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Post by FilmFlaneur on Apr 4, 2017 11:34:57 GMT
Scrappily written, but here's something I thought interesting, given the recent discussion had here:
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Post by faustus5 on Apr 4, 2017 12:10:32 GMT
Two quick responses:
You have to be careful about interpreting Dennett's talk of consciousness as an illusion, because in many respects he means exactly the opposite--his ontology is quite slippery and hard to grasp. The bottom line is that he regards quite a lot of very abstract things as perfectly real. From one perspective, their being abstractions will forever ban them from the list of things some people regard as real. But Dennett is quite comfortable treating all kinds of abstract things as real. You might say his ontology is that many things that are illusions are so useful that we are justified in treating them as real, and that this includes most of the concepts we use. This is where you get him having no problem with free will existing even in a completely deterministic universe. Just try and imagine what it would be like doing the things we do with computers without visually helpful user interfaces.
Second thing: it really drives me crazy when people throw the word "reductionism" around without understanding what it actually means in philosophy. Dennett is actually anti-reductionist to the core, and in a way this is tied to his comfort level with treating abstract things like intentional states as perfectly real, even if they are user illusions.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 7, 2017 8:59:05 GMT
Everything is an illusion.
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Apr 8, 2017 2:07:11 GMT
Two quick responses: You have to be careful about interpreting Dennett's talk of consciousness as an illusion, because in many respects he means exactly the opposite--his ontology is quite slippery and hard to grasp. The bottom line is that he regards quite a lot of very abstract things as perfectly real. From one perspective, their being abstractions will forever ban them from the list of things some people regard as real. But Dennett is quite comfortable treating all kinds of abstract things as real. You might say his ontology is that many things that are illusions are so useful that we are justified in treating them as real, and that this includes most of the concepts we use. This is where you get him having no problem with free will existing even in a completely deterministic universe. Just try and imagine what it would be like doing the things we do with computers without visually helpful user interfaces. Second thing: it really drives me crazy when people throw the word "reductionism" around without understanding what it actually means in philosophy. Dennett is actually anti-reductionist to the core, and in a way this is tied to his comfort level with treating abstract things like intentional states as perfectly real, even if they are user illusions. Most of what I've read from Dennett strikes me as being (or striving to be) reductionist in nature: ie, explaining how things work as them being the interaction of smaller, more fundamental parts. I don't think treating abstract/useful illusions as real disqualifies one from being a reductionist, or even means one believes those things are real in any sense beyond them being the things that make them up. I actually think Sean Carroll explained this quite lucidly in his "free will is as real as baseball" analogy. To use a less controversial example, if I say a film shot in digital (let's say The Revenant) exists, it does't mean that I don't believe that what I call The Revenant isn't actually a thing made up of however-may-illions of pixels, which are themselves just 0s and 1s of digital information (reductionism). But not wanting to describe every single 0 and 1 that makes it up instead of just saying "The Revenant" doesn't make me anti-reductionist, and if I treat The Revenant is real it doesn't mean I believe it's anything beyond those 0s and 1s. Also, Dennett seemed to support reductionism when defining his idea of Greedy reductionism
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Post by faustus5 on Apr 8, 2017 14:20:49 GMT
Most of what I've read from Dennett strikes me as being (or striving to be) reductionist in nature: ie, explaining how things work as them being the interaction of smaller, more fundamental parts. That's conversational reductionism, or rather science going about business as usual. And note that the term is almost never used as a compliment. It functions as an empty insult, a place holder for a critique that is rarely ever fleshed out. You trot out the big old scary "R" word, and then your work is done. In its more precise technical meaning in philosophy of science, reductionism is a relationship between two different descriptive or explanatory vocabularies. The terms of one vocabulary are said to reduce to the terms of the other if you could take a sentence or paragraph using one vocabulary and replace the key words or phrases with the terms of the other vocabulary with no real change in meaning--the switch would be truth-preserving. This is only possible if the terms in one vocabulary can be linked to the terms in the other through scientific "bridge laws" or logical deduction. The classic example: "Heat is molecular motion". Is there a lawlike relationship between "Mary believes the movie Get Out is a powerful social critique" and a description of the networks of neurons in her head which instantiate this belief, such that this same relationship would exist for all subjects for whom this sentence is true? Nope. So reductionism with regards to mental content, or intentional states, is impossible. For people like the Churchlands, this means mental states are folk fictions, a kind of failed, third rate science of mind. For Dennett, it means ascriptions of mental content are normative tools we use to predict and describe what agents around us do. Mental states are perfectly real, they just have very fuzzy boundaries and truth conditions, and our ascriptions are made independently of any story science could tell us about what is going on inside of us. (This is why, for a compatibilist like Dennett, there is nothing neuroscience could tell us about whether we have free will. The brain isn't where you look to decide that issue.)
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Apr 8, 2017 16:35:21 GMT
Most of what I've read from Dennett strikes me as being (or striving to be) reductionist in nature: ie, explaining how things work as them being the interaction of smaller, more fundamental parts. That's conversational reductionism, or rather science going about business as usual. And note that the term is almost never used as a compliment. It functions as an empty insult, a place holder for a critique that is rarely ever fleshed out. You trot out the big old scary "R" word, and then your work is done. That depends on the circles one moves in. It's usually not a compliment in everyday parlance and among the more woo-ie contemporary philosophers, but among rationalists reductionist IS used as a compliment and considered a key goal of rational and scientific inquiry. Are you certain about this? Because it strikes me that if you could model a brain state that leads to a mental state like the one you describe then for anyone who agreed with that statement, assuming they were referring to the same thing (which might not be the case), the brain state as it related to that statement would be the same. I still think whether or not this excluded Dennet from being a reductionist would depend on what he means by them being "real." If, like in my example, saying "The Revenant is real" is tantamount to saying that The Revenant is all the 0s and 1s that make it up, then that's not anti-reductionism. Not sure exactly what you mean by "ascriptions of mental content" though: is the attempts made at describing mental content the same as ascribing causes to them? Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by "ascription?" As for the free will issue, do you think Dennett would deny that science can debunk certain issues or ideas about free will? IE, that it's impossible to address a notion like libertarian free will? As I understand the compatabilist notion, it doesn't seem in conflict with reductionism. It's the same as talking about baseball as a real thing despite it not being present on a more fundamental level.
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Post by NishmatHaChalil on Apr 8, 2017 21:50:29 GMT
That's conversational reductionism, or rather science going about business as usual. And note that the term is almost never used as a compliment. It functions as an empty insult, a place holder for a critique that is rarely ever fleshed out. You trot out the big old scary "R" word, and then your work is done. That depends on the circles one moves in. It's usually not a compliment in everyday parlance and among the more woo-ie contemporary philosophers, but among rationalists reductionist IS used as a compliment and considered a key goal of rational and scientific inquiry. As I understand the compatabilist notion, it doesn't seem in conflict with reductionism. It's the same as talking about baseball as a real thing despite it not being present on a more fundamental level. Hello, Eva. I think you are right in your view that both in science and in analytical philosophy (which provides the fundaments for the scientific method), reductionism is certainly not an offense. I believe the problem here, however, would be that you and Faustus seem to be referring to different things. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I believe you are referring to operationalization, one of the basic principles of science (which came into being due to methodological reductionism; which you may also be referring to), while Faustus is referring to the possibility of reduction in a specific explanation, that is, to reductionism as a position opposed to anti-reductionism (in cognitive science usually termed “holism”). I agree that a degree of reduction is always needed in order to provide any science at all its validity and efficiency, and I would also agree with the assumption that total reduction is a scientific ideal. However, reduction, per se, is more a descriptive term than either a negative trait or a scientific principle (which, in the scientific community, I guess, would be what would count as a compliment). Reductionism, as a position, is only the best position in the eyes of science when it’s supported by evidence. If science was complete in its knowledge (whether or not that’s possible), it might even be true that reductionism would always be the best option, but, at our current level, it’s not always the case. Since it’s a principle, operationalization must always be followed, independently of what is possible and what is not, and total reduction, the bridging of all operational definitions, would be an ideal to be sought, but not necessarily a possibility. When faced with a phenomenon, however, whether to embrace reductionism (as a position, in the sense applied by Faustus) or not is a pragmatic decision, which must be made according to the direction pointed by the body of evidence and its statistical analysis. I’m switching my field to medicine, but I started college life studying cognitive science. Thus, I can tell you that cognitivism (as opposed to radical behaviorism) is basically an anti-reductionist explanatory position, but it’s also the official scientific view. As Faustus suggests, although it’s not necessarily impossible, we cannot currently link all of neuroscience to cognitive science. Doing so is an ideal, but not necessarily one we will attain someday. Furthermore, in part owing to this gap, cognitive theories are not completely reducible to their operationalization, depending also in a certain degree of abstraction. Even so, we prefer the best available cognitive explanations to the best available radical behaviorist explanations, because, since the greater development of computer science and functional neuroimaging in the last few decades, the former have achieved more evidential weight than the latter. As a description of the official position of cognitive science, however, I actually prefer the term “non-reductionist” to the more orthodox “anti-reductionist”, since, as I explained, the decision to drop the available reductionist explanations was merely a pragmatic one. If we had a reductionist explanation which proved superior to our current “holistic” ones, successfully bridging the gaps between neuroscience and cognitive science, we would certainly favor it. After all, doing so is only impossible now due to the limitations of our modelling capability. Whether one day our models will surpass some, or all of these limitations, is open to speculation. I would also like to add that, while cognitive neuroscience has not come far enough to permit the level of specificity suggested by Faustus in its assumptions, it has come far enough to make several informed predictions about Mary’s brain, most of which would hold true. We cannot deduce from an image of Mary’s brain exactly what she is thinking about, but we can correctly predict that certain areas of her brain will be functioning while she has certain thoughts, and we can correctly presume the same would be true of any other neurotypical person (here meaning someone without significant loss, damage or non-expression of encephalic structures). In functional neuroimaging, we have access to a glimpse into the hardware while it’s working and, from what we know of it, we can also make informed assumptions about the different software that are being employed, but we don’t have access to the data that is stored in it and is being manipulated. Perhaps a method of modelling capable of identifying the data will be developed someday, perhaps not. Either way, unfortunately, cognitive neuroscience is not there yet. We certainly can already predict how different parts of the brain influence consciousness, however, and we can also predict which changes will be observed when any of them are damaged. When the corpus callosum is damaged, for instance, we observe a phenomenon usually referred to as “split-brain“ – the brain hemispheres lose their connection, and parts of what we usually call consciousness are divided, becoming greatly independent from one another. Sorry for going off-topic, but would you by chance be the same poster as LitNet’s MorpheusSandman? It has been a long time since I last visited LN, and I don’t remember all that much about MS, but I have noticed the similarity between you two. Either way, since you were away from the CM boards during the brief time I posted there, we didn’t interact that much in IMDB, but I liked your posts and reviews. Have you and the others from the Evangelion boards migrated somewhere? I was intending to start posting there next year as well, but then the boards were deleted. I probably won’t have much free time this semester, but, after leaving cram school and getting back into university, I will probably be able to watch movies again and, when that happens, I would enjoy participating in the types of discussions which you and the others used to have there.
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Post by faustus5 on Apr 9, 2017 14:07:58 GMT
Are you certain about this? Because it strikes me that if you could model a brain state that leads to a mental state like the one you describe then for anyone who agreed with that statement, assuming they were referring to the same thing (which might not be the case), the brain state as it related to that statement would be the same. Except that the brain states wouldn't be the same, ever. Beliefs in humans aren't like values stored in a computer memory address. There's no place in anyone's brain where you will find "Believes that P" for any "P". Any belief is going to be part of a complex, holistic network of associations that will be different for every person, even among those who we say share the "same" belief. That's why reductionism can never work for mental states. He isn't strictly speaking or "officially" a philosophical pragmatist, but in effect if a concept is useful then it qualifies as real in his view. He's very much in the Sean Carroll camp, i.e. "X is as real as baseball" for many X's in philosophy of mind. Ascriptions of mental content are just conjectures about what other agents believe, think, desire, etc. "Causes" here are not scientific, but contextual. I may come to think Beatrice was caused to believe it is raining because she looked out the window or was informed by a radio announcement. Science could only address specific claims made about what kinds of capabilities people had. "Free will" as a concept has more to do with social norms about behavior and responsibility. So whether people have free will generally would be established by philosophical arguments where science literally has nothing to say. And I do mean "literally"! However, in a court case where someone wanted to establish that a guy should be partially absolved of guilt for killing his girlfriend because the bug spray he uses in his job was recently discovered to cause neurological impairments (true case), well now science can step in and make a contribution. What kind? That's an interesting debate to be had.
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Apr 10, 2017 17:24:13 GMT
That depends on the circles one moves in. It's usually not a compliment in everyday parlance and among the more woo-ie contemporary philosophers, but among rationalists reductionist IS used as a compliment and considered a key goal of rational and scientific inquiry. As I understand the compatabilist notion, it doesn't seem in conflict with reductionism. It's the same as talking about baseball as a real thing despite it not being present on a more fundamental level. Hello, Eva. I think you are right in your view that both in science and in analytical philosophy (which provides the fundaments for the scientific method), reductionism is certainly not an offense. I believe the problem here, however, would be that you and Faustus seem to be referring to different things. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I believe you are referring to operationalization, one of the basic principles of science (which came into being due to methodological reductionism; which you may also be referring to), while Faustus is referring to the possibility of reduction in a specific explanation, that is, to reductionism as a position opposed to anti-reductionism (in cognitive science usually termed “holism”). I agree that a degree of reduction is always needed in order to provide any science at all its validity and efficiency, and I would also agree with the assumption that total reduction is a scientific ideal. However, reduction, per se, is more a descriptive term than either a negative trait or a scientific principle (which, in the scientific community, I guess, would be what would count as a compliment). Reductionism, as a position, is only the best position in the eyes of science when it’s supported by evidence. If science was complete in its knowledge (whether or not that’s possible), it might even be true that reductionism would always be the best option, but, at our current level, it’s not always the case. Hi nishmat, By reductionism I was thinking of methodological reductionism, though opertionalization is useful too (and I'm surprised I didn't know that term, or if I did I had forgotten; so thanks). I'm still not entirely clear in what way you think faustus is using it though... maybe some examples would be useful. Yeah, I wouldn't say that reductionism is a "principle" of science, but as you said an ideal. I also agree that it should be mostly descriptive, but because a lot of philosophy out there is hostile to reductionism it's become a term with both positive and negative connotations depending on what philosophy you subscribe to. In epistemic rationality circles, it has positive connotations. Likewise, I understand the need for science that works on levels above what things physically reduce too. It's why we haven't done away with chemistry and biology just because we have physics. But I think one thing that's important to understand is that everything we describe on larger, more macro levels do reduce to simpler things. One of the popular modern philosophical positions maintain a kind of top-down view that insists that larger, more macro structures that we refer to have existence that is fundamentally irreducible. I think when people like Dennett or Carroll or Yudkowsky refer to such macro-structures it's with the understanding that they do reduce to more fundamental things even though our targets of inquiry are not always concerned with those levels, so the more macro descriptions are matters of pragmatism and convenience more than anything. To ape Carroll, we say "baseball" rather than listening the position of every particle that makes up every player, umpire, ball, bat, base, dirt, etc. Very cool that you studied cognitive science. It's an area that I have an informal/casual interest with primarily due to my interest in rationality (which obviously involves cognitive science). Thanks for the examples from the field as well; it's fascinating stuff. Yep, I was MorpheusSandman on LitNet. I think you're the only one that ever connected the two, though! I similarly haven't visited there in a while. It was typically only a board I posted on when my interest in literature spiked, but I also found many of the in-depth discussions there exhausting after a while. Only so many hours in a day and typically so many other things I would rather be doing! Yeah, the Evangelion board regs (really just three of us; couldn't contact the others in time) migrated to a private board that was primarily for the saner members of the IMDb Religion, Faith, and Spirituality board--though coincidentally the board's admnin was an Evangelion fan himself named Gendo. I'll send you a PM with a link to the forum if you're interested. You can find most of our (Evangelion regs, I mean) discussion in Raxivace's thread in the movie section.
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Apr 10, 2017 17:35:47 GMT
Are you certain about this? Because it strikes me that if you could model a brain state that leads to a mental state like the one you describe then for anyone who agreed with that statement, assuming they were referring to the same thing (which might not be the case), the brain state as it related to that statement would be the same. Except that the brain states wouldn't be the same, ever. Beliefs in humans aren't like values stored in a computer memory address. There's no place in anyone's brain where you will find "Believes that P" for any "P". Any belief is going to be part of a complex, holistic network of associations that will be different for every person, even among those who we say share the "same" belief. That's why reductionism can never work for mental states. I realized after I wrote that I should've said "similar" rather than "the same." Or rather I think it's possible that there is some part or area of a brain state that may be "the same" for certain beliefs even if many others related to it are quite different. It's kinda like saying that all robins are different, yet there's a similarity that allows for the same taxonomy. So saying that two people's beliefs reduce to a similar brain state would be like saying that there are two different robins in which certain aspects of their biology are the same in order to allow for the classification. Of course, determining whether or not this is so with beliefs is much more difficult, just as much do to the language as anything else--not knowing exactly what anyone thinks any given linguistic belief actually refers to in their mind. Right, but I also think Sean Carroll is a reductionist. If you read his "free will/baseball" article essentially what he's doing is recognizing that the macro terms we use reduce down to more fundamental descriptions, but that the macro terms are useful, necessary, and because they essentially refer to the more fundamental descriptions, they are real. So saying baseball is "real" for a reductionist is essentially saying that all the particles that make up the players, bats, balls, bases, etc. is "real." An anti-reductionist would be someone who thinks that there's a way in which baseball is real beyond this reduced state. At least, that's how I understand it. I understand you now. Free will as a social concept is certainly one way of looking at it, but what I mean by science addressing certain aspects would be, eg, the study that showed that a brain could make decisions before the agent was consciously aware of it. That seems to address at least one notion of free will as consciousness being the thing that makes the decision. Personally, I've never understood why people think you need to believe in free will for social justice. Even if you take the deterministic view that we're essentially just robotic slaves to incontrovertible physical laws, social justice would simply be a means of quelling certain actions taken by determined agents and preventing future such actions.
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Post by hayjaley on Apr 10, 2017 19:43:42 GMT
IMO because it can to lead to preemptive detainment and indeterminate sentences. If we believe that someone has literally no choosing in his actions, it flows naturally that we should abort such "symptoms" before serious crimes can happen (like civil commitment for minor offences normally requiring a fine) or that they should be treated away before the prisoner is released (post sentence commitment for sex crimes for example). Most of the big names in the business past to present (Esquilor, Benjamin Rush, Maudsley, Menninger, Torrey etc) have addressed these issues rather disturbingly:Karl Menninger for example, said that "if a man has a makeup which indicates that he will be antisocial all his life, he ought to be in prison all his life, without the necessity of his having committed murder" and how punishment after a crime has all ready been committed bypasses the the real problem of "how to identify, detect and detain potentially dangerous citizens". And this man was no crank, but probably the most influential american psychiatrist of the first two thirds of the the last century. If one believes that human behavior is caused (especially deviant behavior), then a duty/temptation of arresting such behavior will naturally arise.
This is not IMO a purely scientific problem, like the Copenhagen interpretation. The social consequences of these ideas resemble more of the problems of witchcraft rather than the problems of quantum mechanics. Unless a person has some sort of right (resembling the fifth amendment) protecting him against an expert declaring him "being unfree of his will" they may fuck him, regardless of the therapeutic nature of the intentions. (sorry to butt in, but cannot resist this new forum no more...)
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Post by general313 on Apr 10, 2017 21:04:18 GMT
This is not IMO a purely scientific problem, like the Copenhagen interpretation. The social consequences of these ideas resemble more of the problems of witchcraft rather than the problems of quantum mechanics. Unless a person has some sort of right (resembling the fifth amendment) protecting him against an expert declaring him "being unfree of his will" they may fuck him, regardless of the therapeutic nature of the intentions. Interesting, when you put it like that it reminds me of the Spielberg film Minority Report (based on a Philip K, Dick short story). That film hints at some of these issues.
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Post by permutojoe on Apr 11, 2017 2:35:39 GMT
The way I see it, we're moderately clever, but our cleverness has limits. There are things we will never understand, like the nature of the universe and perhaps the nature of consciousness as well. We're simply not smart enough to figure out certain things and we never will be. It's pretty fantastic that some half-man half-apes from millions of years ago made it this far.
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Post by The Lost One on Apr 11, 2017 11:10:29 GMT
This is not IMO a purely scientific problem, like the Copenhagen interpretation. The social consequences of these ideas resemble more of the problems of witchcraft rather than the problems of quantum mechanics. Unless a person has some sort of right (resembling the fifth amendment) protecting him against an expert declaring him "being unfree of his will" they may fuck him, regardless of the therapeutic nature of the intentions. Interesting, when you put it like that it reminds me of the Spielberg film Minority Report (based on a Philip K, Dick short story). That film hints at some of these issues. It always bugged me that Spielberg essentially inverted Dick's point with the story.
In Dick's story Pre-Crime is the perfect system and the only people wanting to bring it down are corrupt. But their attempts to do so ultimately fail because of just how flawless a system Pre-Crime is. A key point here is the minority report and why such a thing might come about yet the system still be flawless
With Spielberg Pre-Crime is presented as a dystopic system and indeed a flawed system because in the end Tom Cruise's character brings it down by proving it wrong. The minority report is just a red herring (it turns out there is no minority report in this story). Much focus is given to the ethics of using the three psychics, something Dick spends no time on at all
Dick's story is a study in determinism and its compatibility with justice. He leaves the reader to consider his/her own view whether Pre-Crime is good.
Spielberg takes the audience's moral judgement out of their hands by presenting Pre-Crime in a dystopic light from the off (he even films it with subdued colours as if to reinforce how bleak this future is). And what's more he goes out to say that it doesn't work anyway meaning the viewer can cheer along when this unpleasant, flawed system is brought down in the end
Dick's story is one of the cleverest sci-fi stories I've ever come across, perfectly constructed. Speilberg's story is generic dystopic blah.
Your mileage may vary of course!
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Post by hayjaley on Apr 11, 2017 16:05:38 GMT
That is a good PKD story, haven't seen the film, but I wish that this was only science fiction. A far more accurate portrayal of these issues is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where Mcmurphy realizes too late that instead of getting of easy, the staff considers him sick and he has been railroaded into an "therapeutic" indeterminate sentence in the nuthouse. Here is a good story of such persons: linkWhat kinda surprises and disturbs me a little whenever these issues are discussed, is that most people do not seem to recognize this and merely see this as some kind of hypothetical scenario. There is not IMO, no reason to ask what will happen to justice if the notion of free will is dismissed. Such notion and it's results are allready applied to "crazy" persons. Ezra Pound was denied trial and hospitalized for over a decade. Janet Cresswell was in Broadmoor for almost 30 years for slashing her doctor in the ass with a fruit knife. (this is an interesting story: link. Peter Green was transferred from jail to a hospital after threatening his manager. Louis Theroux did a wonderful special few years ago about California, where sex offenders are instantly committed after serving their sentences. Various real life Mcmurphys have spend years in institutions for misdemeanors. Sometimes it swings the other way, like Dan White dodging a first degree murder charge because of diminished capacity. Such are the consequences when we assert that the insane criminal has no free will and that his crime was merely a symptom of some disease process in his mind/brain. The question is whether we wish to expand this thinking to the sane criminal. I doubt it will fare much better.
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Post by Times Up on Apr 11, 2017 16:29:52 GMT
I have all of the characteristics of a human poster. Flesh, skin, hair, quotes. But not a single clear identifiable reply except for quotes and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. I feel lethal on the verge of frenzy. I think my quotes of sanity are about to slip.
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Post by faustus5 on Apr 11, 2017 16:53:44 GMT
So saying that two people's beliefs reduce to a similar brain state would be like saying that there are two different robins in which certain aspects of their biology are the same in order to allow for the classification. Still, not enough would be similar to qualify as true reductionism. You are probably aware that using brains scans, we can tell which of several choices a person is going to make as long as ten seconds before they are aware of having made it. Or that we can tell what kinds of things you are thinking about in a very rough, abstract way. What the breathless news sources which report these advances DON’T tell you is that these achievements are only possible after multiple trials so that the unique properties of the subject’s brains can be identified and calibrated. Or that in a weeks’ time, the subjects brains have changed so much that the calibration processes has to start all over. If mental states reduced, there would be no need for calibration in the first place. There would be lawlike relationships between mental states and brain states such that every subject’s brain would exhibit that same, instantly identifiable processes in these experiments. That’s not reductionism, strictly speaking. That’s its philosophical alternative, holism. Yep, science can get under the hood and tell us about the mechanisms responsible for what we do when we make choices, but (under the view Dennett and I defend), there is no possible experiment that could tell us that free will did not exist in general. That is not a scientific issue.
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Post by general313 on Apr 12, 2017 0:15:50 GMT
Interesting, when you put it like that it reminds me of the Spielberg film Minority Report (based on a Philip K, Dick short story). That film hints at some of these issues. It always bugged me that Spielberg essentially inverted Dick's point with the story.
Dick's story is a study in determinism and its compatibility with justice. He leaves the reader to consider his/her own view whether Pre-Crime is good.
Dick's story is one of the cleverest sci-fi stories I've ever come across, perfectly constructed. Speilberg's story is generic dystopic blah.
Your mileage may vary of course!
Having only watched the movie, I rather liked it, even though I though there was something muddled about how the story's split concern with the justice of Pre-Crime and the plight of the Pre-Cogs. Spielberg does have an annoying tendency to spoon feed his audience, as he did in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (too bad we'll never get to see Kubrick's imagining of that film). I'll have to check out the short story.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 12, 2017 2:27:18 GMT
All explantions are reductionist in that it reduces the subject to something more fundamental than itself. This includes substance dualism. Dennett is a functional reductionist in that he sees consciousness as reducing to goal-directed interactions within the system. It does not exist above and beyond this. Eva Yojimbo is correct in that Carroll sees all phenomena as being able to reduce to collections and interactions of simpler kinds and the higher level interactions do not have causal roles in themselves which is pretty much Laplacian. This is quite different to a physicalist account like Searle's (with influences from the Stanford school) reduction of mind. See this blog where he addresses a lecture from his (Searle's) philosophy of mind course: www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/09/08/consciousness-and-downward-causation/See also the comment feed from this Pigliucci blog where philosophers and system scientists contest Carroll's claims: rationallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/essays-on-emergence-part-i.html
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Post by The Lost One on Apr 12, 2017 7:50:05 GMT
Having only watched the movie, I rather liked it, To be honest I probably would have liked it a lot more had I not read the story first. I had a similar reaction to Blade Runner, I felt it took the complete opposite stance to Dick's novel. But I would concede Blade Runner is good in its own right.
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