Free Will: An attempt to make sense of it.

I wonder what happens in the following example:
I throw up a coin and choose one: Heads or tails?
What happens in my mind? Is deterministic or random?

 

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Gambling is a deliberate temporary abdication of free will.

 

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LOL...no gambling.
Try doing without any reason such as a stake.

 

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The inescapable part is with regard to the practical. Again, just as you can understand why an optical illusion is an optical illusion, you can not escape the practical side of it... you eyes will always show you the illusion.
In the same way one might understand free-will to be an illusion, but they can not act as though they don't have it, they can not step outside it on a practical level, just as your eyes can not step outside the illusion and see something else.

 

The thing is you can't escape your nature cause soon as you do it it becomes part of your nature . We write the history of humanity right now cause we are the living . What we do becomes part of human nature . Get it . Your not free from this . You were made for that very purpose. You are the winners cause you are the ones that live . Your reading this right ? O.K. I rest my case

 

Gambling isn't limited to playing the lottery and the such.
The stakes may be all kinds of things - from money to relief of anxiety (about making decisions and taking action).

 

Of course the eyes can step outside of the illusion - this is how we can recognize that there is an illusion to begin with.

Usually, what is necessary for that is a rearrangement of objects.

 

Focus and completely empty your mind and choose a number.
What happens? Is there random?

 

I'd have to be omniscient to answer that.

 

Neither I know the answer. For that "I wonder..."
My position on free will:
I can not prove logically but there is free will.
Reasons for this are:

oops ... I will return

 

Free will needs to be delivered from the determinism speculation and placed in the context of autonomy versus heteronomy, an issue of "Am I an internal, decision-making agent or merely a puppet whose choices and actions are entirely of external origin?"

If rewinding the metaphysical romp that is determinism, the baton of responsibility would be handed backwards from one superficial cause to another until arriving at an imaginary set of initial starting conditions that is crowned the actual slavemaster of all that followed. The latter is even more distant than claiming "I'm being remote-controlled by aliens on the far side of the universe who are using hyperspace to circumvent light-speed restrictions." Since the starting conditions that the whole universe is supposedly genuflecting to would either no longer exist or at least be figuratively exerting their rigid rule across a vast span of time.

 

not necessarily..

If microsaccades do indeed drive the Enigma illusion, future research will still need to investigate whether the cause is direct or indirect, and what neural mechanisms may be at its root. In previous studies, researchers have proposed a few possibilities based on the idea of “phi movement,” which is the illusion of apparent motion caused by switching off one stimulus and immediately turning on another in close proximity.

For example, microsaccades may cause parts of the image to shift, which could cause the black and white lines to continuously reverse, resulting in phi movement. Another possibility is that microsaccades may displace after-images of the black and white stripes, also causing phi movement. A more complex eye-brain explanation is also possible, and the researchers will continue investigating this intriguing illusion.

if it can be understood it can be fixed
optical illusions are artifacts of the body defective and possibly inimical to the health of the organism
agree?

 

Figure 5 is rough sketch of how it is possible.

In some indeterminate manner I would argue, yes.

It appears that talking about the will as an intrinsic faculty or capacity attracted to something is vague unless one makes it more clear exactly what the will is naturally attracted to and whether it acts of necessity when confronted with such a "something".

To make matters worse, if it is free, then it appears a judgement is totally indeterminate or to put it differently, the judgement appears to be separated from a person's reason for acting or to put it in yet another way, the intellect is connected to the will in an indterminate manner..

The relationship between a person's intellect and his free will needs to be explained. So the problem in this case is not a problem for free will, but making sense of the relationship between free will and rational judgements based on a person's intellect.

I would argue that some form of indeterminism is necessary for acts to be free to some degree.

 

I disagree with that. Optical illusions vary in their causes, but the artifacts are generally there for good and adaptive (or at least not "maladaptive") reasons. The illusions exploit them, but they are not generally "defects", rather they are "features."

Take for example:

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Where the squares labeled A and B are exactly the same color, though they appear not to be. That's adaptive. Our brain is trying to make sense of the image in light of the shadow being cast. In most cases, the image we all imagine is a useful one, and the ability to contextualize colors in this way a useful skill for anyone whose survival depends on scanning the environment, contextualizing what they see and deriving information from it.

Here's another example of that:

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The bar in the center is a single shade of gray. Our brain is designed to focus on contrast, because that was more useful to our ancestors.

In another illusion with a different cause:

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we see the illusion because we are simultaneously trying to activate light and dark receptors in the eye. That we can switch between them swiftly (without simply doubling up on both kinds of receptors) is ordinarily efficient enough, with this being a rare case (unlikely to arise in a natural environment) where to see the image "properly" we need both sets of receptors.

That we can "adopt" an artificial limb such that our mind responds to it as if it were our own natural limb seems stranger than visual illusions to me, but certainly potentially useful for those who lose limbs and have them replaced with artificial ones (at least insofar as we can learn to harness the effect.

Here's an even better demonstration of people with two perfectly good hands feeling as though a fake rubber hand is a part of their body: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxwn1w7MJvk

 

To step out of the illusion we need to introduce something that is not caught up in that illusion... i.e. to cover up parts of the image, or as you say to rearrange the objects.
But the objects caught up in the illusion (the eye/brain interaction) can not, of themselves, escape it, no matter how well we understand it intellectually.

Free-will is an illusion that encapsulates our entire consciousness. To escape it in a similar fashion we would need to step outside of that consciousness.

Whenever we are not conscious, do we exhibit free-will?

 

"Fixed"? Not a term I would use, to be honest... there is merely disparity between subjective interpretation from the sense, and our knowledge of the reality.
But to "fix" it requires stepping outside that which is caught by the illusion. The eye alone can not "fix" itself, no matter how well we understand why it happens and what the causes are.

Similarly the consciousness can not "fix" itself of an illusion by which it is caught. It would take something outside of that consciousness to help do it (if the analogy with the eye is followed).

I'm open to suggestions as to how we could test it, though.

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Techne,

Kudos on the time you have taken to prepare such an extensive study, you have obviously given this alot of thought AND have actually done the research into the subject, unlike most users here who just have their opinion(myself included)

because of this, i think for this thread only, i will only read your posts..
(yeah right..don't bet on it.

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)

 

When Jan earlier said

I don't think he was talking about optical illusions and such.

Jan, would you explain what you mean by "illusion" here?

 

If this is true, then how do you know it?

 

a reasonable compromise would be "defective features".

you find nothing weird about touting an evolutionary advantage to optical illusions in general? i can perhaps see one in the second image you provide but find the theories behind the others disconcerting to say the least.

the first image contains an visually deceptive attribute that exploits a "defect" in either the makeup of the eye and/or the physiology of the brain and could possibly endanger an organism whose survival might depend on making the necessary distinctions b/w the blocks.

the third explanation is mystifying. could you explain again why it is advantageous to see those scintillations in the grid despite it having no known ("unlikely") parallel in real life?


edit: Sensory illusions in aviation