The is no Objectve NOW.

[Brant Gaede]

3 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Not true.  I know several people who work for government who believe they have free will and I know several people who -never- worked for government who do not believe they have free will.

The question of free will is NOT objectively decidable.  There is no way of quantifying free will (even if it does exist)  and no technology available to humans can test for it or its lack.

The question of free will is in the same category as the question of whether minds  or souls exist.   These questions are not empirically testable. 

Government has nothing whatsoever to do with the theological-metaphysical  question. 

All free will is is the method--the means--of choosing from cognitively derived conclusions. Otherwise there'd be no need for thinking.

According to your metric there is no way to know you're capable of thinking unless numbers are somehow involved to empirically test the proposition.

Qua all this we know we have consciousness. We know it via axiomatic reasoning. We have no evidence or logical reasoning for "soul." "Mind" is a metaphor for a thinking consciousness or merely a synonym for consciousness. It's mostly a matter of semantics.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

9 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

All free will is is the method--the means--of choosing from cognitively derived conclusions. Otherwise there'd be no need for thinking.

According to your metric there is no way to know you're capable of thinking unless numbers are somehow involved to empirically test the proposition.

Qua all this we know we have consciousness. We know it via axiomatic reasoning. We have no evidence or logical reasoning for "soul." "Mind" is a metaphor for a thinking consciousness or merely a synonym for consciousness. It's mostly a matter of semantics.

--Brant

A person may very well know that -he is thinking-.  He  has no sure means of detecting thought or intention in others.  The best one can do is measure neuro-chemical activity.

Problem for you:   Detect and mind in a body that is not yours.   I would be very interested in saying  what  answer  issues forth in the form of a written reply.  

I have a basic epistemological problem:  I know when I am thinking and what I am thinking.  The only thing I know from others is what they say,  what the write and what publicly observable actions they manifest.  I can also  detect and measure a subset of t heir body states,  given the right equipment.   But I never know what they think or even if they think.  The best I can say of another is that i detect and measure  electro-chemical activity that I associate with "mental"  processes.  

Maybe you have mental telepathy  but I do not.   Maybe you have a mind but I do not.  I have a working brain  whose activity I sense through my working brain. There is not one thing about me or in me that is not physical. 

[RobinReborn]

I usually avoid these sorts of conversations as they often devolve into people describing the idiosyncracies of their own consciousness and speculative theories about physics.

 

But I think the concept 'attention span' is useful to consider.  You can focus your brain to pay lots of attention to a little bit of detail over a short period of time, or to pay a little attention to a lot of detail over a long period of time (or other permutations of those concepts).

[BaalChatzaf]

15 minutes ago, RobinReborn said:

I usually avoid these sorts of conversations as they often devolve into people describing the idiosyncracies of their own consciousness and speculative theories about physics.

 

But I think the concept 'attention span' is useful to consider.  You can focus your brain to pay lots of attention to a little bit of detail over a short period of time, or to pay a little attention to a lot of detail over a long period of time (or other permutations of those concepts).

Now lasts about a second and a half.  Anything after that has to  be recalled. 

[RobinReborn]

I have the ability to make now last for longer or shorter, but a second and a half sounds like a reasonable average.

[moralist]

On ‎11‎/‎16‎/‎2016 at 2:09 PM, BaalChatzaf said:

.The question of free will is NOT objectively decidable. 

That just has to be the silliest thing you've said so far, Bob... a denial of moral choice. The objective reality of the consequences of your own actions has rendered the final verdict on your life.  Either being a government employee for all your life has totally f**ked your mind...or your totally f**ked mind is what qualified you to be a government employee. Government loves tools like you.  Your denial of moral choice or personal accountability for your choices makes you the quintessential bureaucrat... a capo who does what its told.

Now go cash your government benefits check.

Greg

[BaalChatzaf]

10 hours ago, moralist said:

That just has to be the silliest thing you've said so far, Bob... a denial of moral choice. The objective reality of the consequences of your own actions has rendered the final verdict on your life.  Either being a government employee for all your life has totally f**ked your mind...or your totally f**ked mind is what qualified you to be a government employee. Government loves tools like you.  Your denial of moral choice or personal accountability for your choices makes you the quintessential bureaucrat... a capo who does what its told.

Now go cash your government benefits check.

Greg

What is it about the notion empirically or objectively that you do not understand.  

Of course moral choice exists.  So do the rules of contract bridge.  Both are man-made. 

I would appreciate it, really I would,  if you would stop putting words in my mouth,   You are no where near smart enough to  figure out what I am going to say.  Actually you are a mediocre intellect....

[moralist]

On ‎11‎/‎18‎/‎2016 at 8:05 AM, BaalChatzaf said:

Of course moral choice exists.  So do the rules of contract bridge.  Both are man-made.

If moral choice is man made as you claim...

...then it's all just people's subjective opinions...

...which makes your subjective opinion of morality equivalent to a Nazi's subjective opinion of morality.

You're the perfect government bureaucratic employee, Bob. All intellect with zero common sense makes you a genius in the government world, but a dummy out in the real one. And that's why you would be a total failure if you had to make your own way in life without your mommie government to take care of you.

 

Greg

 

 

[jts]

6 minutes ago, moralist said:

If moral choice is man made as you claim...

...then it's all just people's subjective opinions...

 

The rules of chess are man made. Are they therefore subjective opinion?

 

[Brant Gaede]

1 hour ago, moralist said:

If moral choice is man made as you claim...

...then it's all just people's subjective opinions...

...which makes your subjective opinion of morality equivalent to a Nazi's subjective opinion of morality.

Greg

Moral choice comes from man's nature, if you are a secularist as I am--or from God, if you're religious. Either way you don't end up with anything arbitrary as Bob implies, for if the religion doesn't fit man's nature you can't or shouldn't submit. The virtue of the religious is using powerful simplicity to bypass arguments about the right philosophy, especially for hoi polloi, and cuts out--we hope--the real bad stuff like Naziism. Even scientific geniuses have embraced God, bypassing philosophical musings and getting on with their work and lives usually using compartmentalization, even if only subconsciously.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

1 hour ago, jts said:

The rules of chess are man made. Are they therefore subjective opinion?

Not once they are made; then they are objective. The rules could have been made differently.

--Brant

[moralist]

27 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

Moral choice comes from man's nature...

While the free will to choose is innate to man... morality is the choice to act contrary to man's nature.  

 

Greg

[moralist]

2 hours ago, jts said:

The rules of chess are man made. Are they therefore subjective opinion?

The rules of chess are made up by the subjective opinion of men. Whoever plays, agrees to those rules... but they just as well could be anything. A knight could just as well move three spaces forward and one to the right or left, instead of two spaces.

Morality is quite different in that it is an objective set of laws determined by the objective reality of the consequences of people's own actions... with which men freely choose to either subjectively agree or subjectively disagree.

 

Greg

[moralist]

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

Not once they are made; then they are objective. The rules could have been made differently.

--Brant

While the rules of chess are made up by subjective opinion... however the act of playing by those subjective rules is indeed objective because it is a human act in the real world.

 

Morality doesn't really enter into playing chess unless you talk about cheating which is defined by objective moral law.

 

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

Morality is good and bad not just bad. It cuts both ways. You can have two or more choices all of them good but the problem then is not to avoid the bad but to choose the best. This is more subjective and difficult than merely avoiding the bad or immoral for the immoral generates pain in the actor, assuming he's not sociopathic or simply nuts.

--Brant

[jts]

Getting back to the original topic of this thread, there is no objective now:

In my ignorance and simple mindedness and not being a fan of complexicated, I have a suspicion that physicists made a mistake with or after Einstein and instead of correcting the mistake they kept on going.

Like a man who tells a lie and then to support the first lie he tells a second lie. Now he has 2 lies to support. And his story gets complicateder and complicateder and weirder and weirder, just like modern physics. Modern physics has relativity, dark matter, dark energy, no objective now, quantum flux, multiple universes, and it gets weirder and weirder.

Maybe in the future a super genius will come up with a theory that simplifies all this complexication  and is more consistent with common sense, and provide evidence. But by that time it probably will have difficulty getting a hearing because it will be contrary to what is commonly accepted.

Maybe in the more distant future people will marvel at the weird theories that physicists took seriously.

 

[BaalChatzaf]

1 hour ago, jts said:

Getting back to the original topic of this thread, there is no objective now:

In my ignorance and simple mindedness and not being a fan of complexicated, I have a suspicion that physicists made a mistake with or after Einstein and instead of correcting the mistake they kept on going.

Like a man who tells a lie and then to support the first lie he tells a second lie. Now he has 2 lies to support. And his story gets complicateder and complicateder and weirder and weirder, just like modern physics. Modern physics has relativity, dark matter, dark energy, no objective now, quantum flux, multiple universes, and it gets weirder and weirder.

Maybe in the future a super genius will come up with a theory that simplifies all this complexication  and is more consistent with common sense, and provide evidence. But by that time it probably will have difficulty getting a hearing because it will be contrary to what is commonly accepted.

Maybe in the more distant future people will marvel at the weird theories that physicists took seriously.

 

Most of physics does not really deal with time.  Time is just a parameter.  And most of the laws of physics  are time symmetric.  They work both backwards and forwards.  The main law that is asymmetric  is the second law of thermodynamics.  Total entropy either remains constant (n a system in equilibrium)  or it increases.  It never decreases. Energy spontaneously dissipates where there are temperature differences.  Energy spontaneously flows from the hotter body to the cooler body until both bodies are at the same temperature.  That is the way the cosmos works.

We still lack a genuine theory of time that  can define Now.   

[Brant Gaede]

How it all began is similar to using God as starting it all, begging the question of who/what started God? Entropy demands a beginning but what if there was no beginning respecting the totality? Everything winding down demands a winderupper. Either way, though, there has to be much more going on than available to our instruments, etc.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

To understand existence demands, first, understanding non-existence--that is, that there is nothing to understand.

It's a parasite concept; merely an idea with no referents except the biggie: existence itself.

The totality of existence seems beyond our grasp. Can we say therefore it might be exponentially more than we know not only in kind but not in kind?

I suppose so, but it's not helpful. If you have more than one kind it would seem to exclude the other. My idea is that the universe is enveloped and acted upon by some unknowable--so far--something. That's just as valid, it seems, as to say it's suffused with dark matter. Where's the science?

--Brant

 

[BaalChatzaf]

On 11/16/2016 at 8:51 PM, Brant Gaede said:

All free will is is the method--the means--of choosing from cognitively derived conclusions. Otherwise there'd be no need for thinking.

According to your metric there is no way to know you're capable of thinking unless numbers are somehow involved to empirically test the proposition.

Qua all this we know we have consciousness. We know it via axiomatic reasoning. We have no evidence or logical reasoning for "soul." "Mind" is a metaphor for a thinking consciousness or merely a synonym for consciousness. It's mostly a matter of semantics.

--Brant

not really.  I know when and what I am thinking.  I don't need no steeenking theory to know when and what I am thinking.  cogito ergo cogito  

Now I might need a physical chemical theory to know when YOU are thinking.  

I have not got the foggiest notion of how to detect a mind in a body  that is not mine. 

[jts]

3 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

not really.  I know when and what I am thinking.  I don't need no steeenking theory to know when and what I am thinking.  cogito ergo cogito  

Now I might need a physical chemical theory to know when YOU are thinking.  

I have not got the foggiest notion of how to detect a mind in a body  that is not mine. 

You don't have the foggiest notion of how to detect a mind in your own body.

 

[BaalChatzaf]

8 hours ago, jts said:

You don't have the foggiest notion of how to detect a mind in your own body.

 

Maybe because there is no mind in my body to detect.  I have wonder  Nuclear Resonance Images  of my brain and I have seen my brain at work with a PET Scan.  Have you seen yours at work by way of a precision measuring/imaging  instrument?  I bet you have not.  

And my notions  may be foggy (by your judgement)  because I have a different operating system from what you have.  I am an Aspie.   you are a Normal.  We don't work quite the same way.

[moralist]

On ‎11‎/‎19‎/‎2016 at 3:30 PM, Brant Gaede said:

Morality is good and bad not just bad. It cuts both ways.

That's totally true, Brant.

The good takes care of itself and brings with it its own beneficial consequences, so it's the only the bad that needs to be addressed.

 

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

13 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Maybe because there is no mind in my body to detect.  I have wonder  Nuclear Resonance Images  of my brain and I have seen my brain at work with a PET Scan.  Have you seen yours at work by way of a precision measuring/imaging  instrument?  I bet you have not.  

And my notions  may be foggy (by your judgement)  because I have a different operating system from what you have.  I am an Aspie.   you are a Normal.  We don't work quite the same way.

Seeing your brain at work is seeing your mind or consciousness at work. The brain of course does more than manufacture consciousness.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

9 minutes ago, moralist said:

That's totally true, Brant.

The good takes care of itself and brings with it its own beneficial consequences, so it's the only the bad that needs to be addressed.

Greg

Wrongo! Address the good to find the best.

--Brant