The stuff of reality beyond the senses

[James Heaps-Nelson]

James,

Supposing my speculation is correct that we do not process some parts of reality (or we process them incorrectly) because the sense organs are being evolved or do not exist.

Using that as a premise for further speculation, isn't it plausible that forms and states (including life) would not just emerge from below, but simultaneously could be drawn upwards from above? (Above and below being metaphorical meaning smaller and bigger, part and whole, subatomic and macro cosmic, bottom and top, etc. Something, say, governing or forming things with gravity for starters...)

Michael

Michael,

Sure. The question is what governs in any given domain. The reason that we live in the kind of world we do where many things have bottom up causality is a remnant of how symmetry-breaking happened, the kinds of particles that were created and the kinds of forces and dimensions we live with. One enormously successful top down actor is DNA. It directs a symphony of lower level events and it makes life possible. It has an incredible level of fidelity, but just enough room for change. On an individual, human timescale DNA is incredibly deterministic, so much so to produce identical twins, but there is still incredible variation in brains between twins because each brain is an organically grown, environmentally and self-influenced organ. And not just growth is happening, but death too, but luckily for us the human brain has an incredible amount of redundancy.

One thing that distinguishes life-based top-down causality is that it is based on information storage and processing. Adam Reed had a good article about this on the old SOLOHQ. There is a limited amount that can happen until you have energy and replication. Metabolism and cell division and organism level reproduction. The brain's neocortical architecture is a very interesting top-down causality system.

Jim

[James Heaps-Nelson]

As an addendum to the above, Stuart Kauffman has set out a radical, nonmainstream theory in his books, At Home in the Universe and Origins of Order, that life isn't as accidental as it seems and that autocatalytic chemical systems are much more likely to yield greater levels of complexity than previously thought. One of his main themes is that life and other interesting phenomena occur mostly on the borderlands of order and disorder.

Jim

[BaalChatzaf]

As an addendum to the above, Stuart Kauffman has set out a radical, nonmainstream theory in his books, At Home in the Universe and Origins of Order, that life isn't as accidental as it seems and that autocatalytic chemical systems are much more likely to yield greater levels of complexity than previously thought. One of his main themes is that life and other interesting phenomena occur mostly on the borderlands of order and disorder.

Jim

Another way of saying this is that living or quasi-living systems emerge in thermodynamic systems that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[James Heaps-Nelson]

As an addendum to the above, Stuart Kauffman has set out a radical, nonmainstream theory in his books, At Home in the Universe and Origins of Order, that life isn't as accidental as it seems and that autocatalytic chemical systems are much more likely to yield greater levels of complexity than previously thought. One of his main themes is that life and other interesting phenomena occur mostly on the borderlands of order and disorder.

Jim

Another way of saying this is that living or quasi-living systems emerge in thermodynamic systems that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Exactly.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

James,

Incredibly, I think we are on the same page.

I would not even reject the moniker of determinism if it included the top determining just as much as the bottom does. (At least until I thought about it in more depth, but at first blush, that sounds right to me...)

Michael

[Dragonfly]

Even critics who disagreed with many of Penrose's conclusions http://hanson.gmu.edu/penrose.html still agree that volition cannot exist in a deterministic universe.

Really? Did you read the article? I cannot find anything there that supports your statement. The last, summarizing paragraph:

Martin Gardner calls Penrose's book "the most powerful attack yet written on strong AI." If so, AI must be doing pretty well. If the book were condensed to a paper by deleting the excellent tutorials, and if Penrose's name weren't on it, I doubt if the paper would have been much noticed, or even published. Regardless of your opinions about the appropriateness of current AI research strategies, or about the length of the road ahead, Penrose's book offers no substantial reasons to change your views about the long-term possibility of computer-based AI. The fact that many casual observers have been misled about this is yet another indication of the inadequacy of our current methods of forming and communicating scientific consensus.

I read your paper on using randomness as a characteristic of non-deterministic systems. The problem with this usage is that randomness continues to imply a causal agent outside of consciousness (and hence contradicts volition). Even if human behavior can be described as a mixture of randomness and algorithms, it undermines completely the system upon which judgments of validity rests. To say that judgment is a product not just of previous states but is also a product of randomness is actually worse off! Volition, in this case, may instead be the force that directs the "seemingly-random" digit creation, not some external actual "random" event.

You missed the point of the article. The only thing Edis does in that article is to show that using the Goedel argument in itself fails if you admit the possibility of random input, it doesn't say anything about how we think. However, Penrose's more general error is that you cannot use the Goedel argument itself to discredit AI, as, if the human brain is a formal algorithmic system, it is not an infallible formal system - and that is the assumption he needs for his argument - but a heuristic system that can make errors, and only by checking with other people we (or the mathematical community) can arrive at a consensus with hopefully a minimum of errors. Penrose has in fact realized this error and therefore he has changed his argument from a single brain to the whole mathematical community. But of course this is only a quantitative and not a qualitative change. The errors may be largely weeded out, but we cannot prove that there isn't any error anymore. An excellent article about these things can be found here.

So no matter how you look at it, you're incorrect.

No, you are incorrect. I won't argue here that the theory of the brain as a deterministic system is correct (although all the evidence points into that direction), but that your argument that the brain as a deterministic system would lead to a contradiction is incorrect. The problem is the vagueness of the concept volition. When asked to elucidate this notion, the answer is usually something like "volition is the fact that I'm free to choose between different possibilities, that more than one outcome is possible and that I know by introspection that I'm free to choose". But what does "free" here really mean? When we introspect, we may see different possibilities with different outcomes. We may weigh the arguments for either of them ("I can do A, or I can do B, or I can do C... when I do A this will happen which has this advantage and that disadvantage, when I do B... etc."). Finally at a certain point we make a decision and choose one of the options, because that gives the output which seems to us the most desirable. But how free were we in making our choice? In fact not free at all! No matter how extensively we deliberate and weigh the alternatives, the whole machinery of our brain is busy firing neurons that determine what we're thinking and where every state of the system in terms of its building blocks is determined by a previous state of that system. There was in that whole process just one outcome possible, namely that one that in fact occurred. Did you ever see that more outcomes at the same time were realized? Of course in similar situations we might make another choice, but "similar" is not "the same". Even if we had to choose twice in succesion, the second time the circumstances are different, as our memory now also contains the outcome of our previous choice, which may influence our second choice.

This was captured nicely by Schopenhauer's dictum "Der Mensch kann wohl tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will" ("Man can do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants"). No matter how "deep" you introspect, there is always a point where you can't get "deeper", where you cannot explain where the flow of your thoughts comes from, it "just" happens. Well, at that point there isn't any reason that the underlying processes cannot be deterministic (and there are good arguments that they are), as they lie outside our conscious perception. That we think we're "free" to choose is because we cannot observe by introspection the processes "under the hood", and therefore we cannot predict our own thought processes and therefore we cannot predict the outcome of our choice. This ignorance generates the feeling that we are "free" to choose, that's what we call "volition".

One might ask "why are those underlying processes that we can't see or influence so efficient, so that we in many cases derive correct conclusions by our reasoning?" The fact is that for individuals for which this were not the case, the odds of survival would be drastically diminished, so thanks to evolution those unconscious, lower level processes lead in general to good results, or in other words, in general we can reason correctly (which of course doesn't mean that we can't make errors, but that we in general can reason at least well enough to survive and procreate), just as our eyes have evolved in such a way that they will give use useful information, which doesn't imply that they never err. The method of error correction that is created by using the scientific process greatly increases the accuracy and reliability of our thinking processes and moreover, this process is cumulative by conserving knowledge and building further on it. Therefore we don't have to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel everytime.

Additionally: I will not accept personal criticisms. I called your intial assertion wrong because logically I believe it is. I can see how you might take this personally. You however did respond with a personal attack that needs no interpretation. You should be above that.

I've no idea what you're talking about. Personal attack? Where?

[Christopher]

Chris,

Just because the mind is a product of the physical brain does not mean we don't have free will. The typical argument against the coherency of epistemology in determinism is that a deterministic system is necessitated to think or believe something and the truth or falsity is immaterial to whether we think or believe it.

Brains are not Laplacian systems and there are any number of reasons why they could be nondeterministic. I think nondeterminism probably comes about from chaotic systems with something akin to Lyapunov instability. It is also possible the quantum mechanical perturbation in far from equilibrium chemical systems arises in nondeterminism.

Free will likely arises from the conjunction between the aforementioned mechanisms of nondeterminism and brain structures that have evolved to have the facility for information storage of reasonable fidelity.

If you're interested in the interaction between brain-based epistemology and traditional epistemology, Gerald Edelman has a terrific book: Second Nature which takes up the subject.

Jim

I partially understand what your getting at here. Let us take the philosophical definition of determinism then: basically that outside forces produce choices, whatever the origins of those forces - probability, rules, etc. Aren't we still saying that operation of consciounsess is non-volitional (or pseudo-volitional)? Unless the action of consciousness itself can produce changes to the structure of the external system (shifts in probability, directing seemingly-random events, changes to laws, added measurability), then overall it still seems that the external system guides the internal system completely... at which point, we are still stuck in saying that volition per se is non-existent. (( Just a fun aside, NB commented that volition is really the choice to think or not to think, to extend awareness or not, which could be (scientifically) taken as adding or reducing resolution to a chaotic system - and hence changing the outcome of that system... of course, how would volition do this from the inside? ))

As for the top-down argument, that is a cool cool paradigm shift. The question relevant for this thread is: aren't we still clashing two external systems together?

Christopher

[Steve Gagne]

Of course, even taking a naturalistic view of consciousness as a concomitant of brain functioning, it really depends upon your model of how consciousness is processed -- questions of free will or determinism must always be framed after the discovery phase, in terms of fact, or barring that, in terms of the possible. Anything else is airbrushing reality.

Consider, then, the differing implications of these two possible naturalistic philosophical models:

(1) The brain is a computer which takes in all inputs, processes them according to logic and internal feedback, and creates a set of (definable) outputs or behaviours.

(2) The brain is a radio which takes in some inputs (including imperceptible waves at the quantum level or even below), making them manifest, and responding with certain (unpredictable) behaviours.

Of course much thought must be brought to this to see what tremendously different responses these two models would elicit, yet at which point has any one of us achieved the level of knowledge to say which model is accurate?

[James Heaps-Nelson]

Chris,

Just because the mind is a product of the physical brain does not mean we don't have free will. The typical argument against the coherency of epistemology in determinism is that a deterministic system is necessitated to think or believe something and the truth or falsity is immaterial to whether we think or believe it.

Brains are not Laplacian systems and there are any number of reasons why they could be nondeterministic. I think nondeterminism probably comes about from chaotic systems with something akin to Lyapunov instability. It is also possible the quantum mechanical perturbation in far from equilibrium chemical systems arises in nondeterminism.

Free will likely arises from the conjunction between the aforementioned mechanisms of nondeterminism and brain structures that have evolved to have the facility for information storage of reasonable fidelity.

If you're interested in the interaction between brain-based epistemology and traditional epistemology, Gerald Edelman has a terrific book: Second Nature which takes up the subject.

Jim

I partially understand what your getting at here. Let us take the philosophical definition of determinism then: basically that outside forces produce choices, whatever the origins of those forces - probability, rules, etc. Aren't we still saying that operation of consciounsess is non-volitional (or pseudo-volitional)? Unless the action of consciousness itself can produce changes to the structure of the external system (shifts in probability, directing seemingly-random events, changes to laws, added measurability), then overall it still seems that the external system guides the internal system completely... at which point, we are still stuck in saying that volition per se is non-existent. (( Just a fun aside, NB commented that volition is really the choice to think or not to think, to extend awareness or not, which could be (scientifically) taken as adding or reducing resolution to a chaotic system - and hence changing the outcome of that system... of course, how would volition do this from the inside? ))

As for the top-down argument, that is a cool cool paradigm shift. The question relevant for this thread is: aren't we still clashing two external systems together?

Christopher

Chris,

There is no way to accomplish anything except through physical means. The free will/determinism question centers around whether we possess top-down causality that is directed by our consciousness (or some material component of it) and not necessitated by previous events.

Jim

[BaalChatzaf]

There is no way to accomplish anything except through physical means. The free will/determinism question centers around whether we possess top-down causality that is directed by our consciousness (or some material component of it) and not necessitated by previous events.

Jim

Our consciousness is physical from A to Z and top to bottom. Only physical things exist.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[James Heaps-Nelson]

There is no way to accomplish anything except through physical means. The free will/determinism question centers around whether we possess top-down causality that is directed by our consciousness (or some material component of it) and not necessitated by previous events.

Jim

Our consciousness is physical from A to Z and top to bottom. Only physical things exist.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Agreed. The above parenthetical caveat was meant to address the possibility that consciousness is epiphenomenal and mental causality happens one level down at the subcomponent level as described by Gerald Edelman.

Jim

[tjohnson]

Knowledge consists of the correct identification of the facts of reality; and in order for man to know that the contents of his mind do constitute knowledge, in order for him to know that he has identified the facts of reality correctly, he requires a means of testing his conclusions. The means is the process of reasoning - of testing his conclusions against reality and checking for contradictions. But this validation is possible only if his capacity to judge is free - i.e. nonconditional (given a normal brain). If his capacity to judge is not free, there is no way for a man to disciminate between his beliefs and those of a raving lunatic. (p.54)

I missed this thread! The statement " in order for him to know that he has identified the facts of reality correctly, he requires a means of testing his conclusions" is fine but the next statement "The means is the process of reasoning - of testing his conclusions against reality and checking for contradictions" is rather vague. It requires experimentation - not just reasoning. Reason allows us to come up with plausible explanations but experimentation allows us to reject explanations that fail to predict the outcome properly. This is simply a rewording of the falsification principle by Popper. So maybe Branden is saying the same thing as Popper but not in as clear language?

[Christopher]

Popper is in a way offering a process of testing conclusions against reality, whereas it appears NB is discussing one step higher about the use of reason that incorporates the process of testing. Ironically, even experimentation is still deterministic without some volitional ability to reason about the results.

... and the process!

Edited November 5, 2009 by Christopher

[tjohnson]

Popper is in a way offering a process of testing conclusions against reality, whereas it appears NB is discussing one step higher about the use of reason that incorporates the process of testing. Ironically, even experimentation is still deterministic without some volitional ability to reason about the results.

... and the process!

I don't see how someone could form hypotheses and design experiments without using reason. We must not have the same thing in mind when we talk about 'reason'. What do you mean "experimentation is still deterministic"?

[Christopher]

One determinist argument I've heard is: as long as we're programmed to validate reality through experimentation, this means we are still able to accurately understand reality in the absence of free will.

Of course the problem with this argument is that we need to evaluate the validity of the process of experimentation as a source of validation.

[Dragonfly]

One determinist argument I've heard is: as long as we're programmed to validate reality through experimentation, this means we are still able to accurately understand reality in the absence of free will.

Of course the problem with this argument is that we need to evaluate the validity of the process of experimentation as a source of validation.

That's no problem at all, it works.

[tjohnson]

One determinist argument I've heard is: as long as we're programmed to validate reality through experimentation, this means we are still able to accurately understand reality in the absence of free will.

Of course the problem with this argument is that we need to evaluate the validity of the process of experimentation as a source of validation.

I find many of these expressions confusing, like 'accurately understand reality'. It seems to me that "reality" is not something we understand so much as something we map. One of Korzybski's more famous expressions is "the map is not the territory" and if you think of reality as the territory and our theories as maps then the goal is to produce as accurate maps as possible. You determine the accuracy of a map by trying to navigate the territory is supposedly represents and using the map analogy with language, you determine the accuracy of a theory by seeing how well it predicts the events we observe.

[Christopher]

One determinist argument I've heard is: as long as we're programmed to validate reality through experimentation, this means we are still able to accurately understand reality in the absence of free will.

Of course the problem with this argument is that we need to evaluate the validity of the process of experimentation as a source of validation.

I find many of these expressions confusing, like 'accurately understand reality'. It seems to me that "reality" is not something we understand so much as something we map. One of Korzybski's more famous expressions is "the map is not the territory" and if you think of reality as the territory and our theories as maps then the goal is to produce as accurate maps as possible. You determine the accuracy of a map by trying to navigate the territory is supposedly represents and using the map analogy with language, you determine the accuracy of a theory by seeing how well it predicts the events we observe.

I'm not sure how your comment relates to my quoted statement. Perhaps you could elaborate...