Are you a neuroscientist?
116 karma · joined January 2, 2016
To summarize, given all this new informatio: no, deterministic machines do not contradict free will. Because those machines are intelligent and have feedback loops and can (deterministically) make intelligent decisions based on the information.
For many people the physical description of the brain does actually have free will.
The point is to change people's intuition about free will, based on all this new information we've discovered in the past century.
"external to our physical reality" There is no need for that.
Is the world inside of "No mans sky" game "external" or "internal" to our physical reality? Soul is something that is run on the hardware of the brain, and thus can have different properties than the physical properties of neurons. It's virtual. No less real for that though.
There are obviously some mechanisms for creating new information and action, based on past experience as well (thus also creating new unforeseen behavior). These mechanisms can clearly be implemented on the neural machine of the brain, since it's evident that it can even already be approximated in Google Deep Dream to create new unforeseen images based on previous inputs.
Whether the human can always verbally describe the decision tree (or whatever other decision mechanism is used), is another question. But even if it cannot describe, so what? The decision is done somewhere deep in the net, and the verbal processor does not have access to it. It's still the network making a decision...
So what makes you say that free will is an "illusion"? Our brains obviously soak up the information and then make future decisions based on that information (subject to effectiveness of learning, etc...).
However, if one studies the experience itself, it would be very accurate to say that the soul is timeless. It is simply that there is no information about time in the feeling of a soul. It's not connected to any time-based experience.
It's like there is an object in the mind's processor that described the "soul". And in that object there is no field with the type "Datetime". It's not needed. The object can very well function without it. It is also very compatible (or rather accessible from) with any other experience, whether it has a Datetime field or not. One can think about the past, the present, the future, the Abstract - and one can feel the "soul" in any of them.
Since the experiences connected to the soul are really the only ones that seem to "matter", (being in this regard different from any practical life problems or circumstances), it behooves a lot to understand this timeless nature of it.
In either way, pursuing such goals is EXACTLY what it means to live. It's the process of the evolution itself. We are not alienated from it, on the contrary we are in the very heart of it and we get to experience it first-hand.
Alienation from life is more like non-accepting a certain aspect of it which is obviously happening. An aspect like people researching into biology to cheat death. So isn't that what your comment is?
As a social species, in the development of humans it's not only the biological structures that are important (the body itself), but the informational, social structures. A tribe which works well socially (helping each other, keeping together etc.) will survive much better and longer than a tribe of individualists, and yet even better than individuals living on their own. A big part of actually keeping a tribe structure alive is the knowledge than elders constantly pass on to the new generation. And that does not stop after the genes are passed.
Additionally, there seems to be some (deeper, philosophical) knowledge that is very hard to acquire before a certain age. It just takes that long to collect enough experience to be able to connect certain high level concepts. It's very likely that a tribe with longer-living monkeys (metaphorically) would have more of these wise elders that have acquired the knowledge and could pass it on better to the rest, than a tribe with monkeys that would die off fast after making babies.
But this still would only mean that the evolution would not kill you off directly after passing on the genes, but instead some time afterwards, after you've already learned all important things about life and were able to quickly teach them to the new generation. It would still kill you off either way.
For example: I go to work and do some project there. Let's say that I now found out that there is a base reality, and my work won't matter in the base reality, that there it's all like a video game. It doesn't change anything for me, does it? I only do the work because I enjoy doing things with my mind, because I enjoy the experience. I also know that my work will cause changes in this reality (I have a lot of past evidence for this), like give me a paycheck or change some part of the world in some way, and so I can plan according to this and how the things I do will affect other parts of the reality, including other people. All that still happens even if it's a simulation.
So why would you ever want to even think about if it's a simulation or not? There is still no way to go to the "base" reality.
Also, if it's simulation, wouldn't you want to make your life here longer? (Or are you just assuming that when you die, all your experience will somehow travel with you into some base reality that you have no way of accessing now? )
If, however, you are making an objective claim about "past lives" and reincarnation - there is no solid evidence for it. 99% of "past life memories" examples are in the form of "I had a family and we had a house" (omg, that sounds like our dead relative, you must be him reincarnated), or in a form of an obviously imagined past life of a historic figure, with details which have been read in history books by the individual claiming to experience the said past life. And interestingly they always seem to read about the historic figure first (giving their subconscious mind the change to soak up that knowledge (in this life though)), and "experiencing a past life" only after.
So to answer your question - because you only get one particular mind, and that's it. This is what science shows us. Whether you "feel like" you are "one with all other minds" is just a subjective experience. It's not physical reality.
Whatever you do, at least don't undermine the science that tries to prolong life. I am not saying that you might have wanted personally to undermine it, it's just that the argument of yours (coming from similar people) comes up EVERY TIME eternal life is discussed.
What happens when the science will eventually come up with technology to recreate (by all external empirical evidence) a human consciousness? Would you still say it's a "question outside science"? Then perhaps you can still claim that even the newely created mind inside a machine is also just a "radio" receiving the consciousness signals from the cosmos? Even so, of course noone can stop you from looking at things from that perspective, but then you can perhaps just look at the practical applications of understand exactly how such "radios" work and being able to have a technology which will in all external observable regards act as a human (even if you still perhaps won't believe it will have the same "real" type of consciousness as one).
The peculiar thing about this question is that normally people who don't understand some advanced science (like automobiles or computing or radio, etc.) - don't actively express a will to keep others from studying and developing that science. There are billions who don't understand all the intricacies of a modern smartphone, but almost none of them (minus the religious fanatics) say things like "humans should not try to find this out", "that is not a question for science", "you will never be able to understand that", "herecy!", etc.
And yet, when it comes to the science of consciousness, the mind, human cognition, artificial intelligence etc - we hear these voices all the time. "Stop studying the brain", "science can't help", "we'll never understand the mind", "it's above our abilities", etc. etc.
Latest years have shown a tremendous progress in understanding and recreating parts of human intelligence. The task is huge and a lot is left to do, but every new understanding or technology clearly shows a pattern that we are getting close to it. And yet no matter how much "evidence" (in form of recreating) comes up, people still seem to feel unsettled that the science tries (and slowly succeeds) to understand the human mind.
Having talked to many of these people it almost seems like they have a fear, a deep rooted fear of being a "machine" themselves. Somehow if they know that there is someone who understands how they work (and can recreate them), they feel like that diminishes their value, or perhaps removes their "soul" somehow? Well it doesn't. No amount of technical understanding and technological will abilities will diminish any subjective religious and other deep experiences. Because that's what they are: subjective.
> But seeing the radio as the source would be kinda missing the whole point, wouldn't it?
What point are these scientists missing? They are simply trying to create Strong AI. There is no "point" to this besides the technology itself.
Sorry if anyone is upset, I'm just trying to understand the objection here. The scientists are clearly doing great and useful work, why would anyone think that they are wrong in doing that?
Well, not really. For example, we don't understand how some brain function works. For some reason we might get a hypothesis that it is governed by a production of a certain neurotransmitter (very simplified here). At that time we have no other version of how the function might work at all. Then we do experiments where we mess with the said neurotransmitter, or a brain region, etc. If the results show that there is no measurable effect on the brain function, then that hypothesis becomes disproven (or at least a certain specific way of understanding that hypothesis).
If there is no alternative that might just mean that we haven't found it yet. Or that the current framework we're using is not suitable to the question. But even then working on existing hypothesis might give a lot of information on what framework might actually work.
And yes, this is science. What is your alternative? Just say "must be the almighty" and do nothing? Because doing that is surely more scientific?