What is the fundamental difference between information processed by a mechanical computer and a brain? How can there be a fundamental difference in what is happening if all we are is mechanistic?
What is the implication of this for the idea that computers are just too mechanical to be, conscious, to love, to generate or understand meaning, to have a self or to have free will? How would changing notions of consciousness, meaning, morality, free will and self to make them fit with bodies as mechanical as any robot change these psychologically important notions? — Restitutor
Physic is mechanistic to the point we can shoot rockets across the solar system and know with extreme accuracy where they will end up. Even clockwork isn't' so precise. — Restitutor
What is the implication of this for the idea that computers are just too mechanical to be, conscious, to love, to generate or understand meaning, to have a self or to have free will? How would changing notions of consciousness, meaning, morality, free will and self to make them fit with bodies as mechanical as any robot change these psychologically important notions? — Restitutor
What is the fundamental difference between information processed by a mechanical computer and a brain? How can there be a fundamental difference in what is happening if all we are is mechanistic? — Restitutor
Physics is mechanistic because we constructed the framework for describing and measuring certain phenomena within geometric space-time grids. In other words, it’s not the physical world in itself that is mathematical or mechanistic, it is our template for interpreting it — Joshs
Meanwhile, this mechanistic form of causality is less useful in representing biological and psychological phenomena, so we apply a different descriptive vocabulary.
saying something is mechanistic we are just generating a representation of the ineffable like we do with every word we utter.
— Joshs
Meanwhile, this mechanistic form of causality is less useful in representing biological and psychological phenomena, so we apply a different descriptive vocabulary — Joshs
I just don't see why every atheist doesn't agree with me. — Restitutor
What is the fundamental difference between information processed by a mechanical computer and a brain? — Restitutor
The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. — Mind and Cosmos, p35
The human body with skin pulled back is obviously mechanical with muscle, bone and tendon obviously arrange to maximize the efficiency of mechanical tasks — Restitutor
Science says humans are mechanisms — Restitutor
The discovery of the genetic code was a breakthrough of the first order. It showed why organisms are fundamentally different from any kind of nonliving material. There is nothing in the inanimate world that has a genetic program which stores information with a history of three thousand million years! — The growth of biological thought, Ernst Mayr
I think your question relies on confused assumptions.Science says humans are mechanisms and what we think and feel are products of that mechanism, most people do not believe this and vocabulary isn't the problem. I don't think the rest of what you said answered the question i posed.
— Restitutor
We can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental).
“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem, but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.
One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity of the human life-world.”
The human body with skin pulled back is obviously mechanical with muscle, bone and tendon obviously arrange to maximize the efficiency of mechanical tasks. This is however nothing compared to what we see at the molecular scale with molecular machines like Kinase, the myosin motors in muscles, ATP synthase and the bacterial flagellum. How neurons work is no less mechanical, with Ligand and voltage gated ion channels neurotransmitters. We know how neurons work individually and in groups like the 302 neurons of c-elegans. We know fare more than I am able to convey here.
Other than potential for quantum indeterminacy having an effect, science would suggest that even the brain is deterministic, even if know what it will do isn’t predictable. Even if you believe that the randomness of quantum indeterminacy can have a macro effect the effect would only be to inject some randomness into an otherwise deterministic system. Given this aren’t we as mechanistic, mechanical and as much a machine as any automaton, robot or computer?
I personally don't like most conceptions of libertarian free will I have come across. If our decisions aren't "determined by" the way we are, and the way the world is, then it seems like they are arbitrary, random, and thus not free. Plato and Hegel seem to have the best popular definition of freedom I am aware of: freedom as (relative) self-determination. — Count Timothy von Icarus
For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes: (1) the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the chalice required is determined as to its form and mat- ter; (4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith.
It is of utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. It is of utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handcraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis also, the arising of something from out of itself, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. For what presences by means of physis has the bursting open belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossomn into bloom, in itself (en heautõi). In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g., the silver chalice, has the bursting open blonging to bringing- forth not in itself, but in another (en alloi), in the craftsman or artist.
“What is the instrumental itself? Within what do such things as means and end belong? A means is that whereby something is effected and thus attained. Whatever has an effect as its consequence is called a cause. But not only that by means of which something else is effected is a cause. The end in keeping with which the kind of means to be used is determined is also considered a cause. Wherever ends are pursued and means are employed, wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality… For a long time we have been accustomed to representing cause as that which brings something about. In this connection, to bring about means to obtain results, effects. The causa efficiens, but one among the four causes, sets the standard for all causality.
It seems to me like plenty in physics, the life sciences, and complexity sciences are willing to take a broader view… It's all well and good to show that the dominant paradigm is shot through with error, but what do you teach if there is no one solid replacement? That's where it seems we are at. — Count Timothy von Icarus
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