This is a thread to allow discussions about how those lucky enough to have free will make decisions.
As materialism doesn’t explain squat, this thread is a place for explanations from those that presumably have them.
And if they can’t provide them, well, this will be a short thread.
So do phoodoo, mung, WJM et al care to provide your explanations of how decisions are actually made?
That only works gjven how Chalmers defines physicalism. But his definition is highly contestable, and arguably a position that no one has ever held.
Besides which, even Chalmers himself thinks that consciousness has a physical explanation the actual world. The only point of the zombies stuff is to point out that it’s not a necessary truth. But so what?
Mung quotes Feser:
That doesn’t solve the problem at all. Feser elsewhere says, following Aquinas, that the intellect is immaterial. If so, then he can’t escape the interaction problem. How does a decision made via my immaterial intellect come to influence the behavior of my physical body?
fmm,
Great! So how are decisions made then if phyisicalism is false?
Or is ‘they just are’ your final answer?
No it works for any position that holds that the material is all there is.
So the conceivability of Zombies puts the materialist and the non materialist on a level playing field.
Except now the materialist now has to explain what it is that makes some matter conscious while the vast majority is not.
IOW The materialist needs to explain the thing that separates minds from brains.
For the non-materialist the answer is simple immaterial consciousness.
peace
Once again, a person weighs his options and chooses the most desired one.
‘they just are’ was never my answer at all
peace
Do you offer college credit or just CEUs?
Not even close. We know that material things and processes exist. There is no evidence for anything “immaterial”. You have actively refused to provide any.
Those don’t seem to me to be even nearly the same thing.
Patrick,
We have no physical evidence for those things that aren’t physical! Wow, what a revelation you have stumbled on Patrick.
Please provide whatever you think constitutes evidence supporting the existence of anything “immaterial”.
As I suggested previously, one would first need to establish that the appearance/reality distinction does not apply to consciousness in order to conclude that since consciousness seems to be non-material therefore it really is immaterial substance.
+1.
I have to say, I’m not really sure what sort of answer you are looking for here. If they deny there’s a physical mechanism, what are they supposed to tell you?
Here’s a paper/book chapter that attempt to explain “agent causation” that maybe will help: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&ved=0ahUKEwi53Ybwp63PAhXTQD4KHbSDAkMQFgguMAM&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.indiana.edu%2F~scotus%2Ffiles%2FAgent_Causation.pdf&usg=AFQjCNFx0qKAD-pF7muUt8CyTB_Ha_GD4A&sig2=P7dpvKHsribkHN-sMuMPfA
According to this author (whose work I don’t know),
Here’s a bit more on it (though I don’t always trust their summaries):
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/agent-causality.html
Look, I’m not saying that this picture is right–or even entirely coherent–but it’s a commonly held view that goes back at least to Aristotle. Anyhow, as phoodoo et al. have not answered your question after repeated attempts to get them to do so, I thought maybe this would be helpful.
If you want something else, you should probably tell them the sort of thing you are looking for.
It always comes back to the interface, for me. If the immaterial affects the material world, there has to be an interface of interaction. How does God move things in mysterious ways?
Though there are major differences between Aristotle, Descartes, and even more-or-less contemporary defenders of agent causation like Roderick Chisholm and Robert Kane.
You too may find the stuff I linked to helpful.
I don’t know what I’m looking for, hence the question.
Fmm, phoodoo, mung, what do you think about the content on walto’s links? Is that how decisions are made in your world?
I don’t think so, as we are still talking there about brains made of atoms and the movements or swerves of those atoms is neither here nor there if minds are not brains (which are made of atoms).
But I’ll certainly be up for discussing it if phoodoo says that is indeed the way decisions are made in his world.
Had a quick skim through O’Connor’s paper but he doesn’t seem to address my simple point. (May have missed it, of course.) If an immaterial agent causes some change in the physical world, then an event which defies the laws of physics must occur. We don’t see such events.
Like, why they do so, other than that they have a really really strong belief that there’s a soul and libertarian free will.
I think it’s theoretically understandable (why not an uncaused cause?), but it’s not clearly internally consistent, more importantly, it’s not at all consistent with what we know about the nature and workings of the natural world. Causality does hold in classical events so far as we know (and it’s typical that causes are demanded of the science side, while they try to weasel out of it for themselves), and we know how neurons work to a fairly high degree. Do nerves fire under the impact of immaterial causes? There is some spontaneous nerve activity, but there does not appear to be any magical action-potential production at all.
But never really led to any productive ideas.
Something better than that. More exactly, yes, I suppose that we’d want something like “immaterial science,” and are more than a little aware that it doesn’t exist. One can always shoehorn “free will of the gaps” into what we still don’t know, of course, but there is no evidence for it at all.
Glen Davidson
The question is, what would you consider evidence for it?
An unbalanced effect. An effect without a cause. Action and reaction not opposite and equal.
What would you consider evidence for God?
The thing is, you’re bringing in amorphous, undefined claims and asking those not pushing these basically meaningless claims what would be good evidence for them. Nothing. That’s yet another problem with their position, there’s not enough sense to the ideas to even decide what could be evidence for them.
It’s not the critics’ responsibility to make the shambles of amorphous, meaningless claims into coherent, meaningful ideas having distinct entailments. For one thing, the moment you do that the proponents of these meaningless ideas are going to say that they didn’t mean that, as they almost certainly did not (never having thought that coherently).
Glen Davidson
It was already implied:
If there’s no reason an immaterial cause cannot be generated on demand (after all, if minds are that then we do it all the time) then presumably we can watch one ‘end’ of the mind-brain connection and have the ‘mind’ do something on demand that causes the ‘other end’ (i.e. the material end we can put under a microscope) to light up, that lighting up having no physical explanation and being correlated with the ‘mind doing something on demand’. That would be evidence, I suppose.
But, frankly, I could be talking utter bollocks with all these microscopes and nerves and that. I literally don’t know how decisions are made in phoodoo world, it could be all of that or none of that. I really don’t know. Hence the question.
In the partner post to this one phoodoo says in the OP:
For all we know, his ‘decisions’ are not really decisions either and he has no control over them either. We’d perhaps be able to judge that if he’d say how those decisions are made in his world.
I don’t really know, but my impression is that with respect to so-called “voluntary activities” we don’t have any evidence one way or the other. It seems to me that they might as well ask you for an instance of a “balanced effect” in that area. What evidence could YOU proffer?
I’m not holding any brief for their view. But I do think it’s only fair to point out that if one thinks that nothing would or could count as evidence for their position, it’s kind of rough to keep asking them to provide some.
I don’t think he does, myself. I asked a couple of days ago whether people thought they had control over what they believe. Nobody responded.
Oh, well in that case yes, I’m sure you can control what you believe in some ways.
Tell yourself 10,000 times it is true and it becomes true…
If we really have “free will” it seems like we shouldn’t have to go to all that trouble, doesn’t it?
I don’t think that anybody suggested that nothing could (in theory) count as evidence for their views. It’s kind of like ID, we could likely think of conceivable evidence for it, but whenever we ask for actual evidence of design behavior in producing wild-type life we’re accused of being theological. Of course it’s the opposite, we’re certainly asking for design that is in principle as we’ve seen it (how else could we judge it to be design?), whether the designer is a god, alien, or whatever, but in ID “design” is simply being conflated with complex functionality, hence it is meaningless (our point, usually).
Likewise, we could ask for, say, human thought not being caused by various inputs and circumstances, but again, we’re going to be told that cause is there, it’s just not total. Which kind of makes it a meaningless claim with respect to epistemology, that “free will” looks a lot like what one would expect of caused wills, it’s just not the same. Again, that’s the actual problem, they’re not willing to predict anything meaningful because they’ll be falsified.
As to why people keep asking for evidence, it’s sort of a constant with FMM and phoodoo, they simply make statements that they think they don’t need to support. Or it’s “supported” with “revelation,” or some meaningless “definition.” If you’re going to engage them–and I try to keep it minimal with FMM (and not at all with phoodoo)–you’re going to have to ask for substance even though you know you’ll never get it.
Glen Davidson
It’s always boils down to the problem of the existence of other zombies!
It’s a shame, really, but no one ever gets credit for being pedantic.
Obviously, the power of cumulative selection has to qualify.
Well, I don’t recall it, but this is one of those very complex issues where of course there is some control–since one can seek out sources of information and confirmation that will tend to affirm a certain belief–but hardly any sort of complete control. And then some things work for some, and not for others. Sal, for example, appears to have swallowed ID easily enough, but had to work to believe YECism–and has some truly bizarre ideas about it (like that rocks might be old, while the fossils in them are not). I don’t think I could ever persuade myself to believe either one, whatever the incentive, except perhaps by undergoing severe cranial trauma.
Of course we’ve been over these matters in various ways, regarding Pascal’s Wager and WJM’s many instances of arguing from consequence. Many people seem in fact to control what they believe by sticking with whatever seems best to prop up their beliefs–whether these involve appeals to emotion or to supposed fact–but in these instances they seem to be at least as much being controlled by their beliefs as vice versa, I think rather more being controlled than in control (although behavior may very well not be controlled by those beliefs). If one has gotten to the point of letting the evidence control beliefs in certain areas (it’s doubtful that anyone does so throughout life), it’s not likely that they’re going to want to control what they believe in that area unless there is a strong egoistic reason to do so (one’s pet project, etc.).
Glen Davidson
I don’t think belief is volitional (which is part of the reason WJM is round the bend). If we could believe as we choose it would be the end of suffering – and total chaos.
We do have some indirect control in the sense that my belief (or agnosticism) about whether it’s raining outside is at the mercy of my popping my head out of the window to find out.
C:\projects>irb
irb(main):001:0> it = false
=> false
irb(main):002:0> 10000.times {"Self, it is true."}
=> 10000
irb(main):003:0> puts it == true
false
=> nil
irb(main):004:0>
Doesn’t seem to work so well for computers. Maybe computers don’t have beliefs.
Try it with a neural net.
Woodbine,
Reminded me of this:
keiths August 6, 2015 at 6:44 am
I found the discussion i was looking for.
William:
Well, Mr. Free Will, why not choose to like the feeling of lying in a piss-soaked bed? Don’t you have the power? Perhaps you’re a biological automaton after all.
More from that discussion:
keiths:
William:
Well, if you can choose to enjoy having your fingernails pulled out, then it should be a piece of cake to enjoy lying in a piss-soaked bed. Why get up and walk to the bathroom if you can simply choose to enjoy your sloshy situation instead?
keiths:
William:
keiths:
keiths, after getting no answer from William:
It goes without saying that Mr. “I can choose to like anything” did not accept my offer.
William, you crack me up. You can choose to like anything, except for the things you can’t choose to like.
Reality has you whipped, doesn’t it?
Well, this is what I’m wondering. They seem so very sure. I’ve read some sci-fi where people can just evolve a different state of mind using many copies of their mind in parallel to find the right ‘setting’. Good book that. Pushing neurons around with repetition must seem so gauche in comparison, eh phoodoo?
That’s my experience, too.
Certainly with “immaterial” input, we have none.
I’m not sure if you’re missing my point that seems so obvious to me. Equations balance. Mass and energy are conserved.
I’m saying evidence that the immaterial impinges on the material is not there because, for instance, mass and energy are conserved. If the divine (immaterial) foot kicks a football, the equations don’t balance.
Do neural nets have beliefs? Are they atheists? Are there any theistic neural nets? Are decision trees real trees?
Did you read the paper at all?
If I can imagine a world populated by beings with no consciousness that are empirically equivalent to this world (and I can) then whatever consciousness is is not material.
If you disagree with this observation please explain why
I don’t mind that you don’t pay attention to what I say but please don’t pretend that you are engaging in an open and honest give and take and that I haven’t provided evidence.
Peace
please elaborate, I’m willing to be corrected but to me they seem to be precisely the same thing
peace
What?? So you want to rehash epistemology before we can even discuss what a mind is?
If appearances don’t in anyway correspond to reality how do you know you are not a brain in a vat?
peace
I would tend to agree with you here. We need an interface that has the ability to interact with both the materiel and the immaterial.
After all this time do you really need me to spell out for you what I think that might be?
peace
That does not follow. You can imagine many things that cannot possibly exist. Complex brains without consciousness may be in that set.
Neural nets can learn from training data. If you keep presenting foolish beliefs to them, they will start acting like creationists.
Only if you claim it is observable, otherwise it’s just a matter of opinion.
I would of course as a Calvinist say we don’t have control over what we believe.
We do have control over what we do with that.
peace
Of course it’s observable we all observe it all the time. Some of us choose to suppress that truth
peace