part of the site's diversity initiative — apokrisis

That made me chuckle.

You think this is some grade school class where you the teacher are going to keep asking me the same question until you get the answer you want? — Rich

Well in that scenario you're a grade school child, so I suppose it isn't entirely inaccurate.

Jokes aside, though, I already explained myself. This is a forum for discussing for philosophy, and that's not what you're doing. I'm very open to discussing things that are illogical and without scientific or philosophical basis, but this is not the place to do so.

↪batman The question I have is: "How much of our mental structure (conscious, unconscious) was evolved and is present in other animals?" I am quite sure that we were not the first draft of consciousness, or sub-consciousness. I suspect many animals evolved features that are present in our minds, only to a lesser degree, and in many cases, a lot lesser degree.

So a dog's mind obviously has less capacity to think than we do, but people have observed the outcome of "dog thought". Dog thought isn't very elegant, as far as I can tell. A lot of what they think about seems to be how to get us to do things they want us to do. Or, how to circumvent limitations (like fences) that we have placed on them.

We didn't evolve from dogs, but we have common ancestors and a lot of animals display varying levels of mental activity, sometimes fairly complex. Not just dogs; think of parrots and crows; primates, of course. And other animals.

What, you think that you know how to discuss philosophy? You have barely scratched the surface. Read about world philosophy so you can go beyond your narrow If .. Than logic, which explains nothing but is a cute academic game. I grew out of it as fast as I grew into it.

Illusion of free will is not like a meme. You experience it. — bahman

Rubbish. It's concept. Without the concept there would be no experience of it.
Even if you could prove that, it would not make any difference since evolution allows selectively neutral traits to come and go.

...your small contribution was the magical Thermodynamic Imperative. — Rich

Thanks for the credit. But that's just mainstream science really. The stuff you "grew out of" once you took up astral transportation and whatnot.

Out of curiosity, why aren't you assailing folk with your quantum holographic mind projection theories so much these days? Too "sciency"?

Thanks for the credit. But that's just mainstream science really — apokrisis

It's not mainstream anything. It is just your biased view. Determinists pull out stuff and just present it as "science". Now let's look at the origin of this cute little story:

http://www.eoht.info/m/page/Thermodynamic+imperative

"The term "thermodynamic imperative" was introduced in the lectures of American physicist Robert Lindsay in his physics classes at Brown University prior to 1959 and later popularized in his1963 book The Role of Science in Civilization. [2] Lindsay's version of the imperative states, based on the oft-reasoned generalized tendency that the universe (or systems) tend towards disorder, as embodied in second law, that one should fight the law as vigorously as possible “to increase the degree of order in their environment so as to combat the natural tendency for order in the universe to be transformed into disorder.” [1] In short, Lindsay's thermodynamic imperative is a type of ethics based on reducing entropy to the minimum or, in other words, increasing negentropy to the maximum, and for his theories on how humans should have guidelines on how to live and behave based on the laws of thermodynamics and what he called the entropy concept of human consumption. [3] His generalized living principle is what he called the thermodynamic imperative states that: [2] "

Besides the rather puzzling view that "we" should be constantly fighting the Law, (this is embarrassing even to repeat), one must fully understand that this beautiful story began as an exercise is some sort of philosophical theory of ethics. Then it slowly evolves into some sort of theory of evolution, as evolutionists desperately searched for their new version of Cause. Full credit should be given to Kant for putting the story in motion.

It is just your biased view. — Rich

Full credit should be given to Kant for putting the story in motion. — Rich

So it is either just me or just Kant now?

Let me know when you decide who to blame. >:O

No one is too blame. You are just playing out your role as an Apostle proclaiming Truths of Science. But how does it feel being a desciple of Kant? Rather amusing I would say.

What's a desciple?

And why would you imply that Kant might have to be either accepted or rejected in his entirety. Wouldn't that be a rather religious approach on your part?

He would have to be accepted as part of the Thermodynamic Imperative. An apostle no less. But less we forget, that Disorder (the Devil) exists in all of us and we should never succumb but instead continue our ceaseless fight against it.

And so goes modem evolutionary science. Quite iterally Calvinism reincarnate. And Determinists eat it up.

Hmm. Are you saying that Kant's categorical imperative IS the thermodynamic imperative? Try reading your own source perhaps?

Read the article as it traces the origin story. Pretty fascinating with all of the religious overtones (not surprising).

Have you been able to figure out why Apostle Lindsay suggests that we all fight against the Imperative. Why would the Imperative be urging its offsprings to fight against itself? Reminds me of the age old Christian debate about God vs the Devil.

Is the Imperative Good or Evil?

While we are at it, is it Natural Selection or the Thermodynamic Imperative that is determining evolution? What we have here is clear evidence of how a philosophical musing is morphed into a science because Natural Selection was in big trouble explaining things. Science just invented something bigger and better.

Well, I have to say that I am amused and confused — bahman

Right. An anti-life, thus anti-evolutionary, ability suggests free will.

What do you mean with useful? — bahman

Serves some purpose.

In the case of the 3D image, the purpose is to help our imagination get a more accurate picture. In the case of conciousness it would be to help our cells reproduce, but I don't think it's valuable on a philosophy forum to get tied up in exactly what conciousness might have evolved to do.

One can never establish what a feature evolved to do. The Black Crane uses it's wings primarily as a cowl to lure fish into the shade, but it would be ludicrous to suggest it evolved them for this purpose.

The point, from a philosophical perspective, is the the arm movement experiments give us a question to answer about concious decision, we know the answer can't be that we (the concious self) decide to do something and then instruct the rest of our body to carry out that something. We speculate that conciousness might well be an illusion. A counter argument to that theory would be if illusion served no purpose in evolution.

We've demonstrated that it could serve a purpose, and so removed that particular counter argument. What that purpose actually is is a matter for evolutionary biologists, not philosophers. Philosophically, it is sufficient that such a purpose could exist.

Get back to basics. The sense of self is a perceptual contrast the brain has to construct so as to be able to perceive ... "the world". Even our immune and digestive systems have to encode some sense of what is self so as to know what is "other" - either other organisms that shouldn't be there, or the food the gut wants to break down. And so too, the brain has to form a sense of what is self to know that the world is other. — apokrisis

I don't think that the sense of self is create in order to allows us to perceive the world. That is off topic so lets please put it aside.

A second basic of the evolved brain is that it is needs to rely on forward modelling the world. You probably think the brain is some kind of computer, taking in sensory data, doing some processing, then throwing up a conscious display. Awareness is an output. But brains are slow devices. It takes a fifth of a second to emit a well learnt habitual response to the world, and half a second to reach an attentional level of understanding and decision making. We couldn't even safely climb the stairs if we had to wait that long to process the state of the world.

So instead, the brain relies on anticipation or prediction. It imagines how the world is likely to be in the next moment or so. So it is "conscious" of the world ahead of time. It has an "illusion" of the next split second just about to happen. That creates a feeling of zero lag - to the degree the predictions turn out right. — apokrisis

I agree with what you stated but these are off topic.

And this forward modelling is necessary just to allow for a continual perceptual construction of our "self". We have to be able to tell that it is our turning head that causes the world to spin, and not the other way round. So when we are just about to shift our eyes or move our hand, a copy of that motor instruction is broadcast in a way that it can be subtracted from the sensory inputs that then follow. The self is created in that moment because it is the part we are subtracting from the flow of impressions. The world is then whatever stayed stable despite our actions.

It is not hard to look at the cognitive architecture of brains and see the necessary evolutionary logic of its processing structure. And a running sense of self is just the flipside of constructing a running sense of the world.

Then on top of that, brains have to deal with an actual processing lag. And the best way to deal with that is to forward-model the shit out of the world.

Then on top of that, it is efficient to have a division of labour. The brain wants to do as much as it can out of learnt habit, and that then leaves slower responding attention to mop up whatever turns out to be novel, surprising or significant during some moment.

That leads to consciousness having a logical temporal structure. You have some kind of conscious or attention-level set of expectations and plans at least several seconds out from a moment. About half a second out, attention is done and learnt, well-briefed, habit has to take over. It does detailed subconscious predicting and reacting. If someone steps into the road while you are driving, you hit the brakes automatically in about a fifth of a second. After that, attention level processing comes back into it. You can consciously note that thank god you are so quick on the brakes, and what was that crazy guy thinking, and why now is he looking angry at me, etc.

So [conscious prediction [subconscious prediction [the moment] subconscious reaction] conscious reaction].

This is all proven by psychological experiment. The whole issue of reaction times and processing times is what got experimental psychology started in the late 1800s. — apokrisis

Thanks for illustration.

Where does human freewill come into it? Well what I've outlined is the evolution of the cognitive neurobiology. The basic logic is the same for all animals with large brains. They all need to construct a running sense of self so as to have a running sense of what then constitutes "the world". They all have a division of labour where they can act out of fast learnt habit or slower voluntary attention.

But humans are different in that we have evolved language and are essentially social creatures mentally organised by cultural evolution. Yes, memes.

So now our perceptual sense of self takes on a social dimension. We learn to think of "ourselves" in terms of a wider social world that we are representing. We learn to "other" our biological selves - this running perceptual self with all its grubby biological intentionality - and see it from an imagined social point of view. We learn to be disembodied from our own bodies and take an introspective or third person stance on the fact we can make choices that our societies might have something strong to say about.

So freewill is a social meme. It is the cultural idea that being a human self involves being able to perceive a difference between the "unthinking" selfish or biologocally instinctual level of action and a "thinking", socially informed, level of self-less action.

An animal is a self in a simple direct fashion - a self only so far as needed to then perceive "a world". A human, through language, learns to perceive a world that has themselves in it as moral agent making individual choices. That then requires the individual to take "conscious responsibility" for their actions. Every action must be judged in terms of the contrast between "what I want to do" and "what I ought to do".

So the idea of freewill is an ideal we strive to live up to. And yet the temporal structure of actual brain processes gives us plenty of dilemmas. We do have to rely on "subconscious" habit just for the sake of speed and efficiency. The gold standard of self-control is attention-level processing. But that is slow and effortful. However - as human culture has evolved - it has set the bar ever higher on that score. As a society, we give people less and less latitude for sloppy self-control, while also making their daily lives fantastically more complex.

A hunter/gather level of decision making is pretty cruisey by comparison. You go with the flow of the group. Your personal identity is largely a tribal identity. You get away with what you can get away with.

But then came institutionalised religion, stratified society, the complex demands of being a "self-actualising" being. A literal cult of freewill developed. The paradoxical cultural demand - in the modern Western tradition - is that we be "self-made".

So sure, there must be some evolutionary logic to this. There must be a reason why the freewill meme is culturally productive. But the point also is that it is a psychologically unrealistic construct. It runs roughshod over the actual cognitive logic of the brain. — apokrisis

That is the key point. What is the use of free will?

We just shouldn't beat ourselves up for not being literally in charge of our actions at all times. We are designed to be in some kind of flow of action where we let well-drilled habit do its thing. And of course our minds will wander when we are being expected to consciously attend to the execution of stuff we can handle just as well out of habit. The idea that we can switch our concentration off and on "at will" just cuts against the grain of how the brain naturally wants to be. Attention is there for when things get surprising, dangerous, difficult, not for taking charge of the execution of the routine. — apokrisis

How could we deliberately switch on and off our attention if there is no free will?

So "freewill" sits at the centre of so much cultural hogwash. There is good cultural reasons for it as a meme. It is really to modern society's advantage to have us think about our "selves" in this disembodied fashion. It allows society to claim control over our most inadvertent or reflexive actions.

But it is also a demonstrably unhealthy way to frame human psychology. If we just recognise that we have slower voluntary level planning and faster drilled habitual responses, then this unconscious vs conscious dilemma would not create so much existential angst.

We are not a conscious ego in possible conflict with an unconscious id (and also under the yoke of a social super-ego). Our "self" is the skilled totality of everything the brain does to created a well-adapted flow of responses to the continually varying demands of living in the world - a world that is both a physical one and a social one for us as naturally social creatures.

The actual freewill dilemma arose because Newtonian determinism appeared to make it paradoxical. If we are just meat machines, then how could we be selves that make our own rational or emotional choices?

But physics has gone past such determinism. And the very fact that the brain has to forward model to keep up with the world means that it is not being neurally determined anyway. Its knowledge of how the world was an instant or two ago is certainly a constraint on the expectations it forms. But the very fact it has to start every moment with its best guess of the future, and act on that, already means we couldn't be completely deterministic devices even if we tried.

Universal computation is logically deterministic. A programme - some structure of set rules and definite data - has to mechanically proceed from an input state, its initial conditions, to an output state.

But the brain is not that kind of computer. So it is neither physically deterministic (as no physics is that in the LaPlacean sense), nor is it computationally deterministic.

Thus "freewill" just isn't a real ontological problem. There is no metaphysical conflict. (Unless you are a dualist who believes "mind" to be a separate substance or spirit-stuff. And of course there are many who take that essentially religious view still. But for psychological science, there just isn't an ontological-strength problem.) — apokrisis

So you believe that free will is a meme for cultural control.

the question is, why did 'evolution' result in the ability to, oh I don't know, understand the age and size of the Universe? Amazing the things you pick up, chasing wildebeest, considering. And then it comes to the point of trying to work out what kind of animal can do this, and wonders what is odd about the question. — Wayfarer

That is also an interesting question. Perhaps we needed very high level of intelligence to live in poor condition that we used to live. Now we are rich and that intelligence is used for something else.

I don't have time just right now to read the whole thread, but I want to add this, in case it hasn't been raised.

The brain where consciousness and subconsciousness reside is a system. It does a lot of things, everything from triggering heart beats, breaths, putting you to sleep and waking you up, to imagining the plots of novels, and deciding what kind of canned tomatoes to buy. The various facilities of what we call "the mind" aren't discrete parts as much as they are the products of this "system".

We probably over-rate the conscious mind. I don't know what exactly consciousness is, but I am pretty sure it is supported by a much more extensive not-conscious part of the brain that not only does a lot of heavy lifting, but also, in a very real sense, runs the conscious mind. Since we can't access what is going on second by second in the subconscious, non-conscious 'mind', we think the conscious mind dominates. It is a subtle process to tease out what the non-conscious mind is doing.

You are your conscious and non-conscious mind. There isn't "something else" or "somebody else" between your ears: It's all you, all the time. — Bitter Crank

I agree with what you stated. That however is not a answer to question of this thread.

The question I have is: "How much of our mental structure (conscious, unconscious) was evolved and is present in other animals?" I am quite sure that we were not the first draft of consciousness, or sub-consciousness. I suspect many animals evolved features that are present in our minds, only to a lesser degree, and in many cases, a lot lesser degree. — Bitter Crank

I agree.

So a dog's mind obviously has less capacity to think than we do, but people have observed the outcome of "dog thought". Dog thought isn't very elegant, as far as I can tell. A lot of what they think about seems to be how to get us to do things they want us to do. Or, how to circumvent limitations (like fences) that we have placed on them.

We didn't evolve from dogs, but we have common ancestors and a lot of animals display varying levels of mental activity, sometimes fairly complex. Not just dogs; think of parrots and crows; primates, of course. And other animals. — Bitter Crank

I agree.

Serves some purpose.

In the case of the 3D image, the purpose is to help our imagination get a more accurate picture. In the case of conciousness it would be to help our cells reproduce, but I don't think it's valuable on a philosophy forum to get tied up in exactly what conciousness might have evolved to do.

One can never establish what a feature evolved to do. The Black Crane uses it's wings primarily as a cowl to lure fish into the shade, but it would be ludicrous to suggest it evolved them for this purpose.

The point, from a philosophical perspective, is the the arm movement experiments give us a question to answer about concious decision, we know the answer can't be that we (the concious self) decide to do something and then instruct the rest of our body to carry out that something. We speculate that conciousness might well be an illusion. A counter argument to that theory would be if illusion served no purpose in evolution.

We've demonstrated that it could serve a purpose, and so removed that particular counter argument. What that purpose actually is is a matter for evolutionary biologists, not philosophers. Philosophically, it is sufficient that such a purpose could exist. — Pseudonym

Purpose, useful, etc... Consciousness does something. It cause something.

Purpose, useful, etc... Consciousness does something. It cause something. — bahman

Does the 3D image cause something, just because it is useful? If I hallucinate a bridge where there is none and plunge down the chasm, does the hallucination become real just because it caused something?

Does the 3D image cause something, just because it is useful? If I hallucinate a bridge where there is none and plunge down the chasm, does the hallucination become real just because it caused something? — Pseudonym

Could we learn about 3D image without sensing it? Everything becomes indifferent if there was no shape to experience.

The point of consciousness is to keep us with the illusion of "self", so we can function 'normally' with everyday acts of survival. For example, self preservation would be a difficult thing without consciousness for animals like us. More primitive lifeforms like bacteria reacts according to what's written into the genetic code in terms of their self preservation. I am thinking, animals like humans and similar animals with sophisticated central nervous system would need a very strong illusion, hence the consciousness.

Freewill is a complex subject I would imagine. In biological sense, freewill looks like a sure illusion, then we get into the quantum stuff, the debate gets bizarre. One thing is certain for me though. We need the feeling of having freewill, regardless of whether it is a complete illusion or not.