Re: Making your mind up

On Fri, 12 Apr 2024 13:27:10 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
wrote:

On 2024-04-12 6:56 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Thu, 11 Apr 2024 21:32:18 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
wrote:
 

On 2024-04-11 2:42 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Wed, 10 Apr 2024 10:19:45 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
wrote:
>

On 2024-04-10 4:09 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Tue, 9 Apr 2024 11:28:11 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>
[snip for focus]
>

Yep. It's just the spectre (ha) of the supernatural that seems to
inevitably arise when 'free will' is invoked that bothers me.

>
What bothers me is when people dismiss things out of hand just because
they might have even a hint of the supernatural.
>

Hint? Is is supernatural

>
Funny how in the whole discussion about free will and determinism, you
are the only one to raise the supernatural.
>

see just below
>

and that bothers me because it invalidates much
of what we believe we know about the universe.

>
I think at this stage, you have a broad idea of my beliefs but just to
summarise them - I'm a religious believer (Catholic), I'm a dualist
inclined towards panpsychism and I believe there is such a thing as
free will. I don't reject any scientific knowledge or *evidence-based*
conclusions, finding my beliefs readily compatible with them. What in
my beliefs invalidates much of what we know about the universe?
>

>

It's the 'dualism' bit. Perhaps I misunderstand, but It seems to me that
dualism requires the existence of some non-material entity that can
cause material changes in defiance of physical laws.

>
What physical laws are being defied?

>
Non-random physical activity without the required energy supply.

 
I see two problems with that statement. First of all, I'm not at all
sure what you mean by it; if my dualist consciousness makes me decide
to go for a walk, the physical effort involved in that comes from my
body, not from my consciousness - perhaps you can give a specific of
what you mean.

>
If you had said, in that statement just above, 'if my consciousness
makes me decide to go for a walk, the physical effort involved in that
comes from my body, not from my consciousness' then we would be in
complete agreement. The "makes me" bit is consistent with determinism
and the electrochemical conditions and energy flows are consistent with
and sufficient for the changes associated with the decision being made.

"Consistent with" on its own is not scientific evidence, you need to
show a direct relationship between the two. We have a pretty good
understanding of the brain activities that take place during
decision-making and other conscious activities but nobody has been
able to identify how those activities originate.

IIUC, dualism posits the existence of an entity separate from but
intimately associated with the brain than can non-randomly channel the
brain's activity. This should require the application of some sort of
energy to the brain. Since there is neither evidence or necessity for
this in the observed brain activity I think it counts as supernatural.

You seem hung up on this need for an external energy source. Apart
from the fact that there may be a force that we have not yet
identified, there is no reason why dualist consciousness could not be
using the energy generated within the brain. I have a thermostat in my
living room controlling an electric heating system. The thermostat is
not an inherent part of the heating system but it draws its energy
from the same source in order to control it.

>

 
Secondly, even if some unidentified energy supply is necessary, I
can't understand why you see that as a problem; 50 years ago we knew
nothing about the existence of dark energy, but now we know a lot
about it. Why do you rule out other forces or supplies of energy that
we don't know anything about?

>
My argument is not that it *is* necessary but that it is not observably
necessary but would have to exist under dualism. Dark energy is presumed
to exist because something like it is required to account for observed
conditions.

It wasn't presumed to exist 50 years ago. When first put forward by
Guth and Starobinsky in 1980, it was pure conjecture, it wasn't until
nearly twenty years later that the first direct supporting evidence
was found.
.

 

>

That meets my
definition of supernatural.

>
The general definition of 'the supernatural' is "caused by forces that
cannot be explained by science" (adj) or "things that cannot be
explained by science" (noun)
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/supernatural
>

I'm happy with that definition as long as it is taken quite strictly, ie
"cannot be explained by science" and not 'is not presently completely
explicable by science'.

 
I have no problem with that provided the qualifier is not just an
attempt to create unjustified wriggle room. (See my comments below
about the lack of progress in neurological explanations).
 

>

As discussed just a couple of months ago, science, at least at this
point in time, cannot explain consciousness of which decision-making
is a subset.

>
Except that there are scientists working on the problem and believe they
have some promising ideas (there is a short discussion in last months
Scientific American on AI)

 
They have been promising for rather a long time. As I pointed out to
you two months ago, in Matthew Cobb's book "The Idea of the Brain", he
refers back to a meeting of 20 scientists in Quebec in1953 for a 5-day
symposium on 'Brain Mechanisms and Consciousness'. Opening the
symposium, Horace "Tid" Winchell Magoun, regarded as one of the
fathers of neuroscience, warned his colleagues of 'the head-shaking
sympathy with which future investigators will probably look back upon
the groping efforts of the mid-twentieth century, for there is every
indication that the neural basis of consciousness is a problem that
will not be solved quickly'. Cobb observes that "Tid would probably
have been amused to learn that nearly seventy years later the neural
basis of consciousness is still not understood, nor, the optimism of
Science magazine notwithstanding, is there any sign of an answer on
the horizon."
 
Has there been some major development since that book was published of
which I am not aware?

>
Not that I am aware of, but there is no indication of any movement to
abandon the search as fruitless.

I'm not suggesting that the search should be abandoned as fruitless.
What I do think is that there should be a recognition (which does seem
to be happening, albeit very slowly) that the current emphasis on a
neurologic solution is not delivering answers and that alternative
approaches should be considered. Perhaps we need a modern-day
Copernicus to say - "Let's turn this around; instead of brain
processes forming "the mind", could "the mind" be forming the brain
processes?" I use quotes around "the mind" because althogh we both
know what I mean, there is no clear definition of it but that itself
might at least in part be because of limitations in our current
thinking and approaches, perhaps a new approach would allow us to come
up with a clearer definition.

I also think that we really need to abandon the idea that
consciousness is purely part of the brain. Recent research has shown
that when gut microbes are transferred between rats, mental states and
behaviour are also transferred from host to recipient, no brain
transplant involved. I have also long felt that no satisfactory
attempt has been really made to explain how we experience different
emotions in different parts of our body - grief in our heart,
nervousness in our stomach, fear in our bowels. The standard approach
seems to be to handwave these away as the brain sending messages to
those organs but no explanation is offered as to why it works that
way.

We should also be looking at other life forms - jellyfish have no
brain yet seem to be able to sense and respond to stimuli and even
have some learning capability. Other research has suggested that even
plants may have a rudimentary form of consciousness with ability to
transfer information between plants.

Another aspect that strikes me is how individual minds can operate
collectively, almost as if a new mind is generated as in mob hysteria
but also in other useful ways; as a management consultant delivering
management development programmes, one of my favourite topics was
showing how collective decisions are generally better than individual
decisions. Although that has long been recognised in management and
business,  I am not aware of any attempt to study it from a science
perspective.

I think an underlying problem is that science generally is focused on
a materialistic solution, a convincement that the answer to
everything, including consciousness, must have a materialist origin. I
get the impression that this is accentuated by a phobia about not
opening the door to anything that might even hint of the supernatural,
especially God.

We need to recognise that there is no scientific evidence to confirm
either materialism or dualism as the explanation for consciousness. A
materialist approach to science has produced many wonderful results in
the way we have come to understand so much about nature and the
universe and should quite rightly be our initial approach for
attempting to solve unknown questions but it should not lead to closed
minds; if it fails to deliver results, we should be prepared to at
least consider other options whether or not they fit into a
materialist way of thinking.

 
Incidentally, I said some time ago that I think that if we do
eventually get an understanding of consciousness, it is more likely to
come from work on machine learning and AI rather than neurology. I
said that some time before the recent explosion in AI applications and
that explosion reinforces my thinking.
 

And there is no indication that it violates
any physical laws. so I would call it paranormal, not supernatural.

 
I've already given you the Cambridge definition of supernatural i.e
"caused by forces that
cannot be explained by science". The same dictionary defines
paranormal as "impossible to explain by known natural forces or by
science". Can you clarify what the significant difference is that
makes you prefer the latter?
 

I screwed up badly there. I came across a description similar to my
beliefs and grabbed their terminology without vetting it (bias
acknowledged). I should have said unknown at present (perhaps
unknowable). 'Consciousness' is hard, is there a widely accepted
definition? I've seen everything from 'absolute proof that we are
transcendent beings' to 'named hallucination'. Both of those extremes
fall into the 'unknowable bin but for different reasons. There is lots
of evidence that the brain is intimately involved but I am unaware of
any evidence of any other involvement.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

>
  In that sense, therefore, determinism also qualifies as

the supernatural. I think your definition of the supernatural is
related to a particular association of the supernatural with religious
belief but that is down to your own personal belief

>
I'm sure you do believe that, but then I believe you had no choice but
to do so, it's just who you are. I also believe that you are wrong.
>
  and, if you want

to be consistent in your scientific arguments, you really need to
treat belief in determinism just as much based on the "supernatural"
as free will is.
>

That does not follow. I believe that I did not chose my belief, I
believe that I hold my belief because of who I am. where is the
supernatural in that?

 
Can you provide a scientific explanation for your belief?
 

It's a manifestation of the electrochemical conditions of my brain. Of
course the brain is far from perfect in  these matters and may be lying
to me (and yours you) in spite of its best intentions (helping you
survive). Are you familiar with the 'white/gold' 'blue/black' picture of
a dress a few years ago? It turns out it is blue/black but the people
who saw white/gold completely wrong. Their brains were quite honestly
telling them an untruth. The brain's vision processing system is quite
clever and quite unconscious and does a lot of unconscious processing
before reporting its results to the rest of the brain. If you were a
morning, outdoorsy person, your brain *assumed*, lacking conflicting
information, that this was the most likely lighting and processed the
actual colours in the picture to reflect that. In this case it reported
blue/black (correctly). If you were a night, indoorsy person it made the
colour corrections and reported white/gold (incorrectly). Even being
told what the lighting conditions were did not alter that. Conscious
knowledge did not override what the vision system 'knew'. Shown the
actual dress they get it right. (I believe some of the white/gold group
deny that they were shown the actual dress).

That leads into another topic that fascinates me - illusion - but
let's leave that for another day. In regard to the above example,  I'd
just repeat the analogy I gave before. I'm typing my ideas on a PC. If
something goes wrong with my keyboard, some of the letters I type and
the letters that appear on screen may be different. That doesn't,
however, mean that my keyboard is responsible for the generation of
the ideas I have. In the same way, the brain carries out a vast
multitude of complex activities and it is no surprise that there may
be some variation in outcome between brains in different people even
if they get the same inputs. I didn't really see it as an argument in
favour of either materialism or dualism.

>
BTW, I am a bit pissed off by part of your other earlier reply and will
not be responding to it. In future, I would appreciate it if, in
responding to my points, you refrained from comparing me to some other
arsehole on the web, I am arsehole enough on my own.

 
Sorry, but that sounds like a cop-out. I wasn't comparing *you* to Ron
Dean, I was comparing your *line of reasoning* to his.

>
Hmm. That sounds like a cop-out. Go ahead, critique the line of
reasoning, I expect nothing less.

You seemed to be stretching things beyond breaking point to support
your argument. I know you walked away from that post in disgust but I
think my original point is important. I said that as I understood it,
you seemed to be saying that determinism doesn't only make my decision
in advance, by pre-determining the changes in conditions that will
affect me making the decision, it effectively determines the processes
that I will go through to reach it, even determining that I will spend
the night tossing and turning about the decision. I thought your
argument is starting to sound more and more like someone who is
convinced of a particular answer and will either ignore or endlessly
manipulate contrary indicators to squeeze in the answer. Considering
it further since, to say that determinism is the result of the
conditions  that exist but that determinism also created those
conditions is a circular argument, much like the 'begging the
question' fallacy that Ron Dean rightly criticised for.

But why even mention Ron Dean?

Mainly because he is the only IDer currently using that sort of
process in TO and is generating a massive amount of activity but also
because rather than viewing you as in any way, like him, I see you as
the polar opposite of him in terms of rational thinking. It struck me
that he is on the opposite end of the spectrum from both of us yet I
saw similarities in the methodology *in this particular instance*. In
retrospect, I would probably have been better to refer to ID
proponents in general rather than a named individual.

one
might be tempted to think you were making an invidious comparison while
cloaking it in a veil of plausible deniability. You know, like _____
______ used to do.
>
 Scientists are

just as prone to squeezing evidence to support their beliefs as
religious believers are and I have no hesitation in calling out either
case when I see it. I certainly don't regard you as an arsehole and
don't believe I have ever indicated that I might think so.
 
BTW, I don't regard Ron Dean as an arsehole either; he has some really
strange beliefs and ideas but that doesn't make him an arsehole in my
eyes.
 
 

>

I can't help (ha) but feel that belief in
free will and dualism are two sides of the same coin.I'm sure you don't
*reject* scientific knowledge but I think you must be allowing some
'leeway?' to accept dualism.

>
I honestly can't think of any area of scientific knowledge where I
have to allow any such 'leeway'; can you suggest any in particular?

 
Nothing to offer on this?
 

re: my comments above. You seem quite happy to accept the (possible?)
existence of unnecessary and unevidenced goal directed energy affecting
brain processes.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to put the question mark on
'possible'. I have never promoted dualism or any other
non-materialistic solution as a *definitive* answer, just that dualism
seems to me a better explanation for what we know at this point in
time. If convincing evidence is produced to support a materialist
explanation for consciousness, I will quite happily accept it, just as
I have accepted all other conclusive findings of science. It beats me
how you see that as "leeway". Right now, there is no such convincing
evidence for either materialism or dualism and I think that outright
dismissal of *either* is the real reflection of a closed mind.

>
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