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Old 2010-05-17, 17:55   Link #37
Proto
Knowledge is the solution
 
 
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: St. Louis, MO
Age: 39
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Meaning to say, what's the point of reducing an emergent phenomenon, even if you could? All you can tell me are the parts that made it possible. Those parts, on their own, cannot possibly tell me why the phenomenon occurred. It simply did. All the fluff that made it possible simply happened to go down one particular quantum pathway out of an infinite variety of possibilities and, voila, the phenomenon exists.
I'm familiar with emergent behavior as it is one of the things you encounter the most when you are dealing with heuristics and numerical programming in computer science. To have your computer systems to solve its tasks in a way that it was never directly programmed into is indeed something baffling, interesting, and a great area to research more about. I think we have been disagreeing because of my lack of ability to properly convey my thoughts, but I say it here: I agree, an analytical POV is necessary in order to understand some of the qualities of the human mind where a synthetic POV is not enough. I was just a little tingled when you just took what I considered a breakthrough in human analysis research and seemingly dismissed it as a mere simplified model, and a wrong approach to understanding the complexity of the human mind. Mea culpa, I misunderstood your intentions.

Still, I still want to remark that a synthetic approach to emerging behavior is not without its merits. More than often seemingly emergent behavior is just the result on us not having performed a comprehensive enough synthetic analysis of our phenomena.

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All I state is that free will is real. It exists. It requires no "why". We can seek to understand it by trying to study some, if not all, of its basic parts.
And as such I request that we start again. You can state human thought from a synthetic POV. You can state the human-mind duality from an analytical POV. What I don't understand is how you infer from this that free will arises? Are you, like the compatibilists I quoted earlier, one that doesn't consider forces of nature to be limitants of free will and only considers human and social limitants when defining this concept?

Or could you give me your definition of free will? I previously stated that a human being is chained by his genetics, by his uprising and by his circumstances. I see these three elements shaping the human mind up to the point that it takes any decision, making this human decision making a perfectly definable,even if nonpractical, Turing machine. (this may be an oversimplification but it's good for illustrating my point). The only way I could see free will arising is by the inherent probabilistic nature of physics that a quantum analysis of the electrical signals within the brain would give raise to. Is that where you are coming from?

For example....

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Through conscious decisions, habitual behaviour can be overcome. Physical limits previously thought inviolate can also be surpassed through the conscious application of willpower.
You definite these concious decisions as an example of free will. However, aren't these conscious decisions equally limited by the same genetic, uprising and circumstantial restraints? I cannot conceptualize things that are above my IQ capacity, that I have never experienced before or which the circumstances do not compel me to think. Or at least that's how I see it.

Last edited by Proto; 2010-05-17 at 18:07.
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