The An-Jel

My sister does the same thing

__________________
"And let there be Light!" said the Blind man.

Life is simple, people make it complicated - Basilisk

Nulli Expugnabilis Hosti - Royal Gibraltar Regiment

Jehanne

It is difficult for me to accept that all there is to "me" is my brain. As I said in my introduction to the forum, I am not saying that there is a "soul" or "spirit" that is the source of "who" I am, but I find it difficult to conclude with 100% certainty that my conscious experience is nothing but neurons and synapses. Those things are important, to be sure, but can Science definitively rule out the existence of the soul? And, if our behavior is governed by QM, are we just mindless automatons?

Og

Mindless doesn't really apply. We are much more highly complex than any automaton that we have created thus far. But yes. Your entire system is a collection of competing forces attempting to keep a homeostatic equilibrium. Every unit of your brain is a little robot (neuron or supporting cell). There are 100 billion of those and 100 trillion connections amongst them all with dynamic properties. It's extremely complex. The human brain really is the pinnacle of evolutionary complexity.

The thing is that every experience/memory/thought you have is based on your senses. If you think about it, there's no way you can't think of a thought in terms of images or sound or even smells or tastes or touches or temperature or pain. We are systems with some highly adapted sensory I/O. It's extraordinarily complex far beyond anything we could hope to create for quite a while (except of course through the usual process of growing one in the belly )

But yes, what science shows us is that we are an immensely complex collection of chemical processes that follows the rules of quantum electrodynamics which governs all processes in nature. If you think of a neurosurgeon on TV mapping out parts of the brain during some dramatic brain surgery and how the person on the table will have memories and emotions or move body parts based on where the doctor shocks his brain, then you get the idea.

Our sensory inputs are about a billion little shocks that are constantly feeding highly ordered "shocks" into our brain at various points and our brain is a vastly complex computer that analyzes and computes values or stores memories and then uses the results of these calculations to interact with the world that it's in.

It's amazing, and it's what WE experience. Free will is the quintessential humane delusion and it's ok to be deluded!

And really if you have trouble accepting that "all there is" to you is your brain, then think of it this way. "All there is to you" is the entire universe. You are like a flower that buds out of it but are still part of it. Just because your skin doesn't enfold my neurons doesn't mean that we are in any way separate. You are part of the same process that produced hitler and ghandi and MLK and alexander the great and everyone you see around you everywhere.

There's no sense of "if hitler hadn't existed"... There's ultimately no choice in anything in the universe. But free will as myth is as good a way as any in my opinion to move forward in the world. Just make sure you know it's myth so you don't get all hooked up on the past and feel terrible about it (or overwhelmingly proud of it either). It's kind of the ultimate carpe diem thing.

I read this great segment in a book on eastern spirituality by Joseph Campbell last night.

It's quite at odds with most western ideals of good and evil as ultimate truths to the universe and man being inserted into the world supernaturally (soul) and then taken out at the end (death) to be tossed into one of two collection bins based on how he/she behaved in life. Much more harmony with nature and the experience of life as opposed to be at odds with it (earth is the devils playground, for example). This idea is completely absent in eastern mythology.

Hinduism/Buddhism, Everyone is a component of the divine and the worst that can happen is that the people simply don't figure it out.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Jehanne

I agree that everything that you stated is probably the way reality is. I do not, however, feel comfortable with those who attach a "very low probability" to the existence of a soul or of an afterlife. Perhaps this is due to my lack of education in the relevant subject areas! But, since you are our resident expert in this area, I have read that we have 1,000 trillion synaptic connections in our brains. You cite 100 trillion as the figure. Is the "1,000 trillion" number wrong?

The An-Jel

He doesn't Know Jehanne. He is seeing things in his single universe. I am seeing in mine. You see things in yours. He is afraid of what he is seeing. I am afraid of them to. Life is really simple, People make it complicated.

__________________
"And let there be Light!" said the Blind man.

Life is simple, people make it complicated - Basilisk

Nulli Expugnabilis Hosti - Royal Gibraltar Regiment

Og

I don't think you can count something on that level jehanne. All the estimates I've seen are around 100 trillion, but another order of magnitude doesn't really seem to make a difference where our understanding of the complexity is concerned. The largest branching neurons have approximately 10000 connections to other cells while others can have only a few to a dozen connecting to them.

1000 trillion sounds fine to me. It's within an order of magnitude of the number of connections actually in the brain. No one has counted them one at a time.

As for the soul/afterlife thing, I apply no probability at all. I personally think that soul and afterlife are fairly limited ideas and nowhere even remotely close to touching on the wonderful width and breadth of the universe.

We are sensory beings. Every thought and memory and experience we have is 100% based on our sensory experience. Try thinking of something that's not experienced by one of your senses. You can't. This is what humans are. When we die, those senses stop functioning. But "you" haven't really gone anywhere. You are a pattern in the universe. The energy that went into creating and sustaining your pattern is not destroyed. Nor is that matter that you consisted of at the time of death. You continue to be part of the universe. Nothing is created or destroyed. Conservation of energy.

But I understand the psychological imperative for the idea of soul/afterlife. It's a necessity for motivation in this life. A sort of value to the worldly actions that you carry out. It's necessary in lots of cases and I appreciate it's existence as an idea.

The above is just my perspective. I need no one else to internalize it.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

redcliff

Few comments:
1. Some people suspect that there might be 'laws of complexity' i.e. laws that only emerge when a system is complex enough and cannot be reduced to the more basic laws (similar to the Godel theorem where you have a true statement that cannot be proven so by the system) therefore, since the brain is very complex, some new laws might apply and they allow free will.
2. some of you, in my opinion, engage in deconstruction - they talk about the most basic elements (neurons) which sometimes make one lose sight of the big picture. in my opinion it is a bit like explaining Shakespeare by focusing on the letters in his plays. and like I said in 1. the whole might be bigger than the sum of its parts.
3. We certainly don't have the final theory of physics, so there might be some new basic laws that might change the current leading ideas. now, admittingly, the brain doesn't operate in the levels of energies in which we lack understanding, and we know that QM and relativity are pretty accurate in the levels which we can explore. but there is a possibility that somehow, the brain can utilize those yet unknown phenomena (see Penrose). actually if you think about quantum computers, it is a device that operates according to principles that were known in the 30's but it took 50 years until someone understood this particular implication. it might be that free will does hide in our current equations but no one has figured it out yet.

And before talking about free will, I really think we should first try to define it. if we have different definitions then clearly, we can reach nowhere.

I also think that free will is inseparable from consciousness, (I mean, no one think that an inanimate object has one) so until we know for sure what consciousness is (one way would be to be able to build a thinking machine) we really cannot say that free will, whatever it is, does not exist.

The An-Jel

Interesting thing about Agnostics is that with almost each individual there is a different concept for Free Will. Defining it would be interesting because I don't think most of us believe in it.

I just don't believe in Free Will so defining it is beyond us but I am open to agreeing on certain terms associated with the concept.

__________________
"And let there be Light!" said the Blind man.

Life is simple, people make it complicated - Basilisk

Nulli Expugnabilis Hosti - Royal Gibraltar Regiment

Og

Free will is the ability of an individual to make a choice between two options in his environment. It allows an individual to be considered a moral agent in the population. It does exist. It is as real as money, music, and love (and God).

As for "laws of complexity," I've got this great thick book by steven wolfram that illustrates massively complex systems arising from simple underlying rules (book title: A New Kind of Science). Wolfram is one of the most prominent theoretical physicists of the last 30 years and wrote the symbolic math software "Mathematica" which is used by almost every physicist in the world.

From what I've seen from his writing and from what I've heard him talk about, "emergent" properties of complex systems seem to simply be results of the behaviors of the underlying rules. It's nothing "new" that can not be traced to the sum of its parts. Our behaviors as organisms are complex, but it's only a matter of "degree" when compared to the behavior of a rock. It's not a matter of "kind."

I don't think #2 up there holds water either. Network behavior is dictated by it's components. The big picture is in the neurons. They are the ones that have integration (capacitive membrane) and can express a variety of modes of synaptic plasticity. I think this "Deconstruction" is like understanding DNA or amino acids when looking at protein structure. I think it's extremely valuable and we're not missing anything of the big picture by deconstructing it in this manner.

in response to #3, of course, science is always open to the possibility that we could be wrong, but there have been MANY documented and ongoing inquiries into the behavior of the components of neurons on many levels. We can apply a broad range of drugs to effect large scale network modification (see steroids and other psychotic drugs). We can insert an electrode deep into the brain to a certain spot and counter some of the degenerative effects of parkinsons. People stick electrodes into cells or nearby them every day and do a variety of electrochemical tests on them. The components of their membranes are well studied. Researchers have taken individual membrane molecules from a variety of neurons and looked at their code and their behavior. There is a massive volume of work on the study of molecular and genetic neuroscience in addition to cell level neuroscience and network level neuroscience (behavioral neurophysiology).

There's simply a vast body of observation where the components of our nervous systems are concerned. It's a huge field.

That, and neurons certainly aren't at any real fringe of science (such as high energy or sub-atomic or cosmological). The science that they do address is that of complexity. Which is a matter of calculation, not a matter of comprehension.

__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are