But your evidence doesn’t show what you say. You can’t keep posting here and only saying, “that isn’t true”. This is an evidence based forum, with moderation you have one more chance.
The only study that would be related was one in which they measured telling people if free will was real or not. In the ones where they told them it wasn’t and showed them studies to back it they found their moods took a dip compared to ones told the opposite.
Apart from any anything in google just turns up opinion pieces or philosophy papers.
If we’re going by evidence though you don’t have anything to prove that to be the case either. You aren’t looking beyond the face value at the implications of being behind in time, or how emotions work. You don’t have evidence that knowledge inspires wonder when cultural attitudes seem to suggest otherwise:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749597816303144
I mean if what you guys here are saying were true there wouldn’t be a massive cultural attitude toward the opposite. It seems to be common among the science types who (naively) think that knowledge inspires wonder while staying only at surface level discoveries and not considering broader implications. A little dose of philosophy would show how they’re mistaken in their views.
You made the claim. I linked that a talk about the biggest names in the history of explorations into the mind, and how they agree. You link something about how expressions of emotions has an affect on feelings. How do you make the leap from that, to how only act the way culture tells us?
The key word is “only”. Your evidence says we are influenced by others. You say we don’t have our own feelings.
Appeal to authority doesn’t prove your point. It doesn’t matter what Socrates or the rest thought, that doesn’t mean knowledge inspires wonder. I can pull several names from the philosophical school of pessimism to show otherwise.
The observations that have been made have also been falsified. Therefore they can be considered valid.
Please do. So we can discuss them. My sources invluded comtemporary science that uses experiments and evidence.
And, you didn’t use that fallacy correctly
This first part from a few days ago,
I would like to propose a different perspective.
If there’s a charioteer, it is our biological body with all its innate drives and needs.
Since we are evolved biological creatures, our body has developed layers of communication and understanding we’ve yet to grasp, so it’s self evident that we would be opaque to much of the bodily turmoil happening below our “conscious” realm.
As for the charioteer that the ancients were referring to, seems that would be something closer is what Dr Mark Solms describes as our: “Free Won’t” The achievement that empowered our human brain~mind a modicum of disciple over our instinctive behavior. My bet is on that zone of competition is the realm of those ancient “charioteers.”
An awareness of this enables one to better own our intentionality.
Knowledge is power. We do have the answers to many of those old mysteries and must not be afraid to modify old assumption with the power of the new understanding we are developing.
====================================
Dark, you really need to do more reading and learning before you make outlandish remarks, that expose your disregard . . .
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognition-animal/
It’s a continuum and if one can’t keep up, one become someone else’s lunch.
“… Our findings challenge existing assumptions in organizational behavior and psychology by identifying a significant disadvantage of expressing happiness, and underscore the importance of examining emotional expressions at different magnitudes. We call for future work to explore how the same emotion, experienced or expressed at different levels, influences judgment and behavior.”
This article is more alone the lines of emotions and the strategies of playing Poker.
From the abstract it sounds more about how your over expression of emotion influences others. Not about the why the emotions. Apple and potatoes.
“Bliss is ignorance: How the magnitude of expressed happiness influences perceived naiveté and interpersonal exploitation☆”
Alixandra Barasch, Emma E. Levine, Maurice E. Schweitzer
The analogy is that the charioteer is using rules, logic, memory, and reasoning. The body doesn’t have those. You call something memory in the body, but that’s using that as analogy. Tissue doesn’t have memory cells, although it has something that functions in some ways like a memory of our past lives, but that’s instinct, it’s different.
Don’t forget the part about the charioteer not really being in control, that’s the free won’t. So, sure, the body is “driving”, but it’s like a car with no one at the wheel.
But it’s not like that. That’s what evolution has taught us, it’s more complicated. Our subconscious contains layers of nuanced complexity undreamed of until the past couple decades (thanks to imagining and computing advances)
Although it was foolish of me to argue with a metaphor.
I take it back.
And that’s why a better understanding of our body’s biological evolution is so crucial to understanding ourselves. We need to modernize our metaphors to better track current advances.
As for Free Won’t, sure, it isn’t in control.
It’s an interrupt signal and a situation modifier. If you want to look at it that way.
Our instinctive reaction is the driving force, our “Free Won’t” strives to challenge and modify the reflexes which are primal driving force.
The Free Won’t is a temporary stopping of the ‘engagement of reaction’
in order for our mind to process alternative outcomes and strategies for modifying those potential outcomes.
Then we let the body react via one of those alternate impressions.
After all, most reactions have already been refined by evolutionary practice. Which means the body has them internalized, woven into it’s very fabric.
Here again appreciating the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide is key for building a better perception of our complex bodies and behaviors.
I stumbled on this discussion earlier, listening to it I was increasingly disappointed. It highlights all that’s wrong with today’s public facing discussion. To keep it simple I found it very disappointing. Ned Block might have been interesting to listen to, but Rebecca and Philip are a bust.
Unraveling the Mind:The Mystery of Consciousness
Nov 29, 2022
How does the mind relate to and differ from its seemingly inseparable companion, the brain? Where does the mind begin or emerge from? Is it merely a by-product of neural activities within the brain, or does it connect with deeper and more fundamental features of physical reality that possibly span across nature beyond the realm of living forms? Philosopher of mind Ned Block, philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and philosopher Philip Goff dissect the connections between the human mind, brain, and consciousness.
I thought about bringing my critique over here, but don’t have the heart for it, busy with other distractions. It should be posted over there, if you don’t see a critique by peterm…, please let me know.
We must be taking about different things. I’m talking about a body that reacts to a rustling in the bushes by running away. That body lived to procreate.
Now, a body with all those practices is on the corner of a busy city street with lots of rustling and metal objects hurling by a few feet away. It wants to run, but that wouldn’t lead to safety, and might make things worse. The body tenses. The mind holds the reins but isn’t sure the whole situation is the right choice either. The two follow the spirited horse, this time.
Wait a minute, what are you asserting, . . .
Slow down a little. You are touching on one of the evolutionary wonders of humanity, our children are born premature. During the first year, the infants brain doubles in size, at 3 y.o. its brain is 80% of its adult size. That matters because the infant develops within it’s particular unique location, in tropics, or on the tundra, or in the cities with nonstop traffic outside their windows.
That’s all the result of evolution and evolutionary pressures producing the body we possess, look at other mammals, They live complete lives without an introspective mind, they aren’t bothered by Free Will and moralities, although I bet they have a modicum of Free Won’t happening.
Appreciating Evolution means also appreciating that you are part of that continuum. Which for me means respecting that the insides of me know at least as much as this voice that’s always talking to me.
It’s more a matter of thinking in different ways.
When others search for consciousness they run to philosophers, heck Philip Goff will tell us science can’t find these answers. Looking at that crowd, I see people in love with & trapped within their own imagination.
When I search for consciousness I run to evolution and the observable natural world. And no one can teach me more about that, then Earth scientists & biologists, neuroscientists and such.
I did know that animals have rather remarkable displays of intelligence. I knew about all these examples, but I also know all the challenges to them. Lisa Barrett would argue that we are just projection our notions onto animals, I don’t think so but that seems to be a think in the science community.
I knew the bit about crows and octopi too, but again others would say otherwise.
There isn’t really an experiment you can perform to demonstrate that wonder is bloomed from intelligence, if anything a lot question the framework humans use to navigate the world around them:
There are others but these are some examples.
I can’t imagine what would make me agree with this.
It seems you are having trouble mapping an image of yourself that you developed in early life onto what you are discovering as an adult. From the article:
Problems arise, however, when that self-image is negative, inaccurate, or even overly positive. Considering that we develop our concept of “self” as children, it is inevitable that our self-image doesn’t map to reality as adults.
Questioning yours, or everyone’s ability to map anything to reality however, that doesn’t follow. This is talking about your ability to learn, or to use your physical skills, or that you see youself as ugly when others don’t. It’s not about the laws of physics being unreal.
How else could we even discuss if the self-image is accurate or not?
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Well Dark, I had other things planned for this afternoon, but my wife’s not around and I get distracted so easily. I looked up your Lisa Barrett, interesting, then I found a short talk that gave me some handles to comment on.
So here it is. Smart lady, I can only imagine what she might achieve once she absorbs more of the science of consciousness, again I’d point to Dr. Solms and Dr. Damasio for the bona fides, I can’t produce. Not to mention the education you could achieve.
Happy trails,
Your brain doesn’t detect reality. It creates it. | Lisa Feldman Barrett
Big Think
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikvrwOnay3g
The debate over reality
0:07
- Sometimes people wanna say,
"No, we definitely don’t experience reality the way that it actually is.” And some people wanna say, "Yes, we do.” Philosophers have been arguing about this for like as long as philosophy has existed:
0:22
The question of does your experience match reality,
or are you really experiencing reality in its stark, objective truth?
I don’t accept how this is always presented as some shocking secret,
of course we don’t experience objective truth!
In a world where there are an infinite amount of individual creatures, each being their own center of the world, how can anyone possibly expect, objective reality or ultimate truth?
It’s a fool’s errand.
And the answer is simply: “Not exactly.”
Reality, for us, is what we can sense with our sensory surfaces, and what we can make sense of with the signals in our brain.
0:48
The signals in our brain are as necessary for our experience of reality as the sensory signals that come from the world.
Objective reality
0:57
So, I’m gonna use a metaphor to describe how the brain works.
It goes something like this: Your brain, my brain, everybody’s brain, is trapped in its own dark, silent box called your skull. And the brain has no knowledge of what is going on around it in the world or in the body, right?
Wrong! That is a philosophical supposition.
The biological material reality is that your brain is constantly connected to every millimeter of your body including the sensing organs. Beyond that, your brain is not totally isolated from, nor totally protected from influences of the physical environment, heat, pressure, etc…
There are feedback mechanisms always at work.
1:24
Because it’s in this skull, and it’s receiving sensory signals from the sensory surfaces of your body.
1:33
These signals are the outcomes of some changes in the world or in the body - but the brain doesn’t know what the changes are, it’s receiving the outcomes.
So what? This sounds like a mashup to me.
Is a phone conversation less valid because it came over a wire?
How else could to be?
1:45
And that is what philosophers and scientists call the ‘Reverse inference problem.’
You start with an outcome, and you have to guess at the cause. For example, if you hear a loud bang, it could be a car backfiring, a door slamming, it could be a gunshot. Your brain doesn’t know what the causes are, it only knows the effect, and so, it has to guess.
Then it immediately proceeds to collect more information.
Why not recognize the interactive nature of consciousness?Shouldn’t that be part of this conversation?
2:15
And the guess is important, right? Because you would do different things if it’s a gunshot
versus if it’s a windy day that slammed a door. And luckily, it has one other source of information, and that is your past experience.
True, but we’re also interacting with life.
Consciousness is that interactive dialogue between ourselves and the world surrounding us.
2:31
The really cool thing about this - if that wasn’t cool enough - is that it’s actually doing it predictively.
2:37
Sometimes scientists talk about this as the brain running a model of the world,
but the brain is not running a model of the world; the brain is running a model of its body, and it’s doing it in this really interesting way.
That’s a very good analogy, but don’t draw the wrong inferences from it.
My question is, what else would we expect a real body, within a physical world, to do?
Here again, is a phone conversation less valid because it came over a wire?
It’s the same dilemma every creature has to learn to deal with - we can only know the world through our senses, which are tailored to our immediate needs.
Human’s are the only species that’s manage to step out of the confines of our body, and we’re barely appreciating it. So sad.
2:51
In psychology, a group of instances which are similar is called a category.
In essence, what your brain is doing, when it’s making a prediction, it’s creating a category of instances from the past which are similar in some way to the present, in order to predict what’s going to happen next, what the brain has to do next, and what your experience will be next.
All that is plenty true, but there’s so much more.
In real life, you sometimes have to react without thinking, when circumstances force action, when your mental experience are wholly inadequate, but we have our body’s reflexes, based on generational experience and awareness.
The thing that’s been evolving for millions of years, takes over and all there’s time for is action.
Quite often under fire, under pressure, people react differently than we think we would. That’s because it’s up to one’s body, not one’s consciousness and the stories we’ve been telling ourselves.
3:16
And so, when a human brain is creating a category, you have to ask, "What features of similarity is it using?” Is it these sensory and motor features?
An apple is round. An apple is hard and crunchy.
Or is it these abstract features; abstract, multimodal summaries of patterns of features.
I could take a bunch of apples and I could say, “Well, these are good for baking, and these are not good for baking.”
And these patterns, this summary, only exists in your brain.
This is incongruous.
Try making a pie with rotten apples.
The patterns are there, and they are telling us something!
‘The summary, of those patterns, that your mind perceives’, is something else altogether.
Not becoming aware of that distinction is another failure, we create Perceptions of reality, not reality. A fine point worth keeping in mind. Another thing to keep in mind is that the underlying reality certainly is there.
Social reality
3:55
Because our brains are structured to construct categories based on the function of things rather than what they look like, or taste like, or smell like, humans can create something called ‘Social reality,’
As in ideas, concepts, Gods, and governments, and greenbacks.
Here’s another place where an explicit recognition of the Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide, really helps clear up the confusion.
“which is where we collectively impose a function on objects that the objects don’t have by virtue of their physical nature.”
The wording of this makes my skin crawl. It’s not wrong, but it is way over expansiveness.
Sure, we can make symbolic objects, but we should not forget most physical objects must be recognized for their physicality, hammer, knife, food, and such physical objects, they ought always to be recognized for their physicality - instead of creating inferences that everything might be as ephemeral as the symbolism and power we can infuse into pieces of paper, or ornamental objects.
Although, yeah, yeah, sure. In the great scheme of things everything is ephemeral, but that’s a different philosophical conversation. This is now, and we are here.
4:19 So, a really good example of this is money-little pieces of paper. We all agree that these little piece of paper have a function of value.
And it turns out that many things that we think of as being part of reality are actually like this. We can draw lines in the sand and create the borders of countries, which creates categories of people called immigrants and citizens.
4:47
We can create governments because we all agree that certain actions like making little tick marks has a meaning to elect someone into a position that has certain powers- it’s a form of social reality.
5:06
In our lab, we work on the hypothesis that many psychological categories are forms of social reality.
No argument so far as it goes.
5:13
We impose a meaning on a scowling face that it did not evolve to have, but because we all agree that it has that meaning or that function in a particular culture, then it does.
Seems to me there are plenty of studies indicating that human smiles, laughter, anger and such are accompanied by strikingly similar gestures. Heck take a look at the way a rich man walks and how a poor man walk, I’ll bet that’s fairly universal.
5:26
To say that your brain resides in a dark, silent box doesn’t mean that you are trapped in that box.
NO! To imply your brain resides in a dark silent box is a denial of our physical evolutionary reality! Your brain is not encased in a black box, it is in constant communication with every millimeter of its body, which is in contact with the outside world.
5:35
Your brain has this wonderful capacity to take bits and pieces of past experience and create something completely new that you’ve never experienced before.
5:49
We call it imagination. That’s a double-edged sword, right? Because our brains are so good at imagining and creating predictions that are not yoked to our immediate surroundings, sometimes we have a lot of trouble staying in the present.
You have to practice your ability to control how much you wanna be constrained by what’s going on outside that box-and how much you wanna be free of it.
If gaining a better understanding of oneself, within this fantastical world that surrounds us, is the goal. This goes off into a counter productive direction because of its blindspots.
Yeah okay,
I got pretty sloppy with that wording.
The biological body’s “understanding” is of a different order than the understanding my mind produces. But, I’ve certainly learned to respect my body’s innate knowledge and I’ve honed myself to be aware and respectful of it.
And we sure as hell depend on each other to survive.
Such as taking up my minimalist eating habits before being out of my teenage years.
I pay attention to my body and it communicates with me. No not hippy dippy discussion, simply being attentive to feelings, respecting warning shots across the bow, and such. Tough to explain, but don’t tell me it ain’t real, I’ve been buying that line from others all my life, I’m 68 now and over the past few years I’ve learned that I actually do know what I know. And that there’s value in what I know.
What else can I say: I simply feel a kinship with other animals, especially mammals, that’s apparently become rare. I can easily see (relate to) how we grew out of them.
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Also, recognize that the example has a limited number of inferences. We don’t see a watch and assume a creator of the universe, we assume a watchmaker. We don’t feel the wind and infer a message from outer space, we infer sources of wind. Even if we are pre-verbal, there are still limits to what we think it could be, mostly physical things. We don’t have to match every aspect of reality to be able to navigate and survive, we know we don’t know a lot, but that’s different than having no idea what’s real.
You confuse me, are you taking about the video or about the bracketed quote?
As for the quote,
There is no ‘yeah but’ there.
The act of consciousness is an act of interacting with one’s immediate environment, which is always changing and updating, with you influencing that environment and it influencing you, an interaction.
I pretty much agree with everything you say there. But I’m not making the connection. What do you mean? I have said that truth is irrelevant and that in the evolutionary reality we do the best we can with what we have, and close enough is good enough.
Which I think is pretty much the same thing you’re trying to express.
Okay, now here I was a little while ago, I’m trying to wind down and something stupid to watch for a few minutes, then going on our last walk. But, this sort of melodrama slaps me in the face
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
For crying out loud, the actual question is about OUR PERCEPTION of reality.
Is our perception of reality a controlled hallucination?
This advertised wording is a intellectual travesty.
I don’t care how well educated they are.
We wouldn’t be here to discuss anything, if not for the reality that “reality” - that is physical matter, laws of physics and nature, biological systems are all exquisitely fine tuned, {fine tuned to what? IDGAF, that’s beside the point}. Exquisitely enough find tuned to operate for many many billions of years to produce something like this one time cornucopia we call Earth.
This Earth may have had countless potentials ahead of it, (depending on countless details), but from where we are, here four some billion years into the pageant, we know with absolute certainty that Earth followed but one specific pathway, or it would have turned to mush and we wouldn’t be here. That’s about as real as it gets.
What’s happening up here, in the little gray cells of this two legged naked ape that we are, is an altogether different story.
This is exactly why appreciating the Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide is so fundamental to understanding the pageant and our place in it. Not to mention coming to terms with this body that you inhabit. It’s all right there, the science is providing the details for interested minds to process. Doesn’t take any woo, not need for metaphysics, although it might require dumping much of that western Abrahamic, God and self-absorbed mindset.