Searching for GOD...

[torridon]

It is the determining factor for consciously driven choices.

No, you cannot say the reason why you chose the peach rather than the apricot is because you chose the peach rather than the apricot.

That's nonsense.

The determining factor will be something about the peach and how it impacts on you.

[Sriram]

There has to be a mechanism for resolving choice; there has to be a method.  If we are stuck with no method to resolve choice then we end up with indecision and we quickly die.  This is why brains evolved, to make resolve choices.  'Conscious Will' has to have some means to do this, it is not going to happen by magic, it happens by method, it happens by reason.  This is the founding origins of consciousness, it is at base an affective state which renders all perceptions, both inner state and outward perceptions on a scale of biological value - that toe is hurting, that peach looks tasty, that bloke over there is ugly; all aspects of conscious experience are rendered in terms of emotional content, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, and these values form the basis for decision making. At every moment of every day, your mind is deriving the optimal action to take informed by the totality of conscious experience (meaning this includes content that is 'subconscious').

I can understand the idea of determination and that our choices are really built into our personality and our circumstances.

https://tsriramrao.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/destiny-freewill/

But your statement that.... brains evolved so that we could make choices...is again questionable. Do you mean that something or someone wanted us to have choices and knew the method by which this could be achieved and therefore made these structures and processes develop??!!

[Alan Burns]

...................

It is that process that must either proceed deterministically - every step is entirely due to previous reasons - or not. And if not then some part of it must be for no reason.

But in this logic you end up with an infinite regress of reasons with no facility for manipulation or initiation.  Every reason is generated from previous reasons.  Hence no freedom at all.

Just going back to Kant's observation, our unique ability to perceive how things ought to be, rather than how things are, is profound evidence that such abstract thought could not have materialised within a material based cause and effect  mechanism.  It is evidence of what I perceive to be a God given insight into what is wrong in our earthly life, and a glimpse of how things should be.

[Alan Burns]

No, you cannot say the reason why you chose the peach rather than the apricot is because you chose the peach rather than the apricot.

That's nonsense.

The determining factor will be something about the peach and how it impacts on you.

The reason why I do anything may be based on my likes and dislikes, but the conscious choice I make to do it, and the time I choose to do it, are entirely under my control.  The choice is mine, not in the physically pre defined electro chemical reactions of my material brain.

[torridon]

The reason why I do anything may be based on my likes and dislikes, but the conscious choice I make to do it, and the time I choose to do it, are entirely under my control.  The choice is mine, not in the physically pre defined electro chemical reactions of my material brain.

The choice of when to do it (etc) is itself a like/dislike.  It is subject to the same principal, it is a choice that needs to be resolved.  You really just aren't thinking this through.

[torridon]

I can understand the idea of determination and that our choices are really built into our personality and our circumstances.

https://tsriramrao.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/destiny-freewill/

But your statement that.... brains evolved so that we could make choices...is again questionable. Do you mean that something or someone wanted us to have choices and knew the method by which this could be achieved and therefore made these structures and processes develop??!!

Eerm, that is your telelogical take on things, sorry if my wording seemed to imply that.  I just take the more straightforward view from evolutionary theory - the ability to make choices quickly and at low cost is a survival benefit so the characteristic would spread naturally.

[Alan Burns]

The choice of when to do it (etc) is itself a like/dislike.  It is subject to the same principal, it is a choice that needs to be resolved.  You really just aren't thinking this through.

And it is resolved by the ability of my conscious awareness to invoke the choice when I choose to do it.

Do you honestly believe that the origin of this choice is just an endless regression of reasons going back to the beginning of time?  If not, what initiated my chosen option of when to invoke my choice?

[torridon]

And it is resolved by the ability of my conscious awareness to invoke the choice when I choose to do it.

Do you honestly believe that the origin of this choice is just an endless regression of reasons going back to the beginning of time?  If not, what initiated my chosen option of when to invoke my choice?

Read the posts, I'm sure this has been covered at least 597 times. Minds have a mechanism for resolving choice, it is the same mechanism whether you are choosing between which fruit to pick or when to action your choice, it is still a moment of choice and which ever item is chosen, or which ever time is chosen to action it comes down to the same principal - the option with the most appeal in the moment is the one that gets chosen and we cannot choose how much something appeals to us. Rival options are rendered on an internal scale of values and we pick the option that has the most emotional appeal to us in the moment.

For all intents and purposes, everything in the present moment does derive from the previous moment, and this includes the mind states of sentient beings.  The only way this could be not the case is if there is some random variability. At the quantum level there is quantum indeterminacy meaning we cannot always fully know specific properties of subatomic particles but this averages out at microscopic and macroscopic levels.  This is known as the principal of adequate determinism, meaning for all practical purposes we can consider everything from the level of chemistry up to be deterministic, and clearly that includes the mind states of biological systems which are composed of biochemical states in cortex.

[ippy]

But in this logic you end up with an infinite regress of reasons with no facility for manipulation or initiation.  Every reason is generated from previous reasons.  Hence no freedom at all.

Just going back to Kant's observation, our unique ability to perceive how things ought to be, rather than how things are, is profound evidence that such abstract thought could not have materialised within a material based cause and effect  mechanism.  It is evidence of what I perceive to be a God given insight into what is wrong in our earthly life, and a glimpse of how things should be.

It's marvellous the things this blancmange like lump inside our heads containing this electro chemical process that's working away doing its best to make sense of this world for us can do, it even manufactures make believe things like the god idea that potentially keeps people like you Alan, feeling safe and secure inside a falsely holistic child like in content way, but hay it's your security blanket like it does for millions of others it keeps you occupied and presumably happy too.

I can understand the security blanket part but why this apparent overwhelming need to have the rather unnecessary woo?

It's not as though there's any viable evidence to support the woo stuff you seem to insist on asserting.

Commiserations Alan, ippy 

[Sriram]

Eerm, that is your telelogical take on things, sorry if my wording seemed to imply that.  I just take the more straightforward view from evolutionary theory - the ability to make choices quickly and at low cost is a survival benefit so the characteristic would spread naturally.

It is not just the wording...its the concept itself. Several questions naturally arise....

1. As I have asked before...why should anything survive? Where does the survival instinct come from? You are taking that for granted and not questioning it.

2. You are speaking as though ..'making choices is low cost'.. is a  known fact to the evolutionary system which then has decided to develop it. How exactly?

3. Why don't other organisms that are far better at survival than humans have similar choices then.

[torridon]

It is not just the wording...its the concept itself. Several questions naturally arise....

1. As I have asked before...why should anything survive? Where does the survival instinct come from? You are taking that for granted and not questioning it.

2. You are speaking as though ..'making choices is low cost'.. is a  known fact to the evolutionary system which then has decided to develop it. How exactly?

3. Why don't other organisms that are far better at survival than humans have similar choices then.

1. The survival instinct, hardly surprisingly, is a trait that confers a survival advantage, and therefore it spreads through populations.  Any creature without such is unlikely to pass on its genes

2. Choices are made as efficiently as possible, there is clear selection pressure for that. A rival species that was slower to enact choice or required higher glucose uptake would be at a disadvantage.  All such things have been honed over the aeons.

3. All creatures with brains make choices that are relevant to their lifestyle, that is why brains evolved.  A brain is an outgrowth of the nervous system required when increasing body size and complexity surpass what can be managed by a straightforward central nervous system. A prey animal is making choices constantly to optimise its chances of staying alive. A fixed interest trader is making choices of investment that are far more abstract and complex, but they too are eventually rendered through the same paleomammalian cortical structures that support decision making in all mammals.

[Alan Burns]

Read the posts, I'm sure this has been covered at least 597 times. Minds have a mechanism for resolving choice, it is the same mechanism whether you are choosing between which fruit to pick or when to action your choice, it is still a moment of choice and which ever item is chosen, or which ever time is chosen to action it comes down to the same principal - the option with the most appeal in the moment is the one that gets chosen and we cannot choose how much something appeals to us. Rival options are rendered on an internal scale of values and we pick the option that has the most emotional appeal to us in the moment.

For all intents and purposes, everything in the present moment does derive from the previous moment, and this includes the mind states of sentient beings.  The only way this could be not the case is if there is some random variability. At the quantum level there is quantum indeterminacy meaning we cannot always fully know specific properties of subatomic particles but this averages out at microscopic and macroscopic levels.  This is known as the principal of adequate determinism, meaning for all practical purposes we can consider everything from the level of chemistry up to be deterministic, and clearly that includes the mind states of biological systems which are composed of biochemical states in cortex.

But in this you do not consider the dynamic capabilities of what our conscious awareness can do in the present moment of time.  Remember it is conscious of present data, and conscious of past memories.  And all this conscious awareness exists in the present.  It is something which we can't replicate in man made machines, because we have no idea how conscious awareness can manifest itself in any material system.  You seem to presume that our conscious awareness works in the same mechanistic way as man made objects such as computers, but this is a presumption, not a verifiable fact.  Our freedom to consciously choose is evidence that it is not as mechanistic as you make out.

[torridon]

But in this you do not consider the dynamic capabilities of what our conscious awareness can do in the present moment of time.  Remember it is conscious of present data, and conscious of past memories.  And all this conscious awareness exists in the present.  It is something which we can't replicate in man made machines, because we have no idea how conscious awareness can manifest itself in any material system.  You seem to presume that our conscious awareness works in the same mechanistic way as man made objects such as computers, but this is a presumption, not a verifiable fact.  Our freedom to consciously choose is evidence that it is not as mechanistic as you make out.

The core principal of choice is quite simple, it is weighing up options against each other and in brains this happens through a process of neural recruitment and the neural assembly that recruits the greatest support is the correlate of the option that is chosen. Admittedly all this goes on within a broader context of mind and neural activity but evidence is that it works and it works sublimely well, we make choices constantly often without conscious thought even being involved.  When conscious thought is involved it contributes layers of complexity to the neural modelling of choice but the end result of all that is still choices made.

[Alan Burns]

The core principal of choice is quite simple, it is weighing up options against each other and in brains this happens through a process of neural recruitment and the neural assembly that recruits the greatest support is the correlate of the option that is chosen. Admittedly all this goes on within a broader context of mind and neural activity but evidence is that it works and it works sublimely well, we make choices constantly often without conscious thought even being involved.  When conscious thought is involved it contributes layers of complexity to the neural modelling of choice but the end result of all that is still choices made.

But if it is nothing else but physical neural activity, there can be no choice, just an inevitable reaction at the end of all the other inevitable reactions.  So the concept of choice does not exist in this scenario.

[torridon]

But if it is nothing else but physical neural activity, there can be no choice, just an inevitable reaction at the end of all the other inevitable reactions.  So the concept of choice does not exist in this scenario.

Yes, that is how brains implement choice, we do not have the 'freedom' to want something we don't want, and the process of neural recruitment is the processes of determining what it is that we most want.  There would be no advantage in making a suboptimal choice. We make the best choice we can under the circumstances, not the worst one - that would be a freedom not worth having; any any individuals operating on that basis would exclude themselves from the gene pool.

[Alan Burns]

Yes, that is how brains implement choice, we do not have the 'freedom' to want something we don't want, and the process of neural recruitment is the processes of determining what it is that we most want.  There would be no advantage in making a suboptimal choice. We make the best choice we can under the circumstances, not the worst one - that would be a freedom not worth having; any any individuals operating on that basis would exclude themselves from the gene pool.

And what is it that quantifies what you deem to call "what we most want".   You have in the past claimed that our choices are made in our subconscious before we become aware of them.  So our conscious awareness apparently does not get a say in quantifying "what we most want".  So what does?

[Gordon]

And what is it that quantifies what you deem to call "what we most want".   You have in the past claimed that our choices are made in our subconscious before we become aware of them.  So our conscious awareness apparently does not get a say in quantifying "what we most want".  So what does?

Perhaps it is more the case that our consciousness simply reflects our subconscious wants and needs.

[wigginhall]

Go back to Freud then, where our unconscious desires are dealt with by the conscious ego, often unsuccessfully.  We let some of them surface, some we squash, and some sort have an underground existence.  What's the problem with this?

[torridon]

And what is it that quantifies what you deem to call "what we most want".   You have in the past claimed that our choices are made in our subconscious before we become aware of them.  So our conscious awareness apparently does not get a say in quantifying "what we most want".  So what does?

Yes that is right, conscious awareness is a construction from preconscious and subconscious elements of mind; all of our desires and hopes and fears and intentions are in our minds, but they cannot all be in conscious, foreground mind all the time, conscious mind is like a small hi-pri workspace into which elements from deeper levels of mind are summoned as need be. Remember that thought experiment to recall a capital city ? You have all the capital cities in your subconscious memory, they cannot all be sitting there in conscious mind all the time ready to reply to a thought experiment.  Our minds summon from subconscious mind to conscious mind on demand.  As I am writing this sentence, each word is coming into mind as I go along; I cannot store 20,000 English words in conscious mind continuously; they are summoned by demand.  Likewise when making a choice, elements of our subconscious desires and fears may be summoned into conscious mind as part of the process of choice, although many choices, usually simpler ones, bypass the need for conscious thought altogether.

[Gordon]

Go back to Freud then, where our unconscious desires are dealt with by the conscious ego, often unsuccessfully.  We let some of them surface, some we squash, and some sort have an underground existence.  What's the problem with this?

The various mental defense mechanisms as per Freud (S & A) also come to mind: a lot going on beneath the surface (consciousness).

[Sriram]

1. The survival instinct, hardly surprisingly, is a trait that confers a survival advantage, and therefore it spreads through populations.  Any creature without such is unlikely to pass on its genes

2. Choices are made as efficiently as possible, there is clear selection pressure for that. A rival species that was slower to enact choice or required higher glucose uptake would be at a disadvantage.  All such things have been honed over the aeons.

3. All creatures with brains make choices that are relevant to their lifestyle, that is why brains evolved.  A brain is an outgrowth of the nervous system required when increasing body size and complexity surpass what can be managed by a straightforward central nervous system. A prey animal is making choices constantly to optimise its chances of staying alive. A fixed interest trader is making choices of investment that are far more abstract and complex, but they too are eventually rendered through the same paleomammalian cortical structures that support decision making in all mammals.

As they say ...there are two ways of looking at the world...One, as though nothing is a miracle and the second, as though everything is a miracle. (Einstein, I think)

I see the origin of Life itself as a miracle, then the survival instinct and reproduction that ensures continued life.  Then, all the emergent properties and complexity. Human development, culture and civilization. All these are nothing short of miracles.

Just because there are natural laws that enable these processes does not mean they are not miracles!  Miracles are not just the 'going against natural laws' variety. The natural laws themselves and the way in which they create life...is a miracle.

[torridon]

As they say ...there are two ways of looking at the world...One, as though nothing is a miracle and the second, as though everything is a miracle. (Einstein, I think)

I see the origin of Life itself as a miracle, then the survival instinct and reproduction that endures continued life.  Then, all the emergent properties and complexity. Human development, culture and civilization. All these are nothing short of miracles.

Just because there are natural laws that enable these processes does not mean they are not miracles!  Miracles are not just the 'going against natural laws' variety. The natural laws themselves and the way in which they create life...is a miracle.

If we regard everything as miracles, then the word ceases to have any utility.  I personally don't see any point in the terms 'miracle' or 'supernatural'.  They just obscure our desire to figure out how things work, and if you call it a miracle then you are closing your mind to investigation.  There is no reason to think life is miraculous for instance. For starters, we used to think of all things as divided into living and non-living, but now that is a naive view, there is a spectrum of life-likeness, with viruses and self-replicating molecules being inhabitants of the region between the living and the inanimate. We are slowly filling in the gaps in our understanding and the days of labelling the apparently inexplicable as miracles should be long gone.  It's an attitude thing.

[Sriram]

Speaking of miracles...here is a little story, of sorts....

Three people were playing golf...Jesus, Moses and a huge old man with a white beard.

Jesus hit the ball first. It fell into a lake. Using his miraculous powers, Jesus walked on the waters and hit the ball again. It fell near the hole but missed it by a whisker.

Then Moses hit the ball. The ball again fell into the lake. Using his miraculous powers, Moses parted the waters and hit the ball again.  It again fell very near the hole but missed it by a whisker.

Finally, the huge old man with the white beard hit the ball. The ball once again fell into the lake. A frog mistook the ball for food, caught it in its mouth and jumped onto the land.  An eagle seeing the frog, swept down, grabbed the frog in its talons and flew away over the green. As it flew, the ball got dislodged from the frog's mouth and fell...straight into the hole!

God does not perform miracles. The world moves to his will!!

Nice one, isn't it?! 

I know...I know...many of you will have many things to snigger about. But it sort of explains the idea of Life being miraculous. That's the point! 

[torridon]

 

[Sriram]

If we regard everything as miracles, then the word ceases to have any utility.  I personally don't see any point in the terms 'miracle' or 'supernatural'.  They just obscure our desire to figure out how things work, and if you call it a miracle then you are closing your mind to investigation.  There is no reason to think life is miraculous for instance. For starters, we used to think of all things as divided into living and non-living, but now that is a naive view, there is a spectrum of life-likeness, with viruses and self-replicating molecules being inhabitants of the region between the living and the inanimate. We are slowly filling in the gaps in our understanding and the days of labelling the apparently inexplicable as miracles should be long gone.  It's an attitude thing.

You are not getting the point. 'Filling in the gaps' does not mean these are not miracles. How does our 'understanding' of these laws make them any less of a miracle?!

We are part of creation and part of the natural world. We are not outside it.