The fact that many people would reject my use of concepts like choice and belief does not make it wrong.

There are two parts: the definition and the application. If you object to the use then you can object to either of those parts.

The dictionary defines choice as:

"an act or instance of choosing; selection".

So if you have a temperature regulator in your house, then is does make choices. It can choose between heating and not heating based on temperature senses and a logic/function system to control the process.


You may feel that this is an 'out-of-the-ordinary-way' of using 'choice', but I don't feel that it is at all. To me it is crystal clear and perfectly logical and simple. I also think that almost all people who are involved in designing technology such as that would certainly call it choice.


To me, humans are systems. Heater systems are systems as well, and so are traffic light systems. Again, you might object to the use of system but we can do the same thing: find out what it means and see if it applies.

The fact that life is an evolved system and that traffic light and computers are designed systems do not mean that they don't operate on the same principles. In fact, if something can't act or make choices then it can't do anything.


If you look at your body then you will find it to be an incredibly complicated system. Your blood, your organs, your skin, and a bazillion things happening to keep it working. There are mechanisms which are mechanical, and there are mechanisms which are electrical (the thing that sets us apart from plants). But they are both the same fundamental process, just a different type. It all has to do with controlling things. Like your breathing for example. Your body carefully measures the oxygen levels and other aspects, and then it controls your breathing to be faster or slower. Again: choosing and acting.

In order to clear up my views on these things and to make a sort of aggregrate response to questions and claims such as in this thread, I made the following video:


Change, the universe, and everything; a response to the free will claim
http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=-6509929196426108952
1h23m


Or on Youtube:

1/3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnvQEbemdWI

2/3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntX5B733XsU

3/3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLWJf80y_Yo

prelimanary question:

I'm at 1 hour now, will listen to the rest tomorrow at work and ask some more things.

I think you said that a plants can be conceptualized as making a choice and as acting, and that the same could be said for mechanical machines and so on. But later in the video when you talk of consciousness you say (I think, but please correct me if I'm wrong) that consciousness allows creatures to make choices. (and you also say that flies have consciousness too) Did you mean that consciousness allows creatures to make better choices (as I think follows from the rest of your ideas) or that consciousness alone allows choice?

When you say that a fly has consciousness like humans have, what exactly do you mean by consciousness? do you mean it as sense-impressions? if so, I'd like to do a thought experiment with you

FYI: I just watched the video and made a lot of notes. I'm too mentally fatigued right now to compose a response. I hope I'll get to it tomorrow.

For now, I'll thank you for the video and make some cosmetic comments. It definitely helped me understand your position better. I appreciate that you spoke clearly and slowly, and stayed on topic. The video was quite long - I'm not sure if we needed to go back in time to the big bang in order to understand your point , but I may be wrong.

Also, a suggestion for future videos: get a tripod, or set your camera on something stable. The constant minor movement is a bit distracting. Although the lack of a tripod allows you to film yourself lying down .

Your points about the various kinds of action reminded me of Daniel Dennett's point about Darwinian, Popperian, Skinnerian, Greogorian creatures:

Quote:

Tower of generate-and-test A system to categorize various design options for brains according to their ability to react to a given situation. Proposed by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in 1975, and very similar to an earlier idea by Konrad Lorenz. The first floor of the Tower is made up of Darwinian creatures, named for Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. These creatures have various genotypes, {W, X, Y, Z}, that code for phenotypes {W, X, Y, Z}. The phenotypes are variations on one biological model When confronted with situation Q in its environment, each phenotype reacts differently. Phenotypes W, X, and Z tend to react to situation Q in a way that will keep the creature with the corresponding genotype from being able to reproduce, by killing the creature or otherwise ending its "family tree" as a result of situation Q. Only phenotype Y tends to allow survival/reproduction, which means that genotype Y will soon outnumber W, X, and Z in the environment. Darwinian creatures are "hard-wired" and can only react in the narrow ways their phenotype will allow. Individual creatures are unable to choose the options available, and are thus largely insignificant to evolution on this floor. The next floor is made up of Skinnerian creatures, named for B.F. Skinner and his school of psychology known as behaviorism. These creatures have a phenotype that can offer options W, X, Y, and Z when confronted with situation Q. They are also equipped with an ability to recognize positive and negative input from their environment, but otherwise "blindly" try random options when confronted with situation Q. Options W, X, and Z tend to cause negative input from the environment, while option Y tends to cause positive input. Eventually, the individual creature will tend to use option Y when confronted with situation Q. B.F. Skinner's behaviorism is the theory that all animals, from sea slugs to people, are these types of creatures. Dennett states, "Skinnerian conditioning is a fine capacity to have, so long as you are not killed by one of your early errors". That is, individual creatures can eventually become more fit for their environments, as long as they don't choose option X first, which leads to immediate death or failure to reproduce. The third floor contains creatures with a system of preselection, a mental ability to weed out the "truly stupid" options before attempting them in the real world - that is, ruling out options X and Z altogether when first encountering situation Q, because the creature's mind can foresee bad consequences without prior conditioning for that exact situation. These creatures are called Popperian, for Sir Karl Popper, who once said that this design element "allows our hypotheses to die in our stead". This will make the creature more likely to choose option Y immediately, when first facing situation Q, and thus survive and reproduce. Fit Popperian creatures can be differentiated from fit Skinnerian creatures: the former are smart enough to make better-than-chance first moves, while the latter are only lucky enough to make the right first moves. Popperian creatures, in Dennett's view, make up most of the animals used in behavioral studies: they have an inner environment, however primitive, that allows them to preselect options. Dennett notes that the sea slug has replaced the pigeon in Skinnerian studies, as pigeons (Skinner's favorites) and other creatures that are not simple invertebrates can be shown to exhibit some preselection. Even the octopus has been shown to be an astoundingly smart Popperian creature by its ability for preselection. But is there a separation of degree between humans and other Popperian creatures? After all, humans do their share of mindless preselection. But Popperian creatures have limits that go back to their biological origins: that is, if Darwinian natural selection has made options Y and Z "unthinkable" to the creatures because of their genetic nature, then Popperian preselection cannot consider those options. It is on this level that psycholinguist Noam Chomsky places human thought, hypothesizing that there are certain things that humans cannot know, in the same way that fish cannot understand what we call "fishing", much less democracy. Chomsky has theorized that perhaps finding the answer to the problem of free will is such an option, ruled out by our biology and prior selection. Dennett disagrees. He theorizes yet another level of creatures in the Tower, the Gregorian, named for the British psychologist Richard Gregory, who is known for his theory of Potential Intelligence and Kinetic Intelligence. Gregory theorizes on the role of information in making "smart moves" the first time. For instance, he examines a pair of scissors - a well-designed artifact - and notes that this is not just a result of intelligence, but something that endows its user with Potential Intelligence. That is, a person with a pair of scissors is more likely to finish the task "divide this piece of paper in two" swiftly and safely than a person without scissors. Tool use has always been considered a mark of high relative intelligence. Chimpanzees use twigs to take termites from termite mounds, thus opening up a food source and allowing greater chance for survival as a species. But even more notable is that there are groups of chimpanzees who cannot "fish" for termites when they are present as a food source - they never "learned". This allows the classification of two chimpanzee "cultures". Twig-use doesn't only require intelligence, but confers it as well, as comparing two individual chimpanzees from different "cultures" will show us. Thus, chimpanzees are a Gregorian creature: they can absorb outer-environment features into their own inner environments. Humans are also Gregorian creatures, albeit ones with a larger environment to work with because of our greater capacity for creating and using tools. Perhaps the most important of our tools are words and concepts: "teamwork" and "inclined plane" are among the tools that we can apply to various situations, as well as higher concepts like "president", "love", "node" and "ska-core", and specific instances like "Everything2", "Chinese New Year", and "Dennett". Darwin (1871, p. 57) posited this trait, that of language, as the prerequisite for "long trains of thought" and thus the human ability to alter its environment in a way umatched by other species. These theories have been supported in recent years by Julian Jaynes (1976) and Howard Margolis (1987), who suggest that self-exhortations and reminders available to us as language-users are what allow us to, say, build dams better than beavers even though we are not born with a complex biological instinct to do so like beavers are. Dennett posits the final level of the tower as that at which humans have arrived: that of science. This is a system that we have created using Gregorian methods of foresight and earlier methods of trial-and-error to embody a better system of generate-and-test that is less arbitrary than all the rest. Situations can be fed into this singular system and accurate results can be gathered without having to actually encounter the situation firsthand - what is known as a hypothesis. Science is also not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public - that is, the human capacity for language allows for a single individual to build upon the results of earlier scientific tests by proposing new experiments for new hypotheses. Thus, there is something of a new genetics in the science of ideas, where old ideas that do not work, like the Ptolemaic theories, do not need to be theorized by each individual and subsequently demolished in order to be replaced by more relevant ideas as the prevailing understanding of a given situation (in this case, the solar system). This makes naked animal Popperian brains no match for our heavily-equipped scientific society, and reverses the burden of proof on Chomsky and other theorists who posit "cognitive closure" (the aforementioned theory that human brains are simply closed to consideration of certain options, even when they are "obvious"). Science provides for a new way of solving problems that can encompass things outside of the Gregorian mien we are born into. SOURCES: Chomsky, Noam. 1972. Language and Mind. Enlarged ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Dennett, Daniel C. 1975. "Why the Law of Effect Will Not Go Away." Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, vol. 5, pp. 179-87. Reprinted in Dennett 1978. Dennett, Daniel C. 1995. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Touchstone ed. New York: Simon & Schuster.

I read the first text that you quoted before you replaced it. Let me respond to that because I don't want to read another long piece (unless it's really necessary):



Yes, this is a perfectly valuable way of conceptualizing choice and action. I like how they emphasize the incremental aspect of evolution.

The part about imagining things in order to not have to do things by physical trial and error is so important and beneficial. In humans and apes there is a specific part of the brain that you can identify that is responsible for this. I believe it's in the front of the brain.

I agree with the first point of criticism of determinism you discuss: that determinist cannot believe in changing people's minds, that conversation for them must be like two television sets opposite of each other.

I cannot understand that Stefan still makes this caricature of determinism and that he gets away with it. I mean obviously the input in the form of voice or written words will do something to the brain and can result in a changed opinion. Television sets dont take input in the form of voice or written words.

will now listen to the other points

In your video you seem to think of consciousness as a central module, a theater as it were where external sensory information is represented in the form of visual, auditory etc. theater that the organism can then use to guide its further actions. While this position is not I think necessary for your general theory, it may bge interesting to engage in the following thought experiment to try to break out of this view:

Quote:

Dennett explains his Multiple Drafts Model through the example of the Phi Phenomenon, and in particular, though the color phi phenomenon. Before reading further, it is best to view the phi phenomenon for yourself by googling “color phi” or visiting the following website: http://www.yorku.ca/eye/colorphi.htm. In the colored phi illusion, two differently colored lights, with an angular separation of a few degrees at the eye, are flashed one after the other. Two interesting things happen. First, the first light appears to move across to the position of the second light. And second, the light appears to change color as it moves. For instance, in the webpage cited above, which featured a green light followed by a red one, the green light seems to turn red as it appears to move across to where the red light is. As Dennett notes, this is quite odd. For one thing, how we could the first light seem to change color before the second light is observed? Dennett entertains two options, both of which he discards. First, he considers the possibility that the observer makes one conclusion, and then changes her memory when she sees the second light. Dennett calls this option “Orwellian”, after George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, where history was constantly revised by the Ministry of Truth (Dennett, 1991, p. 116). In this scenario, shortly after the second spot goes into consciousness, the brain makes up a narrative about the intervening events, complete with the color change mid-way through. This new event sequence is encoded into memory, and the original event sequence is not (Dennett, 1991, p.121). He then suggests a second alternative. According to this scenario, the events are held up in the brain’s “editing room” (if you will), before they go into consciousness. More specifically, the first spot arrives in preconsciousness, and then, when the second spot arrives there, some intermediate material is created, and then, the entire, modified sequence is projected in the theater of consciousness. So the sequence which arrives at consciousness has already been edited with the illusory intermediate material. (Dennett, 1991, p. 120) Dennett calls this second option, “Stalinesque”, after Stalin’s show trials, in which bogus testimonies were staged, and the final verdict was decided in advance (Dennett, 1991, p.117). Dennett then asks: What reason would we have for choosing one interpretation over the other? He contends that here is no way, even in principle, to select one interpretation over the other, for there is no way to demarcate the place or time in the brain in which material goes into consciousness (Dennett, 1991, p.126-132). He further claims that since we cannot tell which is the correct interpretation, there really is no difference between the two interpretations; we are left with a “difference that makes no difference” (Dennett, 1991, p.x). He then concludes that the (putative) fact that there is no way of distinguishing between the two interpretations lends plausibility to the Multiple Drafts Model. For according to the model, there is no concrete place or time in which material is, or is not, in consciousness.

Your video introduced me to determinism for the first time in such detail and clarity. Being a "free-willer," I find it frightening that determinism makes sense . It seems like determism means that the more humanity advances, the less we become. The more we know and understand, the less important we, as indiviudals, become. Someday waaay in the future, when we understand the precise output of all matter given the huge array of inputs, we will be able to put the puzzle pieces together and predict human thought and action (and everything else). And then what difference does any individual make, even to themselves? If I know that I will do X, Y, and Z in the future, what happiness can there be in achieving goals (let alone "choosing" them!), since it's already known that it will happen?

This post is not a debate of determinism, even though most of the time my comments are fighting for free-will . It's more of a cry for help. I still think there is free will, but I'm not as sure as I was. I have made a lot of comments and asked some questions. Please - everyone on both sides of the issue - help me figure this out.

I have posted some of your statements and the times they appear in your video, and then commented on them. I noticed that at about 1 hour into the video, my comments changed from supporting free-will to questioning and attacking determinism. I do not mean this attack to be personal - I am attacking the idea, which scares me.

Also, even though I am posting your statements in the form of quotes, a lot of them are not exact quotes - they are summaries of your ideas at that point in the video.

Lastly: this post is apparently too long to post, so I'll break it up into multiple posts.

Quote:

00:15:00 "Systems have goals."

You use the word "goal" two different ways throughout this video: as an entity's nature, and as a sentient being's *choice* as to what it wants to accomplish.

Quote:

00:16:30 "Something's goals is in its design."

Here you use "goal" as something's "essence" or "nature" - like Aristotle?

Quote:

00:19:30 "The goal of a life system is to procreate."

If the goal of a life system is to procreate, can there be other goals? I ask this in both senses of the word "goal:" a life system's nature, and its desires.

Quote:

00:19:40 "A system can act. If you have a system with an external environment, change occurs through action within the environment...A deodorant bottle can act."

A deodorant bottle cannot act without external stimuli. It doesn't act, it is acted upon. Perhaps your point is that the atams and molecules that make up the deodorant can system - its matter - "act" in response to external stimuli (i.e., the matter that comprises my hand when I press the deodorant can's button). This is true, but matter cannot act, it can only react.

Quote:

00:21:40 "systems must do something for us, or else there is no point" how does uranus do something for us?

How does the system that is "Uranus" do something for us? How does some matter on a planet in a galaxy billions of light-years away do something for us? But they are still "systems," right?

Quote:

00:27:15 In your A, B, C, S diagram, you say that your 2 manipulators are "clearly choosing" because they can either output a 1 or a 0 depending on the inputs.

This is not choice. If your manipulator is a logic gate in electronics, then there is no choice involved: a 1 or a 0 will be output every single time that certain criteria are met (i.e., a certain voltage). If your manipulator is a human, even if that human is only able to say "1" or "0," they can *choose* 1 or 0 regardless of the inputs. An entity with choice can *select* the output based on factors in addition to the inputs. The computer screen that is displaying the pixels that make up your diagram can display black or white pixels, but it cannot choose - it *must* display black or white depending on the inputs (your display can certainly display colored pixels as well, but only based on the input, not by choice).

Quote:

00:29:13 "Choices compared to what? It's also compared to a certain goal."

If by "goal" you mean something's nature, then I agree with the statement: output in the form of change is directly related to a thing's nature.

Quote:

00:29:38 Describing the A, B, Cin, Cout, S diagram, you say, "You can deduce from the diagrams exactly what it does."

If you can deduce what a system does (i.e., what it will choose) based on the diagram (i.e., based on the thing's nature) then no choice is being made. Yes, output and change happen based on inputs, but a choice is not being made.

Quote:

00:32:13 "A thing's 'state' can change the output even with a given input."

Isn't a system's "state" is merely an additional input?

Quote:

00:33:40 "Goal also affects choice." -- "You can inject a goal into a choice process."

A thing's nature is not choice, it is merely another input. A goal in the sense that it is something that I want to accomplish, does affect my choices (I want to make choices that will accomplish that goal, but I don't *have* to), but your example systems (deodorant, thermostat) do not have 2nd type of goal, they only have a nature.

Quote:

00:35:30 "...causality...Without action/reaction no change occurs."

If humans want to accomplish something, they can choose to do something that will accomplish their goal or something that will not accomplish their goal (hence they have choice, unlike a thermostat which must always accomplish it's goal). In either case, their choices will have effects; the things they cause will have effects; their actions will have reactions. A human's choice is also influenced by causality: some things that happened prior to the human decision may have affected the external environment, therefore changing the choices necessary to accomplish the human's goal; but it is still up to the human to *choose* whether to act to accomplish his goal or not accomplish his goal; in harmony with or despite the prior cause/effect.

Quote:

00:39:00 You describe a for() loop in programming language as an expression of choice.

This is not a choice at all. This is causality, as you said. A choice means that the system has more than one option available (which is true here) and can select *any* of the options (which is not true here). This loop function must select only the specific option that it is designed to select, depending on the value of t. The loop does not choose whether to increment and print s, it always increments and prints s if t>0, and it never increments or prints s if t=0. A human, an entity with choice, but be given the same instructions but *choose* to not increment and print s when t>0 out of boredom, for example.

Quote:

00:42:15 You describe a human eating a sandwich as an example of choice. You define "goal" as "you want to be not hungry, you want to be healthy, you want to look good, etc."

This definition of "goal" is *not* a thing's nature, but a thing's desires - what the thing wants to accomplish.

Quote:

00:46:00 "A plant is a mechanical system that relies on action and reaction" - "A flytrap makes choices. When something falls in it essentially pushes a button and the plant reacts"

This is not choice. It is a mechanical process, not a "mechanical choice." It is action and reaction, but the flytrap cannot choose *not* to eat the fly. If the fly triggers the plant's sensors, the plant *must* close and eat the fly. If the fly does not trigger the plant's sensors, the plant *must* stay open. The plant cannot choose to close on a whim, hoping there is a fly inside that hasn't yet touched the plant's sensors.

Quote:

00:49:00 "The bone structure of our legs is mechanical, like a flytrap...it accomplishes goals."

Here, you are using "goal" as in a thing's nature, not as in what the thing wants to accomplish.

Quote:

00:45:00 "Subconscious decisions are autonomous."

I agree: breathing, circulating blood, and sensing (e.g., listening, seeing) are not choices. We cannot choose whether to perceive reality, but we *must* choose how to react to it. There is no automatic, hardwired, chemical, or mechanical response to hearing the buzzing of a bee: all the inputs (including the state) are contemplated by our consciousness and, based on the short and long term goals we have, we then make a choice how to react.

Quote:

00:57:05 "The function of consciousness is to make decisions. Your mind does this for you."

I think you mean "choices" when you say "decisions" here. This makes it seem like humans don't make choices: because their mind does it for them. But without a mind, there is no human; a mind is an integral part of a human; if a mind makes a choice (and it does), then a human makes a choice.