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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Nov 20, 2015 - 03:40pm PT
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Whether free will exists or not, it can't be decided in such a flimsy way. If it's important at all, scientists should be lining up to duplicate the experiments and conclusions. Is the world going to let Harris alone, scientifically, decide the on fate of free will? Again, it's laughable.
Clearly we are more than 2% different than Chimpanzees. For me at this point, I'm arguing against the shoddy science involved in this. It's too spurious to make such a conclusion. Science doe not trump philosophy if it is bad science. To make such a grand conclusion from the results of such a narrowly focused experiment makes no sense.
And, Monkeys might have free will but no capacity to do anything with it.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 20, 2015 - 04:23pm PT
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Free will never evolved, it is always there, eternally.
It doesn't depend on DNA, but on consciousness,
The gross materialists are always in poor fund of knowledge due to plugging in the wrong numbers in their formulas.
They are wrong from the very beginning.
They have no clue what consciousness is therefore everything they do and guess because of their poor fund of clueless knowledge comes out WRONG.
Thus they continually mislead themselves as blind leading the blind in their limited dark well of so called knowledge .....
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Nov 20, 2015 - 04:32pm PT
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Hmmm. Good answer on the monkeys except that the category was apes..
So, here's how it works. Sam is right, we don't have free will. This is different than not being able to change your behavior. All Sam is saying is that any event in our environment will trigger a response that is not editable by some command and control center. We really DO just react via algorithms that we have built up over our lifetimes. At the moment of required action, we can't help ourselves; We do the subroutine.
But let's look at what might happen right after the event. Now, we can access our long-term memories and, because of our penchant for looking for patterns and ascribing meaning to events, we, at this point, take responsibility for the action. It is at this point that our own personal algorithms come into play and it is the result of these algorithms playing out that provides the richness that we see in human behavior and interaction.
To me, the whole neurological response delay would be entirely keeping with this view.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 20, 2015 - 04:38pm PT
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seems to me that consciousness can manifest itself in humans only.
Where do get these crazy ideas from?
Do you just sit around and start guessing about everything?
Every living entity has consciousness.
Even a blade of grass .....
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crankster
Trad climber
No. Tahoe
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Nov 20, 2015 - 04:40pm PT
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Yes, and potato chips, as well
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StahlBro
Trad climber
San Diego, CA
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Nov 20, 2015 - 04:43pm PT
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He said living thing.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 20, 2015 - 05:20pm PT
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Is a bacterium alive?
C'mon moose
If it's not alive it would have zero effect.
Why do you think they want to kill a virus?
Good grief, are you sure you're even a scientist at all?
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 20, 2015 - 05:43pm PT
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You can't reproduce either.
You need a living entity to also ......
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 21, 2015 - 10:27am PT
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Harris has a wiki page that I found illuminating. HFCS should read it.
As for his determinism, he is a little wishy washy.
On free will:
Harris says the idea of free will is incoherent and "cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality". Humans are not free and no sense can be given to the concept that we might be.[68] According to Harris, science "reveals you to be a biochemical puppet."[69] People's thoughts and intentions, Harris says, "emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control." Every choice we make is made as a result of preceding causes. These choices we make are determined by those causes, and are therefore not really choices at all. Harris also draws a distinction between conscious and unconscious reactions to the world. Even without free will, consciousness has an important role to play in the choices we make. Harris argues that this realization about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.
Commenting on Harris's book Free Will, Daniel Dennett disagrees with Harris' position on compatibilism, and asks if Harris is directing his arguments against an unreasonably absolute or "perfect freedom" version of compatibilism, which Dennett would describe as an incoherent, straw man version
From there, I looked at Compatibilism, and from there to the Wiki page on Determinism. You should check it out. It is interesting. I have trouble with determinism. There is the idea that the Universe is completely governed by cause and effect, according to the laws of physics, and there is no possible future other than one. We all know my problem with that idea. I've posted about it many times.
Harris seems to use determinism when it suits him, but is a compatibilist, which is a little different.
Anyway, cool topic to spend a while reading about.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 21, 2015 - 10:39am PT
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You can't reproduce either.
There is both sexual and asexual reproduction. Many organisms reproduce through asexual reproduction. You could even say most.
I grew up working on our family pecan farm. We would take native trees, with small nuts and thick shells, top them, and graft on a particular variety which produced more consumer friendly nuts. Above that graft, the tree was a different organism. We would do it when the root tree was about 4-6 inches in diameter.
Werner, do you even want to learn about the world around you? Or are you so certain of your path that you don't look up so to speak?
This is a dangerous spot for anyone to be in, in either science or religion. Your viewpoint becomes rigid and fixed. You stop learning. I just don't see how people can refuse to be curious. Even if you believe that you know something, time has shown us many times that knowledge is provisionary. It is not fixed. In many cases, it has shown ancient scripture to be false.
That is the glaring conflict between science and religion. Religion is absolutely fixed. Science is not. I'm not saying that scientists can become biased or attached to a theory so much that they are reluctant to accept new findings. All I am saying is that given time, old incorrect solutions eventually die if they do not jibe with data.
Largo's downright revulsion towards science is contradictory. Right now, it is the best way to learn things. Important things.
We live in a time when technology is changing things around us at an unprecedented rate. Refusing to get on that boat is to come to a full stop, where you put your hands over your eyes and ears. Why? Because findings have been conflicting with religion more and more since the time of Galileo.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 21, 2015 - 11:16am PT
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Learning from Wikipedia rather than primary sources reveals a lack of education and just plain laziness.
A primary source is the way to go for learning about reproduction.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 21, 2015 - 11:21am PT
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Learning from Wikipedia rather than primary sources reveals a lack of education and just plain laziness.
this depends on what the articles are about... in particular, the mathematicians have done a good job editing the articles on mathematical topics, many of which are excellent.
The physics articles vary a lot..
...so it seems to be a function of "who cares."
If there are fields represented on Wikipedia that have poor articles, it is really the choice of people in those fields, there is no lack of people with education who could edit the articles and make them excellent resources.
It is apparent that mathematicians care, physicists are catching up (ironic, since they "invented" the internet for exactly the reason to openly share information). It is also apparent, from the comment above, that the humanities don't really care what stuff gets thrown up.
Too bad...
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 21, 2015 - 11:29am PT
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Oh. I disagree. Wiki has become very good over the last few years. It is like the old Encyclopedia that I grew up reading over and over as a kid on steroids. There aren't very many topics that it doesn't address.
Certainly, to become an expert on something, it is lacking. Its entries on Petroleum Geology and its tools is a simple glimpse (although correct). On the topics which I am an expert on, I haven't found an error, only a lack of depth. This is unavoidable, because it is impossible to put everything in an encyclopedia entry.
Its page on geophysical well logging is just a glimpse of something much deeper, but it has references at the bottom to take you further. I has links embedded that take you to related topics, and to put it mildly, is right now probably the single greatest storehouse of knowledge available on the web. In 20 more years, if they keep improving it, it will really be something. If you are really curious, it is the first place to begin. From there you can go to the raw papers.
However, as I said, it gives references, and if you follow those, you are limited only by A) your curiosity, and B) whether or not you have access to publications without paying for them.
I found the wiki entry on Sam Harris very illuminating. I suggest that you all read it. If you then follow the trail left in the references at the bottom of the page, and imbedded links to more specific topics, you can cover a lot of ground fairly quickly.
edit: I posted this while Ed was posting his. I haven't delved too deeply into the humanities, but it isn't exactly blank.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Nov 21, 2015 - 12:44pm PT
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Learning from Wikipedia rather than primary sources reveals a lack of education and just plain laziness
How true. I would much prefer to don a toga and sit at the feet of Socrates, but sadly I don't think that will happen.
;>(
Ed's comments about math on Wiki are spot on. There are over 26,000 mathematics pages there and all of the one's I've seen have been scrutinized and corrected with care (including the one I put up). But I understand how someone in the humanities would find Wiki inadequate.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Nov 21, 2015 - 06:57pm PT
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How thoughtful are we if we cannot understand how we could be misunderstood?
Until you know the mechanism you cannot predict the outcome. Is the mind a mechanism? We don't know the mechanism for the ....free will.
but we can chant Buddha sayings...............
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 22, 2015 - 08:31pm PT
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Wiki has become very good over the last few years. It is like the old Encyclopedia that I grew up reading over and over as a kid on steroids. There aren't very many topics that it doesn't address
Wikipedia is one of the greatest achievements of the internet. It makes Encyclopedia Britannica and similar collections obsolete - a good thing IMHO. One huge flaw of the old encyclopedias was the inability for experts to correct their colleagues, particularly in science and math, except in an annual update book. And it's free to all. Wiki is one of the few organizations I contribute $ to annually. It rarely goes into great detail on a subject, but it will give an investigator a base upon which to start. Humanities and politics are other matters.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Nov 23, 2015 - 11:35am PT
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Yes John, it's all pretty amazing. Oh, and to my surprise, the Bi-Cameral mind work is mentioned in the article below.
I want to post this link again by itself. It's good reading. It's long so take a bite at a time.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2942748/
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