Considering the first three points talk about how everything meaningful to us is just brain structure and algorithms I’m not sure about that. He also seems to say there is no motivation because that implies some self to be motivated
Well it’s more like the fact that I can’t find or remember it bothers me. Like I have to know what it is in order it move on
Perhaps we are reading different articles. That’s sarcasm, it’s your link. He literally says this,
The previous section was an argument against the common intuition that intuitive self-models have an overwhelming, foundational impact on motivations. But I want to be clear that they do have some impact. Specifically, they have an impact on motivation via associations between concepts.
Everyone forgets things and loses things. Homosexuality is not deviance, but there are plenty of people out there who think it is. Arguing with them, or even reading their points of view is not a productive use of your time. Work in developing your own logic instead.
Yeah and then the rest of the article is him talking about how there is no self and how such things like wanting are illusory because of some complicated valence formula he thinks it is.
My logic is what tells me love is meaningless because it’s just a chemical reaction in the brain and some neural pattern firing that would have fired for just anyone on the street.
Yeah. Not very logical. Define your terms. Start with a premise. Build an actual argument.
I mean first this video: https://youtu.be/pYP1CFr_QLo?is=p3DoYYrl0fmR_MQa
But also how love that we feel is just an evolutionary mechanism to encourage pair bonding and survival, without that chemical there is nothing special to it.
Factor that with the reality that the choice of who we fall in love with is just some process that is downstream of neurons. It’s an algorithm that can be triggered by just about anyone, which throws out the notion of your partner either being special or you choosing them. I even listed a link explaining how we don’t know what we love about someone and when people are asked about it they can’t list more than three, fate that they make shit up.
So incredibly untrue. I wish it was. That would be awesome if we fell in and stayed in love with just anyone.
Tell me this, what is the self?
The self is just a story woven to make sense of sensory data.
For the “incredibly untrue” I gave you a video proving otherwise, several actually
And to add a side note about consciousness: “Consciousness is the brain’s non-conceptual theory about itself,
gained through experience - that is learning, interacting with itself,
the world, and with other people,”
What does that mean? Why would we want to make sense?
It’s automatic, we don’t really choose it, the brain just organizes it as such.
or as a professor I talked to put it;
“You’re wrestling with some serious questions. My take on them is more of a experience-based philosophical stance than a neuroscience-informed position… I don’t think of self as a rhythm, but as a grand collection of expectations and beliefs held by the brain about the body’s actions and sensations. Each brain only knows the world through its body and senses, so our sense of the world is always filtered through our sense of self, but that doesn’t mean other people aren’t out there and as real as you. What you experience is a mash-up of sensory signals caused by the world and the ideas and ways of reacting to and interacting with experiences that characterize your self.”
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More evidence:
It’s not simply that you are attracted to humans over frogs or that you like apples more than fecal matter—these same principles of [evolutionary] hardwired thought guidance apply to all your deeply held beliefs about logic, economics, ethics, emotions, beauty, social interactions, love, and the rest of your mental landscape.
Complex social behavior, like trust and fairness, depend on what molecules are present in the brain at a certain time (Kosfeld et al. 2005; Crockett et al. 2008). Perhaps a task as mundane as eating a sandwich can increase your level of empathy (Danziger et al. 2011). Indeed (Eagleman 2016, p. 206):
The exact levels of dozens of other neurotransmitters —for example, serotonin—are critical for who you believe yourself to be.
For the effects of dopamine on decision making, see Sharot et al. (2009).
Finally, after all these intuitional certainties about our outer and inner perception have been deconstructed and exposed as contingent, malleable, and ambiguous, what is the status of our own body? How much of it is under our control and how much of it do we sense? In 1998, a now-classic experiment was performed. In the rubber-hand illusion, researchers achieved a feat in which healthy subjects experienced an artificial limb as part of their own body (Botvinick and Cohen 1998). In other words, the mind incorporated an artificial object into its self-model and discarded a real part of its own body. Body perception, too, is a mental construct which can easily be deconstructed. Indeed (Metzinger 2009, p. 76f.)
What does automatic mean? What do you mean “the brain organizes it”? The brain does not have another brain within it that is capable of organizing all the sensory data.
You’re back arguing that the self (as it has been understood by pre-scientific thinking) does not exist. I’ve always agreed with that. There is no “soul”. What humans need to do now is understand ourselves in light of recent science. We need to learn how to recognize our random thoughts and chemical reactions and then how to act in way that keeps us healthy and stable.
Its in the link I gave and this quote:
“It’s not simply that you are attracted to humans over frogs or that you like apples more than fecal matter—these same principles of [evolutionary] hardwired thought guidance apply to all your deeply held beliefs about logic, economics, ethics, emotions, beauty, social interactions, love, and the rest of your mental landscape.“
That is simply not possible given the current understanding of science. I have one example, the other is how even how we feel we own our own bodies is just a construct of the brain that can be manipulated.
like I said, the link I gave explains how being healthy and stable isn’t compatible with current science about how humans really are.
This too:
I think it’s important to distinguish
- (A) “this thing has explicit goals for the future”, versus
- (B) “this thing was designed to accomplish one or more goals”.
For example, I, Steve, qualify as (A) because I am a thing with explicit goals for the future—among many other things, I want my children to have a good life. Meanwhile, a sandwich qualifies as (B) but not (A). The sandwich was designed and built in order to accomplish one or more goals (to be yummy, to be nutritious, etc.), but the sandwich itself does not have explicit goals for the future. It’s just a sandwich. It’s not a goal-seeking agent. Do you see the difference?
(Confusingly, I am actually an example of both (A) and (B). I’m an example of (A) because I want my children to have a good life. I’m an example of (B) because I was designed by natural selection to have a high inclusive genetic fitness.)
Now, if you’re saying that the Steering Subsystem is an example of (B), then yes I agree, that’s absolutely true. What I was saying there was that it is NOT an example of (A). Do you see what I mean?
You’re not understanding my question.
When I ask what the things are that you are talking about, you say there is something doing some understanding or something making sense, but then you say we can’t understand and can’t make sense.
Exactly right. We don’t know. But you keep saying you have all this evidence and you know it’s all chemicals or whatever. We don’t know. That’s the point. We are animals who have come into consciousness somehow. Claiming to know what that means is pure arrogance.
In the quote, he says he is both (A) and (B). That’s what I’m saying. We are designed by evolution and we have goals.