jools posted:
but thats my point, if it means you can only recall the last few moments of consciousness then theres no chance for trains of thought or whatever to develop
yes but if individual thoughts are completely determinable from initial conditions, then so are the trains of thought. "randomness" doesnt just suddenly creep its way in when you reach some magic threshold in length of thoughts. the internal physiological processes are unchanged
gyrofry posted:
thats what the tattoos are for
if that movie were accurate it would have just been him asking the same 3 questions over and over until everyone got tired of answering them
even writing the answers to those questions down for him on a piece of paper he could hold onto didnt "help" HIM at all, it just helped ME to be able to simply say "look at the paper youre holding" instead of wasting another 30 seconds answering the same handful of questions for the 1000th time in a row
Transient_Grace posted:
I am not disagreeing with what you're saying, i'm just saying that this kind of deterministic examination is not really too meaningful when we consider the subject "free will" or "agency", concepts which are only meaningful within the context of ethics and morality and do not actually pertain to our mechanical understanding of consciousness and the human decision making process.
well if youre just talking about free will in the ethical sense of asking if people are still responsible for their actions, well yeah, people are responsible for their actions. Im still the same person i was before i had this deeper glimpse into human will and consciousness. Nothing in reality changed as a result of that other than my personal understanding. If human minds are deterministic now, then theyve always been deterministic. All the same rules still apply
jools posted:
a little off topic, but does anyone have an explanation for why i might have stopped caring about questions of free will? i mean, i can see on one level why they are compelling philosophical questions, but why does the answer not mean much to me any more?
because its 'total fucking bullshit' mate
Superabound posted:
from any given set of initial conditions, a particular human has exactly 1 possible response. varying the initial conditions may vary the response, but the internal mechanism of the human mind is still only a static interpreter
literally biological Turing machines
a little late to the party but this is not necessarily true. the human brain almost certainly operates quantum mechanically. (it's not exactly my field of study but the electrochemical processes that constitute our brainthinking operate on a quantum level.) there absolutely can be different outcomes from the same initial conditions if modeled using QM, it's probabilistic not deterministic
Hitler posted:
a little late to the party but this is not necessarily true. the human brain almost certainly operates quantum mechanically. (it's not exactly my field of study but the electrochemical processes that constitute our brainthinking operate on a quantum level.) there absolutely can be different outcomes from the same initial conditions if modeled using QM, it's probabilistic not deterministic
google decoherence
babyfinland posted:Meursault posted:
Do djinni have free willyes
except in the case of solomon.
i dunno i really wanna see some scholarship explaining how djinn can be directed. also man with respect to animals. like innate desires for zina which may be construed as evil as compared to possible evolutionary drive to procreate with a million women
dunno if you got anything on this?
this extends pretty far in my mind. like we might need to connect a range of social benefits to working so that people work. but i don't see any intrinsic "justice" in returning a person a product of their labour.
perhaps counter-intuitively, though, i do think there is a sense of justice in terms of people flourishing. like, there might not be strong responsibility, but there is still a sort of injustice involved in not building an egalitarian society. but this is more about admiration of positive qualities within a particular situation than some sort of logical imperative or something.
getfiscal posted:
i don't buy the idea that it is "just" to punish people beyond that pragmatic reason, and even that needs to be weighed against the damage you are doing to the criminal.
this extends pretty far in my mind. like we might need to connect a range of social benefits to working so that people work. but i don't see any intrinsic "justice" in returning a person a product of their labour.
i dont see the connection or the statements aren't clear to me?
guidoanselmi posted:
i dont see the connection or the statements aren't clear to me?
luck egalitarians believe that differences in social outcomes should be connected to responsible choices. like say you choose to be lazy and not work, then it is fair to give you less stuff. but if you are disabled then you shouldn't get less stuff.
my problem with this is that i don't really buy individual responsibility in even that case, i think that if you are "lazy" that is something probably produced by society and also a symptom of something wrong rather than a free choice.
but we may still need to have some basic rules about such things just because of pragmatism.
littlegreenpills posted:
google decoherence
are you saying that decoherence saves determinism? b/c i dont think so tim. unless you're saying decoherence renders quantum computing impossible, which might be true but still needs to be worked out.
i realize the irrelevance of QM and determinism and whatnot when discussing ethical problems (as transient_grace pointed out). however if we're talking about modeling the human brain as a biological computer, the divide between classical and quantum computation theories is (probably) quite relevant. once again i'm no expert in neuroscience, but from what im told researchers have only recently started considering this possibility. (although some claim it is quite implausible, like these guys. i think the jury's still out.) *hand wave* research needs to be done
gyrofry posted:
do you know internationalist
In my heart all the fractal avatar new posters are Internationalist
EmanuelaOrlandi posted:
if Internationalist picked an avatar what would it be?
Hitler posted:
. (although some claim it is quite implausible, like these guys. i think the jury's still out.) *hand wave* research needs to be done
the jury's not really out, there's been shit tossed around for 20 years about quantum mind theory and no one can come up with a viable substrate for quantum effects that doesnt suffer from decoherence on the scales required. id prob get crucified for sayign this but i dont think we're much closer to explaining consciousness or the experience of free will now in any satisfying way than ramon y cajal was, and none of us can draw half as well, so we're maybe farther away lol
shennong posted:
the jury's not really out, there's been shit tossed around for 20 years about quantum mind theory and no one can come up with a viable substrate for quantum effects that doesnt suffer from decoherence on the scales required. id prob get crucified for sayign this but i dont think we're much closer to explaining consciousness or the experience of free will now in any satisfying way than ramon y cajal was, and none of us can draw half as well, so we're maybe farther away lol
i'd agree with you about how close neuroscience is at explaining consciousness/free will. at this point, the quantum mind is mere speculation, like a lot of possible implications of quantum effects. there's still a helluva lot of research to be done in both neuroscience and quantum information/computation. it's been tossed around for 20 years, but the whole idea of using quantum mechanical processes for storing information has only been around for 30 some years. it may just be a few breakthroughs away? eh that was just more hand waving
Hitler posted:shennong posted:
the jury's not really out, there's been shit tossed around for 20 years about quantum mind theory and no one can come up with a viable substrate for quantum effects that doesnt suffer from decoherence on the scales required. id prob get crucified for sayign this but i dont think we're much closer to explaining consciousness or the experience of free will now in any satisfying way than ramon y cajal was, and none of us can draw half as well, so we're maybe farther away lol
i'd agree with you about how close neuroscience is at explaining consciousness/free will. at this point, the quantum mind is mere speculation, like a lot of possible implications of quantum effects. there's still a helluva lot of research to be done in both neuroscience and quantum information/computation. it's been tossed around for 20 years, but the whole idea of using quantum mechanical processes for storing information has only been around for 30 some years. it may just be a few breakthroughs away? eh that was just more hand waving
i wouldn't rule it out entirely, quantum biology is still a nascent field. that said its just that we have pretty compelete -omics level descriptions of neurons from a variety of organisms, we can observe what's going on on a structural level in real time in a freely-moving organism's neurons, we have complete maps of circuitry in a number of species, etc etc, and there just aren't any really good physical substrates for a brain-wide quantum computer. microtubules were being tossed around for a while but they don't make a lot of sense in that capacity.
you're right of course that there's much more to be done, but i'm a bit more pessimistic about the timescale. i've been hearing, particularly from comp scis, physicists, and engineers, that the major problem with neurobiology is neurobiologists for years. like the problem is that we're just really bad at theory and modelling, all the data is there, we just have to have the right model or whatever and then we'll Get It but i don't even know what It is supposed to be anymore and when i hear people talk about describing the biological substrate of consciousness w/in our lifetimes (or ever) i just lol and tbh thats a lot of why im leaving the field
Hitler posted:
a little late to the party but this is not necessarily true. the human brain almost certainly operates quantum mechanically. (it's not exactly my field of study but the electrochemical processes that constitute our brainthinking operate on a quantum level.) there absolutely can be different outcomes from the same initial conditions if modeled using QM, it's probabilistic not deterministic
everything operates quantum mechanically. But all non-quantum-scale events are averages of quantum-scale events. That includes the physiological processes of thought. If modeled using QM, even gravity and the solidity of physical objects are probabilistic and not deterministic. But in order for these large-scale phenomena to "fall apart", so many quantum possibilities would have to "line up" that it makes the probabilistic outliers so unlikely that the system can just be treated deterministically for all outcomes.
getfiscal posted:guidoanselmi posted:
i dont see the connection or the statements aren't clear to me?luck egalitarians believe that differences in social outcomes should be connected to responsible choices. like say you choose to be lazy and not work, then it is fair to give you less stuff. but if you are disabled then you shouldn't get less stuff.
my problem with this is that i don't really buy individual responsibility in even that case, i think that if you are "lazy" that is something probably produced by society and also a symptom of something wrong rather than a free choice.
but we may still need to have some basic rules about such things just because of pragmatism.
i can agree with that. I think we might as well just take care of all the lazy non-workers like babies, because it is my personal opinion that incompetent workaholics retard the system much more than lazy lollygagging goldbrickers, and paying people to just "stay the hell out of the way" would have a net benefit on society. Nobody ever complains about babies getting free food do they? No, because babues cant work and if they did they would just ruin everyhintg for everybody else
welfare states actually work pretty great as long as all the politicians dont spend 90% of their time complaining about it
Superabound posted:getfiscal posted:guidoanselmi posted:
i dont see the connection or the statements aren't clear to me?luck egalitarians believe that differences in social outcomes should be connected to responsible choices. like say you choose to be lazy and not work, then it is fair to give you less stuff. but if you are disabled then you shouldn't get less stuff.
my problem with this is that i don't really buy individual responsibility in even that case, i think that if you are "lazy" that is something probably produced by society and also a symptom of something wrong rather than a free choice.
but we may still need to have some basic rules about such things just because of pragmatism.i can agree with that. I think we might as well just take care of all the lazy non-workers like babies, because it is my personal opinion that incompetent workaholics retard the system much more than lazy lollygagging goldbrickers, and paying people to just "stay the hell out of the way" would have a net benefit on society. Nobody ever complains about babies getting free food do they? No, because babues cant work and if they did they would just ruin everyhintg for everybody else
welfare states actually work pretty great as long as all the politicians dont spend 90% of their time complaining about it
*looks at blueprint of baby-yoke, frowns, crumples paper and tosses over shoulder*
bonclay posted:
serious post: i want government handouts. me. i want so many government handouts that it literally becomes impossible to fail. this is how i want to manipulate the matrix of many fortunes and make the worst life-outcomes impossible, so people do not become desperate and take it out on othe rpeople. you should not be able to fail even if you try. instead of luck-egalitarianism i want to have luck-totalitarianism., force everyone to be lucky and have full bellies and safe houses and healthcare. force educational and vocational institutions to accept as many people as are intersted. i know this is a perversion of truth and rightness and im sorry but im also not sorry.
post this on wsj editorial
bonclay posted:
serious post: i want government handouts. me. i want so many government handouts that it literally becomes impossible to fail. this is how i want to manipulate the matrix of many fortunes and make the worst life-outcomes impossible, so people do not become desperate and take it out on othe rpeople. you should not be able to fail even if you try. instead of luck-egalitarianism i want to have luck-totalitarianism., force everyone to be lucky and have full bellies and safe houses and healthcare. force educational and vocational institutions to accept as many people as are intersted. i know this is a perversion of truth and rightness and im sorry but im also not sorry.
literally this
shennong posted:
*looks at blueprint of baby-yoke, frowns, crumples paper and tosses over shoulder*
there's always fattening them till they're ripe for a stew or fricasse