compute the present moment directly from the big-bang without computing the moment before the present. And as I mention cause and effect is local. If you had perfect knowledge of the past moment you could compute the current moment and knowing about the big-bang wouldn't make a difference.
When we talk about a persons responsibility, it doesn't matter what determined the person. Genes, upbringing, random outside factors only determine which person is making the decision. Say Alice is standing in front of a burning building and has the choice to save someone before the entrance burns down. Say she does. In a different world where she has a different upbringing and doesn't go in. It is not Alice making a different decision but a different person name Alice with the same parents.
edited 25th Feb '14 7:44:54 AM by higurashimerlin
When life gives you lemons, burn life's house down with the lemons.
Ooh, this ought to be fun. I'm a complete "wholist", if that's the word. Minds, cooperating groups, systems of all kinds, are rather more than the sum of their parts. Such systems engage in behavior that cannot be predicted no matter how much information you collect on each part separately.