Is it possible that consciousness can effect...

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Does this mean you're determined to have no free will and that it's your destiny?

I've got jokes too; I just doubt it really proves anything.

I am being half serious. I mean when you boil it down, that's what it sounds like to me.

No, you're maybe 'trying' to be half serious but that's not what's coming out. What you're trying to tell me is that my POV on this is an illogical emotional preference, and you're asserting that with nothing more than your own....well.... illogical emotional preferences.

Well if determinism isn't destiny, then how would you define it without using the definitions that define destiny?

If quantum fluctuations since the beginning of the universe are responsible for everything we do, say, think, eat, then isn't that by any definition destiny? The road has been planned for us and we're merely riders coming to the conclusions of our lives? Sounds like destiny to me. I cannot define it any other way, even in mathematical models, if we were to say the algorithm of our existence is nothing more than a quantum string, that the answer can be defined concretely from start to end.

Maybe you are the one that needs to rethink your philosophy.

It's not different, and I'd fully agree its destiny - just that the traditional use of the word 'destiny' keeps often personifying fate or has some god, deity, or supernatural attached to it. You summed up a response I made by calling it destiny as if simply bringing that word over it meant that I was making a bad move and needed to second guess my beliefs. You also made the implication that I have no free will because I specifically chose that I don't want it and that anyone who wants it has it - not too far from shaking your head at an atheist and asking "What would Yahweh say about the way your thinking?" - what would Zeus, Ahura Mazda, or Jon Frum say for that matter? Same with this - waving a word as a pejorative and acting like that's the end of it or trying to make jokes about people's perceptions doesn't really go that far unless your desire to discuss it more is coming from directions that have little to do with testing the solidity of my beliefs or yours.


Sounds great. I'm not the one pejoritising that. If you want to explain why it leaves such a bitter taste in your mouth we might have a conversation, otherwise probably best to do what we really should have three or four posts ago and call it quits.

Well destiny is improvable is it not? Under those conditions is that not just another belief? Beliefs don't fall under science. My reasoning behind indeterminism is the universe doesn't produce perfect smoothness. There's always a tiny bit of roughness in everything, even waves in spacetime. It's because of this roughness results alter just a little, it throws the equation off just enough to cause a bit of chaos. Even chaotic systems aren't completely chaotic, there's a touch of smoothness in them, and this can settle out into harmony and or complexity. Random? Partially. Just enough to tilt the balance.

Well, a lot of neuroscience that's being done into consciousness would support my claims so - its not settled science yet but, I don't think we'll have to wait too long before it is. Essentially what they're willing to say is that many of our choices are made by pre-conscious parts of the brain before we even realize that we have a decision to make. What I'd simply add - we have stimulus coming in that these parts of the brain are processing, which come in at a certain time, in a certain order, and these things come as part of a huge chain reaction, the universe, which has their velocities all not only interrelated but sourced from one another.


You're making an argument then that in a deterministic universe things shouldn't be this complex? I'd think chaos theory explains it pretty well; the sum of everything is well beyond our comprehension, that may never change. I'd just argue that having a really complicated or indepth marble track, domino scheme, or Heron of Alexandria style mechanical play, just means that its a very indepth and complex marble track, domino scheme, or Heron play - it needs no magic, particularly if it comes together for reasons that don't need the labor of frail ATP and size-limited minds to configure it.

I think a lot of that stems from the fact (pun intended, ha!) that thought processes at near or maybe at the speed of light, but the chemical mechanisms can only correlate so fast. Essentially it seems like your thought races along and your brain has to sample it. So it's quite possible you've already come to a conclusion several moments before your neurons receive the data. I think that's part of the definition of your subconscious, there's that background processing you're not aware of because it's essentially outside of your ability to sample the data as it's coming in. I think this may have something do to with losing your train of thought also, but then again that may be due to something else entirely.



Now that's a good question. I think there's definitely complexity, but at the same time I have to make a conscious effort to get out of bed and go to work every day or someone will come and take my furniture and my lights will go out. If I decide just to sit in the middle of the living room meditating which I could right now and do nothing else I'd run into several issues, but it's still a possibility albeit one I'd prefer not to follow, doesn't mean it can't happen, but the likelihood is low. Essentially what I'm getting at is, things may seem deterministic but the universe tends to follow a bell curve of acceptability. Most activities it gets involved with (well everything) fall somewhere in the middle, but there's always those few little rubber balls that fall to the extreme left or the extreme right due to fractal roughness that exists all throughout the natural world.

So yes, in a sense it's deterministic, but only to a degree.

Lol, a priori conversation. Fair. Of my own core understandings though, for the later paragraph, what's in someone's best interest isn't necessarily in their control - nor is whether or not they'll have enough counter-current in them to break ties with that path and, as is often, a person's 'best interest' by their brain's math won't necessarily be what people outside of that person would do, ie. what they're doing may look absolutely stupid and really they're living out deeper psychological problems which if they're testing reality to get better - okay, othertimes it seems like they're fractured to the core and the computer and processing can't do much to make proper sense of the world anymore (thinking of the child molesting professor from Midnight Express telling the main character that they're all broken robots). Regardless though it seems like there's nothing anyone does that doesn't come from some type of precident, some type of reasoning, irrespective of how much we may agree or disagree with them on a case by case basis regarding just how much quality or accuracy there is in their particular said reasoning.

If our brains operate according to physical law, what is Free Will? I -feel- as though I am choosing, but this could be an illusion. Are the causes of our brain actions totally within our bodies? Or are there external factors operating as well?

ruveyn

First you have to define physical law as it pertains to everything that's going on inside you and around you. Science has not yet cleared a proper and complete understanding yet. Though in all fairness using my bell curve example, science at least has a good idea of what's going on.

There was an interesting study about the paralysis of analysis. It seems with as many choices as modern life has given us, we're unable to cope with the available data. We're often unhappy with our choice because we can't know if a different choice was better for us. However when presented with a smaller data set people generally were able to make a decision and come out a lot happier with the result. Now this may not be pertinent to the conversation but I think it's interesting nonetheless.

The way a brain is designed is determinant through DNA, the instructions on how to build this machine are encoded and it really doesn't change much, except through mutation, or perhaps selection of any kind (natural or man made fiddling perhaps in the future). It's designed (through DNA) to operate within certain parameters and I think some of those parameters are still subject to that roughness that exists within the universe. I think even genetic mutation couldn't occur without some level of indeterminacy. Eventually one of your "zipping" proteins makes an error and sews together a mutation.

So, what is free will? Well what is will? Or consciousness for that matter. I think it's the question. The query as it were. How do you build a query? Well the universe found a way and built logic gates, but that's only part of the answer. You are the observer, but you also have your finger on the remote. I think it has do to with energy interacting with matter. Whereas a computer for example does the opposite, matter interacts with energy.

In a computer, you run energy through it and the matter interacts, whereas I think brains you run matter through energy so to speak, as example, your brain is constantly rebuilding new connections and killing them if they're not important. Energy is interacting with matter, it has direct control over it.

Yeah I know that just opened up more questions, but that's what answers do.

Part of why I have the tag 'A beautiful vector existing among many' is that, when you think about it energy is motion and transfer; its the act of the dominoes falling. With the computer example, actually, its human energy being reflected back at us by matter and its human energy trained to interact with human energy (well, less ambiguously put, human data interacting with human data). Nature does create feedback loops, this is how you have such things as environments in seeming perpetual cyclical motion. Similarly, within the body or even single-cell of anything that's considered alive, its a cyclical set of motions set up by action potentials being met and feeding back into each other and yes, often needing external input (food and water for example) as energy levels - throughout the universe, work their way downhill rather than uphill. Similarly though, as matter is fed into us, so is energy. I'd have to consider human energy an amalgamation of its many input energies, it gets organizes by all the cycles that its filtered through (a bit like making a top shelf whiskey), and essentially that's where *we* (consciousness in plural) seem to come in. If one chooses to argue hyperdimensional aspects to consciousness, that's fine, but even to discuss, fifth, sixth, etc. dimensions we still have a difficult time departing from the sense that, from the teleology we have in the current visible three dimensions, that higher dimensions as well would be just as much reliant on causality.

Well 4 dimension. Energy is the fourth dimension. At least. Maybe as many as 11, but I'm not about to start discussing string theory darn it!

Lol, I used to hear time thrown out there for fourth but, since we're not talking spacial dimensions I get the impression a lot of this is wide open.

Energy is NOT a dimension. It is merely the ability that one physical system has to affect another physical system.

Why don't you all get a real education and stop making things up?