I have a question

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by Redd, Apr 17, 2012.

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  1. Redd Registered Member

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    because i have a consciousness generated by that biological machine.

    what do you mean by free will?
     
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  3. Redd Registered Member

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  5. Redd Registered Member

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    nothing. well thanks for your input...
     
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  7. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Free will just means the ability to make choices and decisions rather than acting, thinking and feeling mechanistically according to genetic programming, automatic circuits, and hormonal reactions.

    Obviously an ant has a very limited range of free will...whereas some advanced alien species might have a range of options we humans cant even imagine.

    If what you call your 'consciousness' is itself nothing more than an electrical mechanism...why do you believe you have free will?
     
  8. Redd Registered Member

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    i mean no ill will here, but to my mind thats a fantastically redundant question. its possible im being ignorant here.

    if i were to explore it, id say that in a sense we are the same as ants, in a bigger glass jar. our options, many as they are, are restricted by the fact we're gravity bound to this planet, we're a certain size, weight etc and we're flesh and bone.

    but within these constrictions we can run amuck.

    i gotta say ive never considered this before and it still seems redundant now that i have.
    maybe you could explain to me how its relevant to anyones existance.

    again, cheers for answering my question and no offence intended.
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2012
  9. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Theres a difference between 'free will' and 'free action'.

    Will means the desire for a certain outcome...action means bringing it about.

    For example, I might have the will to flap my arms and fly...but I cannot do it.

    In love songs you often hear the line "I dont want to fall in love again" and yet, they can't help it. We have little free will over human sexual attraction.

    Some people even take drugs to kill their libido.

    If an ant decides to run away from home and spend the rest of its life hanging out under a banana leaf...it can certainly do so, because the action is possible.

    But, it cannot desire this, it has no free will in this regard. The ant is genetically programmed to prefer a communal life as a member of the colony.

    This is what I mean by the difference between will and action.

    So, if what you call your consciousness is nothing more than an electrical mechanism...why do you believe you have free will?
     
  10. Redd Registered Member

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    ok i dig, i can see it now. so theres a magnetic attraction we cant avoid to be part of a group and society. our actions are dictated by those around us and so on. i hear you about the sex thing, i find females a headache but my testicles think otherwise.



    however, i didnt start the thread asking about will. i wanted an answer about whether our consiousness is the result of electrical signals and nothing else. i got my answer, which is yes.
    we run around and then fall over and die, the end.



    ill consider your point further.

    your after throwing me a curveball, and a headache to got with it, lol. but, ok, ill think on it and figure it out.
     
  11. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    Free-will is limited if you look at it from a Laplace Demon's perspective.

    If you can't see the universe from a perspective outside of it's linear volume rather than a perspective of being relative to the volume, then you can only perceive one intended outcome.

    Your using your relative perspective to attempt to place yourself on a different perspective track, however you can't actually be both(as standard), so through causality you are either one or the other, not both!

    In essence, "a choice" doesn't exist, just "a result".

    There is also the very ingrained essence of "human conditioning", in the sense that you will likely realise the pointless and most likely painful activity of running one's head down a pebble-dashed wall isn't something you are likely going to want to do, let alone likely to do. So it inevitably rules it out as a potential.

    As for "Is the brain electrical signals". The brain does not function on one "Medium" alone.

    The brain fundamentally works on chemical reactions, while there are indeed electrical impulses, there are also wavelengths related to those impulses that the brain uses too. This can simply be proven by looking at various cases involving severe head injuries and birth defects that can effect the brains development and how those people that suffer from those things can still lead a near normal active lifestyle, since the brain has a number of methods to fall back on.

    A good example:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2012
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    By the laws of nature. Do they allow for no randomness? The Heisenberg Principle seems, to me, to clearly state that they do.
    I'm sure it was a continuous process. As good a definition of "consciousness" as any is: "Awareness of one's own existence."

    All organisms nurture, maintain and protect their own existence, even the lowliest fungi, algae, bacteria and archaea. This is clearly not a conscious activity in them, for the good reason that they clearly lack the hardware and software to be conscious of anything. Even plants, which are much more complex than those other four kingdoms of living things, don't have tissues that could remotely be considered to comprise a platform for thought.

    Their actions (or other behavior such as geo- and heliotropism) are (by our standards up here at the apex of the Animal Kingdom) simple programmed reactions to the environment; their decision trees have very few nodes. These are the kinds of behaviors our own bodies execute without any neural activity at all, conscious or unconscious, such as digestion and hair growth.

    Halfway up the tree of the Animal Kingdom we start to see a central nervous system and something like a brain. Arthropods certainly have them; is their behavior conscious or programmed? When a bee dances to tell his friends that he found a new source of nectar on the other side of the woods and it's about a twelve-day supply, is he forming the steps to that dance consciously or is it all instinctive programming?

    Well then how about the cephalopods, a "lower" form of animal but one that strikes us as a quite conscious decision-maker?

    My point is that somewhere down on the lower branches of our tree, we're going to find some animals that appear to act consciously--until they do something that appears to be directed by the "intelligence" of a tree falling down in the wind.

    I've always noticed that at the macro level, the universe rarely presents us with binary choices. So I expect that consciousness is not either-or. Some creatures have a lot of it, some have less, some have almost none, and some have none at all.
    But that's the point: What makes you feel like not doing it today, and presumably every other day? Where does your will come from? Is every decision you make the result of a decision tree with gazillions of nodes, each precisely predetermined by both the choices made at the previous nodes and external conditions, going all the way back to the conditions you experienced in utero? Is it all predetermined, including your rational deduction that you have free will?
     
  13. Cai Registered Member

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    Speak in terms of go, nor what the results of Jing Xiaxin look at this
     
  14. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Trying to observe your own consciousness would give anyone a headache.

    For the simple reason that its not possible. Consciousness is what you observe with...so its analogous to an eyeball trying to see itself without a mirror.

    One of the most difficult problems in philosophy is that consciousness cannot be an object unto itself.
     
  15. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Strangely enough, in spite of a high relative intelligence (or perhaps because of it), humans are the ONLY species that will deliberately bring HARM to themselves.

    Drawing blood with shells and shark's teeth has often been a way of grieving in primitive societies. Modern people poison themselves, scar themselves, engage in all manner of dangerous activities, and sometimes even kill themselves.

    I think much of this has to do with living in the unnatural modern context of the nation state...as opposed to the small community (city state) we are adapted for.
     
  16. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    If I rip open my pillow and dump all the feathers on the floor, the feathers will of course follow the laws of gravity, aerodynamics, etc....but where each one ends up on the floor seems to be RANDOM to some degree.

    What would Heisenberg say about that?
     
  17. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The motion only appears random. At that size level, the laws of physics (gravity, aerodynamics, friction, etc.) are hard and fast. If you had some way to recreate the exact conditions (everything from the precise shape of each feather and its density at every point of its mass, to the precise orientation of each feather and starting distance from each other, to the temperature, molecular composition and barometric pressure of the air, including all gradients, and everything else about that space), you would get exactly the same results down to any level of magnification you could apply.

    You have to go way down below the atomic level before you start finding subatomic particles moving in ways that might be random.
     
  18. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Very good answer Fraggle - especially for a non-physicist.
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I refer to myself as a "former future scientist." I majored in science and math before I became hopelessly lazy, bailed out and got a degree in accounting (once you've learned differential equations, no matter how poorly, balancing a ledger is pretty easy)... and then in turn bailed out of that and got a job in a brand-new field nobody understood called "computer programming" -- which required nothing more than having a college degree in absolutely anything and passing a thinly-disguised IQ test.

    My heroes are people who are not necessarily experts in their fields, but have awesome communication skills and can make the basics understandable to laymen. I try to emulate them. So thanks very much for the compliment!
     
  20. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    This means that the tiniest variation can cause huge differences in outcome by creating a cascade of sequential changes.

    After doing a little checking it seems that even radioactive decay is random only in singular examples...en masse and over time it happens at a predictable rate.

    Therefore, even the eventual cooling of the earth's core is theoretically predictable.

    I've also learned that genetic mutation doesnt appear to be as random as I thought...and it may even be impossible to know if any random mutation occurs at all.
     
  21. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, sometimes called “the butterfly effect.”- I.e. one extra flap of a butter fly´s wings as it lands on flower in China can in principle cause the hurricane in Cuba several months later as weather is a very chaotic system. (“Cause” here means that without that extra wing flap something else would have happened in Cuba that day.)
     
  22. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    This is Sciforums, where everyone can tell you that you are wrong, but nobody can ever set you straight.

    Maybe so. I certainly agree with that in general principle. But having agreed that "mind" is a "product" of brain activity, we are still left with the original question... what IS it?

    Given that 'mind' or 'consciousness' exists in some sense of 'exist', what kind of being does it possess? What else in reality can it be compared with?
     
  23. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

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    Which is exactly the reason why consciousness cannot by itself be physical. Only the processes that gives rise to it can be measured, not consciousness itself.

    The mechanical processes indeed gives rise to something more than itself, and that "more" which we call consciousness can't be physical by any means that we define physical to be (at least what is physical has to be measurable in some other way than testimony, and testimony is all we have of consciousness - it can't be objectively proven to exist).


    In other words; the answer to the question of this thread is that consciousness is the result of the mechanical processes (and might indeed be entirely dependent on them) but isn't the processes itself.
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2012
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