Re: Time and Freewill

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:05:01 -0700

Jason Resch wrote:
> Uv,
>
> One of the concerns people have with free will or the lack thereof is
> that if physics is deterministic, one's future actions can predicted
> beforehand, without them even having to exist. However, an interesting
> consequence of computationalism is this: One's future actions cannot be
> predicted without a simulation that goes into enough detail to
> instantiate that person's consciousness.

I don't think this is true. First, it is often possible to predict someone's
actions in a particular situation, yet this clearly is not done by duplicating
their consciousness. So the amount of computation required to predict a
conscious beings actions a little into future may not be that great. To
actually predict their behavior far into the future would also require
simulating a very large part of their environment; stuff we don't normally
consider part of their consciousness. So conversely the computation required to
instantiate consciousness, given the environment as input, may be fairly small.

Brent Meeker

> As conscious creatures, our
> wills cannot be calculated without our consciousness being invoked by
> the calculations, just as the physics of this universe is doing now.
>
> Jason
>
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 9:28 AM, John Mikes <jamikes.domain.name.hidden
> <mailto:jamikes.domain.name.hidden>> wrote:
>
> "uv"(??) wrote a well crafted post on concepts well endowed in our
> physical (reductionist, figmentous) science-terminology.
> I try to point to some other aspect.
> Free will is a figment of the religious etc. mindset to help people
> get into remorse and guilt feelings according to the tenets of the
> particular religion
> (patriotic, ethnic, racial, loyalty etc. domains).
> It comes with the negation of entailment in total interconnectedness
> - a sort of 1-way determinism in lieu of causality-framing from
> WITHIN the model of the actual considerations -
> akin to 'random' (the 'absolut' one, not the 'little random',
> mentioned earlier by Russell in defence of the 'random generating
> machines') which would inevitably lead to parallel "natures" and
> make the 'physical laws' meaningless.
> (I appologize for swinging between views, 'uv' seems to speak about
> concepts handled in the 'physical world' science-view).
> *
> Time I consider a coordinative help for us in THIS universe (I don't
> know about the others) but to make 'a' universe-startup more
> palatable for our human common sense than the Q-related Big Bang
> tale, I ended up in my "narrative" with a not knowable origin (I
> called it 'Plenitude' -plagierizing Plato's word) in a timeless -
> spaceless setup. So OUR poorly educated (historically spread)
> observations and their reductionist explanations (similarly upon the
> actual levels of thinking) i.e. sciences as we know them even today,
> work in time and space, while the projection into the Plenitude are
> - both -
> a-temporal and a-spatial.
> *
> Paradoxes and logically hard-to-follow complimentarity I consider as
> results from poorly observed and explained phenomena and their
> fitting into a system based on such. "uv" quotes some of these.
>
> John M
> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 7:58 PM, uv <uvscience.domain.name.hidden
> <mailto:uvscience.domain.name.hidden>> wrote:
>
>
> You may have noted the increasing overlap between physics,
> mathematics, philosophy and neuroscience. Many people are still
> primarily focussed on quantum and gravitational matters which may be
> less relevant to some aspects of fundamental physics than
> experimental
> philosophy and logic. Bayesian reasoning is also becoming more and
> more the norm.
>
> I have tried to update matters as far as possible in a paper
> available
> at Yates J., (2008)."Category theory applied to a radically new but
> logically essential description of time and space", Philica.com,
> Article number 135, and in PDF format in the Cogprints archive at
> http://cogprints.org/6176/ and finally also in my blog at
> http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ . I would be happy also to download
> a copy
> of this paper to the group. on request.
>
> Later work will be likely to include experiments on the reverse
> Stickgold effect and the potential use of Global Workspace Theory in
> the MBI and such work effectively follows up my original UK
> patent now
> allowed to expire and publically available.
>
> Very briefly my present theory allows most of quantum theory and
> gravity but introduces The Many Bubble Interpretation, which derives
> from McTaggart's ideas, and various examples of its use and
> effectiveness are referred to. The Schrodinger Cat paradox is
> essentially resolved in principle, the quantum Zeno effect
> interpretable, Kwiat's recent result referred to, and the newly
> discovered reverse Stickgold effect described. The reverse Stickgold
> effect may require the results of experimental philosophy to further
> it. Despite the name, the MBI ("Many bubble Interpretation") is
> mostly good in neutral monism, despite having derived to some extent
> partly originated from the work of Kohler and Wertheimer.
>
> Freewill is certainly an important topic nowadays as fMRI
> results have
> sometimes been said to suggest that freewill does not exist. Haynes'
> work perhaps suggests that mental decisions may be made much earlier
> they are knowingly decided. Haynes does go a lot further than
> Libet's
> work and my experiments and theory will give us some answers
> finally.
>
> uv
>
>
>
>
> >


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Received on Tue Sep 09 2008 - 16:05:23 PDT

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