unapologetic

@Belle Rose, what is it you get from Jordan Peterson?  I have sympathy with him and I don’t think he’s a right wing nutcase.  But I can never understand what he’s talking about, beyond his 10 rules for young men, which I think are a good idea.

_Robert_ wrote:
Ever stick your hand on a hot burner?

I could choose to leave my hand on the burner.  I’d be an idiot, but I could do it.

_Robert_ wrote:
That decision may have been made before the critter knew it would jump. The squirrel’s conscience was informed at some point. Yeah, I’d say a squirrel has some level of self-awareness.

Well, it has to respond to real events in real time, so I’m guessing it has free will.

PopeBeanie wrote:
Must not the feeling of free will at least be a product of determinism? A legitimate product of evolution? And very useful, fortunately, if not more pleasurable than the feeling of having no control at all.

That’s the way I see it.  Nature has endowed us with free will that we can use to navigate contingent circumstances as…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Your arguing in favor of free will is based on a belief you want to defend to the death, not on a fact or set of facts that can’t be denied or disproven.

Maybe, maybe not.  That’s irrelevant to the truth of any argument.  I see yours as the “argument from ignorance” or “argument from dumbfounding”.  In other words, “we can’t work…[Read more]

I see free will as a faculty, or cluster of related faculties, that emerges from the biological substrate of the living brain, in the same way that morality emerges as a number of related faculties from the physical reality of obligate collaboration driven by the biological pressure to reproduce and survive and thrive within a risky ecological niche.

jakelafort wrote:
I can’t get involved in philosophical issues regarding morality. It strikes me as a vacuous endeavor when juxtaposed against the real world. Consequentialist, deontological blah blah blah. I suppose it is okay if you are so inclined in terms of PERSONAL principles.

Some of us think that diagram should be taught in primary s…[Read more]

PopeBeanie wrote:
Can one just think of morality as an emergent thought process, with societal ramifications?

Morality emerges from collaboration.

Unseen wrote:
Nothing happens without sufficient conditions being met,

We think for a reason: to calculate what we have to do to achieve our goals, to thrive, survive and reproduce.  There is therefore biological pressure to think.  As for what direction this thinking takes, then within constraints and limits, and acted upon by influences – i…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
We can be and feel free on a surface level in the sense that we can do things we want to do or out of habit or whatever and not do them at gunpoint,

That is free will right there.  On a day-to-day level, I exercise freedom of choice, restricted or guided by certain constraints, pushed in certain directions by unseen forces – but…[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
We can start with intelligence or hair color and work our way into musical preferences. Throw any of that data on a chart and you will have a bell curve.

What does that have to do with free choice and consciousness?

Unseen wrote:
What we call consciousness seems to be an epiphenomenon of a system based on human flesh. Brain, neurons, nervous system, etc.

Maybe, but it’s not random or superfluous.  It’s structured in a definite way for a reason: to help us thrive, survive and reproduce, like every other part of us.

The purpose of the central nervous system…

[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
We do know that quantum mechanical systems are not deterministic but are instead probabilistic. That may give us the idea that we have free will when actually your decisions and choices have probabilities.

I don’t buy that.  It’s too direct contact between different levels of reality: psychological and quantum reality.  I think i…[Read more]

Even the great overlord, AI?

Here’s a take on freewill.  The perception is one of (limited) freedom of choice at any one moment.  This perception is a conscious perception.  This conscious freedom of choice can be further limited or shaped by subconscious factors.

Yet the background physical substrate upon which perception and consciousness “l…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
How Jordan Peterson fooled young men into thinking he’s the world’s smartest man.

I don’t know what to think about Jordan Peterson.  I admire him for standing up to the woke bullies about free speech.  I think his “rules for young men” probably have done a lot of good.  Beyond that, he has said some apparently misogy…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
A new system of Logic could boost Critical Thinking.

This is really interesting, in that it uses Wittgenstein’s definition of the meaning of words – how they are used in real life; in what contexts – in a way that can be understood by computers.  A computer can analyse the way a word is used by humans, and so, its…[Read more]