Message 12/34
Date: 10-Mar-03 @ 04:24 PM -
RE: free will
psy: hey you brought it up and I don't feel like working so here goes...
definitely check out steven pinker's "how the mind works". it's not too technical (and you can skip the more tech sections without really losing anything).
my reading of pinker's (not wholly original) argument is that as empirical scientists, we have to consider humans as following the same determinist laws that governs other inhabitiants of the universe. but our sense of morality is integral to what it means (to us) to be human, and there is no reason to give it up just because it falls outside the domain of scientific inquiry.
science is not about "tapping into reality"--it's about making causal predictions, which are largely probabalistic (meaning that we can determine how X will TEND to behave under Y conditions).
nor is morality about "tapping into reality". our sense of right and wrong is important to us becuase it's important to us, not because Right and Wrong "really exist".
concepts like "responsibility" and "love" may be difficult to operationalize and study empirically, but that doesen't make them irrelevant.
a school of thought called "eliminative materialism" (stich, churchland) claimed that because "beliefs" and "desires" have no empirical status, they were wrongheaded and needed to be replaced by a theory of mind based on a scientific understaning of consciousness. but then they had nothing to offer...do YOU have a better way of talking about everyday human behavior?
it's not about whether or nor free will "exists", but what we gain or lose by choosing to behave as if it does.
steve:
"There are even many respected Psychoanalysts who believe that conscious thought itself is born of random unconscious signals and thoughts"
there are no psychoanalysts who believe this. (maybe you mean "psychologists"?). the presmise of psychodynamic theories is that consciousness is meaningful and related to unconscious motivations in an organized way. some cognitive science types write stuff like this because it's provacative. it makes stuff for sense like dreams--you "interpret" the random neuronal firings as narrative which often makes little sense. if your interpritiaion is meaningful, then it;s meaningful, but there's no Mr. Meaning sitting there waiting to be discovered.
"and that the way we percieve consciousness is almost and illusion."
how can you be wrong about your experience? you may be wrong about what causes it, but the ONE thing you cannot be wrong about is 'what it feels like to be you'.
Our conscious mind is only the tip of a very deep iceberg that we know very little about."
yup.
"We are highly eveolved socially. Living in the most complex society of any creature that we are aware of, hence our large brains and complex languages, but other than that we are not majorly different from any other mamal on this planet."
this does not qualify as a "major difference"? tough cookie.