Evidence for/against Evolution - a discussion - Page 3

Og · 06-02-2007, 09:39 AM

As I said. We do not have free will. We are neural machines. Free will is an illusion. This is demonstrable in living neural networks today. Signals propagate from neuron to neuron in a complex pattern, but there is no ability of any arbitrary entity to change this path of firing. Signals go from cell to cell without any ability to intervene in the process.

The notion of god/yaweh/allah in the west is one who is intimately tied up in the fact that we actually have free will. The notion of heaven and hell and the "one true god" that we must believe in to be part of the saved in heaven or something like that.

Since God/yaweh/allah are all tied inextricably to free will, they are illusions since free will is an illusion. This is proof that they don't exist. Science can illustrate that things are false.. It never illustrates that things are true.. it only provides evidence. But the whole point of the scientific process is that you propose a hypothesis and attempt to disprove it. When disproven (by showing evidence contradicting the hypothesis) it is discarded.

That is what has happened with the notion of a god that judges any individual entities. The truth is that the notion of an individual is arbitrary and without cosmic meaning. It's an illusion.

God is an illusion. It exists only in the minds of people.

sisterX · 06-02-2007, 09:58 AM

I disagree. The "freedom" in freewill is the ability of our minds to reprogram themselves and to EVALUATE automatic thoughts and emotions. We all have this ability, and we all choose to utilize it however we wish. Of course there are the effects of nature, nurture, random events, and past decisions but they can be modified by our ability to project consequences and by our power to influence choices - by the fact that we are AWARE of our freewill in the first place!
Our abstract thinking, projecting and deciding is 'freedom'.
This freedom of choice makes us human. Therefore, makes us responsible for our actions.

Og · 06-02-2007, 12:05 PM

Yes, you have described the illusion well.

ULTIMATELY, however, all of that that you described is the complex cascade of neural signals in the brain and there is no sense of an individual on that level. What you anthropomorphize and call "freedom" is complex computation and response to environmental stimuli over years. You say "we all choose" to control the brain and modify our behavior, but that illusion is an extra layer of computation on top of the primal brain. It's connected to our ability to predict into the future and remember the past in order to modify our current urge driven behavior.

That's the illusion.. Every time you used: I, our, we, etc, you were referring to the illusion.

This is demonstrable fact. When a neurosurgeon has your head open on the surgical table and stimulates parts of your brain tissue you have all sorts of responses from emotion to motor behavior to memory recollection or sensory problems. When the neurosurgeon closes you up, we know the stimuli that your brain receives (10s of millions of fine sensory inputs) and they behave in exactly the same way that the surgeon's stimulus behaves.

You are a machine that is an expression of your environment. It's a complex process, but it's clearly a biochemical computer on a cellular level.

The notion of freedom has a value as part of the illusion that gives us senses of self and such. But it DOES NOT HAVE ULTIMATE/COSMIC MEANING. Thus, the realization of the illusion of free will disproves the god hypotheses that involve individual separate entities which judge us as though we we able to choose.

There's no way around it. Allah/Yaweh are hoisted by their own petard. Heaven and hell are obviously illusions and the reality is that what we are is one gigantic interconnected process of interacting objects that are all expressions of our environments.

As plants flower, trees apple, and the ocean waves, the universe peoples. Each of us is an expression of the entire realm of nature. Ego is an illusion.

This is demonstrable fact. The notion of the western God is an illusion. it's a construct that only exists in our mind. This is what the garden of eden myth tells us. We were cast into the world of categories of thought of birth/death and good/evil and fear/desire by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (attaining consciousness). That's the nature of the human condition.

God is a metaphor for the mystery of existence that transcends categories of thought.

The cool thing is that Yaweh and Allah are clearly reflections of us as a society, not the other way around!

sisterX · 06-02-2007, 10:27 PM

OoooooK, so where do you stand on moral responsibility? Surely if we do not have free will we cannot be expected to be responsible for our actions.

Og · 06-02-2007, 10:44 PM

How's that again? You're mixing illusion with reality. The notion of moral responsibility is the same as trimming the hedge. Think of a hedge and a given shape you want it to have. Part of it grows over that boundary. So you cut it off. Is it responsible? Does it matter?

The notion of "we" does not apply to the notion of no free will. You are not some entity in your body unable to control your actions. You are not some thing that needs to be pitied because it can't be held responsible for its actions. You/we/I/us are illusions.

This is, however, entirely separate from the fact that Yahweh/Allah/etc are quite demonstrably false in the literal sense. As for all this other purpose and stability (i.e. the goal of morality) stuff, that's important, but able to be figured out. Set the limits where you want the hedge to look pretty and then start trimming it. Use rational concepts of providing opportunity for people to survive and thrive (without these there can be no other goals).

Just don't make the mistake of thinking that you're a poor soul stuck in a deterministic body. That's not the case. YOU are the illusion. It's highly complex, but the bottom line is that you do not have free will.

sisterX · 06-03-2007, 03:13 PM

There he goes again avoiding answering the question.
I get what you mean about no 'poor soul' stuck in a deterministic body but my question was regarding ACCOUNTABILITY. Should we (or our brains) be held accountable for our actions since we do not have free will?
I am assuming you are saying the actions we take are not actually CHOICES but in fact we (or our brains) take the only action available to us, meaning there is no such thing as CHOICE.
Since there is no choice should there be such a thing as accountability?

Og · 06-03-2007, 04:03 PM

Why shouldn't there be accountability? You clip your toenails?

I wasn't avoiding the question. I'm not claiming to have all the answers about what social construct the human race needs to follow!! I don't really know what the implications of all of this are.

It's just clear that given the fact that choice is an illusion, so must be the gods that make eternal judgments based on our chosen behavior.

What's with the "there he goes again" stuff?

**SithLord** · 06-04-2007, 12:07 PM

Og, you're just overanalyzing the issue.

Yes of course down to the hard core basics of what we are and what makes up our minds we are just a product of what our brains have been exposed to and the neural pathways and constructs that resulted.

BUT... that's just getting too deeply involved and it's like saying we can't think and evolve because it's already a result of what's happened to us in the past. Life evolves and grows freely. If that's not free will I don't know what is. Maybe not in the biblical sense though.

There are plenty of naysayers who say machines will never be able to "really" think on their own. But they are being proven wrong every day. Just because we know and fully inderstand the complex nature of supercomputers and the chips that power them, some capable of processing teraflops of data now, doesn't mean it's not still thinking and making decisions. Like when computers lay chess they use mathematical calculations to figure things out and can guess pretty much every move you can think of making before it makes its own move. But that's just the way it thinks. Just because it's different doesn't mean it's not "real" thinking. It's easy to label it not really thinking because we FULLY understand the inner workings of a computer from hardware to software.

Your own argument is flawed simply because it implies that we already know everything there is to know about how the brain works.

Whetehr I want chocolate or vanilla icecream this particular day sure the decision itself "physically" comes from neurons in my head but I can't help that. That's just what I'm made of. But I guess if our brains were made of radioactive dust you'd find a way to say the dust made the decision and not me. Beecause according to you everything is an illusion. Our sense of self. Life itself. Everything. The consciousness of every living being in the universe must be "just an illusion" too I guess.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Og

ULTIMATELY, however, all of that that you described is the complex cascade of neural signals in the brain and there is no sense of an individual on that level

That describes my point exactly. Our consiousness doesn't exist on that level. That's just the engine room where it draws it's power and database from. Our consciousness and how it works has likely just not been discovered yet.

Og · 06-04-2007, 01:38 PM

You are the behavior of a neural network. It's a machine. It responds to its environment in a given way (albeit a very complex way). Neurons are not the engine room.. That's the stomach and the lungs and the mitochondria. The Neurons are exactly what you are. Consciousness is a behavior associated with large groups of neurons in a given type of configuration.

This notion that we're something separate from the neurons (i.e. something that uses the neurons to process) is wrong.

A hurricane doesn't have a will.. It goes where the wind blows it. We are the same. Causality drives all things in the universe. It appears that we have free will, but in an ultimate cosmic sense, we do not.

The notion that we are eternally punished in some extra-dimensional place (heaven/hell) for our freely chosen acts here is false. A god/religion structured around this notion is an illusion as well.

sisterX · 06-05-2007, 08:50 AM

Og what I was trying to get you to say is that if it appears to us that we have free will, then this 'appearance' is the significant part, the effect is more important than the process. Neurons constitute the process of thinking and the thinking itself is the effect of that process.
The fact that we must be held responsible for our actions mean the 'apearance' that we have free will means, in our 'minds', that we actually have free will.