SteveWolfer

I'm not familiar, or up to date on what is going on in neuroscience. I see psychology (assuming it gets its act together a bit better) moving towards a better understanding what mediates behavior. Right now it is often either metaphorical references, like much of Freudian theory, or broad strokes like we see in today's Cognitive descriptions of motivation. But I think that with attempts at AI in software, they will model psychology in ways that talk about subconscious subroutines... and in doing so dig deeper and deeper. (Large software programs are made of many smaller routines and they have still smaller subroutines, and so forth). The AI subroutines ought to be useful models for psychologists (having done both psychology and software, I can appreciate the way each illuminates the other). And starting at the other end, at the neuroscience end, they will be attempting to understand how this or that pattern of electrochemical activity connects to the lowest levels of cognitive activity described in psychology (the most primitive of the AI subroutines). Like building a bridge by starting at each side and working towards the middle. But I think the middle is much farther away then both sides imagine - we still know less than we think we do.

What gives that statement a kind of religious, dogmatic quality, is not just that one can ask how can you say YOU are thinking, YOU are choosing how to reply to a post, and not your substrate, but it the adamant, unyielding assertion that there is no volition which is like saying, "there is no mouse in the house... prove me wrong!"

Ba'al replied: True. And software can do facial recognition and software has been created that can recognize an image of a horse in photos or video. It wouldn't be any harder to have software recognize babies, and to store images of the babies seen, and links to the stored images and any associated meta-data. The computer could then 'visualize' (bring into active memory, or onto a screen) a stored image even when no baby is about. But it would need to be programmed. It would be determined. You and I can choose to visualize a baby or not - the computer can't. Our consciousness includes some form of volition. We are agents and software can't do that, and reductionism when applied to volition is like applying chemistry principles to grammar problems. Adopting reductionism as if it were a one-size-fits-all dogma has the effect of putting on blinders that keeps science away from the truth in some areas.

The reductionist program isn't even in the right ball park when we are talking about volition. And any system as adopted by a person that denies the existence of thoughts, of consciousness, of values, of relationships is, at the least, being adopted in the wrong way. If I attempted to apply the principles of chemistry to writing a software routine I wouldn't have much success. There is always a context defining the boundaries of the area to which principles are being applied - there has to be a match between the context and the principles. Another example would be applying principles of physics to solve a grammar problem. When you 'reduce' an issue of psychology or of human nature to meat, whatever is left in the bathtub doesn't include the baby.

I know.... I was watching the baby disappear down the drain with the bathwater.

Philosophy exists as a foundation for science. I have to ask if you've read Ayn Rand's essay on the need for philosophy? It was the ancient Greeks that first took thought away from the mysticism of everything is created by the gods and began a journey that led to modern science. If you think that modern science could have sprung full blown from the minds of people in some pre-Socratic time your instrument is out of tune. And without the work done by Aristotle, where would logic and critical thinking be today? It's like you are annoyed with children and propose that women give birth to adult beings who won't annoy you so much. Good luck with that. Even the most primitive of tribes provides some degree of order that is at least slightly better for surviving than wandering off in the wilds alone - or living in the complete chaos of a society with no rules, no traditions, no order, no moral code and, as you can imagine, no safety. Science owes its existence to a philosophy that values reason and its morality that sanctions the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Without philosophy you would have no civilization, no science, no computer, no time to spend in thoughts unrelated to finding something to eat and hiding from those that would kill you for scraps. Are you just baiting the people here? It is hard to believe you are serious... seriously.

Yes, that's pretty much what I'm thinking. I'd tend to use the word volition rather than free will since 'free will' can be too broadly interpreted, but that is just a minor detail. The act of selecting between imagined alternatives is where the focusing in (or avoiding a clear focus) is what tips the scale for one alternative or another. Each alternative is like a bundle of pros and cons - reasons and emotions, beliefs and importance rankings. Better to use the concept of 'self-esteem' than 'confidence' since confidence is dependent on a given skillset or an area of activity and self-esteem is so much broader - just another minor detail. You clearly have the principle right - growing self-esteem will result from the proper exercise of consciousness in this way (and lower self-esteem will result from avoiding proper focus). And like bio-feedback the exercise of volition is a mechanism/technique for steering what otherwise is under automatic control of subconscious routines. I'm writing a book on human nature where I hope to communicate this theory of volition more completely. One example I've given many times is to imagine that you are driving to work.... taking the route you've used for months. And, as usual, thing slow down approaching this one major intersection. An annoyance at the slow down on this day spurs you to think of a way to get rid of it. You imagine taking a right a few blocks before the intersection, then after a block or two, taking a left. Then once past that intersection returning to your original path. You are imagining something that has never existed before - you taking that new path. You analyze that alternative. It adds distance. The side street traffic flow might be slower. Going a new path will be fun. It may be a shorter time. It takes a bit of psychic energy to break an old habit and that is felt as a kind of lethargy or resistance. There is the annoyance at sitting in traffic weighting on the old path. This is a simple example where there is little that would be a major self-esteem issue. The level of thought energy in putting logic to work is minor. This process of directing your focus will shift things till an alternative is chosen. On slightly bigger issues, the pull from negative/defensive motives will often be pitted against positive/rational motives... in the sense of involving being more conscious rather than less, being more responsible for yourself than less, honoring your integrity more or less, etc. And in those cases self-esteem will be more strongly effected. It goes on constantly - it is us taking input - evaluating - factoring in purposes - and then having the goal provided that we can act on. It is fascinating because of the nexus between logic and critical thinking, emotions, motivational psychology, our level of knowledge, our self-awareness, our self-esteem, and the understanding that this is the heart of where we are steering ourselves through life.

There is a level on which we agree. If my context is the world of physical entities, there is only matter and energy. And I would agree that 'mind' does not exist in the same sense that items made of atoms do. But when we grasp that we can have thoughts that allow us to understand things, and that much of what we think involves grasping relationships, that is important. I can understand a repulsion to any claims of 'ghosts in the machine' or mystical explanations. And I can understand wanting to apply the laws of physics to all things. But thoughts and relationships need to examined in an honest fashion that recognizes that we can't just dismiss their difference or in a religious-like fashion dogmatically cling to hard determinism of any kind of quasi-mystical claim that reason won't support. What makes this so important is the understanding of issues of responsibility, of agency. On these our social structures and our understanding of bodies of knowledge that revolve around human behavior will depend. I am comfortable letting my mind have a blank spot - an area where it says, "To be Determined" - I don't know the details of how we will resolve these issues. But I do know we aren't squawking parrots and I do know we aren't puppets of a mystical spirit that operates outside of natural law. We have agency of sorts and we will one day understand it (but only if we leave our minds open to what we don't know).

My explanation is a bit different. It is that this choice point reoccurs daily, hourly, maybe every second. And it comes not in just an awareness of aloneness, but in many different experiences. And we make choices on how to focus (or not focus). I agree with your understanding of the choice made leading to choices in philosophy, etc. But I see it as not a single event, but a repeated cycle, a recursive loop where we use the product of awareness, our current knowledge in the context of the moment, past experiences that relate, our imagination of what might be in this context, our emotional impulses of the moment, our kind and level of motivation in the area. With that as the input and setting, we exert a tiny bit of control on the pointing of our focus and on the kind of focus, which shifts things towards one alternative over the others - making a choice. The choice may be so small, like should I read a bit more, say of a topic that is bringing up uncomfortable feelings. It is really a choice between engaging in a kind of avoidance behavior instead of looking at the discomfort to see what it is. And if we choose to look closer, then we may be presented with two different ways of viewing ourselves and one my be less comfortable, and if we choose to focus on that view we may find we are able to choose between alternatives where one is an act of self-acceptance, and if we choose that it may alter our self-esteem just enough to shift the balance on yet another decision..... maybe on what alternative to choose between two beliefs. That's a very abbreviated view of my idea of the recursive loop or cycle in which we use focus to shift between alternatives, and where the way we use focus has the effect of opening us to using logic, or on the other hand using defensive mechanisms, emotionalism, blanking out, etc.

Excellent thread! I had already heard about the hydrocephalus resulting in the brain matter that was but a very thin sheet on the inside of the skull in a functional man with a job and family. There is also the fact that for the first few years of life it doesn't seem to matter which part of the brain becomes associated with which function (up to a point). E.g., if the Broca's area is damaged early on, the child can still learn to speak and some other area takes develops as the speech area. But later on, this isn't the case. I could go on about that and it's relationship to the issue of mind and matter, or about the way that some feeling states from a person's distant past are 'stored' as a pattern of muscle tensions... but I suspect that people would have to go back and follow that link first to have any interest. I sure miss Branden.

As you receive your input, open your mind to the choices that can be imagined, the alternatives available, the kind of mental/emotional experiences you desire, the desires you choose to pursue... and the joy of choosing, of being the author of ones' own life.

The pros and cons of living in a meat machine are obvious, and it is one of those areas where we have little choice.... but to s ay that there is no "I" is a serious philosophical, moral, political, psychological issue.

Once upon a time man could not predict the time of sunrise a month of so in advance. At this time we can not accurately predict the weather more than 3 days or so out. Our ability to predict something isn't the sole factor to be examined. I'll let Ba'al express for himself what his belief is. But I maintain that all the forms of soft determinism are logically reducible (no pun intended) to hard determinism. We have to bite the bullet and acknowledge that at this point in our understanding that there is one entity we know of that can exercise volition and that volition is a form of first cause. That we are agents. Metaphysics is where we should look to understand that nature of causality itself. And it is a property of entities. If it exists, it may have the potential of being the cause of an effect. The nature of the entity determines what it can cause. But does that allow that any form of choice, actual expression of will, of volition to be what determines the succeeding events? A person can say that the thinking a person did in the past, the things they learned, the social/cultural/peer pressures that have impinged upon their experiences, their mood of the day, even their DNA and the effects of embryology would effect what any given mental/emotional state. Who could argue with that? But if at each moment of awareness, the person isn't able to choose to focus differently - however minor the shift - then we have no volition and if we have zero volition, we are automatons and expressions of electro-chemical states whose causal chain does indeed go back to the big bang. Without volition, what would interrupt the causal chain of physical states determining succeeding physical states? In psychology one is always looking for what determines a given pattern of behavior or state of mind. If some guy has a history of self-sabotage in all of his romantic relationships, a therapist wants to know what are the beliefs, thoughts, and/or emotions that lead to taking actions that kill off otherwise good relationships. But that is a cause and effect where the cause is located in entity in specific, not in all humans. And, it is about what can this man choose to do differently that will upset this self-defeating pattern. I'm saying that the use of the word 'determined' in this sense is nothing like how Ba'al is using it and nothing like the argument between those who say man has volition. I come at this with different motivations. One is that of psychology and self-esteem and happiness. In these I know that we need a sense of ourselves as potentially efficacious beings who are the agents of our actions - that we choose. In this if purpose and logic aren't aligned, which requires logical consistency, we can't succeed. Another motivation for me is the understanding of the many ways that we must structure both our understanding of and the construction and maintenance of) social sciences and social structures. Without volition as a part of our understanding of human nature, we will have no basis for morality, psychology, politics, law, etc. Why would you have a courthouse to be part of a legal system that depends upon the very concept of people choosing to obey the law or not? And there is what feels very much like a personal motivation: It feels like an affront to my personhood and a slap in the face to logic to say that one doesn't have some degree of choice (how does someone choose to say they have no choice - only predetermined responses to existing stimuli? I'm not following you exactly... part of what you are saying is about "more interesting in general" and I got lost as to the context there. But there are processes with general, somewhat teleological cause-effect natures, like evolution, embryology, physical development, mental/emotional development, and I'm fascinated by the somewhat metaphysical commonalities in those, and the epistemological aspect of shifting our level of abstraction, the breadth of the context, as we try to grasp those commonalities. Note, for example, the clear presence of an increase in options available to the subject in question as time moves forward in evolution, in various forms of (heathy) individual development, with increases in self-awareness, on the spectrum from mental disorders to mental health, with increases in political freedom, with increased knowledge. There is something very fundamental about the relationship between options available and survival (or flourishing). And evolution gave us the capacity to imagine things that have never been before (small and trivial - like oatmeal or cold cereal for breakfast tomorrow, or huge like a new break through in science) - make alternative in our imaginations, and if reason and knowledge and purpose align, we have created options for ourselves. But if we can't exercise choices at any level, then this is... what? Squawking of a parrot. Neurochemical impulses creating muscle contractions in the larynx and sensations that are just the experience of brain chemical changes. You can't see the stars or understand your love from there.

I choose to believe that a thought is an entity and it is not physical, even though it is mediated by physical processes. I choose to believe that relationships are entities despite being non-physical. You, if your statements were true, have no choices. You are (in your mind) an automaton whose every action, every 'thought' and 'feeling' was theoretically predetermined at the moment of the big bang. Your words and sentences, according to your theory, have no more meaning than the squawks of a parrot who doesn't have understanding (understanding being one of those relationships - one that can be grasped as a thought by those who have choice).

It is interesting to see fundamental approaches to the very idea of deriving a morality. I really enjoyed Jane Jacob's book, Systems of Survival, which gave an account of discovering that our culture had evolved two moral codes of sorts as suited differing purposes in society. There are some forms of Buddhism where a morality is devised not to suit a god or even much of a greater good, but to achieve a kind of inner peace. The owner of the Objectivist-oriented "Rebirth of Reason" forum, Joe Rowlands, has a excellent book, "Morality Needs No God", that describes what morality is and takes it out of the religious context and above all, shows its relation to our self-interest. And, of course, in the same vein, Ayn Rand's brilliant exposition of Rational Egoism.

When you say "It is not a stand alone object" I first want to agree that there is no single entity that stands alone. Only a concept like existence could be said to stand alone (alone in the sense that there is nothing else). But I hesitated to go down that road since you are using the word "object" and that usually refers to a physical entity. Had you said that the mind was not a stand alone entity, that would also be true since there can be no mind without the brain to mediate it and no consciousness without something to be conscious of. Having said all of that, none of it says that there cannot be non-physical entities. Like thoughts. You have thoughts. I doesn't matter that they require a brain. They also require perceptions. They require that you be biologically alive so that your brain can mediate these thoughts. I think you are stuck with admitting that all that is physical is a subset of all that exists. For everything that exists (physical or not) there are relations to other things that exist. As a former software developer I'm keenly aware of the power inherent in meta-data. Data about data. Meta-data includes data about thoughts about things. Where would Google be without its searchable indexes (which are examples of meta-data).

There are a number of issues here. 1. Unless this is some kind of completely cuckoo society where no one dis-values theft, Adam will need to be dishonest, sneaky, and deceitful. He will have to lie. So those are other 'values' that either he dis-values, or he will fail his personal integrity. 2. When a person can't be open about who they are and what they do, when they have to live deceptively, they do great damage to their self-esteem because there are critical areas where they cannot be self-assertive (putting out into the world who one is). 3. I'm just guessing that many thieves, in more or less normal societies, who say that they don't dis-value theft, are at least partly lying to themselves and repressing their negatives feeling... and that puts a limit on their self-esteem. If means they are failing to be as self-accepting as they could. (Self-acceptance is a major pillar of self-esteem, and one that may have no upper limit) 4. It is also likely to be an issue of personal responsibility. We need to feel that we are carrying our own weight. A thief is a kind of parasite. 5. A stupid person might not grasp that, but most others will find that they can only avoid that mental/emotional conflict by some kind of failure to exercise conscious awareness and instead to either blank out thoughts that conflict, or engage in denial and/or emotional repression and/or an irrational projection. 6. Although it isn't explicit as one of the six pillars, there is a great source of self-esteem and joy that comes out of those sets of actions that result in being productive. And there are aspects of a normal career, one that admits to a rational amount of ambition, that is denied to the typical thief. One can nibble around the edges, asking questions, probing on something of an academic level into what Branden is saying. And that is all good - it is part of critical thinking and the way we should come to our own conclusions - making them our own. But then, with this subject - what makes self-esteem - we have to find a very different mental/emotional approach. We have to pursue using our minds in that way. It is like the difference between studying techniques for acquiring physical fitness, and actually starting a program of exercise and nutrition.

I can't recommend Nathaniel Branden's book "Six Pillars of Self-Esteem" too highly. It not only gives one a clear idea of what self-esteem is, and the role it plays in our life, but it also explains the specific causes of self-esteem.

Well said. We are totally in agreement on this. I would have made only a tiny change: "What is mine is Mine and what is yours is subject to my regulation [and/or confiscation]." Like Reagan once quipped, "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

Cause is a relationship between an object and actions possible to an object of that nature. When looking at physical objects through the lens of the laws of physics it may be very appropriate to consider Quantum Theory. But when the object is a human being and the action is choosing to focus more tightly on an issue, or to become less focused, that would be a very poor lens and what would be seen would not relate to volition, that action, or the nature of man. Physics is a discipline, a body of knowledge, but not the only one. If I'm trying understand something written in a book, I don't look to see what laws of physics are applicable to that book - I don't look to see how it is held to the table top by gravity. And I don't make the mistake of choosing the lens of chemistry and trying to find the meaning of the sentences in the chemical make-up of the ink. The billiard ball kind of cause-effect model works for playing billiards, and, to a limited degree, every day life. It is always about objects interacting with other objects. It can even help one, under certain circumstances, advance the narrative on a given attempt to understand something. But, it is wrong at the root because cause is, and should be understood as, that within the nature of an entity that explains an action. There are certain human actions whose cause can be the choice to act, and that choice to act might be understood to have been caused by an emotional impulse, and that emotional impulse might be seen as the effect of a pattern of past choices, and that pattern might find it's ultimate cause in an act of free will - an act of volition - an act of choosing to not focus the mind, to go blank, under certain circumstances. [Think about the stolen concept fallacy in this context. Can one understand "determinism" in the context of human actions, without first grasping the concept of volition of some sort? No. Determinism in the context of human behavior is only understood as in opposition to volitional. Going to Quantum Theory does not make man the agent in any action of his - it is just a different kind of determinism.]

You haven't given us any guidance on these questions.

I started with a couple of Internet definitions: 1. A principle is a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning. 2. Moral: That which is concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character and goals. (Not the best definition, but it'll do for now) Putting those two together gives: A moral principle would be a fundamental truth or proposition relating to the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character and goals. -------------- Ayn Rand's definition: A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. Combining that with combination above gives this: An individual right is a fundamental proposition relating to man's freedom of action in a social context. It serves the purpose of marking the limits of freely initiated behavior and the relations between men so as to allow the greatest flourishing by granting the greatest restriction of initiated force. (somewhat freely modified to suit our purpose of flourishing and to incorporate the fact that right are only violated by the initiation of force). And then, to get where I wanted to go... which is to show that individual rights are relationships: Individual rights arise out of human nature and the requirements of human life. They constitute a moral relationship between the action of an individual and an object, such as a property right that defines an action, say the sale of a car that is properly owned by the individual. Individual -->Rightful Action-->Object

My goodness, what are you implying :-) Yes, the referents are specific things (my mother and my father and me - made of atoms, each and every one of us), but when you start talking about fathers or mothers collectively that collective term is a concept and concepts aren't physical. You could say the concept "refers" to a physical thing, but by being a referent means it isn't the thing. And then when you talk about a relationship you've clearly left the world of atoms. What is the physical make up of a 'relationship' as such? It is my fond hope that you will come to see the insurmountable (and unnecessary) difficulty of insisting that only the physical exists... since it cuts out thought, relationships, emotions, values, rights... so much of what is clearly present and important.

I'm still trying to figure out the best way to argue that all that exists includes more than that which is physical.

That's true. But there is another side to it. Most of the theoretical orientations arose out of just one or two striking ideas. And often, the idea was valuable, but didn't justify the creation of an entire theory around it. Often that theoretical orientation became, as a whole, as you stated, premature and demented. Psychoanalysis was the first time that "talk therapy" became an official therapeutic agent. Freud correctly identified projection as a defense mechanism and theorized that if the analyst was as opaque as possible that the patient would project onto the analyst and that this would have the effect of letting the patient move to freeing themselves of this defense. So, he liked the fact that men wore heavy beards (harder to see their facial expressions), and he positioned the patient on the couch and sat out of their sight, and he let as little as possible be known about himself. Easier to project anger at a father figure onto this opaque analyst than if they were eye to eye and transparent as to who they were. That was a case of a valuable identification of a subconsciously mediated defense mechanism generating much of a set of techniques for talk therapy that are very ineffective. One reason some of the theories don't die is the one or two valuable nuggets the theory formed around. There are other reasons as to why the demented and premature and ineffective parts aren't pruned away. Going back to Freud... this isn't the time of the place, but there are some very interesting aspects to him, and his history. (E.g., he modeled his developmental theories on Darwin's theory of evolution and in his home he had all of Darwin's writings in well-read, heavily annotated forms.) I'm NOT a Freudian and disagree with most of his theoretical orientation and techniques, but I studied under a Freudian at a clinic where I practiced for a while (part of the University... he was the Dean). He had studied under Jung in Switzerland after getting his PhD at UCLA. He wrote a fun book entitled "Makers of Psychology" - I've made that a link so that anyone interested can look at the two reviews of the book on Amazon. Harvey had a great sense of humor, was endlessly curious about different theories of psychology, and was one of the people who helped me understand the difference between theoretical orientation and therapeutic technique.