Mind as a conspiracy of cells

[motherengine]

i will try to expand at a later date but for now i will leave this note to provoke what it may. there is (in my personal estimation) no actual evidence to support the reality of freewill and yet neurological testing seems to have developed valid questions and even some evidence for determinism. i was once in a psychology classroom where a teacher was speaking about b. f. skinner and determinism when a student spoke up that the belief in determinism gave rise to an excuse to 'do whatever you want' and to my horror the teacher smiled and agreed and that was that. i did speak up and said 'but that does not mean it is not true', but was ignored. i have also debated the subject at some length in a humanities class in which we agreed to disagree but my disbelief in the reality of freewill seemed to greatly disturb my teacher. i mention all of this because i believe that there may be a defense system built up in the brain of the average person that prohibates them from approaching true logic when discussing a subject which challenges his or her morality. i have been physically threatened by people when discussing my views on freewill and shows that fear is involved. to me a kind of psychological inertia is happening to complicate perspective on this issue. one brain follws a course which can only be disrupted by outside events or another brain following its course and all of these courses are beyond our collective control. this all comes around to negating ideas of judgment, punishment and good and evil and so a reconstruction of social laws would be the first thing on the list if difinitive proof were to come about. thing is i believe there is much evidence for such a belief that is being ignored socially because of moral fear. i am not sure what i mean by all of this but it is my form of uncontroled inertia for the day.

[infamous]

If one believes that time began with the Big Bang, then all subsequent events were structured in that instant. All resulting actions could be considered to be preordained, even the chaos and or reorganization which would follow. We would like to think that we have choices because we esteem ourselves as intelligent, and without choices intelligence is useless. The future holds evidence for the destination of this journey that we are on, can we change it, that is the question? I would like to believe that we can, but am I sure that this is even a possibility? To many unanswered questions, and how will we ever know, if in fact our so called choices changed anything? I believe that the author of the Big Bang had the answers to those questions before this event occured, and has the answers for all events that will follow.

[Aquagem]

a teacher was speaking about b. f. skinner and determinism when a student spoke up that the belief in determinism gave rise to an excuse to 'do whatever you want' and to my horror the teacher smiled and agreed and that was that. .

 

Hi, there, and welcome to the Unending Discussion of free will and determinism! This first example is a conundrum that pops up continuously -- If I am fully determined by the laws of physics since the Big Bang, what's to keep me from doing just as I please? Here's the answer: If I'm fully determined, then I can't possibly do ANYTHING "just as I please". I can only do what I've been determined to do from the beginning of time! I have no free will to do anything -- just a illusory sense that I have freedom. If embracing determinism leads me to a life of dissipation or violence, there is nothing I can do to prevent it.

 

So the question, which pops up in all sorts of contexts, has an answer, after all, although it's not a very satisfying one for most people. We have the feeling that we are free to do what we want. Our neural machinery has a mental cue that has evolved to tell us when our perceptions arrive at the conclusion we can do or are doing something that is not determined. But, as you said, "It may not be true", which I don't think is stated often enough. I think every scientific paper (and certainly ANYTHING touching on religious ideas) should end with those words as a matter of social ritual, to force to face the fact that we just might not know what we're saying.

 

My favorite story that captures the sense of this argument is a fragment from Stoic philosophy. (I'm remembering the story - some details may be fuzzy.)

 

Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, had a slave, Epictetus, (later freed) who was also a philosopher. As the story goes, Epictetus knocked an expensive vase off a table and it shattered on the floor. Marcus Aurelius starting beating him for it. Epictetus cried out ,"Master, as a believer in determinism, you know that I had no choice in this matter, but was predestined from the beginning of time to break that vase!" Marcus Aurelius replied, still swinging, "And you, as a believer in determinism, know then that I have no choice but to beat you!"

 

i mention all of this because i believe that there may be a defense system built up in the brain of the average person that prohibates them from approaching true logic when discussing a subject which challenges his or her morality..

 

Cognitive dissonance theory is a well-documented function of the mind, and is one of my favorite subjects. Cognitive dissonance occurs whenever your word view and what you observe in the outer world don't jibe. All indications are that this is a built-in mechanism that operates continuously. It gives us our primary motive for learning -- to resolve the conflicts we encounter every day in all activities between belief and empirical fact.

 

Cognitive dissonance is the foundation of science, where a method of analysis and evaluation has learned to seek resolutions through the interaction between inner conceptual representations of the world and observations taken from the world outside the boundaries of our skin. Science takes explicit recognition of the fact that our senses may not be accurate and our understanding may be wrong, which means that if the outer world doesn't match our theories, either a) we need better observations, or, :) we need to adjust our theories.

 

But science in a special case. Usually, when we're faced with a glaring discontinuity between our internal picture of the world and what we observe in the world around us, is first to deny the observation, we "can't believe our eyes". This has been the mountain science has had to climb from the beginning, as every new discovery offended some cleric's idea of what the Bible said should be true, and for which the scientist had to be silenced, or punished (or today, ridiculed, or outvoted, or de-funded). The current point of attack by those deep into cognitive dissonance over science is biological evolution, and this, if nothing else, makes it worth studying up on the subjects (i.e, of evolution and also cognitive dissonance).

 

There's a lot more to this, but this is too long already. Try Googling "cognitive dissonance" and you'll find plenty of examples of what you yourself have seen when people are confronted with something they "know in their heart" just can't be true.

 

this all comes around to negating ideas of judgment, punishment and good and evil and so a reconstruction of social laws would be the first thing on the list if difinitive proof were to come about..

 

If pure determinism is true, this will or will not happen because it's already on rails. It won't be because we decide to do it and have the freedom to do it. We will have no choice, though we will think we do. (Please note -- I'm not convinced this is the only possibility, but it seems to be the only possibility (no free will in the sense we like to think about it), given the current state of our understanding. There are lots of other posts about this subject on Hypography.)

 

i am not sure what i mean by all of this but it is my form of uncontroled inertia for the day.

 

Hope it gets better... Are you determined to make it so?????:)

[infamous]

Excellent post Aquagem; One thing that I would like to point out here, I recieve a lot of critcism because I maintain a faith in a supreme being. At the same time, I also believe in natural selection which is offensive to others of faith. In each case, absolute proof is not available at present, although I do believe there is more empirical evidence to support evolution at this juncture. I don't feel I have a right to infulence someone else's opinion about there faith or lack thereof, only the right to defend my personal belief. I have been accused of having a closed mind because I continue to hold to my personal beliefs, even though I have not one shread of evidence. I get the same treatment from the religious right, because I prefer to see the evidence for natural selection. I'm truly tired of human prejudice, what ever the issue. I will continue to search for understanding to all these questions, I believe faith comes before understanding, no matter what the issue.

[ShadowMind]

i must say i do believe in free will but as in all cases free will does not affect the 1 who makes a choice and in exercising the free will of 1 the free will of another is distroyed. does this mean that the one without a choice can not exercise free will? i would reply no. he (dont kill me, or she) can stil refuse to put up with watever circumstance that befalls him. as for the matter of predestination how can we feel sad over the horrible things going on in the world how can we be angered by the pain of the innocent if it is all to be anyway in that case should we not do watever we want disregarding all morals and laws scince if we do so it was meant to be? i feel that this train of logic is flawed only leading to complete chaos. so if we have a choice in wat we do we have freewill no?

[motherengine]

just to clarify one thing. i believe the idea of one using determinism to justify aberrant behavior as suggested in my psychology class (developmental) was centered on the view that we do have freewill. but even if one does not have freewill if his/her individual tendencies are to capitolize on logistics in order to do what ever they want then the idea of determinism could cause the kind of psychological inertia that i mentioned earlier and give rise to aberrance that would not have occured otherwise. my personal problem with this argument though is that the idea that all humans have freewill has been used to justify many atrocities in the name of justice; 'if joe has freewill then he is in control of his actions and since his actions are in violation of our sense of right, joe must be punished'. i believe that if freewill does not exist there is still a complexity that prevent prediction in behavior.

[Aquagem]

... but even if one does not have freewill if his/her individual tendencies are to capitolize on logistics in order to do what ever they want then the idea of determinism could cause the kind of psychological inertia that i mentioned earlier and give rise to aberrance that would not have occured otherwise.

 

There's that old conundrum again... I determinism is true (as we're talking about it here) there couldn't have been any otherwise. The premise that you can or can't capitalize on logistics, etc., has absolutely nothing to do with the prof says -- He couldn't help saying it, and the hearer couldn't help believing it. If determinism is "true", nothing could have happened otherwise. I know how repugnant this sounds, and I feel that myself.

 

I want to take it one step further, though, and question whether determinism, as used in the determinism/free will debate for 25 centuries at least, might be subject to different interpretations, with what we have come to understand about how evolution works, how our brains are constructed, and whether the two terms are even legitimately considered opposites. Until we transcend the iron box of language we're in, we're in jail!

[Aquagem]

By the bye, this same discussion, with little variation, is going on in at least a couple of other threads. Does anybody monitor this sort of thing and gently suggest combining themes? I came to this thread today to copy a previous post I'd done on the free will issue to "Intelligence the Root of All Evil", but it seems like a waste of space to repeat myself.

 

I think a discussion of mental organization along the lines of the title of this thread would be thought-provoking and fun, if it ever gets around to that...

[infamous]

By the bye, this same discussion, with little variation, is going on in at least a couple of other threads. Does anybody monitor this sort of thing and gently suggest combining themes? I came to this thread today to copy a previous post I'd done on the free will issue to "Intelligence the Root of All Evil", but it seems like a waste of space to repeat myself.

 

I think a discussion of mental organization along the lines of the title of this thread would be thought-provoking and fun, if it ever gets around to that...

 

I agree with your position on this issue Aquagem, I believe that those decisions are however left up to our moderators.