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 Rahz
Alive Again
Registered: 11/10/05
Posts: 9,334
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 Choice 
#9098027 - 10/18/08 09:57 PM (15 years, 5 months ago) |
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Right or wrong.
Good or bad.
This seems to be the gist of choice.
Why choose good? Because it is the good thing to do. It's as if Good is calling us to do Good(s) will.
Why choose bad? Free will. When a person chooses to do bad, they are doing so for themselves, and asserting their ability to choose.
Is this an illusion? (I know free will has been beat to death) Can a person choose to do bad? Have you ever chosen to do good when you would have rather not? How did it make you feel in the short term? How did it make you feel in the long term?
Good was originally spelled god in Old English. God (capital) is also Old English, though I can find no information on when it was decided that good would be a good name for the Creator.
God is good. A redundant statment of fact?
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rahz
comfort pleasure power love truth awareness peace
"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free."
~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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deCypher
Registered: 02/10/08
Posts: 56,232
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Re: Choice [Re: Rahz]
#9098048 - 10/18/08 10:03 PM (15 years, 5 months ago) |
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Recent developments in neuroscience are pointing more and more towards choice being an illusion.
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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
  
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redgreenvines
irregular verb
Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 38,170
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how is that Cypher?
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DieCommie
Registered: 12/11/03
Posts: 29,258
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Quote:
The Cypher said:
Recent developments in neuroscience are pointing more and more towards choice being an illusion.
Is that the field where choice is going to be flushed out? I always kinda figured it would be computer science...
I guess the difference is 'human choice' versus 'choice in general'.
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Rahz
Alive Again
Registered: 11/10/05
Posts: 9,334
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Yea, probably a bad thread title. Even without neuroscience to back it up, I can understand the logic of no-choice. I was just exploring a possible reason for the objectification of God.
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rahz
comfort pleasure power love truth awareness peace
"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free."
~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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 Patisotagami
Organism
Registered: 05/15/08
Posts: 687
Loc: Everywhere 
Last seen: 7 years, 4 months
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Quote:
The Cypher said:
Recent developments in neuroscience are pointing more and more towards choice being an illusion.
Indeed this is true. I will repost with evidence from a scientific journal. Essentially what it found is that for every conscious action and thought, there is a preceding brain event that we are NOT CONSCIOUSLY AWARE OF.
What does this mean? Hold your hand out in front of you. Perfectly still. Now move your index finger whenever you DECIDE to. Just say to yourself "I choose to move it right..... NOW" and then move it. Well before you ever moved it, before said any of those words in your head, and before you even read any of these words, your brain was sending out subconscious "brain events" that you had no idea were happening, but then your consciousness stepped in and gave you the idea that you had control over what was actually being controlled by whatever was sending out these "brain events".
In reality, we experience the world through our consciousness. We believe we control our consciousness; but we simply have conscious AWARENESS of our world. Nothing more.
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EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING
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demiu5
humans, lol
Registered: 08/18/05
Posts: 43,948
Loc: the popcorn stadium
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Re: Choice [Re: Rahz]
#9098334 - 10/18/08 11:33 PM (15 years, 5 months ago) |
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good and bad, right and wrong...
outside of personal definitions (which are more than likely skewed from years of conditioning), these concepts have no place
god is a muth. i really don't understand what you're trying to get at
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channel your inner Larry David
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redgreenvines
irregular verb
Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 38,170
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Re: Choice [Re: demiu5]
#9098377 - 10/18/08 11:51 PM (15 years, 5 months ago) |
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let us say that everything is operating on automatic
action - reaction
repeat,,,
we only see what has already happenned.
this is not where choice is made.
choice is made in the prefrontal cortex about the stuff going on in the cortex, which already happened.
one chooses whether to resist smoking next time it becomes compelling
the choice not to smoke has to be made well before the stimulus arises. it does not operate in the moment spontaneously.
the spontaneous stuff is the result of aggregate conditioning.
one chooses whether to be more receptive the next time that girl asks for help with her math.
one chooses a few things and has to work consciously to implement them to steer the complex automation that we are, around the obstacles of life and towards what we judge most suitable. this involves familiarity with habit and life.
this really is choice, but it is a layer over top of what we normally think of.
it is a meta layer to conscious living, which is otherwise mostly awareness of automation/role-playing and pleasure and pain.
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Rahz
Alive Again
Registered: 11/10/05
Posts: 9,334
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Re: Choice [Re: demiu5]
#9098659 - 10/19/08 01:37 AM (15 years, 5 months ago) |
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Well, to me, what is good is what nurtures our spirits. What's bad is what harms/destroys our spirits. I'm not sure it's a matter of conditioning, though being skewed from years of conditioning might be bad.
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rahz
comfort pleasure power love truth awareness peace
"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free."
~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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deCypher
Registered: 02/10/08
Posts: 56,232
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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
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redgreenvines
irregular verb
Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 38,170
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thanks cypher,
do you think that article covers the material comprehensively as portrayed in WIRED magazine, or is it a sensational extrapolation to the hypothesis.
I can barely see that they might have isolated a test against a control set for something, but I don't see that it relates to the claim.
- not exactly any final word on free will or decision making.
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deCypher
Registered: 02/10/08
Posts: 56,232
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It's not a conclusive demolishing of free will, certainly, but it does provide some compelling evidence towards that view. Other experiments, such as the split-brain studies, have shown that when the right brain makes a decision and the person asked why they made that decision, the left brain tends to rationalize or completely fabricate a reason why the choice was made--also more compelling evidence.
In the end, we're nothing but extremely sophisticated bio-computers. But IMO, even if free will is an illusion, it's enough of a sufficiently convincing one to be treated as real.
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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
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redgreenvines
irregular verb
Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 38,170
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hold on a minute
in this case none of the words "decision", "free will", "thought", and even "rationalize" have been given any biological correlate.
these "objects" or events of mentation are shifty wrt testable biology-
you can see that attempting to corral any of these concepts into a scientific experiment needs to first establish what the biologic events are
and separately, with caveats only, extrapolate towards objects of mentation, and models of brain and behavior.
also left brain right brain functional split is really passed it's due date, went rotten in the fridge years ago (, no longer science either).
one needs a wider deeper bullshit detector these days.
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redgreenvines
irregular verb
Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 38,170
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on a separate note
while mentation is related to associative recording and recall
in which the physics of aggregate wave interference can be applied to show a mechanical character.
and
while the same stimulus will provide the same kind of result statistically under the same conditions,
remember that the state of mind is a fluctuating condition (i.e. emotion, dreaming, drugs, or meditation changes the playing field), and it is "emotionally" driven,
and
remember that the prefrontal cortex can and will use emotion to alter state of mind to concertively change the physics of aggregate memory response to stimulus,
(to enable change from within)
and just because you can predict the outcome of that flexible process (i.e that a person might change!) does not confirm lack of free will,
it may merely corroborate the truth of free will.
so
after the neurologists get together on a model of brain and behavior,
the philosophers will still be left with the question:
is popping to a meta layer in order to engage change of habit incontrovertable evidence of freedom of will,
or is it merely another kind of conditioned response into meta programming, and possibly just another place for disease to begin.
and
if you can meta program the cortex via the prefrontal cortex,
does that mean you can meta program the prefrontal cortex by another structure, or is the cortex itself that structure - enabling a hall of mirrors kind of supervisory level popping potential that can remove the chains of suffering and bondage or merely reshape them in a vain effort to express freedom.
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Icelander
The Minstrel in the Gallery
Registered: 03/15/05
Posts: 95,368
Loc: underbelly
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Re: Choice [Re: Rahz]
#9099593 - 10/19/08 11:21 AM (15 years, 5 months ago) |
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Good and bad are value judgments and are arbitrary to the individuals programming for the most part. There is no such thing as good and bad outside of our subjective beliefs. You choose what you feel most comfortable with and then judge it, label it, defend it.
Life is full up of examples of this which we manage to ignore.
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"Don't believe everything you think". -Anom.
" All that lives was born to die"-Anom.
With much wisdom comes much sorrow,
The more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC
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redgreenvines
irregular verb
Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 38,170
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you could say that good and bad - concepts of others -
are clear examples of lack of freedom of will,
since either way you go you are excercising another person's idea of the way to go or not go.
or it is just another kind of hall of mirrors.
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deCypher
Registered: 02/10/08
Posts: 56,232
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When contemplating free will, the question itself needs to be analyzed carefully. (Most philosophical problems inevitably reduce themselves down to petty linguistic difficulties.)
Do I have free will? In other words, am I making a choice between A or B purely based upon myself, and no other influences?
IMO, this question itself makes no sense. Is such a thing as a purely autonomous entity possible? If so, then there is no cause leading to my making a decision--but this would imply that my actions are purely random and purposeless. If not, then my actions have a purpose and I had a reason for choosing A over B--but this implies that my choice was caused by either a previous experience or sensation (therefore not being truly free), or that it was caused by another thought in my mind (and in this case repeat the argument over again, starting at this previous thought).
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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
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Rahz
Alive Again
Registered: 11/10/05
Posts: 9,334
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Quote:
Icelander said:
Good and bad are value judgments and are arbitrary to the individuals programming for the most part. There is no such thing as good and bad outside of our subjective beliefs. You choose what you feel most comfortable with and then judge it, label it, defend it.
Life is full up of examples of this which we manage to ignore.
Well, I agree to an extent, but I also think the subjective alone isn't all there is to this determination. An example: You have a baby, and you can choose to either A- hold it and make it feel comfortable, or B- Smash it's toes and fingers with a hammer. Is calling choice B "bad" subjective? Is it arbitrary or is there an underlying premise that goes beyond our programming?
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rahz
comfort pleasure power love truth awareness peace
"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free."
~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Icelander
The Minstrel in the Gallery
Registered: 03/15/05
Posts: 95,368
Loc: underbelly
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Re: Choice [Re: Rahz]
#9099915 - 10/19/08 12:47 PM (15 years, 5 months ago) |
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Yes, as far as survival is concerned there are choices that allow us to survive and those that threaten survival. But I wouldn't call them good or bad in a moral sense. Just what works best.
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"Don't believe everything you think". -Anom.
" All that lives was born to die"-Anom.
With much wisdom comes much sorrow,
The more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC
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DieCommie
Registered: 12/11/03
Posts: 29,258
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Quote:
Icelander said:
Good and bad are value judgments and are arbitrary to the individuals programming for the most part. There is no such thing as good and bad outside of our subjective beliefs.
What about 'good and bad' that is hard coded into our DNA and not a function of our subjective beliefs? Wouldn't that be an inherent 'good and bad'? (at least, inherent to the species and not arbitrary to individuals)
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