You are.

Hi nwr,Don't mean to pull this thread too far astray, but I was hoping you'd clarify: If pragmatic judgments are not partially based on truth or falsity, what are they based on? Are you saying they are not deductive, but rather probabilistic? Or are you just saying they're deductive, but executed without "true" or "false" knowledge of all conditions?I think computers can have "free will" just fine (to the degree that it can have general cognitive capacities at all). I see humans and computers as both built off of deterministic systems, but each being capable of executing pragmatic decisions.Anyway.Ben

imagine for a second an adult human brain, that has never recieved ANY sensory information at all, not even from its own body. it knows nothing of language, nothing of its surroundings, nothing of language, nothing of a god or religion, its simply a brain. All the necessary equipment to generate a thought, everything necessary to carry out an action. to have a usefull thought, it'd need a language to process that in, it'd need a reason for action. what would it think about? could it think it all? it couldnt.
NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION
free will is the assimilation of what to do about things that need to be done. it is shaped by reward vs. punishment. your free will has been shaped by many things you experience. it's not your own, but a product of you reacting to your environment on to what is best for your situation. IF THERE IS NOTHING THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE, NOTHING WILL BE DONE. if you didnt know anything had to be done about something, and you didnt know how to do or, or even what it was, it'd never exist to you. your "free will" is the same way. free will is less so much a freedom, so much as it is a formulated response.

To oversimplify, pragmatic judgements are based on pain avoidance and hunger satisfaction. (Toss in sexual gratification too, if you like).To get closer to a physicalist explanation, I see pragmatic judgement as being closely related to measurement. A biological system has many homeostatic subsystems. A homeostatic subsystem is, in effect, measuring its own state and using that in a feedback loop to control its behavior. I see the behavior of such a homeostatic subsystem as a "pragmatic judgement device" (analogous to a logic device). Biological systems are rich in these pragmatic judgement devices.

Not sure. I'm finding "the assimilation of what to do about things that need to be done" vaguer and more confusing than free will. I don't see how that helps.

I agree. Consider an original idea from 1000 years ago that someone wrote down and nobody else has read before. You find the paper and read the words and then have the idea. Now, while thinking of the idea your brain is firing nuerons and atomic interactions are causing (or 'allowing') the idea. But I would say that the idea, itself, is not a spatial arrangement of atoms, would you? and the words on the page (a spatial arrangement of atoms) allow for the idea to exist. Therefore, a spatial arrangement of atoms has allowed for something other than a spatial event.As a side thought...what about when the idea is dormant? Does the idea still exist? It has the potential to exist but it isn't existing...weird. why can't I? Because it doesn't understand itself, you said?I was asking you to explain to me why written language is not allowing for something other than a spatial event. Is your reply that because the language doesn't understand itself and it takes us to interpret it? What about the idea....

Therefore we don't have free will according to materialistic views.

Actually, never mind.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 11-17-2005 05:20 PM

OK, I just want to ask you a question because I am curious. Read the whole thing here.So let's assume that time travel is possible. If time travel is possible then the world in which I leave should co-exist with the destination time. So 1943 should co-exist with 2005. You see?And if so then if I go back in time to 5 minutes ago and talk to my mother is the mother I'm talking to the same consciousness as the mother from when I left?I am quite certain that the answer to this one would be NO!And according to relativity, I believe it is, certain time for certain places with less mass go quicker, like in space, than places with greater mass.Therefore, if your father, an astronot, goes into space, and time goes ever so slighty quicker for him, meaning he moves a bit quicker in time, then when he returns to you, are you talking to the father with the same consciousness as the one who left?I think the answer is the yes, same person.This message has been edited by Guidosoft, 11-17-2005 05:33 PMThis message has been edited by Guidosoft, 11-17-2005 05:34 PM

quote:

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Consider an original idea from 1000 years ago that someone wrote down and nobody else has read before. You find the paper and read the words and then have the idea. Now, while thinking of the idea your brain is firing nuerons and atomic interactions are causing (or 'allowing') the idea. But I would say that the idea, itself, is not a spatial arrangement of atoms, would you? and the words on the page (a spatial arrangement of atoms) allow for the idea to exist. Therefore, a spatial arrangement of atoms has allowed for something other than a spatial event.

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As a side thought...what about when the idea is dormant? Does the idea still exist? It has the potential to exist but it isn't existing...weird.

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They allow for the idea to exist spatially in the brain in a spatial form.What you need to explain is how the spatial movement of particles in the brain account for consciousness of that idea.As for the idea existing before you understand it.....It exists in the brain of the person that has the idea. So, if no one understood english, english would not exist. It is because there is a mind to understand english, that english exists. Otherwise I can say that ookapopo a language that might be invented in a billion years from now, already exists. An idea exists in a persons mind, not by itself. Of course if you believe that other times exist parralel to the present then you could say all kinds of things exist that don't exist yet as long as your reference transcends time.This message has been edited by Guidosoft, 11-17-2005 06:28 PM

As many folk have expressed in this thread, we're still very early in our effort to understand consciousness, there are a great many advances being made. Here is one perspective on the issue.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I'm quite skeptical about time travel. However, this does not provide any basis for making time travel possible. I agree with you.

"This is my grandfather's hatchet. My father replaced the handle; I replaced the head."Is it still his grandfather's axe? Identity is a static label that we apply to the dynamic system of a human being. They used to say that every seven years, every atom in your body has been replaced. I don't believe that's true, but it's undeniable that there's a flow of atoms through your body; they enter your body as food or air, are encorporated into your body's cells via chemical reactions, those cells die and are eliminated from the body. Your hairs are naturally shed. The enamel of your teeth wears down. You continually shed layers of skin. And you eat food to replace all that lost material.Saying "this is a different person than before" or "this is the same person they were before" is a highly subjective thing.

I worry about getting off topic, but while your concept is correct, it is technically incorrect. Computers make decisions based on:
is A < B
is A = B
is A > B
and combinations thereof. Truth or false has implications beyond what I think you intended.However, we (programmers, software engineers) are learning to put together combinations of these comparisons in ever new manners. We are learning ways to generate probabilities then throw in a toss of the dice according to the calculated probabilities. (to over simplify) The result is computer programming that can sometimes be (intentionally) unpredictable and can come up with the right answer for unknown reasons. In other words, we are aproaching the point of computers being able to make pragmatic decisions. There is much more but that is way off topic.

Okay. I was perhaps obtuse. I consider those to all be questions with a true or false answer.Compare to questions such as:

shall I have vanilla, chocolate or peach ice cream?

Shall I use a standard lens or a wide angle lens to take the picture?

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These aren't choices that can easily be settled by true/false decisions.

Re: These aren't choices that can easily be settled by true/false decisions.I completely agree. (and I was a bit pedantic in my protest) Just laying out the concepts that can go into those kinds of decisions still remain beyond our ability. This is part of the reason that we are so far from the realization of a computer or any artificial device with a sense of self.We do have computer systems that can be called expert systems in that thay possess the knowledge (rules to be more precise) to perform compex tasks. But in my opinion, we have not reached the point of being able to create AI (Artificial Intelligence). No computer can sense and form a comprehension of someting it has never "seen" before and incorporate new rules and insructions into its programming to deal with that new something.The brain is thousands if not many millions of simple computers put together in marvelously complex patterns to create, returning to the topic, I AM and YOU ARE.