Illusion cannot have any functioning.

Illusion cannot have any functioning. — bahman

Sorry, I have no idea what that even means.

Sorry, I have no idea what that even means. — Pseudonym

Could consciousness be causally efficacious? It is mere illusion.

↪darthbarracuda
I think that the probability for a neutral trait drops by time and become insignificant in a course million years for such complex phenomena, illusion of free will. — bahman

Why would you say that?
Free will is not a concept carried by the genes. It's a conclusion drawn from experience and expressed and reproduced by logical logic. Such concepts are more like memes that genes, and like god or fairies do not have to confer any specific advantage, but can evolve through culture without any reference to somatic evolution or reproduction. Such "memes" can persist and move into other cultures like viruses move across species.

Why would you say that? — charleton

Because I think there are many mutations are needed in order that we have illusion of free will.

Free will is not a concept carried by the genes. — charleton

The illusion of free will is carried by genes because we experience it.

It's a conclusion drawn from experience and expressed and reproduced by logical logic. Such concepts are more like memes that genes, and like god or fairies do not have to confer any specific advantage, but can evolve through culture without any reference to somatic evolution or reproduction. Such "memes" can persist and move into other cultures like viruses move across species. — charleton

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

Could consciousness be causally efficacious? It is mere illusion. — bahman

No. That's pretty much what this whole thread's been about isn't it? Consciousness clearly doesn't 'cause' the arm to move. If it did, the subject would be aware of the intention before the computer wired to the subject's brain, but the evidence shows that they are not.

That doesn't mean it's not useful. The artist's 3D rendition is useful (it helps us imagine the object in real life) but it's an illusion, it's not actually 3D.

Deleted.

What do you mean with useful?

Cells can, rocks can't — Pseudonym

Cells can and rocks can't? Why? What is the meaning of "can".

Action comes before awareness. Someone's I decide which way to move and then I move. Both most times it is formed habit. The brain is nothing more than a central receiving/transmission network.

Action comes before awareness. Someone's I decide which way to move and then I move. Both most times it is formed habit. The brain is nothing more than a central receiving/transmission network. — Rich

Who is taking action and who is becoming aware of action?

Who is taking action and who is becoming aware of action? — JustSomeGuy

The Mind? Your mind. My mind. Everyone's mind. That which peers out though the eyes and made up the story that it can't make a choice. It's not all that wierd actually. The Mind loves making up stories. It's a pastime.

So the mind and the brain are two different entities?

So the mind and the brain are two different entities? — JustSomeGuy

They are the same stuff just different forms analogous to vapor, water, ice.

That doesn't answer my question. Are they the same entity?

I just told you, but if you want to play games: define entity?

Such silliness.

I just told you — Rich

No, you didn't.

define entity? — Rich

Entity: a thing with distinct and independent existence

This is a very simple question, and your dancing around it makes you seem dishonest.

You said "action comes before awareness". If this is the case, logically there must be one entity acting, and another entity becoming aware of the action. Two entities. All I'm asking you to do is confirm that this is what you are claiming, and make explicit what these two entities are.

Entity: a thing with distinct and independent existence — JustSomeGuy

No such thing. Everything is well entangled.

No such thing. Everything is well entangled — Rich

The statement you just made implies that there are multiple "things", aka entities. You're being logically inconsistent.

Can you stop trying to distract from the original question, though?

What is taking action, and what is becoming aware of the action? Since you don't like the term entity, yet you yourself used the term "thing", I'll use your term. Logically, there must be two different things in this scenario. What are these two things?

The statement you just made implies that there are multiple "things", aka entities. You're being logically inconsistent. — JustSomeGuy

It's like waves in an ocean. Entangled forms.

To understand life one must jettison logic and imagine patterns. Art brings one much closer to understand nature am be life. Logic is only symbolic and this intrinsically incapable of grasping the whole.

It's like waves in an ocean. Entangled forms.

To understand life one must jettison logic and imagine patterns. Art brings one much closer to understand nature am be life. Logic is only symbolic and this intrinsically incapable of grasping the whole. — Rich

Then go post on an art forum. This is a philosophy forum. Logic is the foundation of philosophy. You yourself just admitted that you aren't using logic, which means you aren't doing philosophy, which means you shouldn't be posting any of this here.

Please answer the perfectly valid question I have asked you multiple times. If you don't answer this time,I will take that as an indication that you don't know what you're taking about and stop asking.

I answered your question. Your belief system doesn't allow you to comprehend.

Now back to my question? How does a cell do all of the things you claim it can do? What's the theory that explains these exceptional capabilities such as optimization? I suppose you have some powerful logic ready. You can start with your proposition.

I answered your question. — Rich

You have, inadvertently.

How does a cell do all of the things you claim it can do? What's the theory that explains these exceptional capabilities such as optimization? I suppose you have some powerful logic ready. You can start with your proposition — Rich

I haven't made any claims about the capability of cells, so I have no idea why you're asking me that. Regardless, I'm done engaging with you. I've given you many opportunities to have a rational conversation, and you have denied every one of them. I'm here to discuss philosophy, and you apparently have no interest in that.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 anmals 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.

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.

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.)

I'm here to discuss philosophy, and you apparently have no interest in that. — JustSomeGuy

Rich is here to represent the new age loopies - part of the site's diversity initiative. Just ask him about holographic quantum mind projection and see what he actually endorses. :)

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?

But physics has gone past such determinism — apokrisis

Right, it says it ain't so, so Determinists, the determined ones that they are, just reinvent their God. If I remember correctly, your small contribution was the magical Thermodynamic Imperative. Did I remember correctly. I remember it because it was so totally .... magical and creative. A true artist.

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.

the question is, why did 'evolution' result in the ability to, oh I don't know, understand the age and size of the Universe? — Wayfarer

My own personal question, which others may or may not share with me, is where is the evolutionary advantage in eating Big Macs it watching (and enjoying!) The Real Housewives of New Jersey? I am sure the Thermodynamic Imperative saw something that I am missing.

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.