If this is the case, then how do we show how a conscious goal "acts" as a final cause to produce a chain of efficient causes (habitual action)? — Metaphysician Undercover
so the bridge between final cause and efficient cause would be found in the relationship between anticipation and habit. — Metaphysician Undercover
Anticipation of the shot, which produces preparedness, is just as important as habit, if not more so. — Metaphysician Undercover
I've been in more than one car accident, driving, where the scene unfolds very quickly, but I've always maintained conscious control over how I operated the controls of the vehicle until the end. — Metaphysician Undercover
Since attention is actually a habit, the better dichotomy would habit/anticipation. — Metaphysician Undercover
So attention really only gives to our minds what has occurred, the past. Now we need a principle, such as anticipation, whereby the fact that something is about to occur, is present to the mind. — Metaphysician Undercover
Actually, it is a pointless exercise to argue with someone who thinks that they are right and Merriam Webster is wrong.No that's not true some words can be used in place of another, so they have one sense which is similar to a sense of another word, but no two words have the same meaning. So I refuse to argue whether two words have the same meaning, as I think that is a pointless exercise — Metaphysician Undercover
In broad way that is so. But habit is also final cause/constraint that has got baked in over a long period of learning. So the contrast is in an efficient division of labour in a time-pressured world. Habits represent finality that has been learnt to the point it is baked-in intentionality. Attention is then the finality we have to construct specifically to deal with the current moment in time. — apokrisis
So both attention and habit are separable systems. And being systems, each requires the same structure - finality and efficient cause in interaction. Or constraints vs degrees of freedom. — apokrisis
Alternatively time slows. The fact that attentional level processing doesn't have time to make sense of what is going on leaves us with the feeling of the moment being stretched out and lasting an eternity.
And then you say you were in conscious control. Yet sports science will say the best that could be the case was that you were in the usual zone of responding out of trained habit, then afterwards there was a reportable working memory as attention fixed a record of the blur of events.
So it is your belief against the scientific evidence here.
Sure, relabel the same things anyway you like. It makes no difference. I just go with the standard labelling that has emerged in psychology and neuroscience. — apokrisis
My only quibble is that "anticipation" is useful for signalling another paradigm difference - the switch from "consciousness" as the output of a representation, to seeing it as about predictive modelling. It is anticipation that comes first. And then that acts as a selective filter on awareness which allows us to in fact ignore as much of the world as possible. — apokrisis
Again, I already said that "consciousness" involves both the half second before and the half second after. So the fact that attentional level processing is slow means that it is there in advance of the moment, and there afterwards mopping up. First it generates the prediction that allows most things to be ignored. Then it deals with what in turn couldn't be ignored. After that, we have a tidied up impression of the world that can be filed as reportable memory. — apokrisis
It would be difficult to identify final cause as constraint, because an agent is free to produce one's own goals — Metaphysician Undercover
The word "synonym" means two words that mean the same thing. So, we have a word for the thing that you say doesn't exist (words that mean the same thing). — Harry Hindu
I'm not a fan of dualism or homuncular regress. — apokrisis
Thjs is surprising coming from someone who supports the idea of "final causes". What do you think final cause is, if not a dualist principle? — Metaphysician Undercover
In any activity, there is always an "agent". — Metaphysician Undercover
This is the thing which is acting, the agent produces an effect. — Metaphysician Undercover
You claim to support the idea of final causes but then you describe human activities in your neuroscientific way, as if they are all efficient causes. — Metaphysician Undercover
Unless you can describe an interaction between efficient causes and final causes within one model, there is no basis to your claim that you both support the idea of final causes, and deny dualism. — Metaphysician Undercover
Final and formal cause are wrapped up in the systems notion of top-down acting constraints. — apokrisis
They are matched in complimentary fashion by bottom-up acting degrees of freedom - a notion wrapping together material and efficient cause. — apokrisis
The agent should vanish if the systems account is working. We end up with a system that has the property of agency exhibited hierarchically over all scales of its being. — apokrisis
But in the systems view, both the global constraints and the local degrees of freedom produce effects. Both the general context and the particular events are causal. — apokrisis
As I explained, "top-down constraint" is formal cause, but this is inconsistent with "final cause" which gives the thing acting (the agent) freedom to choose a goal. — Metaphysician Undercover
The acorn becoming a tree, is a bottom-up action. — Metaphysician Undercover
Otherwise the human agent has no freedom to choose one's own goals, and this is inconsistent with observations of human behaviour. We freely choose our goals, they are not enforced through top-down constraint. — Metaphysician Undercover
Then what is the thing which is active? Global constraints and local degrees of freedom produce effects on what? — Metaphysician Undercover
Top-down constraint is formal and final cause bound up. — apokrisis
Hardly. The acorn packs a genome - the product of millennia of evolved intentionality. You couldn't pick a worse example. The acorn - as a small package of carbohydrate and basic metabolic machinery - has to grow. It must construct an oak by constraining material flows for 100 years. But the fact it will be an oak is already written into its destiny. — apokrisis
That doesn't mean there is no "freedom of choice". It means that we are constrained by our biology and sociology to act intelligently and creatively. — apokrisis
You are locked into cause and effect thinking. A doer and a done-to. That is the mental habit you need to break. Aristotle ought to be a good start for any systems thinker. His four causes approach was the basis for self-organising entelechy. Material potential becomes actualised as it expresses its functionality. — apokrisis
. If the acorn grows, it will construct an oak tree (in general), but not any particular oak tree, the intent is something general. — Metaphysician Undercover
Perhaps get someone to explain genes to you sometime. — apokrisis
That human life must be a kind of mistake is sufficiently clear from the fact that man is a compound of needs, which are difficult to satisfy; moreover, if they are satisfied, all he is granted is a state of painlessness, in which he can only give himself up to boredom. This is a precise proof that existence in itself has no value, since boredom is merely the feeling of the emptiness of life. If, for instance, life, the longing for which constitutes our very being, had in itself any positive and real value, boredom could not exist; mere existence in itself would supply us with everything, and therefore satisfy us. But our existence would not be a joyous thing unless we were striving after something; distance and obstacles to be overcome then represent our aim as something that would satisfy us — an illusion which vanishes when our aim has been attained; or when we are engaged in something that is of a purely intellectual nature, when, in reality, we have retired from the world, so that we may observe it from the outside, like spectators at a theatre. Even sensual pleasure itself is nothing but a continual striving, which ceases directly its aim is attained. As soon as we are not engaged in one of these two ways, but thrown back on existence itself, we are convinced of the emptiness and worthlessness of it; and this it is we call boredom. That innate and ineradicable craving for what is out of the common proves how glad we are to have the natural and tedious course of things interrupted. Even the pomp and splendour of the rich in their stately castles is at bottom nothing but a futile attempt to escape the very essence of existence, misery. — Schopenhauer
Genes play a part in determining the characteristics of the individual, but that's only a part. — Metaphysician Undercover
If satisfaction is actually impossible, then it can't really be said to be missing. Motivation remains the direction you want to take because it is "leaving something definitely behind by definitely heading in the exact other direction". — apokrisis
In biology, they are the determining part. What happens during growth or development is then that this finality gets mixed with a lot of particular accidents.
So the acorn is a one-off genetic template - a particular form that can only deliver that one adult tree. Sexual reproduction ensures a shuffling of the genetic cards to create a unique hand. — apokrisis
Again, you have brought the discussion back to a reductionist way of thinking where constraints must be absolutely determining. But organically, constraints only have to regulate contingency to the degree it really matters. Doing more than that is pointless over-kill. — apokrisis
That human life must be a kind of mistake is sufficiently clear from the fact that man is a compound of needs, which are difficult to satisfy; moreover, if they are satisfied, all he is granted is a state of painlessness, in which he can only give himself up to boredom. — Schopenhauer
Yep, machines need a creator. That is why organisms need explanation in terms of a logic of self organisation. — apokrisis
The self is the system as a whole. And it is a whole in that all four causes evolve via mutual interaction. They arise within the system itself. Top-down constraints shape the bottom-up degrees of freedom. And those bottom-up degrees of freedom in turn construct - or rather reconstruct - those prevailing global states of constraint. — apokrisis
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