joigus

I'd just say "it must fall." Maybe not yet, but hopefully some day we get to understand it better. The point I'm trying to make is illustrated, very roughly, with particular examples: The psychopath, the cognitively challenged, etc. All with different deficiencies in varying degrees. Some are a problem for society at large; others mostly to themselves and their families and friends. If you admit to the existence of an irreducible principle of free will, you're denying yourself the possibility of: 1) Early alert systems for different signals of different cognitive or behavioural deficiencies 2) Proper reaction to them when it's not too late yet 3) Avoidance of suffering for these people and others by a chain of inevitable consequences further down the road by proper monitoring There may be other points to make. But those 3 are important enough, I think. Building a black box around a problem has never been proved useful. +1. I address the same question in my last post and I would like to share it with you and others. Very good point.

+1. They "look similar" (to me) ergo they "can adapt" (in unspecified amount of time.) If you drop an elephant from an airplane, maybe it can evolve flight by becoming Dumbo. The latter was an hyperbole, meant only to illustrate the blatant flaw in an argument. Don't misinterpret my words again, please.

Errrr... I correct myself: It's not simpler. It's far more powerful for a very reasonable price in complication.

I concur with Strange. Turing was mostly concerned with computability. Whether a computing machine would stop (give an answer in a finite number of steps,) or keep running forever. Work very much related with the mathematics of decidability. The internet, I suppose, indirectly builds on his work, though. As many other advances in science, everything is interconnected. I suppose Sensei and other users who know far more about computing can tell you more. Turing was a pioneer. Computer architecture came later, as A.I. The specific advances of the internet have more to do with communication networks than computing itself. Although servers are computers, of course.

Ok. Let's review some of your arguments. Apparently you want to engage me in a "rational" discussion. Do I need to say more? I gave you many rational arguments at the beginning of this thread. Many more people have. I haven't insulted you. I did pour scorn on your idea, not you. Your idea is silly, not necessarily you. Ideas come and go. Intelligent people have stupid ideas sometimes. But they dislodge them as soon as they recognize them as such. I've had stupid ideas many times, but I've thrown them away. Do you identify yourself with your previous ideas? "Elk look like impalas, so I don't see why they couldn't adapt to live in a warm climate." Is that an idea? Is that an argument? What the hell is that? How old are you?

I agree that Dilbert is confused, although his is not my stance. I wouldn't say that Dogbert has also fallen victim to the dualistic fallacy, or however we may call it, though. I would say that he's being quite simplistic in the sense that he doesn't bother to analyse why it is that we experience that illusion and society structures itself according to it. But I don't need to identify a place or homunculus. I talked about emergent properties before. One remarkable attribute of emergent properties is that they don't generally have a place. There isn't a definite placement for temperature or pressure. How much more complex will that not be for a human brain, which is so much more intricate than an ideal gas. The chemistry of the brain is no simple sophomore-level equilibrium chemistry either. Nor are the correlations given by Nernst law, or the like. We're talking metabolic cycles, chemical cascades, very complex polarity-inversion signals going on at several places at the same time, and correlating at several rates with several delays, feedback and what have you. We're talking inhibitions and excitations, and correlations between them. Non-linearity is another very important factor. And non-linearity has been argued to simulate or mimic, or maybe remind, in some sense the action of a system on itself. The foreshadowing, if you will, of self-regulation, and one of the basis, if I remember correctly, of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics. The point about the athletes: I think simple examples like this cannot capture the difficult features of how brains function. And I don't pretend that I do. Neither do simple pictures based on classical mechanics cut much ice in this terrain. Add non-linearity, huge number of degrees of freedom, statistical mechanics of open systems (incoming and outgoing fluxes of energy and matter) and you will have enough elements of complexity there to have a plausible basis to explain why a cast of characters taken from the periodic table can result in creatures that think they're deciding something. Physics offers us many examples of paradoxical behaviours that are real enough. Why not this one? What's so superfragilistic expialidocious about free will that requires to be separated as an independent principle of the natural world, not to be governed by the lowly laws of physics and biochemistry? I basically agree with this. I tried to say something similar but made much more of a mess.

Answer to ironic Studiot: Everything is zero. Answer to dead-serious Studiot: And the Poisson brackets formulation of mechanics even simpler, plus the sacred causeway to quantum mechanics. Sorry, I had to work on a quantum superposition of both your selves.

Agreed. That's kind of what I meant by, Dilbert is experiencing the same conflict as everyone who thinks deeply about this matter but doesn't want to throw away everything good that the concepts of free will and responsibility achieve. Probably. Anything but easy though.The question is better addressed, I think, by means of complex self-organizing systems and emergent properties ==> biology. I think I want to say more about this, but maybe later.

No. It's called irony. I automatically shift to irony when I see the rational discussion is hopeless. Read other members that came later. They haven't given up on giving you information yet.

No, no, no. Don't get me wrong. Elk, as they stand, are not threatened. It's you who's threatening them with your "plans." Not to mention the Africans. Why not send them to Venus? They sure can stand heat...

Now that's PhD material.

You do sound to me inordinately unconcerned. Carry on. This is kinda fun.

You do know there's no point further North of the North Pole, don't you?

Ok. I was reading up to this point. What do we do with the penguins and the elk? Any plans?

"Occasionally, an obsession does turn out to be something good." Chen Ning Yang The key word here is "occasionally." "It was a crazy idea, I grabbed the back of a napkin and did the necessary calculations." Murray Gell-Mann The key words here are "necessary calculations."

I think this goes to the crux of the matter. Dilbert wants to have his cake and eat it too. That's the problem.

I know it is. It also helps break the spell. Mechanics becomes crystal clear in your mind once you understand nothing touches nothing and everything is the same. It's all variables in a Lagrangian. As complicated systems of fields. No difference. Maths give you the key to everything physical. I always work Lagrange --> Newton, not the other way about. Great value of more clarifying examples +1. "The equation knows best" P. A. M. Dirac, as quoted by James Gleick

What's wrong with the rabbit hole? I used to like a girl named Alice. She didn't want me, but it was a pleasure going down the hole. Thank you.

What do you mean "survive"? As in we're at each other's throats for decades and there is a good 20 % of humanity that are last ones standing? Never mind inhabitants of Florida and many other coastal areas living underwater, etc? I'm not looking forward to that, really.

I assume it's an aqueous solution, which is polar. Starch has some polarity if I remember correctly, because carbohydrates have covalently-bond oxygen with unpaired electron pairs, although they're not very mobile, because they're macromolecules (very macro in the case of starch.) You should be watchful that you're not removing conductivity-enhancing ions like K+ or Ca2+ or similar also. But wait for the experts. I'm not one. Maybe just a cue for someone to further clarify.

Aaah. Thanks. That clarifies it for me. +1

ad. Always in a hurry. Always mistyping. I'm reading you more and more in successive layers and I think we may disagree less than I thought. I would like to take more time to review Dennett, review you, review myself, and let it all sink in.

Eise, I'm sorry to have abridged you so disrespectfully. I'm starting to value you greatly, among other things because you admire Daniel Dennett at least as much as I do, plus you have many important points to make about free will and other fascinating topics. And you are much better read than I am, and know much that I don't. I promise to take due consideration of your points ASAP. Maybe you can walk me through some of it. But (and it's my big but talking, that so much has annoyed people to no end throughout the years) there would be a very simple way to prove (to me at least) that you're a free agent. Consider it an experiment: You write in big words the following (I'm pretty sure you don't want to write it): Joigus is right, I was wrong: There is no free will!!! It won't mean anything. It's just an experiment. Everybody will know it's just an experiment. If you can't do it, I've made my point, and we will have saved many hours of discussion. Then go out on the street, and as soon as you find some stranger, stand on one feet for 10 seconds and say: I have discovered a way to make an elephant from ants!!! Do this with a smile on your face and one shoe on your head, and then return safely home. Even write a paper about it, explaining how you've found a way to prove the existence of free will. I don't think that will have any undesirable consequences for you. You would have proved your point that you're free and you can do whatever you fancy. Just fancy that. If you find my proposal disgusting, find some other equivalent way of doing something bizarre and harmless to you and others. It will be pointless in its own premises --actually premiseless--, but very purposeful in the sense of proving a point. If you can't, I've made my point. There are many things I won't do, as there are many things you won't do. It's not because you or I can't in the sense that our muscles or nervous system not being equipped to do it, it's because something in our respective brains compels us not to. You think you're driving your molecules, but it's they that are driving you. And there must be a reason why the verb "diswant" doesn't exist. I must watch that movie again. Some sci-fi movies make fascinating philosophical points. Hi, Vexspits. I'd rather not talk about free will or constriction of choice in terms other than qualitative. I can't assign a measure to the number of choices, to be honest. It reminds me an old add for a cosmetic product that said "your eyes will look a 92.3 % more dazzling" (or something like that.) LOL. I strive to understand your subtle philosophical points, but I'm far less sophisticated. I like to phrase the problem of freedom with one of Yogi Berra's famous quotes: When you get to a fork in the road, take it! That's as far as my philosophical knowledge reaches. Really. I think you and Eise are overestimating my philosophical skills.

More.

Exactly!!!!! Sorry I didn't see this before. Because for unbalanced forces it's not an action/reaction pair, you could say they're not a fundamentally coupled Newton pair, which I think is what the book is trying to say. At least, it's the only sense in which I am capable of understanding it. +1