/sci/ - Science & Math » Thread #11687976

429KiB, 638x318, 1589318169376.png

View Same Google iqdb SauceNAO

Anonymous Tue 19 May 05:54:44 2020 No.11687976 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>11687991 >>11688021 >>11688032 >>11688130 >>11688246 >>11688403 >>11688470

Is free will for real?

aren't we all really just really physical process observing other physical processes?

We can remember the past, events that just happened, or events that we were just thinking a about.. which allows us to internally process information in a type of physical feedback loop. This particular phenomenon seems to create the illusion of free will.

I'm not convinced that a person can even make a choice, only that they can remember the choice they didn't make.

What do you observe that you are about to post?

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 06:00:09 No.11687991 Report

Quoted By:

>>11687976
I trend towards saying it doesn't, but it feels oddly defeatist. The implications, drawn far enough out, are pretty grim. But it seems more correct than >muh soul, >muh chauvinist human superiority

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 06:11:53 No.11688021 Report

Quoted By:

>>11687976
I don't believe it is. But I don't live like I don't have free will if that makes sense.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 06:14:32 No.11688032 Report

Quoted By:

>>11687976
No one knows and anyone who claims to is lying, mostly to themselves.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 06:28:34 No.11688055 Report

Quoted By:

my teacher said i could be whatever i want so i became a mollusk

freewill.mp3

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 06:55:27 No.11688130 Report

Quoted By: >>11688134

>>11687976
creativity is unexplained and determinism stops working at the quantum level. watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 06:55:40 No.11688131 Report

Quoted By: >>11688149 >>11688187

you have already poisoned the well. look at the way you talk. you've already accepted that life without free will is meaningless, when I would believe the opposite is quite the case.

>just really physical process observing other physical processes?
>just

ask anyone who is motivated or has something to live for, and you will find that their motivations aren't based on the existence of free will.

I've given some thought to it, and my conclusion is that it thinking about overgeneralized questions concerning the great big "meaning of life" doesn't matter.

someone who is highly self-aware about their motivations doesn't live a more meaningful life than someone who merely acts on their motivations and doesn't question them.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 06:57:15 No.11688134 Report

Quoted By: >>11688167

>>11688130
in what regard is creativity unexplained? I do not necessarily believe that consciousness exists

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:03:26 No.11688149 Report

Quoted By: >>11688180

>>11688131
you’ve got the right of it. Have you heard of “freedom and necessity” and what plekhanov said about it?

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:09:02 No.11688167 Report

Quoted By: >>11688180 >>11688182

>>11688134
it's unexplained in the sense that we're unable to come up with a mechanism that can readily produce "creativity". if we could truly explain it, that is to understand it, then we should be able to construct a theoretical process that would output creativity. i don't know of any ideas that have accomplished this.

you should explain your radical views if you want to be taken seriously. you can't just say "i don't believe in x" when most people certainly do believe in x and expect a continuation in the discussion

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:16:31 No.11688180 Report

Quoted By: >>11688191 >>11688269

>>11688149
no, what would that be about? what did he say?
i just thought of this based on a reaction of some essay that was making the case that X was the meaning of life, because living life in pursit of X felt the most meaningful. this lead me to wonder whether feeling like one has a meaningful life is separate from having a meaningful life.

>>11688167
would some sort of neural network that makes multi-armed bandit decisions satisfy creativity?
I don't think there is any way for me to testify (even to myself) whether I have consciousness. I would hypothesis that what we call consciousness is really at least two separate things: a bodily notion of self, and the ability to have power over one's self.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:16:47 No.11688182 Report

Quoted By: >>11688208

>>11688167
not him but I think the way we define consciousness is a wank. A lot of conversations about whether species we can literally have conversations with, have self awareness, develop stone tools, etc are conscious feels like a projection of metaphysical christian style “humans special” thinking. I’ve never gotten a definition of consciousness that didn’t apply to some animals, and then when you change it to not fit them you can find humans that don’t fit the definition. Unless your strict definition is “it provably experiences qualia” and then arguably you can’t prove anyone else is conscious.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:19:11 No.11688187 Report

Quoted By:

>>11688131

I meant "just" physical vs handed to you from God.

I don't think that being self aware of or aware of possibly not having free will denies the ability, or even the propensity, to get lost in the illusion. so I do not think that not having free will does not mean life is meaningless.

It may remove a certain agency however it is still your unique process moving through life and time, and that has intrinsic meaning, especially when it is shared with others via cause and effect.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:21:11 No.11688191 Report

Quoted By:

>>11688180
note that when he says identified with he means unified with, identity means unity in some philosophical contexts, never figured out why. anyway

> When the consciousness of my lack of free will presents itself to me only in the form of the complete subjective and objective impossibility of acting differently from the way I am acting, and when, at the same time, my actions are to me the most desirable of all other possible actions, then, in my mind, necessity becomes identified with freedom and freedom with necessity; and then, I am unfree only in the sense that I cannot disturb this identity between freedom and necessity, I cannot oppose one to the other, I cannot feel the restraint of necessity. But such a lack of freedom is at the same time its fullest manifestation.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html

an absolutely fascinating view imo

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:28:44 No.11688208 Report

Quoted By: >>11688226

>>11688182
I mean maybe consciousness could be something separate from the feeling of consciousness but again I think what we feel as consciousness is a feeling of self. or maybe it's many things which happen to hinge on the feeling of self. what I mean by this is that the feeling of "being conscious" is the same feeling as "being in control of my arm". even if it's the case, like in phantom limb syndrome, . If this were the case, you could probably coerce (with some sort of drugs) the feeling of consciousness in someone else's body.

Or imagine plugging the brains of two people together somehow. if they could only manage to have one train of thought at a time, they could only maintain one (mutual) understanding of self. I think there is some reasoning here involving split-brain experiments that could be done, but I am not smart enough to figure it out.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:35:06 No.11688226 Report

Quoted By: >>11688242

>>11688208
well there are two headed adults we could ask, that might be insightful.
but there are a not insignificant amount of human adults who like certain qualia, such as visualization of objects, subjective experience of emotion, or even, and this is the big one, no internal monologue - they don’t think thoughts in the way generally considered significant to consciousness.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:47:00 No.11688242 Report

Quoted By: >>11688260

>>11688226
>well there are two headed adults we could ask, that might be insightful.
well they would specifically have to not just be conjoined, but joined at the brain! I can't imagine anyone could survive that, so splitbrain is likely the closest we can get. and the problem there is that one of the brains can't speak, and it's not like one hemisphere can really make a meaningfully separate personality, because they're both subject to the same stimuli. you would have to find someone who was splitbrain at birth, raise the hemispheres as different individuals, and then join them together later in life and ask them about it.

lack of internal monologue is a very difficult for me to understand. I think i can grasp the idea that I can think without literally imagining a dialouge, and I can be certain that I am capable of this.

what confuses me that it is sometimes so difficult to to think without being able to put things in words- that I can only imagine that someone without an internal monologue would be retarded like in a language deprivation experiment.

this was a good discussion, good night.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:48:26 No.11688246 Report

Quoted By: >>11688261

>>11687976
What would it be like IF we had free will vs. not having free will? People who say that free will doesn't exist typically don't accept anything (even something hypothetically conceivable) for free will, no matter how exactly the world turns out to be. So it's not a very interesting proposition in that case.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:54:53 No.11688260 Report

Quoted By:

>>11688242
no, they’re apparently so easy for them they often don’t realize it’s abnormal
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u69YSh-cFXY
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TJLxexapps0
my ex was kind of like this, i don’t know how to describe it because I could never wrap my head around it, but he couldn’t have certain thoughts basically and couldn’t understand how I could.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 07:54:55 No.11688261 Report

Quoted By: >>11688275

>>11688246
if we had free will, we would be influenced by, or part of something external to the universe. for example if consciousness was something separate from the physical world, but if it's an emergent trait then it doesn't seem like it

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 08:02:34 No.11688269 Report

Quoted By: >>11688271

>>11688180
if your neural network that makes multi-armed bandit decisions adequately represents creativity, then sure. How would you measure creativity you might ask? Maybe not directly, but you could compare your machine to people we consider "creative" and give them the same task, and let people be the judge of who expressed more creativity. It might not be perfect, and I'd agree, but at least it would be a starting point for comparison.

More likely though, I think your machine would fail to pass the test, because it's probably missing some crucial systems or ideas that the human would otherwise posses. I think we can both agree human creativity is most likely more than just a "neural network that makes multi-armed bandit decisions", given I haven't heard of any radically ground-breaking theories on creativity taking this approach. But if you found one, and it was universally accepted, then you'd have your explanation and I'd be beat.

The wikipedia, which was the best source I was willing to google for the sake of our discussion, defines consciousness as "awareness or sentience of internal or external existence". So for the sake of our mutual understanding, let's assume this definition is what we're discussing and not another notion of consciousness.
(1)

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 08:03:47 No.11688271 Report

Quoted By:

>>11688269
From this definition, and an assumption I would make from a scientific viewpoint that is every person is a conscious being, I would say it is trivial to deduce you are conscious. Are you aware that you are a person on planet earth? Are you aware of your inner voice and its abstractions and ideas? Then you are by this definition and in this scenario, conscious.

If you believe by a philosophical account that not every person is or may be conscious, then I would have no answer to your observation, as there's no scientific basis we can work with to understand that claim. It would be the same as proclaiming the end of the world was coming within a few days by an unknown means. We have no way to prove or disprove that because the amount of information unknown to us given that scenario is incomprehensively large, if not infinite. The same argument can be made about our scientific understanding of anything. Since it does not accomplish anything on its own, I'd like to acknowledge and respectfully move on from this idea without discussing it further.
(2)

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 08:05:58 No.11688275 Report

Quoted By:

>>11688261
so basically choice and agency would have to be something inexplicable and appear in a totally unpredictable fashion? i guess that is a vaguely conceivable distinction. what i don't get how it undermines anyone's sense of freedom. it seems silly to me like saying that a table doesn't exist because it's just a particular arrangement of atoms.

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 09:52:00 No.11688403 Report

Quoted By:

>>11687976
You people shit on >>>/x/ but it literally has higher average intelligence even taking negative-value IQ of flat earthers into account
LMAOing at ur life
>yes I chose to do that but did I Really choose
Go to your brother board >>>/lit/, they have a plethora of sodomite philosophers' works to show you

Anonymous

Anonymous Tue 19 May 2020 11:10:10 No.11688470 Report

Quoted By:

>>11687976
>Is free will for real?
The scientific consensus is that free will exists.

Capcode	All Only User Posts Only Moderator Posts Only Admin Posts Only Developer Posts
Show Posts	All Only With Images Only Without Images
Deleted Posts	All Only Deleted Posts Only Non-Deleted Posts
Ghost Posts	All Only Ghost Posts Only Non-Ghost Posts
Post Type	All Only Sticky Threads Only Opening Posts Only Reply Posts
Results	All Grouped By Threads
Order	Latest Posts First Oldest Posts First

Your latest searches