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zBrown
Ice climber
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"It is one person's opinion, but it is an informed opinion."
^so it may or may not be true.
Why assert it as if it is true?
In my opinion it would have been more appropriate to say that so and so has [presumably] academic credentials in the arena and leave it at that.
Plenty enough unverified and unverifiable assertions floating around already
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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eeyonkee, you and moose should take a moment and watch the above video (timestamp: 33min) just to see how Ben Shapiro misconstrues "the illusion of freewill" to mean that under this condition Man has no capacity to reason or to make decisions or to control anything.
It's quite revealing, adding to the validation of the claim that the public at large is powerfully confused over the whole concept.
Where there is confusion or ignorance there is also potential for improvement, growth and development. Therein lies the hope.
...
"The value of reason is not something that evolutionary biology suggests." -Ben Shapiro lol
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Plenty enough unverified and unverifiable assertions floating around already
Including that one.
Is it (edit: my authority on issues of neuroscience) truly unverified and/or unverifiable?
Or is that only your opinion, not-so-well-informed?
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zBrown
Ice climber
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What set of qualifiers must one possess in order to talk authoritatively about neuroscience?
Or what mind is? Or what makes for intelligent machines?
Jgill has informed us that you have an academic background which is what,
as I recall, set of this little tangent
So what's the point?
I'm not the one claiming you don't have credentials. It was the other guy. I can't recall who.
Over and out, peace
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Morality as a Biological Adaptation – An Evolutionary Model Based on the Lifestyle of Human Foragers
The problem with assuming evolution is the only engine behind everything in human endeavor is that though evolution may initially lead through a kind of morality to a socially efficient and beneficial condition, moral deliberation and complexity have moved beyond and away from the needs of survival to a standard that celebrates even the sacrifice of reproduction (and that survival) to a higher condition or standard of behavior gleaned from what can easily be described as the spiritual. And the question of course is why?
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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to a higher condition or standard of behavior gleaned from what can easily be described as the spiritual
Perhaps too easily.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Perhaps too easily.
Well, depending how you define the term "spiritual" why not? Spiritual in this case referring to a denial of the flesh, the physical, for the sake of a perceived higher condition.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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What set of qualifiers must one possess in order to talk authoritatively about neuroscience?
That depends on what kind of neuroscience is being talked about. It is a specialized area with many sub-specialties.
You recognize the difference between "being an authority" and "speaking with authority," the phrase John Gill used.
John Gill once asked on this thread for people to tell him a bit about their background.
In brief, I went through grad school at the University of Chicago in the lab of Jay Goldberg and Cesar Fernandez. I learned techniques for recording from neurons. There are many practical challenges to doing any kind of scientific research and it is useful to have had experience with them when trying to evaluate the work of other investigators. I learned a lot from Goldberg and Fernandez, too. You can find their work. Other neuroscientists came to give talks: Candace Pert, Alan Selverston, and Mark Konishi, for example. Beyond their publications, it helps to hear people describe their work in person and answer tough questions from a knowledgable audience.
After grad school, rather than try for an academic career of my own, I followed my wife's own specialized career to Seattle, Toronto, and now Vancouver.
I worked for an anesthesiologist in Seattle. We were the first people to find the minimal concentration of local anesthetic it took to just block conduction in nerve fibers of different diameter.
In Toronto I worked for a neurologist. We did recordings from slices of hippocampus induced to undergo seizure-like activity, synchronized bursts of action potentials, rather than the normal less coordinated activity.
In Vancouver I helped a respiratory medical doctor do recordings from the phrenic nerve, comparing activity in single motoneurons with level of respiratory effort.
Over the years my name has appeared on about a dozen publications. That process of submitting the paper and then responding to reviewers' criticisms is also instructive. No matter how sure we are about something, we may be wrong and may need someone else to point it out, although carelessness is the more common problem.
No one needs credentials, here. This is a small pond, and if I speak with authority on neuroscience, it isn't with that much authority. I'm a stubborn individualist and only interested in what work a person has done, not in what degrees they may have.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Informative post. Thanks.
"In brief, I went through grad school at the University of Chicago in the lab of Jay Goldberg and Cesar Fernandez." -MH2
(1) So you have a phd?
(2) in neurobiology?
"No one needs credentials, here." Says MikeL.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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eeyonkee, when Gazzaniga was lecturing on "free will" and asked the question "Free from what?" - while also illustrating this question in big letters in his power point presentation...
Free from what?
what do you think he meant? what do you think he was driving at?
I think I know - but I'm wondering if you reckoned the same?
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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HFCS, I would say, free from responsibility. I did watch the last two of the Gazzaniga lectures, but have never watched any of the Q an A after the lectures that you have suggested. I'm planning on watching all of the lectures again, frankly. These days, I need to hear something a couple of times at least to incorporate into my functioning understanding of a problem.
I just got through reading from that link up-thread that Ed posted, Morality as a Biological Adaptation – An Evolutionary Model Based on the Lifestyle of Human Foragers. That's exactly the kind of thing that I like to read (thanks Ed) to inform my overall understanding. It all made sense to me. One of the things I found interesting is that, from my point of view, you could read that entire paper from either the compatibilist or incompatibilist side of the free will argument with it making perfect sense.
Two things stand out for me in reading this.
1. That chimpanzees, and presumably other mammal social species almost certainly had already evolved something akin to a proto-Interpreter. Interpreters may only make sense for a social species.
2. This one is more of a reminder, really, that since our split with the common ancestor with the chimpanzee, we lived a foraging, hunter-gatherer lifestyle for 99.9% of that time. It just underscores what an exceptional time that we are living in as (the last of the) humans, and that our morals were clearly mainly adapted to a foraging lifestyle.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Here it is...
He suggests it's a meaningless term (left over from pre-scientific, pre-neuro days), all the moreso if folks don't (bother to) make it clear the specific freedom they have in mind when it comes to speaking of a "free" will.
Free from what? Free from our genetics? Free from our humanity? Free from outside influences? Free from drugs? Free from supernatural forces? Free from natural forces?
"What is it we want to be free from? We don't want to be free from our experience of life. We don't want to be free from our temperament. We don't want to be free from this, that or the other thing. What is it we want to be free from?" -Gazzaniga (23:55)
My take: I am in agreement with Gazzaniga - you can't really answer yes or no till the room is clear on which type of "free" or "freedom" everyone has in mind re the will. Of course in a science room, it usually means "free from physics or physical forces" or "free from system inputs or system constraints" - but in the Christian Church (which still accepts demonic possession and exorcism) it usually means "free from demonic influence" or worse "free from Satanic! influence").
Years ago, here, I used to express it this way riffing off "dangling participles" - you remember your English? It was an infraction, lol... So too, you shouldn't dangle gods (which God?) otherwise it's meaningless or misleading. (An infraction.) And you shouldn't dangle freedoms (which type of freedom?) when discussing will or volition, otherwise it's meaningless or misleading. (An infraction.)
More later...
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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I want to comment on something that healyje has written in some recent posts that I think is exactly on the right track. It's that organization is probably much more important than complexity in explaining emergent systems like consciousness. We probably share with most mammals the ability to imprint memories, which are likely the lingua franca of the mental world as far as I can tell. How we organize and attach algorithms to these memories are what makes our mental life different than, say, a gnu's.
Look at human history; the winners have been the best organizers rather than the strongest or most numerable. Makes me think that organization is something even more fundamental.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Yes, ability to organize, else to plan and to creatively collaborate, was a theme of primacy to Harari's books as well.
...
So here's a tally of notable compatibilists (reconcilists), the short list, as I've note it:
Dennett
Pinker
Gazzaniga
Carroll
Weinstein
hfcs
How does one distinguish in real life in social legal context between signing a contract "under one's own free will" and signing a contract "not under one's own free will". Society need a mechanism for this. Law needs a mechanism for this. The notion/term of "free will" seems to provide it fairly well.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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It's that organization is probably much more important than complexity in explaining emergent systems like consciousness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-based_model
the interesting question is how to identify the agents, in particular, at various scales.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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(1) So you have a phd?
(2) in neurobiology?
Good.
What personal information do you have to put on the table?
See me, raise me, or fold.
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WBraun
climber
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Speculative execution is a technique used by highspeed
processors in order to increase performance by
guessing likely future execution paths and prematurely
executing the instructions in them.
That is why these machines are all ultimately defective ......
Just like these gross materialists programming these machines are metal speculators and guessing to figure out what reality is instead of "As it Is".
They (gross materialists) are essentially are becoming organic robots unknowingly and masquerading themselves as authority .....
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zBrown
Ice climber
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I forgot what I was gonna say! Oh well.
Converging, Synergistic Actions of Multiple Stress Hormones Mediate Enduring Memory Impairments after Acute Simultaneous Stresses
MULTIPLE SIMULTANEOUS ACUTE STRESSES.
The multiple simultaneous acute stresses (MAS) consisted of restraint, bright light, unpredictable loud noise, physical jostling and awareness of peer discomfort (Chen et al., 2008, 2010; Maras et al., 2014). Briefly, mice were put in a restrainer fashioned from a 50 ml plastic tube (Corning), placed five per cage (social stress) on a laboratory shaker, and jostled in a brightly lit room bathed in loud rap music (dB level = 95) for 1–2 h. Initial studies used a 2 h stress to enable exclusion of the genomic effects of glucocorticoid receptor (GR) and, guided by the electrophysiology, we then imposed the paradigm for 90 min and 1 h. The results were superimposable, so the groups were all included here. After MAS, mice were returned to their home cages. Control animals remained in the animal facility. Mice were trained for object location memory a minimum of 2 h after the end of the MAS, based on experiments showing that serum corticosterone levels normalized and exploration behavior was as robust as in controls (see Fig. 1B,C).
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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I adore robust rats. They are so darn cute!
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Robust rats indeed know where the action potentially is
In 1843 Emil du Bois-Reymond, a German physiologist became the first person to prove beyond doubt that electricity - and not some supernatural ''life force'' - runs through the nervous system. Working with electrodes and nerves from animals, he demonstrated the existence of what is now called the action potential
All ethical protocols were followed and mfm was not harmed in any of these experiments
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