No need to apologise. It increases the excitement! The more the merrier… and many heads than better than a few. I’m off to bed now and have to get some food for the family tomorrow as we’ve been snow and ice bound since last week. I’ll answer you after that. In the meantime Happy Saturnalia! I hope it doesn’t involve the settling of accounts…
Thinking, certainly, and hopefully blundering towards some form of understanding. I think it makes sense to understand conscious self-awareness as an emergent property of the human brain, and there can be little doubt that we experience something we understand as free will. The uncertainty over its illusory status or otherwise relates to whether it ceases to be ‘free’ if it is a result of molecular activity. This is where I encounter problems with what I see as the artificial distinction between our brains and us - essentially, our brains and our conscious selves. To say that it’s not us making the decision if our brains are going through particular biochemical processes seems to me an oddly problematic assertion.Okay, it’s no big deal, but earlier you wrote:
“I don’t know whether or not free will is an illusion - in that, our decisions are directed by the physical/chemical functioning of the brain, and we experience the results as “making a decision” to act.”
Now you seem to be talking about free will as a *real *‘emergent’ phenomenon (which it would *not *make sense to call an illusion, right?). I think you’ve changed your mind again perhaps? (You seem to be actually doing some thinking here, not just belligerently spouting your settled opinions, good job - although of course that’s just what we expect from everybody here, right?) Anyway, I’ll let you clarify your own position.
(And just to clarify the question I’m asking: do you want to talk about “what we experience as free will” (preserving the possibility that it is an illusion) or just about *free will *(leaving only the question of what free will is)? Or do you have some reason for continuing to talk about both?)
I don’t particularly care if we continue, but in any case, I’ll concentrate on what I think is important, not whatever you tell me to concentrate on. (I feel free to do this since you’re not actually my teacher, even if you think of yourself that way.
)“It was not my assertion”?? “It” = ??? I don’t know what you mean here but I’ll make a couple of comments. Once again we are dealing with an analogy, this time it’s mine and you are apparently attempting to challenge it (somewhat incoherently, so far I can tell). You asserted that:
I see. So you don’t see any qualitative difference between the stable condition of the uranium mass in an atomic bomb before the two halves are brought together, and immediately afterwards, when the energy gets released. Really, you should think about the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is a qualitative difference between a controlled nuclear fusion (reactor) and an uncontrolled nuclear explosion (bomb).
What does surprise have to do with anything? They expected the explosion, since they hypothesized and calculated the result. As a matter of fact, the violence and power of the explosion was a surprise. But of course that surprise is totally irrelevant.
I disagree. There is a qualitative change in a nuclear explosion. For example, take Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the nuclear explosion, there were more than 200,000 dead people. This is a qualitative change since each human being has an immortal soul. Before the explosion, these immortal souls were on earth, after the explosion, these immortal souls were in the afterlife of heaven, hell or purgatory.
Good observations. However, even in the pen-pal version you can “unmask” the other party with directing a few, well posed questions. Suppose, you ask the same question twice. If the second answer would be: “Hey, you just asked it before”, it would be a good indication of memory (which is no big deal to program). However, if you would ask the second question and use a slightly (or not so slightly) different wording, then you can discern if the other party “understood” the difference or not. And if he could, that would be a further indication of having an actual personality at the other end of the conversation.
I don;t think that this is entirely true. For example, you can program the robot with all of the data and information about the room in question. Then when you ask what kind of an object is in a particular location, he will be able to give you the correct answer.
You are right, but that is beside the point. No one can foresee all the different environments that the robot will be exposed to.
I didn’t know there is a ban. I haven’t seen any announcements to that effect… I’ve been blithely proceeding as usual.
All concepts are in a mind, human or not. The question is whether they refer to “anything”. The same applies to a principle, a fact or a relation. Is a concept itself subjective?! Surely not… I think it is simplistic and arbitrary to divide reality into two classes: that which is mental and intangible as opposed to that which is physical and tangible. Equality, proportion, harmony, symmetry, identity, regularity, freedom, purpose are all intangible but as real as specific objects. They belong to “a third realm” - which is proved by the fact that we have direct knowledge of nothing but our own stream of consciousness. Otherwise, to put it crudely, we know only facts about things, not things as they really are! There is an impenetrable barrier between us and external objects. We receive messages via our senses which give us information (another intangible reality!) and we construct mental images of the objects we perceive, but no two persons receive the same information or interpret it in the same way. What lies between us and objects is the third realm of intangibles.
Having established that concepts (which are not false) have counterparts it is undeniable that their efficacy is due to their relation to reality. Moral concepts are no exception because they lead to harmony and self-fulfilment. What they refer to must exist outside the mind if it is more than an illusion. Freedom, for example, refers to certain states of affairs. Justice refers, amongst other things, to certain ways in which wealth and opportunities are distributed. So what is intangible cannot always be equated with what is subjective. BTW Opportunities are intangible “goods” - in the original sense of the word, i.e they are valuable and their value is not conferred by us! It exists whether we recognise it or not - like the opportunities themselves.
I prefer to avoid labels - which are often misleading - and confine my attention to the exact ways in which we think and establish our moral principles. I am very interested to see your reaction to the above analysis of our conceptual activity - which is not original, of course !
I only noticed the forum admin post about it this morning.I didn’t know there is a ban. I haven’t seen any announcements to that effect… I’ve been blithely proceeding as usual.
I would have said that such intangibles are qualities of objects or circumstances, which can’t be defined independently of said objects or circumstances. Let’s take a certain object, say a sculpture, which we can say has symmetry and proportion, for example. Do you think it is possible to refer to ‘symmetry’ and ‘proportion’ as things in themselves as opposed to qualities that exist in relation to the sculpture? It’s possible to explain what symmetry and proportion mean, but only in relation to metaphysically objective entities. By the same token, I think it’s possible to say that a person has or exhibits morality, but how does one explain this except through reference to the way that person behaves?
This also raises the interesting question of whether the abovementioned intangibles are qualities possessed by the objects we perceive, or if they are qualities we ourselves ascribe to objects. What you call the third realm of knowledge - although I’ve not spent much time considering this way of thinking about it - seems to me to be the interface by which we interact with our surroundings and build useful knowledge of the world. A lot of scientific research, especially when we get into the realms of molecular structures and even - gasp - quantum physics, seems counterintuitive to our regular sensory perception - we don’t feel as though we consist largely of empty space, but that is what experiments examining atomic structure tell us. Part of the purpose of scientific research, indeed, is to attempt to break down the interface. Our brains work to accumulate useful knowledge, and what constitutes a useful perception for us may not be precisely correct in terms of the way things really are.
I’m not sure what you mean by the phrase “concepts have counterparts”. However, I have already and will again readily agree that moral concepts have effects upon the reality outside our minds, via the agency of our actions. I still think that concepts such as freedom and justice are metaphysically subjective - in that they must be experienced in order to have any existence or meaning. Since we are not solipsists, we can accept that others have experience of certain concepts, even if we ourselves do not. That makes the concepts epistemologically objective, but I don’t see that it establishes their existence in any manner other than the experiential.
Truth itself is not a fact. Only propositions can be factual. “True” is a word used to characterize assertions as in the sentence “‘the cat is on the mat’ is true if and only if the cat is on the mat.”
Interesting. I was going to ask if there is anyone else who thinks of ‘emergent properties’ the way RDaneel does when Sid answered the question for me. Thanks Sid! (Unless you were just making a joke? Maybe both of you were?)
Of course there are qualitative changes directly entailed by quantitative changes: when I ride faster on my bike (not because I’m going down a hill), my heart rate goes up and I start to sweat and if I’m not in good shape I might even die. But this is usually called an *effect *(the correlate of a cause), not an emergent property (of bicycle acceleration). Do you understand the difference? (Maybe a clearer example (more in keeping with your original analogy) would just be piling ‘carbon’ on my chest: for a while I’ll be fine, but eventually the quantitative increase will lead to my breathing muscles being overcome and my death.) Obviously the effects of nuclear reactions include qualitative changes, but I think that ordinarily people who are familiar with the meaning of “emergent property” (maybe that’s not many people) are not tempted to think that such changes are indicative of an emergent property, but of an engineered quantitative increase in the rate of the known existing atomic process.
) “emergent property” and here’s some basic criteria for you, which you seem not to understand:I’v elost sight of what the larger issue is in this discussion about emergence. Can someone explain?Interesting. I was going to ask if there is anyone else who thinks of ‘emergent properties’ the way RDaneel does when Sid answered the question for me. Thanks Sid! (Unless you were just making a joke? Maybe both of you were?)
Your idea is very strange though. If people are killed by X (i.e., as a result of X), then X exhibits an emergent property (of lethality?)? Do cigarettes have an emergent property because they can start forest fires and cause cancer? I would say no, but I guess you would say, “tell that to all the trees that died and the people who get lung cancer!” Or when a knife is used to kill someone, guess what - the knife has an emergent property?
But I’m guessing that what RD wants to say (it’s not super clear) is that all qualitative changes entail the existence of emergent properties and that just seems incredibly naive. When I said there was no qualitative change in a nuclear explosion, obviously I was referring to qualitative property change, not qualitative change of any kind.
For your edification I yahooed (that’s right, I didn’t use google
An emergent property is one which arises from the interaction of “lower-level” entities, none of which show it; the new property could not be predicted from a knowledge of the lower-level properties. (Now do you understand what surprise has to do with it?)
I agree, it’s only mostly true, for the reasons you say. There are certainly ways for a robot to “front-load” information about the testing environment. But as RDaneel points out, this may be true (it is true), but misses the point being made; consciousness is a real-time, dynamic phenomenon. In the case you imagine here, I’m testing this robot and I gesture with my hand in asking what that is in the corner. What is the robot to do? Unless it has real-time visual integration, the ability to take in the visual cues of my hand gesture, contextualize it, and ramify my question in light of that work, it can only guess, and hope that it’s 1-in-4 guess is the right one.
Oh, I agree. I don’t doubt there are very powerful strategies for outing a robot in “Pen Pal” mode, and I think some of those are creative ways to focus on consciousness such that a robot will out itself eventually. What I was driving at earlier was the idea that consciousness is really the “signature” of a human that needs sophisticated emulation (or the real thing, however those may differ) in order to pass an aggressive Turing Test. Focusing just on intelligence is probably not sufficient. Maybe this is just pedantics about names, and we should agree that we are just talking about “artificial consciousness” here with respect to Turing Tests.
The enterprise goes on, for sure. AI research is having a bit of a heyday, it’s just moved away from Turing Tests and human emulation/spoofing for the reason I pointed out: intelligence is a daunting challenge – consciousness is way beyond that. There’s lots of good ground to be gained in AI on the questions of learning, contextualization, etc. apart from that which demands human-quality sensory integration.Since we are unable to dissect the other partner and see what kind of neural activity occurs in his/hers/its “brain” (whatever it is made of), we must resort to the duck principle. If the other partner’s responses qualify it to be regarded as a human, we must conclude that it has the same faculties as a human - with all the consciousness or free will or what have you. Maybe these days the AI research is out of fashion. The current hardware is still very simple compared to human brain. But I would bet, that such experiments will be continued. Fortunately for us, there are the geeks with their insatiable appetite for looking into interesting problems like this. What will the believers of “souls” do in that case? I sure would like to see.
Why would this be impossible from a theoretical point of view?
What is your definition of consciousness? Further, do dogs and cats have consciousness. If they do, then why is it not true that consciousness has nothing to do with the spiritual soul and is a purely material property of a living animal.
Hi TS,
, though not in these exact words). Not begging the question here is a much more straightforward logical requirement. You’re right about reasons though; we’ll see where we end up on those! To clarify what I have granted: what we experience as free will is what we experience as free will, whether or not we adhere to materialistic explanations of mental phenomena (and whether or not those explanations ultimately turn out to be coherent and ‘performative’). It’s a fairly trivial point, it seems to me.When you say “there can be little doubt that we experience something *we understand *as free will,” I think this is probably not quite right. To be more precise: there is little doubt that we experience something that traditionally we have been accustomed to calling free will. I think the question here is if/how we *understand *it, and in particular, whether or not it makes sense to continue calling it that, regardless of the other changes in our worldview. It seems to me that the notion of free will comes to us from a particular conceptual framework wherein freedom implies partial independence from material (and social) determination by virtue of an immaterial (i.e., spiritual, i.e., intellectual and voluntative) power. That there is some kind of artificial distinction between “our brains” and “us” is really not an issue - there isn’t (at least not in the basic cases which we have phenomenal access to). The issue is about how we should understand the total functioning of the brain (physical object) vis-a-vis the totality of “us” phenomena that are associated with it. (I think it’s important to note the oddity of an expression you have used a few times: “understanding ourselves from the inside” - as if “we” are “inside” something, presumably that physical blob of grey matter inside our skulls? Or what? This is a strange thought, isn’t it?)