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  #81  
Old March 9th, 2006, 11:10 AM
TomJrzk TomJrzk is offline
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Default Re: Committing suicide to survive?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred H.
“suicide” (the destruction or ruin of one's own interests)
Your definition is the problem. Suicide is the destruction of one'e own life, not necessarily interests.
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  #82  
Old March 9th, 2006, 11:30 AM
ToddStark ToddStark is offline
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Lightbulb Moral reasoning is real

Quote:
Probably both. I think determinism is completely constraining. And the term 'free will' is inappropriate since there is no freedom whatever.
If I take the above literally, then Fred is right, you and I are very far from consensus on important issues. I believe in moral responsibility. I believe that it makes sense to hold people responsible for the way they make decisions, and to both impose contingencies on them and in some cases try to alter the way they make decisions when they are at odds with civilized behavior.

I think it makes sense to say that Stalin and Hitler were not models of wisdom or humanity, because they caused so much suffering for such distorted reasons, whatever their intentions and whatever reasons their supporters might have for finding good qualities in them. I don't know that they were especially unique examples of evil, I think there are a lot of psychopaths walking among us who would act similarly if given a chance. We should be concerned about all of them as well, not just when they become influential.

And we should be concerned about ways of preventing people from growing up without good moral reasoning, which I think requires both good wiring and the exercise of the capacity to develop.

It makes sense to help children learn to make morally informed decisions, and to hold adults responsible for bad judgment. It makes sense to enforce shared values for moral reasoning. When we find psychopaths, people without moral reasoning i the sense I think of it, we should single them out.

It also makes sense to balance these shared values, since they can easily come into conflict with each other. There are always going to be limits to freedom, and so on. That's why morality is dynamic reasoning and wisdom and is not the simple application of fixed rules.

I think morality is based on a very real capacity that is developed in most of us to varying degrees. The fact that events in a brain have physical predeterminants in no way renders this capacity less important or less real. Believing that you have no choice in a matter certainly limits your thinking, but that doesn't mean you could not have reasoned differently if you had believed differently.

The only coherent argument I know of that argues otherwise is that of radical behaviorism, which says that everything we do is the result of contingencies. Genetic determinism of the sort that would guide our every movement is impossible, since genes cannot express quickly enough to guide behavior directly, although they certainly shape everything we do.

For me, as a flower child of the cognitive revolution, it is inconceivable that there is no very real intermediate layer of functionality between physical causes due to genes and contingencies, and human decision making. We do perceive, store, and make decisions based on information and we do represent the world in some sense in our nervous system, and not just for direct action on the world in response to contingencies. We imagine how things can be different, choose how we want things to be, and go after dreams. It is possible, but a rather unwieldy stretch to envision these things as behavioral or genetic contingency mapping.

If we process information, then we make decisions, and if we imagine alternatives and understand cause and effect then we can make decisions in different ways. Moral responsibility means encouraging or enforcing particular kinds of decision making rather than others. Morality is a crucially important form of reasoning.

In my early religious training, it wan't fear of hell or rewards of heaven that I learned to think of when I thought of morality, it was acting in a way that I know I will not regret and which is consistent with my self-image as a human being or "mensch." This turns out to be very consistent with the way many modern humanists think of morality as well, but many people seem to wrongly infer from this that it is an anti-religious view. On the contrary, it is very consistent with my own religious background. I don't argue from a religious position, but I do think it helped me shape the position I've come to, and explains in part why I don't have as much an aversion to religion in general as many others who share my naturalistic philosophy.

kind regards,

Todd
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  #83  
Old March 9th, 2006, 12:08 PM
TomJrzk TomJrzk is offline
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Default Re: Moral reasoning is real

Quote:
Originally Posted by ToddStark
It makes sense to help children learn to make morally informed decisions, and to hold adults responsible for bad judgment. It makes sense to enforce shared values for moral reasoning. When we find psychopaths, people without moral reasoning i the sense I think of it, we should single them out.
I agree with this statement and most of what else you've said. My point is that there's a 'morality' module in the brain, and this deterministically creates people "without moral reasoning ", so to speak. These fellows were sick, not 'immoral'; I don't think they could have done otherwise but I've also said that they should be 'singled out'. To me, the article in http://www.behavior.net/bolforums/showthread.php?t=742 proves my point.
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  #84  
Old March 9th, 2006, 12:46 PM
Margaret McGhee Margaret McGhee is offline
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Default Re: A Free Will Challenge

Hi Todd, I have done the first read of your several interesting and thought provoking posts this morning. It will take me a while to consider them carefully enough to respond - but just know that while you are waiting I am re-reading and trying to completely understand your very well-stated posts - I'm not ignoring you in any sense. (Also, I am working on projects that actually provide some income and trying to work this stuff in

Meanwhile, you said one thing that really jumped out that I can respond to more quickly.
Quote:
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.
I have been trying to come up with a way to test this for some time now. What I am most interested in testing, is the underlying question: Can our intellect affect our decision-making directly (can our recognition of a logical solution go directly into our decision-making outputs), or must a logical solution be negotiated by way of its emotional markers (Damasio, LeDoux) - along with our other emotions produced by our dispositions, instincts and the emotional markers of our memories and beliefs. I'd love to hear any suggestions for testing this question (or sorting these things out) from you or anyone else here.

So far, I can only say that when I look at behavior (human and non-human) through this window things really start to fall into place for me. For example, it explains a lot about the current politics in this country. 9/11 created strong conservative emotions (revenge, punishment, intolerance) in millions of Americans that easily overpower the emotions of our logical conclusions regarding how we should respond. Hence, the lingering support for this highly irrational and corrupt administration and its post 9/11 actions. And - as time passes and those strong emotions dissipate, the slowly increasing desire for a more rational response.

It aslo explains for me why the nine justices of the Supreme Court, who are supposedly chosen as the best legal minds in our nation and who have dedicated themselves to vigorously purging ideology from their decisions - can so often come to opposite conclusions about the meaning of the constitution, and especially why those opposite conclusions so often divide along ideological lines.

I suspect that an imaginary Supreme Court of nine Vulcan's would almost always agree on their decisions and if they ever disagreed it would be the result of some rare logical error, not ideology.

Of course, Vulcans do not exist in nature. I think that's because a purely logical organism with no emotional system would have no reason for making decisions. It would have no motive force for directing decisions in one way or the other.

Thus, I (tentatively) believe that even our logical conclusions are only relevant by way of the emotional weight they acquire somehow in the process of considering alternatives and decision-making. And it therefore seems very likely to me that decision-making is functionally an emotional process. We humans are better at it because we can use our logical conclusions in the form of additional emotional inputs that can indirectly provide very valuable information unavailable to most other organisms - but those emotions are often inadequate (especially in highly emotional situations or in highly emotional minds) to overcome the emotions from our other sources.

Anyway, I'll be back.

Margaret

Last edited by Margaret McGhee; March 9th, 2006 at 01:55 PM..
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  #85  
Old March 9th, 2006, 02:42 PM
ToddStark ToddStark is offline
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Arrow sorry for the confusion

Fred,

I'm sorry if I added confusion to the discussion for you. I was just thinking that the biological concepts of self and self-interest are very different than the folk psychological and commonplace concepts. Evolutionary biology in particular is not based on the notion of the individual organism as much as the gene. Survival and reproduction have certain connotations for us that are very different from those in some aspects of biology.

I don't know that Margaret was making the same point, I was just trying to link the discussion back to biology. This is after all an evolutionary biology forum, and the problems raised by altruism and self-sacrifice are central to sociobiology and evolutionary biology in all their forms.

I appreciate your frustration.

Todd
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  #86  
Old March 9th, 2006, 05:08 PM
Fred H. Fred H. is offline
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Default Re: A Free Will Challenge

Quote:
MM: What I am most interested in testing, is the underlying question: Can our intellect affect our decision-making directly (can our recognition of a logical solution go directly into our decision-making outputs), or must a logical solution be negotiated by way of its emotional markers (Damasio, LeDoux) - along with our other emotions produced by our dispositions, instincts and the emotional markers of our memories and beliefs. I'd love to hear any suggestions for testing this question (or sorting these things out) from you or anyone else here.
OK MM, I’ve the test that’ll prove this one way or the other—

The next time the Lottery gets up into the hundreds of millions, and your subconscious emotional and motivational mechanisms are directing you to run down to the 7-11 and convert your paycheck into Lottery tickets, take a moment and review the statistics showing how dreadful your odds are—if you still find yourself buying Lottery tickets, then you’ll have proven that I’m wrong about all this, that the subcortical mechanisms trump intellect.

OTH, if your intellect’s comprehension of the statistics, a kind of objective truth, results in LeDoux’s downward causation, wherein your intellect effectively modifies your emotional and motivational systems, and you don’t find yourself buying Lottery tickets, then that proves that LeDoux and I were right after all, that you do indeed have some free will.

(However, if your asking whether a decision can ever be made without any emotional input whatsoever, the answer is probably not—without input from the subcortical systems, we’d not even be conscious. It seems that our intellect, the cognitive part of the mental trilogy, impacts our behavior (choices) primarily by modifying/conditioning our emotional and motivational mechanisms. One of the reasons I know that my intellect (free will) is having at least some impact on my own behavior is b/c I don’t buy lottery tickets; and also b/c I don’t have extramarital sex, unlike TomJ.)
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  #87  
Old March 9th, 2006, 05:50 PM
Margaret McGhee Margaret McGhee is offline
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Default Re: A Free Will Challenge

Thanks for the relatively non-offensive post.

You said,
Quote:
OK MM, I’ve the test that’ll prove this one way or the other—
But, what you describe is just a different model that could (possibly) account for the same results.

I don't buy lottery tickets. I think it's because I place a relatively strong emotional marker on my calculation of my (very low) chances of winning and my expectataion that I'll feel stupid when I don't win. And that overpowers whatever small emotions I attach to the thought of being rich, wanting to win, wanting to be a winner, etc.

I propose that all behavior decisions (even for having extra-marital sex) are the result of a summing of emotional inputs at the time the decision is made. If you decide not to it's possibly because you had a very strong input from that part of your brain that is sensitive to future guilt/regret. At least stronger than that part of your brain that wants immediate sexual gratification.

I don't see how either example proves either of our theories. Mine does seem simpler though.

Margaret
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  #88  
Old March 9th, 2006, 09:27 PM
Fred H. Fred H. is offline
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Default Re: A Free Will Challenge

Quote:
MM: I don't see how either example proves either of our theories. Mine does seem simpler though.
I’m inclined to agree.

I’d certainly agree with you that no other animal has free will, although I myself remain convinced that we humans, unlike all other evolved creatures, do have some free will (and therefore moral responsibility) since we alone are able to discern objective mathematical truth and then use it to understand the physical world and act/behave accordingly.

And I think that your belief that humans lack free will is definitely consistent with your atheism, so you’ve got that going for you too.

TomJ, also an atheist convinced that humans lack free will, understands and acknowledges that a result of that POV is that criminals, like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, MiloÅ¡ević, etc., are not “morally responsible” (in any meaningful way) for their dreadful behavior (although he still believes they s/b punished). While I find Tom’s view—that such criminals are not “morally responsible”—somewhat repugnant, it is intellectual honest and consistent with his atheism. Any chance that you, Margaret, have Tom’s intellectual honesty, and agree that for the atheist convinced that that humans lack free will, such criminals (or any "criminal" for that matter) aren’t really “morally responsible” for their nasty behavior?
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  #89  
Old March 9th, 2006, 10:57 PM
Margaret McGhee Margaret McGhee is offline
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Thumbs down Re: A Free Will Challenge

Wow, a second post wherein you did not directly call me immoral. However, you have posed a question in a way that if you don't get the answer you want then you have implied that I would be "intellectually dishonest". Do you really think I'll answer that?

I know you'd love a chance to make your case for your God here. I am interested in discussing science. If I wanted to talk about our different personal views of religion and morality I'd find a different forum.

I don't object to discussing those things objectively since beliefs exist in our minds and can strongly affect decision-making and behavior. So, I have no problem discussing those things in a general, scientific way. I will not engage in any my morality is better than yours discussion - which seems to be your preoccupation.

People here keep going out of their way to give you the benefit of the doubt and I did that too at first - but it now seems obvious to me that you have no interest in any objective discussion of these things. Unless you bring your posts up to that level I will focus my limited time on the several smart people here who already give me far more to think about than I have time to thoughtfully consider.

Margaret
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  #90  
Old March 10th, 2006, 01:23 AM
Margaret McGhee Margaret McGhee is offline
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Default Re: A Free Will Challenge

Hi Todd, Re: Heritability of motivated cognition.

I suspect that we may inherit dispositions that could push us one way or the other. However, I suspect that environment plays an overwhelming role in setting up personality development along that spectrum and could usually overcome dispositional tendencies if they exist. I suspect this probably happens early in life, 2 to 5 years maybe.

In a neutral environment inherited dispositions could be determinative. But I think that few environments are so neutral they would not be the usual determinative factor. With kids who grow up with their natural parents it would be even harder to separate those influences.

I can't see much reason for evolution giving us strong dispositions along that spectrum since we will have ample opportunity to learn ways of dealing with life from our environment - and learning those things could be more adaptive than inheriting them. There are times and environments, even within a single lifetime, when more liberal or more conservative solutions are called for. It seems that an inherited predetermined response mode would be less flexible.

The paper title is Political Conservative as Motivated Social Cognition. Kids don't think much about politics. So I think the question of early psychological development along that spectrum is different from the one they explored.

You ask,
Quote:
Do you argue that the potential heritability of motivated cognition is possible but unlikely, logically impossible, or simply not practically important?
At this time I'd guess possible but unlikely.

Margaret

Last edited by Margaret McGhee; March 10th, 2006 at 01:33 AM..
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