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[lw1990]

@moses
if as you say 'experiencing occurs when brain nerve impulses enter somewhere in the brain', then that is a physical process. brain mechanics are a physical process. The rest of what you are saying such as light, colour, scent, beauty, sound, etc. being non physical simply isn't true. Light is physical, colour is a physical effect from a physical interaction and a physical interpretation of signals coming into our eyes and processed by our physical brain, beauty is largely a pre-set mixture of features given by DNA and a mixture of learned features throughout our lives (disney always gives its characters bigger eyes to have 'cuter' characters, which is a close cousin of 'beauty'), but all of these things reside as synapses in the brain, pieces of code in our DNA, and things like that. Scent is also an interpretation of real life environmental signals by the brain, aided by various other body parts. Sound, again, a processing of external signals by the brain and other various body parts.

@grey cloud

you said when we're not awake we are still conscious, incorrect
a 'different state of consciousness' is right, it's called being subconscious. Just because it has the word conscious inside subconscious, does not mean it means the same thing, in the same way a woman is not a man just because it has the letters 'man' in the word.

The subconscious directly correlates with what I'm saying; that the brain manufactures a sense of control, not your concept of free will or detached control to any extent, and your consciousness on top of your subconscious just gives you the illusion of your sense of control. You lose that sense of control and that consciousness, to varying degrees and at different times, every time you sleep. In those moments between dreams while asleep, no one seems to think you have 'free will' over how your body turns over or snores during sleep. As soon as an individual wakes up and feel 'conscious' again, they resume thinking they are in control of their lives. Yet, what gave them back that consciousness relies completely in a physical brain, which behaves according to physical laws. You can dream and hope and pray that there is more to the story, but no non-physical evidence has ever been found or shown to correlate with brain activity. So, while your opinion may mean something to you and people who believe like you do, without evidence there is no reason for anyone else to subscribe to your belief going forward.

[Grey Cloud]

@@@@@ and coats,

lw1990,

You did not say 'conscious' you said 'consciousness'.

you said when we're not awake we are still conscious, incorrect

I did not say any such thing. I wrote: 'We do not lose consciousness when we sleep - we enter a different state of consciousness'. So once again it is you who are 'incorrect'.
You then go on to agree with me:

a 'different state of consciousness' is right,

I'll forego comment on the rest but you should beware, science is starting to catch up with you:
Harvard scientists think they've pinpointed the physical source of consciousness
http://www.sciencealert.com/harvard-sci ... sciousness
That's from today but don't worry these stories pop up every now and again before fading away.

A few hundred years ago during the Enlightenment period, the empiricists said that everything one knows comes via one's senses. Kant's response was - yes but there must already be something within one to give meaning and order to the input otherwise one could not function (or survive).

[moses]

lw1990,
brain nerve impulses entering somewhere in the brain is a physical process, but the actual experiencing induced by this is clearly non-physical if one simply asks the who, what, how, when, where, why of that experiencing. And then there is a heap of qualities that can be ascribed to experiencing, like sensitivity, austerity, simplicity, freedom, order, compassion, depth, seriousness, intelligence, clarity, virtue, passion, creativity, learning, vitality, silence, gentleness, peacefulness, strength, denial, wisdom, beauty, and of course, love and understanding.

You cannot tell where your experiencing is. Think about it.

Grey Cloud,
Psychologists use two different defnitions of consciousness, one uses awareness and arousal, whilst the others use experiencing = consciousness. And then throw in Jaynes and others means 'consciousness' is a word worth avoiding.

Cheers,
Mo

[Grey Cloud]

Grey Cloud,
Psychologists use two different defnitions of consciousness, one uses awareness and arousal, whilst the others use experiencing = consciousness. And then throw in Jaynes and others means 'consciousness' is a word worth avoiding.

Mo.
Agreed but I agree more with your previous post vis-a-vis the ancient and eastern use of the word.
'The All is in all; all is the All'.
'All is Mind - the Universe is mental'.

[lw1990]

@grey cloud


doesn't matter if it's in adjective or noun form, you were wrong that we still have the above definition while asleep
you can try to run and hide in ever more obscure definitions of consciousness like 'being' or 'experiencing' in some voodoo type context, but the fact is that even most 'free will' believers would admit that they don't have 'free will' while asleep.

@grey cloud and moses

When your 'free will' turns off because the brain merely switches into a different state, such as states during sleep (especially when not dreaming), that suggests very strongly the brain is in ultimate control of your sense of free will, it being a sense, not an actual thing indepedent of the brain, not a thing mysteriously affecting the brain equally at all times, but changes in degree/intensity depending on the brain the state is in as well as whether parts of the brain are missing, etc. All evidence points to humans having the illusion of self control or free-will-based decision making when it is actually solely determined by the brain and the rest of the natural world. I don't really care if you 'vibe' with some eastern voodoo view of the universe or if it makes you feel good, I just look at the mountain of evidence - which does not start or stop at one singled out google result for some harvard group's claim, it starts with common sense and the evidence seemingly has no end.

[Grey Cloud]

'The awareness of perception of something by a person'. - e.g. a dream, a loud noise which awakens you or the realisation you need to get up and have a piss.

'The fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world'. - e.g. a dream, a loud noise which awakens you or the realisation you need to get up and have a piss.

As I stated previously, I'm not advocating free will.

All evidence points to humans having the illusion of self control or free-will-based decision making when it is actually solely determined by the brain and the rest of the natural world.

Then provide some evidence.

I don't really care if you 'vibe' with some eastern voodoo view of the universe or if it makes you feel good, I just look at the mountain of evidence

Voodoo has its roots in Africa not the East. 'Vibe' is so sixties. I study eastern philosophy, mostly Vedanta and Tao plus some Buddhist and a few others. I also study Greek and Hermetic. What philosophy have you studied that you feel qualified to dismiss over two thousand years of intellectual endeavour? Have you any idea how immature such statements are? Again, throw us a few rocks from this mountain of evidence.

I linked the Harvard piece because a: it was from that day and b: it showed that science still does not know where the consciousness resides. Perhaps you should write to them and put them right.

and the evidence seemingly has no end.

And seemingly no beginning either.

The thing about common sense is that it is not that common.

[lw1990]

most people are not 'aware' they are dreaming, they may be dreaming, but they are not 'aware' much less alert, and are definitely not 'awake'.
if a loud noise awakens someone, they are not asleep anymore. we are talking about being asleep, not after awaking. during sleep you are not awake and therefore you are not conscious. loud noises wake us up as a survival mechanism. no one here is claiming that when you sleep, you're brain dead, the claim is that you are not concious, alert, or even seemingly in control of your mental state. when you awake, you become seemingly in control of your mental state, at least more so than when asleep, and especially regarding decision making. the important word is 'seemingly', there has never been a shred of evidence to suggest we can act independently of past events, as all other objects and lifeforms act completely dependently on past events, moment to moment.

do you know what an antonym is?


evidence has been provided, try teleporting your arm to the other side of the room instantly, this is a scientific experiment you can do to verify that your arm, as well as the rest of your body, obeys natural laws, and is not supernatural or magical in any way, you are not a god, you can not use a magical will to make your body not behave according to physics/physical laws, you can also not make your brain, which is a physical part of your physical body just like your arm, make decisions based on a magical will for the same reason you can't alter the behavior of your arm in a magical way. Anything which does not behave the natural laws that control atoms and smaller components is magical, because there is no evidence such things exist in the first place. Yet, you can research for yourself how the brain, your arm, etc behave according to physics; if you really believe I need to personally give you this obvious and easily accessible evidence then you are not rational. I would start with anatomy textbooks to know why your arm can't do things like transform into a dolphin.

The counter claim to this physical evidence so far is that there is an elusive non-physical thing affecting the physical brain. No evidence that anything non-physical exists, including this. None. So I don't care if that's your theory, there's no evidence. Rational people need some iota of evidence to even start to take you seriously. The reason so many rational people believe in this 0 evidence free will idea, religions, or any magical existential idea counter to determinism is because they simply haven't thought it through objectively. It's the same way so many people believed the earth was flat, it just 'seemed' true when it was always assumed to be true. The evidence suggests otherwise, like it or not.

[moses]

Free will comes via experiencing. A robot has no experiencing and no free will. Consider the enormous difference between objects that have, or do not have, experiencing. The real life of an object is it's experiencing. The more sophisticated is the object the more sophisticated is it's experiencing, as in cells for example.

But I fully concur that the common belief in free will is incorrect. It comes from conflict and in the resolution of that conflict there arises the notion "I chose". But there was presumably no free will choice. And what is "I"?

The belief in free will is thus deluded. We agree. And this has little to do with whether there actually is some way of having free will. This needs a very deep inquiry using the ancient understanding built up from such inquiry. Whereas seeing that people's belief in free will is deluded, is simple enough to see.

cheers,
Mo

[lw1990]

@moses
you are right the illusion of free will, of choice, and of self control comes entirely from the complex brain
but it is an illusion and not a real thing, just like vision is an illusion - it portrays the real world in front of us in a simplified manner. the images hitting our brain are not real, they are signals, which are real, which interacted with or came from real things, but the images themselves that we see in our vision are not 'real'. They also do not reflect the total reality of the visual spectrum, just a tiny sliver of it. That's why it's important to distinguish what is real and what is not, otherwise you may conclude that what we see is all there is, or that what we feel (free will) is all there is, and that there is no deeper truth. The deeper truth is that we are part of the natural world just like a rock, a deer, a cell, and we are not above or below or detached from the natural world in any way; just a different organization of similar building blocks allowing novel forms of things like thought, movement, civilization, and organization.

I make this parallel between the illusion of visual images being the total reality vs the non-deterministic self illusion because both are largely persistent throughout our waking lives

[Grey Cloud]

lw1990,

Your posts are becoming ever more irrational and incoherent in your desperation to score a point off me. You also seem to have lost the Caps Lock key again.

most people are not 'aware' they are dreaming, they may be dreaming, but they are not 'aware' much less alert, and are definitely not 'awake'.

You seem to be an expert in what people are doing or not doing in any given situtaion. Personally, sometimes I am aware that I am dreaming and I watch the dream unfold. More often I recall the dream when I am awake, whether hours or days later. So there can be a degree of awareness while asleep. Who has suggested that one is awake while asleep?

we are talking about being asleep,

We were actually talking about consciousness. You wrote that we lost consciousness when we slept. I challenged this stating that we didn't lose consciousness but entered a different state of consciousness. You then quoted me with a statement I had not made: 'you said when we're not awake we are still conscious'. You then went on, in the same paragraph, to agree with what I had actually said: 'a 'different state of consciousness' is right'.

loud noises wake us up as a survival mechanism.

One is asleep when the noise registers, one's state of consciousness then alters to the awake state as a result. Ditto the need to have a piss. Is this a survival trait too?

Yes thank you, I know what an antonym is. What I do not understand is what they have to do with the present subject. The examples you provided are seemingly antonyms of sleep.

evidence has been provided, try teleporting your arm to the other side of the room instantly, this is a scientific experiment

What evidence has been provided for what? How does the first part of this sentence relate to the second part? That is not a scientific experiment, it is one of your tin-pot analogies. When I was 10 years old I couldn't drive a car or build my own PC. That did not mean such things were impossible. Presumably the rest of the blather relates to free will rather than consciousness. How many times do I have to state that I am not advocating free will? I see your obsession with the word 'magical' has resurfaced.

I would start with anatomy textbooks to know why your arm can't do things like transform into a dolphin

Are we still on free will here or have we gone back to consciousness? Surely according to Darwinian Evolution dolphins and humans had a common ancestor so they have both, in fact, transformed from one thing into another. I would suggest that an arm would transform into a fin rather than a whole dolphin.

The counter claim to this physical evidence so far is that there is an elusive non-physical thing affecting the physical brain.

'Elusive' means difficult to find or catch. You have not even tried. You have no knowledge of any of the related subjects e.g. psychology, philosophy, biology etc. yet you somehow feel yourself qualified to dismiss the notion out of hand.

Rational people need some iota of evidence to even start to take you seriously.

That is exactly why I keep asking you for evidence.
Would you consider Plato and Aristotle as rational? I could mention a host of others but you probably haven't heard of them. Plato did not believe the Earth to be flat, he stated quite clearly that it was spherical. The sheeple, those with no breadth or depth of knowlege who clung to their comfort zone probably did believe it to be flat.
You threw in the word 'existential' - another philosophy you know nothing about.

Still awaiting evidence from science, psychology, philosophy, etc. showing support for your assertions.

[Grey Cloud]

lw1990,

you are right the illusion of free will, of choice, and of self control comes entirely from the complex brain
but it is an illusion and not a real thing, just like vision is an illusion - it portrays the real world in front of us in a simplified manner. the images hitting our brain are not real, they are signals, which are real, which interacted with or came from real things, but the images themselves that we see in our vision are not 'real'. They also do not reflect the total reality of the visual spectrum, just a tiny sliver of it. That's why it's important to distinguish what is real and what is not, otherwise you may conclude that what we see is all there is, or that what we feel (free will) is all there is, and that there is no deeper truth. The deeper truth is that we are part of the natural world just like a rock, a deer, a cell, and we are not above or below or detached from the natural world in any way; just a different organization of similar building blocks allowing novel forms of things like thought, movement, civilization, and organization.

That is actually quite good. Now let us try to think it through.
If there is a difference between 'total 'reality' and the 'limited reality' we have access to, then would the task not be to try to bridge that gap?
So how to do this?
'Know thyself' - learns one's limitations and abilities.
'One eye for study and one eye for meditation'. Study to learn as much about the 'physical' world as possible. Study what the world's great eachers have written to save yourself from mwasting time going over old ground and making mistakes. Meditate (from the Greek 'properly, to care for, attend to; hence be diligent') to to sift through the information and to find the correct questions or the correct way to ask them. When you think you have found an answer, put it on and wear it (accept it as true for the time being). See how it pans out in the actual day to day world. If it doesn't then drop it and start again.
All this takes many, many years, i.e. decades. It is a difficult and often frustrating endeavour. It is diametrically oppessed to today's culture of short-termism and instant gratification.
It is scientific in that that the philosophers of e.g. Greece, India and China all, independently, used a similar methodology and arrived at the same results which were (and are) reproducible.
No magic or voodoo needed, just a lot of hard work and dedication.

[Panurg3]

free will: compared to what? what is observable that can be pointed to that contains this property?

one answer is god.
only god can do anything. god is all-powerful.
to an atheist, free will is not a real thing.
or
free will is not absolute.
is it the measure of an organism's flexibility in response to stimuli?
?
of course we couldn't hold a candle to the big g or a very advanced eti.
so maybe 'free will' is having a lot of computational complexity?
or should we just say complexity?
or anti-entropy?

everything is determined- in a closed system,
but until we can say whether this is so, who can say?
oh him again.
but plus chaos is ordered but not apparantly determined.



sry caploc iffy. &? key i?s ju?mpy

[moses]

<No magic or voodoo needed, just a lot of hard work and dedication. Grey Cloud>

This is the classical monk method. Dedication is selfish. We just need to lose all this sort of stuff that makes up the self. Then free will comes in earnest. All effort comes from the self. Maybe from some ideal or desire.

One cannot imagine an outcome without effort. It is the 'will' part of free will. So losing the self has to be effortless. Just seeing one's self without a reaction which arises from the self. Just the seeing alone.

lw1990,
you are moving from the illusion of free will to other illusions. Of course the chief illusion is that 'I' is a living entity that makes choices. The 'I' is only ideas and so is not really alive. The real life of a creature is it's experiencing. Robots do not have experiencing.

It is shamanic to say we are part of the natural world. The real connection is through experiencing.

Cheers,
Mo

[lw1990]

@grey cloud

Personally, sometimes I am aware that I am dreaming and I watch the dream unfold. More often I recall the dream when I am awake, whether hours or days later. So there can be a degree of awareness while asleep.

You missed the bigger picture; it is not that 'no degree of awareness' temporarily exists in some dream state, it is that the degree of seeming free will or non-deterministic control of ones body is adjusted based on different brain states, often to the point of zero conscious awareness. Just because you dream during sleep does not mean it's even happening the majority of the time you're asleep. You are singling out and focusing on narrow aspects and missing the bigger picture. If you really want to learn from our discussion and not just be a contrarian, you should always be focused on the bigger picture rather than petty details.

When you were younger, you very well could have physically driven a car or whatever, you might not have been allowed, it might have been dangerous, etc. but you very well could have physically done it. Moving your arm in the air may not seem like a scientific experiment to you at first, but what doesn't happen is just as important as what does happen. The point was that the body, as well as all objects we know about, behave regularly according to physical laws, not magic or non-determinism. There is simply no evidence-based corner for free will, magic, or non-determinism to exist if everything we scientifically have examined behaves according to physical laws. It is a simple but profound piece of logic, such a simple and obvious truth is often overlooked by the mistake of not thinking about it objectively. There are still many religions out there, all of which cannot be true, many superstitions as well, such flawed ideas have largely been shared by ancient thinkers and philosophers as well. Just because ancient thinkers may move forward in rational thought does not mean they had an entirely rational world view. We have so much data now with the internet, that piecing the logic together is easier than ever before, just try.

We very much are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of wisdom and knowledge, but only if you examine the data we have accumulated thus far. I fear that too often the majority of what someone bases their worldview off of is hearsay. Lose your personality & identity and emotional bias for a moment if you want to see further than the limits of the current ideological programming.

[Grey Cloud]

lw1990,

You missed the bigger picture; it is not that 'no degree of awareness' temporarily exists in some dream state, it is that the degree of seeming free will or non-deterministic control of ones body is adjusted based on different brain states, often to the point of zero conscious awareness. Just because you dream during sleep does not mean it's even happening the majority of the time you're asleep. You are singling out and focusing on narrow aspects and missing the bigger picture. If you really want to learn from our discussion and not just be a contrarian, you should always be focused on the bigger picture rather than petty details.

What are you blathering on about? The sleep thing started because you said that we lose consciousness when we sleep which I challenged. Challenging your incorrect statements and constantly asking for evidence of your assertions is not being contrarian or focusing on details. I have learned from this discussion. I have learned that your standard of English is poor; that you have no breadth or depth of knowledge of any of the subjects you pontificate upon; and that you are incapable of providing any evidence of your ridiculous assertions.

When you were younger, you very well could have physically driven a car or whatever,

So I could have driven a car aged 6 months? My use of these examples was in response to one of your silly analogies, it had nothing to do with free will, which as I have repeatedly stated, I do not subscribe to.

Just because ancient thinkers may move forward in rational thought does not mean they had an entirely rational world view.

I did not say that it did.

We have so much data now with the internet, that piecing the logic together is easier than ever before, just try.

Quantity of data is not as important as quality of data. 'Just try it'? This is rich coming from you who have failed to provide one link to support your claims and have, on more than one occassion, criticised me for providing such links.