So are you saying that we have free will and reason, and that it has causal power over our physical bodies inside of a closed system of strict laws?
What I said was that the laws of motion govern how people move, not why they move; unless, by 'laws of motion' you mean all the laws of nature (physics, chemistry, etc).
Free will is just a way we talk about our experience - we experience making choices and decisions, and when we feel we are not constrained or coerced in doing so, we say we are exercising our free will (if you mean something different by 'free will', please describe it). This is the subjective view.
Objectively, a choice or decision is a deterministic evaluation, effectively a calculation; all the events involved are causal and, for all practical purposes, deterministic - we make choices for reasons that are rooted in our experience of the world, our innate predispositions, our current emotional state, and so-on, all determined by causal sequences of prior events.
As Schopenhauer said, "
A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants". IOW, your wants, drives, desires, & emotions ultimately arise from feelings that are not consciously originated.
So we have a technical explanation about brain processes that conveniently allows for “bizarre” behaviors that just so happens to match up perfectly with what things would look like if people had wills that have causal influences over physical bodies, and these wills make decisions, and these decisions tend to be goofy at times, or bone headed, or cause self injury, etc. So brain processes have an error factor that perfectly matches up with the “Myth” of a non-computational mind? Wow what a convenient error factor for scientific consensus!
Incredulous sarcasm is not an argument. What we call 'will' is just the motivation to do what we want, i.e. goal-directed behaviour. It has causal influence over the body because it is a bodily (neural) process - nerves can activate muscles. Two descriptions of the same phenomenon - one subjective and experiential, one objective and physical.
There’s no behaviors whatsoever that humans could possibly engage in that can’t conveniently be explained away by technical scientific talk.
Good! Your disparaging tone notwithstanding, scientific explanations are what we want.
Even worse you actually used the words “Appears To” in your reply. Why do you rebel against embracing BOTH science, and the complicated goofy funny but also dangerous mess called human minds? I don’t protest science, science is awesome, I just call out cases where people get too seduced by science and refuse to let our will in.
Lol! 'even worse' than having a scientific explanation, I'm explicit about it being a conclusion based on observational evidence and not absolutely certain. But hey, that's how science works.
Humans literally step back from their evolutionary instincts, and they get behind their default perceptions and their default illusion of reality that evolution has equipped us with…and we have the capacity to second guess it all and go against it in the direction of our choice.
No, they don't
literally step back, they
metaphorically step back. Yep, we're sophisticated learning systems; evolution has provided us reasoning capacity and the ability to set ourselves new goals.
Same exact situation for our cultural conditioning, we can also step back from it, re-evaluate it, and make a more informed final decision. We also repeatedly challenge the default illusion of ultimate reality on a grand scale that evolution has given us, we constantly seek out what it really looks like IN DEFIANCE OF evolution. None of these things are required for survival in our surroundings, or for our procreation. So we can’t explain this with evolutionary theory…
Not in defiance of evolution - the traits you mention are all evolved. Curiosity, inventiveness, culture, etc., all have a selective advantage. It's all well explained by evolutionary theory. If you look at our close primate relatives, chimps and bonobos, you'll see the rudiments of those same traits.
but gee I’ll bet all the money that I have that you could conveniently come up with a “More Robust” scientific explanation for this that excludes the obvious conclusion that we have wills that have causal power over our physical bodies. Of course you can when you practice a self fulfilling prophecy where nothing can ever fall outside of scientific jargon.
Explained above.
Psychology needs to co-exist with scientific theories in order to explain us...as opposed to the claims that psychology “Reduces” to physics. How do you explain the success of psychology? In the 19th century it shocked many scientifically minded people that you could actually help troubled patients by just talking to them (as opposed to the theory that every problem with the mind was just due to some physical or chemical ailment or deformity). But again, the self fulfilling prophecy of scientific consensus will no doubt be able to explain this one away as well with technical scientific processes of some sort. Don’t you think it gets pretty ad hoc?
Psychology, until fairly recently, has not been particularly successful; a number of models have been tried and abandoned. But of course it's possible to help people by talking to them, just as it's possible to harm them; computationally you're giving them fresh input to process that can change their internal state, psychologically you're helping them understand themselves and establish new beliefs. Two different descriptions of the same phenomenon.
Again, you're disparaging about science being able to provide explanatory models for complex phenomena, but that's what science does. The important thing is that they are testable models, and it helps if they make useful predictions.
I was in no way striving for any kind of neuroscience accuracy here, it was a totally made up scenario for the thought experiment of how adding a key section of matter would be the missing ingredient for consciousness.
What for? Scoffing at a 'totally made up scenario' is simply irrelevant.
The problem of psychophysical emergence doesn’t disappear if consciousness was a process of incremental steps. You have the same exact problem of psychophysical emergence for bodies & minds developing together in incremental stages.
Sure - that's a characteristic of emergent phenomena, they have rules and ontologies that bear no obvious connection to the rules and ontology of the underlying phenomena. There will always be a connection but it's typically subtle and non-obvious. The connection between the objective & subjective ontologies is certainly non-obvious, and is yet to be described.
Lol which part made you think I was emotional? I wasn’t angry or emotional but you saying that makes me think that I may have sounded cocky somewhere, my bad!!
The sarcastic tone, the use of all caps and exclamation marks, the misrepresentation of my position (if you want to know what I think, just ask), all gave that impression.
I’m the longest posting wind bag in this place and even this reply is long Haha
And yet it's all been expressions of incredulity, and you've failed to explain your position or answer any of the questions I asked about it
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'll leave the readers to draw their own conclusions.
