User Controls
Determinism
-
2017-06-10 at 9:10 PM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny holy shit, you both suck at base conversion. I don't even understand why you care, it's fucking boring, but if you're going to bullshit about it for two pages take like the 5 minutes required to understand how it works
What do you think I have wrong about base conversion? What have I said that's wrong so far? I just threw an offhand insult lol. -
2017-06-10 at 9:23 PM UTC
Originally posted by Captain Falcon What do you think I have wrong about base conversion? What have I said that's wrong so far? I just threw an offhand insult lol.
Actually it's not too bad but these are kinda goofy things to say, it's not really clear what they mean so I don't even know if you could fairly say they're wrong:
Originally posted by Captain Falcon 6 is the ten in base 6.
Originally posted by Captain Falcon 6 is the first tens unit, and each tens unit is a multiple of 10.
Sploo on the other hand says things that ostensibly have a clear meaning but are flatly wrong.
But also yeah, this isn't a GS thread. Let's make another thread if there's a need to continue to discuss IQ or bad base conversions. -
2017-06-10 at 9:36 PM UTC
-
2017-06-11 at 2:10 AM UTC
Originally posted by Rebirth test doesnt have legit psychometric calculations, there's no evidence on the certificate or links to the author
your pic is clearly photoshopped. i only blacked out my name for non-PI purposes.
its basically impossible to measure IQs over 170, since it is extremely rare. a score of 180 or 190 is completely theoretical and not used in most valid tests
checkmate
prolly someone elses test, for all we know.
proves nothing.
. -
2017-06-11 at 2:24 AM UTCIsn't compatibilism just a semantic argument? It seems a little weak to just take the determinism and redefine free will.
-
2017-06-11 at 2:29 AM UTCits prolly leik a paradox or summing
. -
2017-06-11 at 6:37 AM UTCCompatibilism is a semantic argument, but "semantic" doesn't mean wrong or indicate an argument not worth having.
-
2017-06-11 at 10:27 PM UTC
Originally posted by Captain Falcon that's the point. Again, what is "our"? do you consider your identity to be in a vaccum, like you're some sort of godly black box outside of the universe?
How is that a problem? There's no condition that what happens inside of your skin is what constitutes free will. You're setting up a straw man to knock down. There is some qualitative content to your experience and this is what the concept of free will is tied to. If that exists for other elements of your body, then that would apply to them too. It might! But we don't know if it does.
Let me put it another way; you cannot consciously decide what thoughts you have. These seemingly just emerge from the mists of your mind. but whatever box of scraps rattles that thought around and spits out an outcome, if what is considered to be "you". The key difference between this and some other system that spits out an output for an input is your ability, seemingly, to process 2nd and 3rd order reasoning with some qualitative content to your 2nd and 3rd (or higher) order considerations. We can' quantify these qualia but that's fine, we know it exists because we have it (what is blue? The colour you see, not what the wavelength of light).
that's what your will is; whatever you are predisposed to decide, that's YOUR predisposition, and it comes from that weird black box in your head and not because some other black box is forcing you to, then it's your free will.
Again, define free will. You're constantly trying to dismiss things as being not free will, but yet you refuse to define it. this conversation is useless unless you actually commit to a position.
I swear, this is the weasliest discussion on this site.
Another problem I see with the compatibilist point of view is that it rests solely on the concept of the "self" and how you define yourself, which is actually an illusion. You see, one of the problems we have in discussing consciousness objectively is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. Consciousness is what it's like to be you. If there's an experiential, internal qualitative dimension to any physical system, then that is consciousness, and we can't really reduce the experiential part of this to only talk about information processing and neurotransmitters. For example, by looking at different states of the brain, all we can do is correlate experiential with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become, you can't just throw out the actual experiential side of consciousness. That would be analogous to saying if you just flipped a coin long enough, you would realize it only had one side. It's true that you can become committed to only talking about one side, you can say that heads being up is only a case of tails being down, but that doesn't actually reduce one side of reality to the other.
To give a more precise example, we have very strong third-person "objective measures" of things like anxiety and fear. Your bring someone to the lab, they say they're feeling fear, you can scan their brain with FMRI and see that their amygdala response is heightened, you can measure the sweat on their palms and see that there is an increased galvanic skin response, you can check their blood cortisol and see that it is spiking. So these now are considered objective third-person measures of fear, but if half the people came into the lab tomorrow and said they were feeling fear yet showed none of these signs, and said they were completely calm when their cortisol began to spike and their palms began to sweat, these objective measures would no longer be reliable measures of fear. So the cash value in the change in physiology is still a change in the first-person, conscious, subjective side of things. We are inevitably going to rely on peoples subjective reports to understand whether our correlations are accurate. So the hope that we are going to talk about consciousness shorn of any kind of qualitative internal experiential language is a false one. We have to understand both sides of it, subjective and objective.
I'm not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain, or that it floats free of the brain after death. I'm not making any spooky claims about the metaphysics of consciousness. What I am saying is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads, as a kind of passenger in a vehicle of the body. That's where most people start when they think about any of these sorts of questions. Most people don't feel identical to their bodies, they feel like they have bodies, like they're inside the body, and most people feel like they're inside their heads.
Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuo-anatomical sense. There is no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. We know that everything you experience - your conscious emotions and thoughts and moods and the impulses that initiate behavior - all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain that are spread out over the whole of the brain, they can be independently erupted, we have a changing system. We are a process and there is not one unitary "self" that is carried through from one moment to the next unchanging, and yet we feel that we have this self that's just the center of experience.
Now it's possible, I claim, and people have been claiming for thousands of years, to lose this feeling, to actually have the "center" drop out of the experience, so that rather than feeling like experiences are happening to you, you identify with/feel identical to the sphere of experience that is all the colour and light and feeling and energy of consciousness, with no sense of center. This is classically described as self-transcendence or ego transcendence in spiritual, mystical, new-age literature. It is the baby in the bathwater religious people are afraid to throw out. If you were to seriously take on the project of being like Jesus or Buddha, whatever your favorite contemplative is, self-transcendence really is at the core of the phenomenology being described there. And what I'm saying is that's a real experience.
It's clearly an experience that people can have. It tells you nothing about the cosmos or what happened before the Big Bang, nothing about teh divine origin of certain books, it doesn't make religious dogmas anymore plausible. But it tells you something about the nature of human consciousness. And it just so happens that this experience of self-transcendence does link up with what we know about the mind through neuroscience, to form a plausible connection between science and spirituality. If you lose that sense of a unitary self, if you lose your sense that there's a permanent, unchanging center to consciousness, your experience of the world actually becomes more faithful to the facts. It's not a distortion of the way we think things are at the level of the brain, it actually brings your experience into closer register with how we think things are. -
2017-06-11 at 10:48 PM UTC
Originally posted by Open Your Mind Another problem I see with the compatibilist point of view is that it rests solely on the concept of the "self" and how you define yourself, which is actually an illusion. You see, one of the problems we have in discussing consciousness objectively is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. Consciousness is what it's like to be you. If there's an experiential, internal qualitative dimension to any physical system, then that is consciousness, and we can't really reduce the experiential part of this to only talk about information processing and neurotransmitters. For example, by looking at different states of the brain, all we can do is correlate experiential with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become, you can't just throw out the actual experiential side of consciousness. That would be analogous to saying if you just flipped a coin long enough, you would realize it only had one side. It's true that you can become committed to only talking about one side, you can say that heads being up is only a case of tails being down, but that doesn't actually reduce one side of reality to the other.
To give a more precise example, we have very strong third-person "objective measures" of things like anxiety and fear. Your bring someone to the lab, they say they're feeling fear, you can scan their brain with FMRI and see that their amygdala response is heightened, you can measure the sweat on their palms and see that there is an increased galvanic skin response, you can check their blood cortisol and see that it is spiking. So these now are considered objective third-person measures of fear, but if half the people came into the lab tomorrow and said they were feeling fear yet showed none of these signs, and said they were completely calm when their cortisol began to spike and their palms began to sweat, these objective measures would no longer be reliable measures of fear. So the cash value in the change in physiology is still a change in the first-person, conscious, subjective side of things. We are inevitably going to rely on peoples subjective reports to understand whether our correlations are accurate. So the hope that we are going to talk about consciousness shorn of any kind of qualitative internal experiential language is a false one. We have to understand both sides of it, subjective and objective.
I'm not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain, or that it floats free of the brain after death. I'm not making any spooky claims about the metaphysics of consciousness. What I am saying is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads, as a kind of passenger in a vehicle of the body. That's where most people start when they think about any of these sorts of questions. Most people don't feel identical to their bodies, they feel like they have bodies, like they're inside the body, and most people feel like they're inside their heads.
Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuo-anatomical sense. There is no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. We know that everything you experience - your conscious emotions and thoughts and moods and the impulses that initiate behavior - all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain that are spread out over the whole of the brain, they can be independently erupted, we have a changing system. We are a process and there is not one unitary "self" that is carried through from one moment to the next unchanging, and yet we feel that we have this self that's just the center of experience.
Now it's possible, I claim, and people have been claiming for thousands of years, to lose this feeling, to actually have the "center" drop out of the experience, so that rather than feeling like experiences are happening to you, you identify with/feel identical to the sphere of experience that is all the colour and light and feeling and energy of consciousness, with no sense of center. This is classically described as self-transcendence or ego transcendence in spiritual, mystical, new-age literature. It is the baby in the bathwater religious people are afraid to throw out. If you were to seriously take on the project of being like Jesus or Buddha, whatever your favorite contemplative is, self-transcendence really is at the core of the phenomenology being described there. And what I'm saying is that's a real experience.
It's clearly an experience that people can have. It tells you nothing about the cosmos or what happened before the Big Bang, nothing about teh divine origin of certain books, it doesn't make religious dogmas anymore plausible. But it tells you something about the nature of human consciousness. And it just so happens that this experience of self-transcendence does link up with what we know about the mind through neuroscience, to form a plausible connection between science and spirituality. If you lose that sense of a unitary self, if you lose your sense that there's a permanent, unchanging center to consciousness, your experience of the world actually becomes more faithful to the facts. It's not a distortion of the way we think things are at the level of the brain, it actually brings your experience into closer register with how we think things are.
where you get that from, wikipedia?
. -
2017-06-11 at 10:59 PM UTC
-
2017-06-11 at 11:05 PM UTCFreewill is an illusion and so is the self.
By free will I mean the libertarian concept of free will,the idea that our choices are free from the determination or constraints of human nature and free from any predetermination.
Captain falcon says a puppet can be free as long as it loves it's strings, or rather, the strings are an extension of the puppets sense of "self". But as explained above, the self is an illusion. -
2017-06-11 at 11:19 PM UTCSkimming through this thread, does anybody other than Obbe even know what the fuck determinism is? It doesn't seem like it.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
-
2017-06-12 at 12:19 AM UTCI'm going to respond to your massive gishgallop post when I'm home and on my computer, but I'll take this one down now:
Originally posted by Open Your Mind Freewill is an illusion and so is the self.
Why is free will an illusion? Why is the self an illusion? Perhaps the feeling of being uninfluenced and undetermined is an illusion but there is no problem with the existence of the sense of self and of free will; people generally just have the wrong idea.By free will I mean the libertarian concept of free will,the idea that our choices are free from the determination or constraints of human nature and free from any predetermination.
Yes, if you propose completely unfulfillable criteria for free will, then there's no such thing as free will. What would such a free being's decision making look like?
Let me propose a thought experiment:
- I create a quantum "coin flipper" (QCF) that produces truly random, indeterministic results.
- I make the (thus far predetermined) decision that whether or not I commit to live my life according to the QCF, will be decided by next QFC coin flip.
- The coin flip says "yes".
- I have now committed, with no predetermination or external restraint, to follow the future decision of the coin flipper.
- All my future actions are indeterministic and therefore free of predetermination, aside from the precommitment to follow the outcome of the coin flipper.
Am I free? Is the quantum coin flipper free?Captain falcon says a puppet can be free as long as it loves it's strings, or rather, the strings are an extension of the puppets sense of "self". But as explained above, the self is an illusion.
To call people puppets and our predispositions "strings" would imply that we are being controlled by another agent, and this is the sneaky caveat built into the foundation of your use of this example to try to discredit compatibilism. Here is the problem; we are not puppets. We are a collection of innumerable weighted dice. And the biased outcome of the roll of the weighted dice, to the input of any throw, is still the outcome of the weighted dice.
What we have within our system is not a restraint, it is a predisposition. That's what we call a personality.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2017-06-12 at 12:19 AM UTCThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
-
2017-06-12 at 6:49 PM UTC
Originally posted by Captain Falcon I'm going to respond to your massive gishgallop post when I'm home and on my computer, but I'll take this one down now:
Why is free will an illusion? Why is the self an illusion? Perhaps the feeling of being uninfluenced and undetermined is an illusion but there is no problem with the existence of the sense of self and of free will; people generally just have the wrong idea.
Yes, if you propose completely unfulfillable criteria for free will, then there's no such thing as free will. What would such a free being's decision making look like?
Let me propose a thought experiment:
- I create a quantum "coin flipper" (QCF) that produces truly random, indeterministic results.
- I make the (thus far predetermined) decision that whether or not I commit to live my life according to the QCF, will be decided by next QFC coin flip.
- The coin flip says "yes".
- I have now committed, with no predetermination or external restraint, to follow the future decision of the coin flipper.
- All my future actions are indeterministic and therefore free of predetermination, aside from the precommitment to follow the outcome of the coin flipper.
Am I free? Is the quantum coin flipper free?
Good post. That will be all. -
2017-06-12 at 6:56 PM UTCLimited free will
-
2017-06-12 at 8:32 PM UTC
-
2017-06-12 at 8:37 PM UTC
Originally posted by Captain Falcon Yes and no.
Everything you do is probably predetermined. But it is you that is doing it, and therefore it is your doing, and not anyone else's.
The EXACT things we do aren't predetermined, but the reasoning is. Or something.
My big thing is, we are restricted to our physical and mental capabilities. I don't have the free will to dunk a basketball on a ten-foot rim. I still have free will to try, but it's limited. -
2017-06-12 at 10:09 PM UTC
Originally posted by mmQ The EXACT things we do aren't predetermined, but the reasoning is. Or something.
My big thing is, we are restricted to our physical and mental capabilities. I don't have the free will to dunk a basketball on a ten-foot rim. I still have free will to try, but it's limited.
Nobody actually believes that free will means being able to will anything into being so. If that were true i would will myself a spaceship, 30 lolis and several thousand Oxy 80's.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2017-06-12 at 10:13 PM UTC
