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WBraun
climber
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There's no question of electricity in matter.
But you yourself is NOT matter.
Just as a car requires some electricity for the operator to use.
But operator himself is independently free from that.
But without the operator originally all matter will never ever move or animate.
It is the soul (the living entity itself) who drives matter ......
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Funny you should mention that hB
I was just wondering last night how it is that some practitioners of Eastern traditions can injest large (large enough to give a sperm whale the heebeejeebees?) of "hallucinogenic" substances and without any materialistic intervention go apparently unaffected!
Are these folks indeed soul brothers or merely sleight of hand charlatans who don't really swallow.
RamDass Alpert swears he saw the medicine go down.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Hallucinogenic substances temporarily put a person into closer resonance with the oneness (effective, but not a particularly good idea for several reasons)
A person already in tune with the oneness would be unaffected
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Lennox
climber
in the land of the blind
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Number of neurons, number of connections, level of interconnectivity (11 dimensions), level of organization (of neurons and brain regions), level of synchronization (as seen on an EEG or fMRI).
All of the above.
Birds have the most densely packed neurons. Maybe when we are gone and birds rule the world they will have some analogue of SuperTopo where they discuss the nature of mind.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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We all know about how people raised within a thought-form framework that a flat earth is the center of the universe, had a hard time adapting to the idea that the earth is actually spherical and one of a multitude of similarly spherical objects moving in an arrangement of gravitational fields.
Those astronomical discoveries represented a major disturbance to their space-time reference framework.
Pilots of electromagnetically cloaked stealth aircraft experience similar vertigo disorientation challenges for similar reasons..... solved by having a space-time reference generator to artificially provide them with a familiar electromagnetic reference framework localized within the cockpit.
This thread represents a big discussion among people raised within Newtonian physics perceptual reference frames, trying to adapt to quantum physics discoveries from a hundred years ago that energy/matter/space/time do not exist separate from conscious observation.
Solved by exploring every imaginable nuance of how the egg came before the chicken and conscious observation is an anomaly arising from eons of random shuffling of physical material.
Material which provably doesn't exist in our quantum universe except as an energetic field of potential probabilities, until viewed by a conscious observer.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Tom, do you think my cat qualifies as a conscious observer? How about the mouse that she's stalking? So, I am observing the cat who is observing the mouse who is observing the cat. If we are all creating our realities out of the quantum froth or something, it sure seems that there will be a lot of dependencies.
In high school and college I remember reading a lot of pop literature revolving around the philosophical implications of quantum physics. Books like The Dancing Wuli Masters and the Tao of Physics. Fun ideas to explore for sure. The thing is, almost none of the physicists who know the most about the subject got much into these ideas as I recall.
HFCS, pretty good lineup, for sure. Let me see, on my team is Sam Harris, Jonathon Greene, Moose, and me (oh, and Yuval Harari). I'm sure there must be more. I am definitely not completely settled on it.
As far as complexity goes, I read that last link of Ed's and realize that there is a lot written on the subject (who knew that Health Care could be so complicated?). It seems to me now that both complexity and organization are clearly important but related. You probably need a certain degree of complexity for truly interesting things to emerge from organization.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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TC,
had a hard time adapting to the idea that the earth is actually spherical
Flat or spherical? As a kid, I moved around having fun in my locale, whether it was flat or spherical made no difference. I didn't have these problems when I heard the world was not flat -- No vertigo.
Those astronomical discoveries represented a major disturbance to their space-time reference framework.
It seems older folks have trouble ... enlarging their locale without adding some dreaming as opposed to sampling?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Books like The Dancing Wuli Masters and the Tao of Physics. Fun ideas to explore for sure. The thing is, almost none of the physicists who know the most about the subject got much into these ideas as I recall.
just a reminder, Fritjof Capra was certainly a physicist at the time he wrote The Tao of Physics. The reception of the book at that time certainly influenced his career thereafter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritjof_Capra
I ran into him when he was at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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You know, I guess I did know that, Ed. I just looked him up. I wasn't sure how other physicists thought about him.
MH2 reminded me that I have a book by Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory, that I have not looked at for years. I'm re-reading it.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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we're a dull bunch, exploring new ideas with the aim of trying to figure out how they might help our physics...
as quickly as ideas are picked up, they are discarded if not applicable.
Capra was working in one direction for understanding particle physics at a time when the field changed dramatically, and quickly, away from those ideas. A lot of the good work of many theorists were later re-incorporated into various aspects of particle physics, but the major physical themes were abandoned.
It was a time when field theory started to be able to explain what was going on, the constituent view of elementary particles spectacularly illuminated by the discovery in 1974 of the ψ/J meson. This was not the area Capra was working on (as far as I recall). And my memory is foggy on the specific parallels drawn between the physics Capra was studying and eastern ideas.
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WBraun
climber
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Physics doesn't need help as it operates perfectly without mankind already.
Humanity needs help .....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Humanity needs help .....
We get a little from a cat and dog, and a lot more from the rest of the planet.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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re: "free from what?"
re: "free from responsiblity" vs "free from causation"
So bear with me eeyonkee, I'm still trying to work this out.
Here I'll try to express it in an alternate way. Here goes...
How is it you can consider "free will" on different levels (where on one level it does not exist while on another level or two it does exist) and then NOT see the usefulness in the term "compatibilism"? if not adopt it?
Re Sam Harris, it's pretty clear to me that he's limited himself to just one (categorical) level of thought (not unlike Tom Cochrane's "thought-form framework" above) to the exclusion of others whenever he has discussed it (i.e., free will's nonexistence) in his podcasts or wherever.
In your post, last page, you posted "free from responsibility". But this isn't what you have in mind, first and foremost, when you claim you REJECT free will, right? First and foremost, do you not REJECT the claim of free will for the same reason Harris does - namely because it's claimed (e.g., by nondeterminists, by ghost in the machine advocates, too) that this type of free will is "free from causation" or "free from physics"? After all, the ideas of a will "free from responsibility" and "free from causation" are two different animals.
Or what am I missing?
No rush. No worries. Just food for thought.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Free to choose whether your experience of reality is valid or not.
Free to choose whether there is any value to your existence.
Gee, let's see what else is out there.
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pb
Sport climber
Sonora Ca
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I'm less sure than I once was, but I think it's fast.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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There's moments when my mind brings forward the thought: "... the white potato talks and talks..."
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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So, while we're on the subject, how crazy can this get?
Here's yet another kind of "compatibilist", or so it seems...
Harris believes his will is 100 per cent free from blame (thus a "free" will, yes) because Mr. Harris also believes at the same time that his will is 100 per cent constrained by physics/causation with no ability to TRULY CHOOSE (thus a free will? no).
Thus Sam Harris, after all, IS a compatibilist of a different stripe by other means, other criteria. Somebody let him know. ;)
...
If you liked Black Mirror, "San Junipero" you might like Black Mirror "Black Museum". Netflix. Both concern the notion of uploading one's consciousness or else sentience to a computer. Black Museum: Not for the squeamish.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Somebody let him know
Why? He seems to be having such a good time.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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HFCS, here's my current train of thought on this subject.
1. Whatever it is that we have as humans with respect to consciousness and free will, it is a product of evolution, and we should be able to imagine how we could have gone from a common ancestor with the chimpanzee to where we are now, realizing that we are missing a lot of intermediate data points (e.g., extinct hominids).
2. Following from point 1, we should be able to imagine how the chimpanzee evolved from some proto-primate...evolved from proto-mammal, etc. At some point, and it literally would be a point more or less, since these are all nodes on the tree of life, we could likely come up with a type of animal that we could all agree has a very limited conscious state, and could not do other than follow it's "instincts" with respect to decisions. By the way, after you posted the actual screenshot of the Free from what? question, I realized that I was remembering it wrong. My new answer would be "free from instinct." In other words, free to make decisions that are not "merely" instinctual. This is the freedom that is in dispute, IMO.
3. If you are a compatibilist, you believe that somewhere along this evolutionary trajectory, emergent behavior evolved that somehow rises above instinct and grants privileges to the agent to make decisions that override instinct. This is what I can't get past. Remember, instinct can do some pretty incredible things.
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