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  #71  
Old March 8th, 2006, 11:23 AM
Margaret McGhee Margaret McGhee is offline
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Default Re: A Free Will Challenge

I hesitate to provide a reasonable answer to a snarky insult, but for the benefit of others . .

Women have always chosen not to get pregnant. With few opportunities to procreate in life our strategy is to pick and choose the best time, place and partner to optimize the results. In some cases when times are lethally dangerous we may have a better opportunity to pass our DNA into the future by foregoing pregnancy and remaining alive and healthy to help raise siblings or their children. Only a patrairchal ideologue could so reflexively interpret a woman's choice not to get (or be) pregnant as inherently self-destructive.

Of course, we do not sit down and calculate the odds. But that's how it works out when we are free to follow the emotions produced by our dispositions, instincts and reasoning when deciding to get pregnant or not - and when we are not under the control of those who see our purpose in life as the production of cannon fodder for their God's latest war.

Quote:
Sure, that must explain the self-destructiveness of various forms of feminism wherein women choose to not become pregnant, and of the West’s nonreligious and so-called liberal elites and their declining birthrates, all of which results in a kind of suicide, at least for their particular gene pools.
Do you really think that liberalism and conservatism are inherited? There's a good paper (a meta study) that identifies political conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition http://www.wam.umd.edu/~hannahk/bulletin.pdf. You might enjoy the read.

I don't think your decison-making mechanism is broke. It's just that your intellectual capacity (which is fine) seems far weaker than your ideologically based emotions when you make some of these statements.

That wasn't an insult although you see me as your enemy and will therefore take it that way. It's just a suggestion that you could make more points for your side if you gave more emotional weight to your reasoning and less to your ideology. And, IMO, the discussion would be a lot more interesting.

Margaret
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  #72  
Old March 8th, 2006, 12:16 PM
TomJrzk TomJrzk is offline
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Default Re: The very, very difficult compatibilist argument

Quote:
Originally Posted by ToddStark
So I agree with Tom that machines can have agency and potentially free will, and that animals at least have a form of agency, but I also agree with Fred that human free will is distinctly different from current machines or known other animals.
This statement is correct when you use your definition of free will, which is OK when I read it but may mislead others. I prefer to say that neither humans nor machines have free will; our choices are determined by our physical brains, our will is not free. Our agreement comes when you equate humans with machines. Either way, it should remove ambiguity from Fred's perspective since his 'free will' is available to humans alone.

Our brains are distinctly different, we can even imagine to the point where we believe that we have free will. But we, perhaps alone, can make choices "based on goals, preferences, expectations, and dispositions", so our will is not blind. Our will is intelligent but not free.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ToddStark
Tom and I agree more than we disagree, that the world is deterministic and causally closed and that the philosophers strong sense of free will is unsupportable, but I think he stops short of compatibilism between determinism and the sort of free will I envision humans to actually have.

I don't know if this is because he thinks determinism is more constraining than I do, or if he thinks free will is too inappropriate a way to think of human agency.
Probably both. I think determinism is completely constraining. And the term 'free will' is inappropriate since there is no freedom whatever.

Great posts, Todd!

Last edited by TomJrzk; March 8th, 2006 at 12:33 PM..
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  #73  
Old March 8th, 2006, 01:30 PM
Fred H. Fred H. is offline
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Default Re: A Free Will Challenge

Quote:
MM: It's just a suggestion that you could make more points for your side if you gave more emotional weight to your reasoning and less to your ideology. And, IMO, the discussion would be a lot more interesting.
More interesting? Au contraire Margaret. While you’ve obviously mischaracterize my explanations/arguments here, I think you may have forgotten JimB’s observation back in his February 4th, 2006 post— http://www.behavior.net/bolforums/sh...30&postcount=1 :
Quote:
Topics and authors may have an influence. Fred, for example, usually gets the pot to simmer but he also is most apt to comment on religion. That topic may be uniquely unstable, avalanching very often, or unstable for brief intervals. I suspect that unstable topics are linked to our unstable minds: that is, postings on ghosts and space aliens would show similar popularity….
And my response:
Quote:
Vince Lombardi: Gentleman, this is a football.

Fred H.: I suspect it has more too do with the lack of appreciation for fundamentals. If anything is not unstable, it’s mathematics; and yet the narrow materialism of many here seems to preclude their acceptance or acknowledgement that 1+1=2, or that the infinitely many prime numbers, are timeless objective truths, that mathematical truth is not merely some sort of relative, subjective construct.
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  #74  
Old March 8th, 2006, 02:04 PM
Margaret McGhee Margaret McGhee is offline
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Default Re: A Free Will Challenge

I think you posted this on the wrong part of the thread - but, that study I mentioned notes a high correlation across cultures with conservative ideology and one's inabilty to accept ambiguity in life as well as with a high need for cognitive closure, even when evidence is lacking.

Hence, your repeated fixation with comparing the complex exigencies of evolved human life with a simple mathematical equation (1+1=2). I know it must seem comforting to you that such a comparison is meaningful. But, it's not so bad accepting the mystery of those things we don't understand that well - which is most of it - and speculating about the rest.

Only when we describe constructs that human minds wholly create such as numbering systems - where we can define the rules they must obey - will the mental images we form in our minds ever be the same as the reality we hope to describe with those images. That's a real limitation that you might do well to accept even though I doubt that you can.

Margaret
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  #75  
Old March 8th, 2006, 09:15 PM
Fred H. Fred H. is offline
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Default Re: A Free Will Challenge

Quote:
MM: Hence, your repeated fixation with comparing the complex exigencies of evolved human life with a simple mathematical equation (1+1=2). I know it must seem comforting to you that such a comparison is meaningful.
Margaret, I’m humbled—apparently you yourself are one of those with the appropriate ideology and the “[ability] to accept ambiguity in life as well as with [little] need for cognitive closure” . . . but then again, MM, all the other lesser animals seem to have that same ability too . . . and the lesser animals certainly don’t believe in free will or moral responsibility either—hell, they don’t even argue about such things! Go figure.

BTW, I used the “simple” “1 + 1 = 2,” to make it a little easier for you mathematically challenged folk to understand that objective mathematical truth does in fact exist; and that it is only with objective mathematical truth that we humans can do science and truly begin to understand the physical world and ourselves. Got that Margaret?—It’s only with objective mathematical truth that we humans can do science and truly begin to understand the physical world and ourselves!

Of course I can always provide more objective truth that is less “simple,” with a bit more "ambiguity" and "mystery," if it’d be more to you liking. Let me know darlin....
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  #76  
Old March 9th, 2006, 08:45 AM
ToddStark ToddStark is offline
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Thumbs up Could suicide be a biological adaptation?

"There are many examples of committing suicide for survival reasons"

Yes, quite so, and I think it is important to consider that Survival and reproduction are fundamentals of biological thinking, probably even more fundamental than the concept of "self."

There is also an interesting evolutionary argument that a propensity for "self"-destruction can come from competing propensities for survival of "selves" of other sorts, such as extended phenotypes or closely interlocked groups.

In other words, the self as we think of it is not neccessarily always the self that is most important in biological terms. At the extremes, this becomes "group selection," which remains very controversial, but it also has some far less controversial forms.

It is not a foregone conclusion, but certainly is plausible I think, that suicide could at least sometimes be motivated biologically as adaptive in some sense (though obviously not to the person's own personal survival) rather than as an artifact of simply bad wiring or symbolic processes or cultural programming gone haywire.

kind regards,

Todd
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  #77  
Old March 9th, 2006, 09:41 AM
ToddStark ToddStark is offline
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Exclamation A stake in the ground for scientific realism

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The rest (like this discussion) is a mental game in that it has no real consequence for our survival (except in very indirect ways). And so we are free to imagine whatever narratives appeal to us.
Hi Margaret,

Although I do agree with this, I also caution that it seems to slide very easily and perhaps too often imperceptibly into an unwarranted kind of postmodern global skepticism of all narratives.

Surely, things are more real than stories about things, since the reality of things affects us in very direct ways. This doesn't neccessarily imply further that all narratives are equal in their warrant, or that warrant is irrelevant to our thinking and our lives.

IMO, whether a story is more or less true does matter! There is a connection between our descriptions of things and what is real, though granted it is mediated by layers of symbols and language. Sure, it's language games and mental games, but those games do meet with things that are independent of human minds and human knowledge (imo) and are constrained by things that are independent of human minds and human knowledge.

I'm stating my conclusion, not making the argument, since this is not a philosophy forum where the nuances of scientific realism should be a primary topic. But I do want to at least place a stake in the ground for it here so you know where I'm coming from.

Great to have you here in the forum!

kind regards,

Todd
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  #78  
Old March 9th, 2006, 10:13 AM
ToddStark ToddStark is offline
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Post Quibbles over "emotion"

Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret McGhee
Todd, Thanks for taking the time to try to understand me. I am sure that any problem you have with that is mostly due to my inability to state it clearly enough.
If that is true in general, then Fred and I have failed to speak clearly to each other for years, because we certainly don't seem to understand each other very well. I'm inclined to think that there might be more to understanding each other than just speaking clearly, but maybe that's because I seem to be so bad at it.

Quote:
Yes, except I'd go further and say that when any organism makes a decision - it does so according to a built-in mechanism that evolution has provided that allows it to predict the outcome (in emotional terms). With some organisms it is a simple chemical response to light, for example. With others the decision can result from the complex workings of a CNS - but the goal is the same, to make decisions that optimize the predicted survival result.
I agree with your overall viewpoint, I think, although I don't quite share your emphasis that everything outside of awareness is "emotional." This is outside the challenge, and a quibble. It seems to be a definitional difference, and there are good neuroscience reasons as well as behavioral (and phenomenological) ones for defining some things as emotions and others not.

There are a number of reasonably good theories of emotion, and in general I think they make a useful distinction between emotion and other kinds of process. I'd like to argue for retaining that distinction in biological organisms.

My reasoning is that if we say that all neural processing outside of awareness is emotional, then the term loses its distinct and useful meaning. Species like insects and bacteria that don't have anything even vaguely resembling emotional predispositions would be seen as making emotional decisions. Then, what does it mean when mammals make decisions differently? They have patterns that are very different, dividing approach/avoidance into finer shades of predispositions. Mammals have this whole set of rituals for signalling and organizing closely related behaviors, and we have this whole set of closely related experiences as well. These things are what we intuit as emotions. It seems odd to me to say that a cell moving up a glucose gradient is following its bliss in the same sense. Yes, the analogy works up to a point, but only if we ignore all the reasons we make distinctions in neuroscience and behavioral science for distinguishing different kinds of behavior in different kinds of species.

Calling everything outside of awareness emotional seems to me to beg the question of what is "emotional" vs. "intellectual," a distinction that you rightly point out is most relevant to the behavior and mental games of human beings.

One quick thought experiment: let's say I develop a program that simulates human extreme emotional responses. Imagine a robot given this program that flies into an apparent rage and begins trashing my sci fi lab looking for an unfaithful refrigerator that's been flirting with a water heater. Or imagine it apparently cowering in fear in response to my bringing in a screwdriver. Is it responding emotionally? Is that "emotional" response different from its other behavior? I would say that yes, it makes sense to say that I gave it emotional responses that are meaningfully different from its other behaviors, even though I assume that everything it does is unaware and without phenomenal experience or particularly sophisticated decision making.

My intuitions about emotion are based on the patterns which we and other mammals seem to use to respond broadly to particular kinds of situations, not the fact that our responses are unaware.

I don't know if this helps clarify my objection, but I'm probably belaboring the point by now, so enough about that.

Quote:
Yes. The important part is that decisons occur as the result of emotional negotiations that occur whether we are aware of them or not. Usually, for non-trivial decisions, our conceptualization adds valuable emotional inputs to the process. That's why we can make better decisions than (hairy) apes in complex situations.
Could be. And this has the advantage of being an empirical question rather than one of definition. We can test whether someone makes better or worse decisions in particular situations, given a particular decision making model and assumed goals.

Thanks for the interesting discussion!

kind regards,

Todd
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  #79  
Old March 9th, 2006, 10:43 AM
ToddStark ToddStark is offline
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Question Can motivated cognition be heritable?

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Do you really think that liberalism and conservatism are inherited? There's a good paper (a meta study) that identifies political conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition http://www.wam.umd.edu/~hannahk/bulletin.pdf. You might enjoy the read.
Hi Margaret,

You seem to be saying that dispositions in political thinking cannot be heritable.

I've seen both sides of this question and I have to say that I haven't been entirely persuaded by either one yet.

In particular, I don't see the connection made above.

Let's say I argue that political stances are motivated social cognition, but that motivated social cognition follows different trajectories, influenced by something inherited, leading to some tendency to weigh alternatives and gather evidence in one way rather than another. So a predisposition for conservatism can be motivated social cognition and yet also be highly heritable. What makes these two ideas incompatible in your mind?

Do you argue that the potential heritability of motivated cognition is possible but unlikely, logically impossible, or simply not practically important?

kind regards,

Todd
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  #80  
Old March 9th, 2006, 10:53 AM
Fred H. Fred H. is offline
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Default Re: Committing suicide to survive?

Committing suicide to survive?
Quote:
Margaret: BTW - all decisions are survival decisions.

Fred H.: Oh sure, like when one chooses to commit suicide.

Margaret: There are many examples of committing suicide for survival reasons

Todd: Yes, quite so, and I think it is important to consider that Survival and reproduction are fundamentals of biological thinking, probably even more fundamental than the concept of "self."
How is it that you people will take a fairly straightforward and unambiguous word, like “suicide” (the destruction or ruin of one's own interests) and then twist and spin it so mean something obviously much different and more akin to “sacrifice” (forfeiture of something highly valued for the sake of something considered to have a greater value or claim)? I’ll tell you how—it’s called a lack of intellectual rigor and/or honesty.

Frankly, these half-ass just-so stories you people feel obliged to conjure up, and then feel obliged to pontificate on, can be exasperating . . . I guess I’ll just have to up my meds.
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