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PostPosted: Mon May 26, 2003 7:31 pm 
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If the illusion of free will is so complete that 99% of the population never questions it, does it really matter whether or not it in fact exists?

I personally agree with you that free will is not really "free." However the guise is good enough to fool me and it isn't like it would ever affect anything if it weren't actually "free." It is more of a case of bad naming than anything else.


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PostPosted: Mon May 26, 2003 11:07 pm 
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Stoned comment:


WERE ALL IN THE MATRIX!!!


End stoned comment...


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 Post subject: Rana made me.
PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 1:03 am 
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IcyMonkey wrote:
I've read many convincing philosophical arguments disproving the existence of time, matter, space, and self. Without those three what do we have left?


Bad math?


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PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 8:02 am 
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No no... FUZZY MATH


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 Post subject: random quantum events resulted in me writing the following:
PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 10:13 am 
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Abunai! wrote:
IcyMonkey wrote:
I've read many convincing philosophical arguments disproving the existence of time, matter, space, and self. Without those three what do we have left?

Bad math?

Tsk. Silly postwhore. Obviously, Icy's implying that our existence has a value of -1. Not only do we not really exist, but our universe would annihilate any actually existing things that came into contact with it :)

As far as the free will thing, I've always thought of it as being a problem of definition. What, exactly, is "free will"? If you accept a reductionist explanation for human behavior (which I believe is reasonable), then one could say that we *have* free will, and that it's just predicated on the interactions of a bunch of single-celled organisms (or a bunch of quarks, if you prefer to go down that far), as easily as one could say that we *don't* have free will for the same reason. The way I see it, even if we don't have free will in the sense that we can't do anything that isn't implicit in our underlying construction and the world around us, we do have free will in the sense that we make decisions, even if that decision-making process is predicated on predictable underlying phenonmena. In other words, we may not have free will, but we might as well think like we do (If that makes any sense)...

Nebula Queen wrote:
Personally, I <i>do</i> believe that the human mind is made of something different. I do believe in such a thing as a human soul. However, since this, like many other beliefs can't be proven (and the fact I don't really want to go into why I do believe in souls), I'll move on to another point.

Aww... you're not even gonna give me the chance to smack down soulist assumptions with my Evil Materialist Reductionism? You're no fun!

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PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 11:56 am 
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I said I would do it, so now I am. Devil's Advocate time.

Nah, I really just want to see the argument.

So, WI. I have a soul, thats why I have free will...


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 Post subject: Going to end up back at my usual Agnosticism, I'm sure...
PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 12:39 pm 
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krylex wrote:
I said I would do it, so now I am. Devil's Advocate time.

Nah, I really just want to see the argument.

So, WI. I have a soul, thats why I have free will...

(Heh. I was partially joking, since as MIB mentioned, we don't have a fully working neurological model of human behavior yet. But I'll do what I can, just for the heck of it. >:)

What's a soul?

(If you claim to have one, you should know what one is, methinks.)

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PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 1:08 pm 
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A soul is a submatter entity that cannot be measured by any physical means.


I don't necisarily think I have a soul, but I would still like to see what you have...


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 Post subject: Time for some rampant Materialist smackdown...
PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 1:52 pm 
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krylex wrote:
A soul is a submatter entity that cannot be measured by any physical means.


I don't necisarily think I have a soul, but I would still like to see what you have...

Leaving aside for the moment of just what "submatter" is, what, exactly does a soul do? What is its function? Or are you merely saying the equivalent of "I have a large invisible ice cream sundae, that is made of non-matter and is thus not detectable, sitting inside my chest"?

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 Post subject: In this corner - Krylex portraying someone who cares.
PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 2:37 pm 
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A soul is the driving force behind the human condition. It is the true conciousness of a person and lives on after our bodies do not. That is why we have conciousness and animals do not...


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 Post subject: Overextending myself, but we'll see...
PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 6:14 pm 
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Trying to beat me down with multiple definitions at once, eh? Reductionism shall prevail!
krylex wrote:
A soul is the driving force behind the human condition.

Still too vague. Either souls affect the universe in some way, or they do not. If it's the latter, we're back to the ice-cream thing, above. If it's the former, I want to know what, exactly they do. This just seems like an abstraction, not an actual metaphysical construct.

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It is the true conciousness of a person and lives on after our bodies do not. That is why we have conciousness and animals do not...

How do you know animals don't have souls? And if the non-physical soul is what makes us conscious, why is it that you would lose consciousness if I beat your physical head repeatedly with a bat? What do you think the brain does?


I knew this debate reminded me of something. This is ripped from the website of a Singularitarian* theorist I happen to like (but who is also slightly full of himself, and with whom I have my share of disagreements).

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sole Hope for Humanity wrote:
"Soul" is a blatantly overused term that conflates the following completely independent conceptual entities:

  • Immortal soul: An entity generated by forces within the brain, which survives the destruction of the neurons that originally generated it, and is in some formulations intrinsically indestructible under the laws of the ultimate reality. (If this soul continues independent, internally generated cognition equalling the capabilities of a physical brain, someone has a lot of explaining to do to with respect to split-brain patients, lobotomy patients, amnesiacs, and other forms of brain damage.)
  • Extraphysical soul: An entity which operates outside the laws of physics. (Strictly speaking this doesn't make logical sense, since anything that affects physical reality is part of physical law, but under some circumstances we might find it useful to separate that law into two parts - for example, if some physical patterns obey mathematical rules and others are totally resistant to rational analysis.)
  • Weird-physics neurology: Neural information-processing that uses the "weird" laws of physics. "Weird" is any physical pattern not visible in everyday, macroscopic life, or any pattern which isn't Turing-computable. We generally don't use the word "soul" in discussing this possibility.
  • Morally-valent soul: A physical entity representing the atomic unit of decision-making and moral responsibility. I'm reasonably sure this doesn't exist except as a high-level game-theoretical abstraction embodied as an "atomic" element of social cognition.
  • Qualia:The basic stuff of conscious experience, redness of red, etc.
  • Theological soul: A piece of God integrated into the human mind.
  • Mind-state preservation: Let's say our descendants/successors invent a time machine (or a limited version thereof such as a "time camera") and read out everyone's complete neural diagram, memories, etc. at the moment of death. That would be one form of mind-state preservation; any immortal soul that preserved memories, or information from which memories could be reconstructed, would also count.
  • Self-continuity: "If you go into a duplicator and two beings come out, which one is you? Is a perfect duplicate of your brain you? Does continuity of identity require continuity of awareness or just continuity of memories?" Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. I don't think such questions have real answers; or rather, the answer is whatever you decide it is. Though John K Clark's decision is worth mentioning: "I am not a noun, I am an adjective. I am anything that behaves in a John-K-Clarkish way."


* Vinge-ean offshoot of the general Transhumanist movement. Eliezer is by far one of the saner ones. And if anyone doesn't know who Vinge is, they're not allowed to call themselves a science fiction fan.

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Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.
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PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 7:12 pm 
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Minor off-topic note: Anyone can call themselves a science fiction fan. I do, quite often. But it seems I am a fan of a different strain of science fiction than the one that begat this "Vinge" of whom you speak.

On-topic: I won't argue the point over whether or not the actions themselves are free, but I will ask this: Do your actions seem controlled?

Another thing is: Maybe no action is free. Maybe every action IS predetermined. But perhaps the part that makes those actions free is not the action itself, but the WHY of the action. The decision behind it. Any number of rationales can be given for the whys of an action, and I think that is what "free will" is--the defining of why you took an action. Even if your free will is that your every action is out of your control, you still determine why you made the action.

Pure speculation on my part, but as MiB already said, there can be nothing else. (And Icy, MiB: Perhaps one of you should post Hume's views on this? I don't know them, and I think I could use a little enlightenment. Mebbe PM them to me or summat.)

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PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 7:24 pm 
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Why are "animals" not conscious? What is the difference between us and some birds that can recognize their image in a mirror?


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PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 7:46 pm 
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If an animal was concious, we would be able to effectivly communicate with it. Just as someone can be introduced into a foriegn culture and eventually learn their language, if an animal were truly sentient, we would be able to activly communicate, which is a great deal different from trained responses...


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PostPosted: Tue May 27, 2003 8:01 pm 
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http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1175/ ... html?term=

You forgot about Koko :( She is so cool. She proved that using excrement as in insult transcends species after she called another gorilla named Michael a "stupid shit"


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 Post subject: C'mon, just go for the agnostic draw (only way not to lose)
PostPosted: Wed May 28, 2003 8:19 am 
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Kitsune1527 wrote:
Minor off-topic note: Anyone can call themselves a science fiction fan. I do, quite often. But it seems I am a fan of a different strain of science fiction than the one that begat this "Vinge" of whom you speak.

Vernor Vinge, creator of the best space opera novel ever, coiner of the term Singularity (as it pertains to technological progress), and one of my top five favorite sci-fi authors. What can I say, I'm opinionated :) I'm curious, what kind of science fiction do you like?

Quote:
On-topic: I won't argue the point over whether or not the actions themselves are free, but I will ask this: Do your actions seem controlled?

Another thing is: Maybe no action is free. Maybe every action IS predetermined. But perhaps the part that makes those actions free is not the action itself, but the WHY of the action.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I said.
*Looks back*
In a slightly more convoluted manner... (Yudkowsky's wordiness must be rubbing off on me...)

krylex wrote:
If an animal was concious, we would be able to effectivly communicate with it. Just as someone can be introduced into a foriegn culture and eventually learn their language, if an animal were truly sentient, we would be able to activly communicate, which is a great deal different from trained responses...

We can communicate with animals. Yell at a dog, and it will react accordingly. And what about somone born deaf, blind, and dumb? They are not necessarily genetically any different than normal humans, and their basic brain structure is the same. Are you saying that they have no souls because they are unable to communicate? People's ablily to speak can be taken away by certain types of brain damage. If speech (and by your defninition, consciousness) is a function of the soul, why should damaging the physical brain affect it, when all of the speech organs are intact? Once more, what do you think the brain does?

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Last edited by Wandering Idiot on Thu Dec 18, 2003 3:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Wed May 28, 2003 10:50 am 
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Ignore this post, anyone but WI.

I usually read philosophical sf. (Yes yes, I hate the abbr. too, but it's online and I can afford it.) As in, Orson Scott Card's Ender Quartet (and its more recent sequels), Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (all . . . whatwasit? 17, IIRC), Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter, and Simon Green, who really isn't sf, more fantasy in space, but I like him because I've always liked psychic stuff. I like hard sf, but I prefer to read those stories in anthologies, where I can get multiple stories in one sitting, and then I can throw out wild combinations of the theories within to amuse myself.

I consider myself enough of a science fiction fan to realize the major flaws in the genre, and I try to pick books that I know will, if not get rid of them, at least successfully neutralize them that my brain won't be constantly pointing out where the laws of physics take a backseat. Another thing I like figuring out is what other ideas the writers are hiding behind their main concepts.

I realize that's more of what I get out of sf than what I actually get that is sf, but I do tend to ramble.

On another note, this post certainly FEELS like it came out of nothingness--like I actually freely thought it out and wrote it without having to. IOW, it certainly appears to me that I freely wrote these words. If this was out of my control, then why does it feel like I'm missing something, like I forgot to mention something?

Of course. Because I'm supposed to? Ah hell, this WAS a largely pointless post anyway.

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 Post subject: I shall not lose, even though I care not for my standpoint!
PostPosted: Wed May 28, 2003 12:58 pm 
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Wandering Idiot wrote:
We can communicate with animals. Yell at a dog, and it will react accordingly. And about somone born deaf, blind, and dumb? They are not necessarily genetically any different than normal humans, and their basic brain structure is the same. Are you saying that they have no souls because they are unable to communicate? People's ablily to speak can be taken away by certain types of brain damage. If speech (and by your defninition, consciousness) is a function of the soul, why should damaging the physical brain affect it, when all of the speech organs are intact? Once more, what do you think the brain does?


We do not effectivly communicate with them. I can't have a conversation with my dog that he will coherently understand. They understand commands as trained responses. The reason yelling works is an ingrained instinct, much as a mother snapping at her pup for wandering off. Someone blind, deaf, and dumb can communicate - look at Helen Keller.


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PostPosted: Wed May 28, 2003 4:55 pm 
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/Extends Koko argument

And also, what about newbornes? They, by definition, have only instinct. Do they have souls? Or do they only get souls when they learn to communicate?

Also, talking is not the only kind of communication. So that we may better crush you, please define "communication" to the extent that it shows possession of a soul. I guarantee that you'll either exclude some humans, or include animals.

One thing, though. Assuming that we are "conscious," why are we, unless some sort of "soul" exists?

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 Post subject: I guess you didn't read that I don't believe in my point...
PostPosted: Wed May 28, 2003 6:12 pm 
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I was saying animals aren't truly concious as we cannot achieve effective communication. I'm not saying that language is the only from of communication, but it is the most efficient there is. Now, concious humans, even if from two different parts of the world with different language, behaviors, etc placed together on an island alone will eventually learn to effectivly communicate with one another through some form or another. Now, conciousness is one of the things I was using in conjunction with my idea of a soul. A newborn, although they do not effectivly communicate on an adult level, are very concious even in the womb...


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