I can't help but think that even if our decisions are causally determined, it's irrelevant because we are sort of forced to believe that we are free while we are making a decision. It's interesting because it sort of renders the issue of determinism as kind of trivial, because we can't really function without the notion that we are making choices with a degree of freedom.
Of course, I haven't really studied much mind or decision theory, so this isn't really my area. Like, I have next to nothing on it in the 20th century aside from some Gilbert Ryle, a little Searle, and a bit of Chalmers.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
- presumably any signal or combination of signals that can be identified as a preconscious "decision" can be propositionally articulated.
Not necessarily; it might be that consciousness is necessary for propositional content, and hence that no pre-conscious signal could be propositionally articulated. Classical empiricists had theories of content (and thought) like this, where the basic constituents of meaning were conscious sensations and demonstratives targeting them. But this might be a weak reply on my part. After all, people who are into drawing dramatic conclusions from this sort of neurological research are likely not going to be very friendly to classical empiricist theories of content and thought. They're more likely to go in for some sort of externalist, evolutionary semantics a la Ruth Millikan.
I think my original question still has force, though: by virtue of what do these "decision-specific neurological signals" count as being decision-specific in the first instance, and as constituting a pre-conscious decision in these specific situations where we find them? This is going to depend on a substantive theory of mind, meaning, and mental content. And it is not at all obvious that any reasonable theory of mind, meaning, and mental content is going to agree with diagnosing these neurological events as pre-conscious decisions.
By virtue of requiring a decision, e.g., raise a finger on your left or right hand of your choice at a timing of to your own arbitrary discretion, presumably (I have no specific awareness of such an experiment but to my knowledge this would not be atypical of Libet-type experiments). But perhaps I am misunderstanding your query.
Practically, though, we can override confabulation and subconscious decision making with logic and restrained thinking. If you take your time in deciding whether to wear a long sleeved shirt or a short sleeved shirt by going online to check the weather and thinking to yourself "does it really serve me to stay warm or cold during this weather?" then you are dictating the terms of your decision entirely consciously, like a computer program. Phineas Gage and alcohol have shown that there is an area of your brain that keeps a leash on impulses and may block these subconscious signals that the rest of your brain has carefully prepared and tried to sneak by your consciousness. I'd argue that you can totally, consciously reject any action the rest of your brain tells you to do if you keep track of your decision making down to every detail, at least for decisions that don't have to be made immediately.
See, but what I'm arguing here is that you do nothing consciously, your consciousness is purely observational. Logic and restrained thinking are, themselves, separate modules apart from consciousness (though likely modules that very often recruit narratives established by consciousness as inputs). You must imagine it as a sort of feedback loop, consciousness is constantly updating its narrative which is fed back to other modules to act upon.
If a computer is hooked up to a scale, and you put a package on the scale and asked it if the package was light enough to send via express mail and the computer said no, then on face it would appear the program had made a decision, when in reality you could trace the weight signal from the scale to a function that compared the value to a table of package weight limits. This is further deconstructed to stored numbers and logic expressions prearranged into a specific pattern, which is further deconstructed to logic gates arranged in a specific sequence, which is further deconstructed to electrons in a wire in one position that force other electrons to move through the wire in another position. The computer has practically made a decision, but in reality its answer was a foregone conclusion as a result of the input and output in its programming.
Our total external input to our body stimulates certain neurons to carry an electrical signal to other neurons or other cell types. No neuron has any sort of decision making property - if it receives sufficient signal, it sends that signal down its axon, and the nature of the signal is determined by the source of the signal and structure of the neuron. Therefore, a bundle of neurons connected together will have a finite and predictable reaction to external signals. Extrapolate that to the whole brain - given the structure and state of the brain, you can achieve predictable signal. There is a lot of state variation involved and confounding factors, but these impart complexity and nothing else. Nothing in the laws of matter accounts for a unique, self empowered reaction - every reaction is preceded by an action entirely determined by the laws of physics, predicted by the universe if not by humans.
When you get right down to it, the universe is just a bunch of matter and energy bouncing around in a vastly complex pattern. There is no difference between a person and the air and a drinking straw, because they're all made out of the same matter whose only job is to take up space and transfer energy. There really is no room for sentience in this view of the universe, because everything can be broken down to "matter and energy bounce around or radiate or whatever and sometimes goes one way when it was supposed to go another way, whoops," and every construct, no matter how complex, can be broken down to matter and energy, whose only job is to follow the laws of physics and bounce around and take up space. A computer is broken down to "send an electric current this way or the other way" so in the end, no matter how complex a computer is, its entire purpose can be boiled down to "send electrons this way or the other way" and further to "take up space and transfer energy."
So yeah, maybe there is no such thing as a decision. logic gates don't decide to open, neurons don't decide to fire; they do so when the correct stimuli is given. If that's true for one neuron, that's true for several neurons in a line, then neurons both vertically and laterally connected, then neurons interacting with fluctuating and rapidly changing networks, then neural networks affected by general environmental potentials and signaling molecules and cyclical feedback, then ????, then ????, then ????, then ????, and then the brain, which boils down to molecules knocking about in the shape of a brain.
Or maybe there is such a thing as a decision and a self and our knowledge of how the universe works is incomplete in a way that doesn't jive with the current laws of physics.
I agree absolutely with everything that was said here, with only a few caveats ("no sentience" can be "redefined sentience", etc). I think that using "decision-making processes" was perhaps a mistake in the OP, but what I was attempting to describe was whatever processes that lead to behavior, whether these can be accurately described as "decisions" or not. And to expand:
In other words, I am not sure I accept the idea of a wholly non-conscious process which could be properly called decision-making. Decisions and choices occur in 'the space of reasons;' they at least sometimes proceed according to reasons, they can be given the semantics attendant to a propositional structure (including incorporating the logical constants like and, not, or, etc.), and so on. If you point to a particular neurophysical event, prior to conscious awareness, and which is not conceptually or propositionally articulated, and call that the real decision-making process, then I suspect a confusion between the causal antecedents of a decision and the thing itself.
And I think this is very interesting, because the way I envision it is like this: our "behavior-causing processes" (which I confusingly referred to as "decision-making processes" previously) do not make decisions in this sense at all. Rather, they are much as Paladin described them, the simple cause and effect of vast populations of neurons summing synaptic inputs and firing if over a threshold. 'The space of reasons', the semantics attendant to a propositional structure, and so on are all products of the narrative that the conscious process builds to describe them, after the fact. The entire point of the conscious process is then to look at what the brain has done and articulate it. The "decision" happens before it is even understood to be a decision.
I hadn't heard of confabulation before this thread, and it blows my mind.
Like, split-brain is fairly weird condition but the confabulation aspect of it, to me, utterly undermines my perception of what makes a person because the conscious recall in no way indicates that the reasoning may be faulty.
I suppose in many respects though, our day to day experiences indicate this rather strongly if you look for them: the human eye for example has a fairly big blind spot. But if you go looking for it - if you draw a dot on a piece of paper and gradually shift your gaze, the crazy thing is that the image you see is not something going out of your field of view - instead what you see is apparently just a continuous blank sheet of paper.
Which would seem to me to be some day-to-day confabulation: what's in an area I actually can't see is being invented by my conscious brain, and were it not for the foreknowledge that this is expected I would have no idea anything was wrong.
Which does start to make me think that if you could get a brain enhancement, that would be an awesomely useful one: something that checksums neurological information and flashes a great big warning if a set of links go down or send unusable information.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
By virtue of requiring a decision, e.g., raise a finger on your left or right hand of your choice at a timing of to your own arbitrary discretion, presumably (I have no specific awareness of such an experiment but to my knowledge this would not be atypical of Libet-type experiments). But perhaps I am misunderstanding your query.
This is unhelpfully circular, though. It's a decision signal. By virtue of what? By virtue of requiring a decision. But then by virtue of what does it count as requiring a decision? As far as I can tell, so far the answer has been: by looking at which signal fires, we can fully predict one's later picking of the blue or the red splotch--that is by virtue of what it counts as a decision signal. But this is a 'decision' only in the sense that everything was decided long ago by the starting conditions of the universe. One needs a further explanation for why it is also a decision in the sense relevant to human action; that it is, despite being fully unconscious, a mental event of mine which constitutes a decision I made, albeit unconsciously.
By virtue of requiring a decision, e.g., raise a finger on your left or right hand of your choice at a timing of to your own arbitrary discretion, presumably (I have no specific awareness of such an experiment but to my knowledge this would not be atypical of Libet-type experiments). But perhaps I am misunderstanding your query.
This is unhelpfully circular, though. It's a decision signal. By virtue of what? By virtue of requiring a decision. But then by virtue of what does it count as requiring a decision? As far as I can tell, so far the answer has been: by looking at which signal fires, we can fully predict one's later picking of the blue or the red splotch--that is by virtue of what it counts as a decision signal. But this is a 'decision' only in the sense that everything was decided long ago by the starting conditions of the universe. One needs a further explanation for why it is also a decision in the sense relevant to human action; that it is, despite being fully unconscious, a mental event of mine which constitutes a decision I made, albeit unconsciously.
I mean, isn't the obvious conclusion to draw that a decision never happens?
By virtue of requiring a decision, e.g., raise a finger on your left or right hand of your choice at a timing of to your own arbitrary discretion, presumably (I have no specific awareness of such an experiment but to my knowledge this would not be atypical of Libet-type experiments). But perhaps I am misunderstanding your query.
This is unhelpfully circular, though. It's a decision signal. By virtue of what? By virtue of requiring a decision. But then by virtue of what does it count as requiring a decision? As far as I can tell, so far the answer has been: by looking at which signal fires, we can fully predict one's later picking of the blue or the red splotch--that is by virtue of what it counts as a decision signal. But this is a 'decision' only in the sense that everything was decided long ago by the starting conditions of the universe. One needs a further explanation for why it is also a decision in the sense relevant to human action; that it is, despite being fully unconscious, a mental event of mine which constitutes a decision I made, albeit unconsciously.
I mean, isn't the obvious conclusion to draw that a decision never happens?
Except this is unsatisfying because I made a decision earlier today.
I mean, you can tell me this is all illusory, and that I don't really make any decisions, but that doesn't seem to jive with experience we have. I have experience with lots of decisions every day.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
By virtue of requiring a decision, e.g., raise a finger on your left or right hand of your choice at a timing of to your own arbitrary discretion, presumably (I have no specific awareness of such an experiment but to my knowledge this would not be atypical of Libet-type experiments). But perhaps I am misunderstanding your query.
This is unhelpfully circular, though. It's a decision signal. By virtue of what? By virtue of requiring a decision. But then by virtue of what does it count as requiring a decision? As far as I can tell, so far the answer has been: by looking at which signal fires, we can fully predict one's later picking of the blue or the red splotch--that is by virtue of what it counts as a decision signal. But this is a 'decision' only in the sense that everything was decided long ago by the starting conditions of the universe. One needs a further explanation for why it is also a decision in the sense relevant to human action; that it is, despite being fully unconscious, a mental event of mine which constitutes a decision I made, albeit unconsciously.
the point of the Libet argument doesn't rely crucially on how much earlier the decision-point is, as long it is conceded that a decision is in fact made and that it is in fact occurring too early to be argued to be concurrent or postcedent with conscious awareness
arguing that the causal chain stretches far earlier rather bends the common understanding of making decisions in daily life, though. This is not a point about determinism; rather the point is whether awareness is the causal intermediary or the causal effect (so to speak) within the temporal sequence of making decisions (a process which may be ultimately deterministic or non-deterministic in nature and this would be irrelevant to the point at hand).
By virtue of requiring a decision, e.g., raise a finger on your left or right hand of your choice at a timing of to your own arbitrary discretion, presumably (I have no specific awareness of such an experiment but to my knowledge this would not be atypical of Libet-type experiments). But perhaps I am misunderstanding your query.
This is unhelpfully circular, though. It's a decision signal. By virtue of what? By virtue of requiring a decision. But then by virtue of what does it count as requiring a decision? As far as I can tell, so far the answer has been: by looking at which signal fires, we can fully predict one's later picking of the blue or the red splotch--that is by virtue of what it counts as a decision signal. But this is a 'decision' only in the sense that everything was decided long ago by the starting conditions of the universe. One needs a further explanation for why it is also a decision in the sense relevant to human action; that it is, despite being fully unconscious, a mental event of mine which constitutes a decision I made, albeit unconsciously.
I mean, isn't the obvious conclusion to draw that a decision never happens?
Except this is unsatisfying because I made a decision earlier today.
I mean, you can tell me this is all illusory, and that I don't really make any decisions, but that doesn't seem to jive with experience we have. I have experience with lots of decisions every day.
And how I choose to explain this is that you have a conscious process that has the job of going through all the things that it observes concerning your perceptions, feelings, and actions and comes up with a story regarding what "decisions" you made and why.
A story that, ultimately, is important for informing your future behavior as well as for communicating with other humans.
It is something of a convenient fiction, in much the same way as color constancy or other similar optical illusions.
By virtue of requiring a decision, e.g., raise a finger on your left or right hand of your choice at a timing of to your own arbitrary discretion, presumably (I have no specific awareness of such an experiment but to my knowledge this would not be atypical of Libet-type experiments). But perhaps I am misunderstanding your query.
This is unhelpfully circular, though. It's a decision signal. By virtue of what? By virtue of requiring a decision. But then by virtue of what does it count as requiring a decision? As far as I can tell, so far the answer has been: by looking at which signal fires, we can fully predict one's later picking of the blue or the red splotch--that is by virtue of what it counts as a decision signal. But this is a 'decision' only in the sense that everything was decided long ago by the starting conditions of the universe. One needs a further explanation for why it is also a decision in the sense relevant to human action; that it is, despite being fully unconscious, a mental event of mine which constitutes a decision I made, albeit unconsciously.
I mean, isn't the obvious conclusion to draw that a decision never happens?
Except this is unsatisfying because I made a decision earlier today.
I mean, you can tell me this is all illusory, and that I don't really make any decisions, but that doesn't seem to jive with experience we have. I have experience with lots of decisions every day.
And how I choose to explain this is that you have a conscious process that has the job of going through all the things that it observes concerning your perceptions, feelings, and actions and comes up with a story regarding what "decisions" you made and why.
A story that, ultimately, is important for informing your future behavior as well as for communicating with other humans.
It is something of a convenient fiction, in much the same way as color constancy or other similar optical illusions.
Right, you say that it's all an illusion, and that when I seem to be going through the process of making a decision, I'm really not. But now you're questioning experience. That's not exactly a safe road, as that's the same kind of reasoning that people used in the early days of science to question whether empirical observation was a source of knowledge at all. If I can't trust my own observation of my actions, then why should I trust the observations that are made that lead to the scientific advances that we're using to question my observation? Either observation works, or it doesn't. Optical illusions are far different than what we're talking about here. The closest that you could come would potentially be talking about hallucinations, but even then it isn't something that is sensory input. It isn't my senses being fooled into believing that I'm making a decision.
I actually think that Kant has an interesting line on this with respect to decision making. Even if it is the case that we don't make decisions, it's kind of a trivial thing because we have to think that we make them. We can't function in a way where we aren't freely making decisions between options. If it is fiction, it's a necessary one that we can't get out of.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Right, you say that it's all an illusion, and that when I seem to be going through the process of making a decision, I'm really not. But now you're questioning experience. That's not exactly a safe road, as that's the same kind of reasoning that people used in the early days of science to question whether empirical observation was a source of knowledge at all. If I can't trust my own observation of my actions, then why should I trust the observations that are made that lead to the scientific advances that we're using to question my observation? Either observation works, or it doesn't. Optical illusions are far different than what we're talking about here. The closest that you could come would potentially be talking about hallucinations, but even then it isn't something that is sensory input. It isn't my senses being fooled into believing that I'm making a decision.
I actually think that Kant has an interesting line on this with respect to decision making. Even if it is the case that we don't make decisions, it's kind of a trivial thing because we have to think that we make them. We can't function in a way where we aren't freely making decisions between options. If it is fiction, it's a necessary one that we can't get out of.
I don't exactly want to get into the philosophy of science and epistemology, but I would argue that there are extremely many cases where going against intuition or perception is the only way to yield the truth. One excellent example might be Capgra's delusion.
EDIT:
In regards to Kant, I agree that in day to day life you have to think that you make decisions, in face I would argue it's impossible to believe otherwise on a practical level, your brain just won't do it. It's like looking at an optical illusion and attempting to will yourself to see it correctly. You have no ability to prevent your conscious module from working in this manner.
EDITEDIT:
I would also argue that this does not make it nearly "trivial". Just because we're stuck with this illusion doesn't mean that we can't take into account the actual truth.
Right, you say that it's all an illusion, and that when I seem to be going through the process of making a decision, I'm really not. But now you're questioning experience. That's not exactly a safe road, as that's the same kind of reasoning that people used in the early days of science to question whether empirical observation was a source of knowledge at all. If I can't trust my own observation of my actions, then why should I trust the observations that are made that lead to the scientific advances that we're using to question my observation? Either observation works, or it doesn't. Optical illusions are far different than what we're talking about here. The closest that you could come would potentially be talking about hallucinations, but even then it isn't something that is sensory input. It isn't my senses being fooled into believing that I'm making a decision.
I actually think that Kant has an interesting line on this with respect to decision making. Even if it is the case that we don't make decisions, it's kind of a trivial thing because we have to think that we make them. We can't function in a way where we aren't freely making decisions between options. If it is fiction, it's a necessary one that we can't get out of.
EDITEDIT:
In regards to Kant, I agree that in day to day life you have to think that you make decisions, in face I would argue it's impossible to believe otherwise on a practical level, your brain just won't do it. It's like looking at an optical illusion and attempting to will yourself to see it correctly. You have no ability to prevent your conscious module from working in this manner.
I would also argue that this does not make it nearly "trivial". Just because we're stuck with this illusion doesn't mean that we can't take into account the actual truth.
To what end? I mean, it seems a bit useless if I must engage in a decision making process, that I somehow have to be trying to remind myself that I'm not really making any sort of decision.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I think this research Winky is talking about is very interesting (although these phenomena have been fairly well-known since people started reading Oliver Sacks), but as he said near the start, it doesn't really impact the discussion of the existence of consciousness, free will, decision-making etc.
It is about the nature of these things. The actual physical processes that are involved in our cognition. Thinking isn't what we think it is. Or what we think we think it is.
That doesn't mean it goes away. Just that we are learning more about how thinking works. Which was always going to need to happen anyway - it's clear that the free-will 'debate' shows that our concepts of mind and decision-making are deeply flawed.
I think a lot of the problem here is that our language for describing mental processes is inadequate. We make 'decisions', which don't happen anywhere except within our minds. I don't mean I don't think they exist - I mean that they have no analogue, no referent outside our brain. We are intimately aware of our subjective experience of decision-making but that's not enough to be able to communicate it well. For example we're talking about illusions here but these aren't illusions, because we're not talking about improperly perceiving physical events - we're talking about 'improperly' perceiving mental events. And since it's the mind that is the organ that perceives the mind, I don't know we can really say there is a 'proper' way to perceive our mental processes.
Which is unhelpful of me - so does anyone know philosophers etc who are exploring other vocabularies to describe consciousness and cognition? E.g. words for 'sense' or 'perception' that are used for mental processes and self-observation of our mind rather than the observation of the external physical world?
I think a lot of the problem here is that our language for describing mental processes is inadequate. We make 'decisions', which don't happen anywhere except within our minds. I don't mean I don't think they exist - I mean that they have no analogue, no referent outside our brain. We are intimately aware of our subjective experience of decision-making but that's not enough to be able to communicate it well. For example we're talking about illusions here but these aren't illusions, because we're not talking about improperly perceiving physical events - we're talking about 'improperly' perceiving mental events. And since it's the mind that is the organ that perceives the mind, I don't know we can really say there is a 'proper' way to perceive our mental processes.
Well, arguably there is not a 'proper' way to perceive physical events either. Rather, it's a matter of whether the conclusions you draw from how you perceive physical events actually reflect the external world. Likewise with the perception of mental events.
I would never use the word 'illusion' to describe consciousness either, because it's actually working as exactly as intended. The concern is over whether or not the way we intuitively believe our mind works has any relationship to the reality of how our mind works. I would say that the fact that consciousness works the way it does is actually a vitally important part of how we function, much like how our perception of color constancy may not reflect reality but it is still incredibly useful. As I was saying previously, these are useful fictions.
To what end? I mean, it seems a bit useless if I must engage in a decision making process, that I somehow have to be trying to remind myself that I'm not really making any sort of decision.
Ah, but this isn't the case you need to understand it for, it's useful for us to believe that we make our own decisions. Instead look at another person and their actions. Do you blame them for deciding to carry out an action? Or do you look at the antecedent causes of those actions and address it that way? This is a completely way different way of looking at behavior. Furthermore, it's nearly always worthwhile to understand something in and of itself. I just can't comprehend supporting the position that we should be blissfully ignorant concerning what really goes on in our brains "so long as it works". Which, I suppose brings up another problem: deficiencies of consciousness and how understanding actual mechanism of consciousness helps to solve these problems.
I have a problem with describing mental processes as 'fictions'.
Brains and neurology - those are things with an objective reality. I don't think mental processes are in the same class.
We can be wrong about physical reality - e.g. when we dream that someone spoke to us and shook us and then there were hours of dream events, and we were shaken in an earthquake and then God spoke to us in a loud voice and said 'Get the fuck up! It's your turn to make breakfast!', we are wrong about the physical events but we are not wrong about the mental events. We really did have that dream. And we really do make decisions and see the colour red and fall in love.
But then I'm back to the 'the language we're using is inadequate' thing.
I have a problem with describing mental processes as 'fictions'.
Brains and neurology - those are things with an objective reality. I don't think mental processes are in the same class.
We can be wrong about physical reality - e.g. when we dream that someone spoke to us and shook us and then there were hours of dream events, and we were shaken in an earthquake and then God spoke to us in a loud voice and said 'Get the fuck up! It's your turn to make breakfast!', we are wrong about the physical events but we are not wrong about the mental events. We really did have that dream. And we really do make decisions and see the colour red and fall in love.
But then I'm back to the 'the language we're using is inadequate' thing.
I would argue that mental events are physical events as well.
Anyway, you can be wrong about mental events, you may misremember your dream, for instance. Mental processes are just as much objective realities as every other physical process.
I am arguing, of course, from a position of strict materialism but you will not find a neuroscientist today who doesn't.
EDIT:
A very good example of being wrong about mental events: the confabulation examples.
I have a problem with describing mental processes as 'fictions'.
Brains and neurology - those are things with an objective reality. I don't think mental processes are in the same class.
We can be wrong about physical reality - e.g. when we dream that someone spoke to us and shook us and then there were hours of dream events, and we were shaken in an earthquake and then God spoke to us in a loud voice and said 'Get the fuck up! It's your turn to make breakfast!', we are wrong about the physical events but we are not wrong about the mental events. We really did have that dream. And we really do make decisions and see the colour red and fall in love.
But then I'm back to the 'the language we're using is inadequate' thing.
I would argue that mental events are physical events as well.
Anyway, you can be wrong about mental events, you may misremember your dream, for instance. Mental processes are just as much objective realities as every other physical process.
I am arguing, of course, from a position of strict materialism but you will not find a neuroscientist today who doesn't.
I get the strict materialism. I do.
But it seems like there are two different ways to be wrong about your dream. One is to misremember the dream, in the normal way that I misremember someone's phone number. The other is for the dream to apparently reflect the physical processes involved in a way that does not mirror those events, e.g. dreaming that something physical caused a dream when actually the event was at the end of the dreaming period and you edited it into the dream, altering the dream experience. Dreaming is something we perceive as broadly temporal, a narrative, but evidence shows us that this is not the case - it is something more akin to a confabulated memory.
So there are two classes of 'wrong' here - misremembering in the normal sense, and confabulation. But since the only type of dream that has ever existed is confabulated, how can we say we are incorrectly dreaming? We have always and only dreamed in this way. No other kind of dreaming exists. What is wrong about it?
I have a problem with describing mental processes as 'fictions'.
Brains and neurology - those are things with an objective reality. I don't think mental processes are in the same class.
We can be wrong about physical reality - e.g. when we dream that someone spoke to us and shook us and then there were hours of dream events, and we were shaken in an earthquake and then God spoke to us in a loud voice and said 'Get the fuck up! It's your turn to make breakfast!', we are wrong about the physical events but we are not wrong about the mental events. We really did have that dream. And we really do make decisions and see the colour red and fall in love.
But then I'm back to the 'the language we're using is inadequate' thing.
I would argue that mental events are physical events as well.
Anyway, you can be wrong about mental events, you may misremember your dream, for instance. Mental processes are just as much objective realities as every other physical process.
I am arguing, of course, from a position of strict materialism but you will not find a neuroscientist today who doesn't.
EDIT:
A very good example of being wrong about mental events: the confabulation examples.
I would classify that confabulation as being wrong about physical events.
I agree that of course the world is atoms and so on. But I'm sure you know what I mean, because professional philosophers have said it better than me - the internal mental world is a real thing too, regardless of its connection to the physical world. Nothing is physically 'red'. Red is purely an experience. EM Wavelengths are physical, and we talk to each other about things being red. How can I be wrong about something being red? Because everyone else disagrees? That's not scientific at all - objective reality isn't democratic. Or is it?
I think the 'confabulations' of consciousness are to perfectly integral to our consciousness that they are a part of science and 'fact'.
I have a problem with describing mental processes as 'fictions'.
Brains and neurology - those are things with an objective reality. I don't think mental processes are in the same class.
We can be wrong about physical reality - e.g. when we dream that someone spoke to us and shook us and then there were hours of dream events, and we were shaken in an earthquake and then God spoke to us in a loud voice and said 'Get the fuck up! It's your turn to make breakfast!', we are wrong about the physical events but we are not wrong about the mental events. We really did have that dream. And we really do make decisions and see the colour red and fall in love.
But then I'm back to the 'the language we're using is inadequate' thing.
I would argue that mental events are physical events as well.
Anyway, you can be wrong about mental events, you may misremember your dream, for instance. Mental processes are just as much objective realities as every other physical process.
I am arguing, of course, from a position of strict materialism but you will not find a neuroscientist today who doesn't.
I get the strict materialism. I do.
But it seems like there are two different ways to be wrong about your dream. One is to misremember the dream, in the normal way that I misremember someone's phone number. The other is for the dream to apparently reflect the physical processes involved in a way that does not mirror those events, e.g. dreaming that something physical caused a dream when actually the event was at the end of the dreaming period and you edited it into the dream, altering the dream experience. Dreaming is something we perceive as broadly temporal, a narrative, but evidence shows us that this is not the case - it is something more akin to a confabulated memory.
So there are two classes of 'wrong' here - misremembering in the normal sense, and confabulation. But since the only type of dream that has ever existed is confabulated, how can we say we are incorrectly dreaming? We have always and only dreamed in this way. No other kind of dreaming exists. What is wrong about it?
This gets back to what I said before: it's a matter of your account being consistent with external reality. When you say that while you were in the act of dreaming you went through some sort of temporally linear narrative, you are wrong about what happened, factually. If you make the statement "I experienced it as a temporally linear narrative" you'd be making a true statement. "I made a decision" is a truth statement that has far-reaching implications about the nature of the universe, if the nature of the universe is inconsistent with these implications then "I made a decision" is false. Surely he had the experience of making a decision, this is not the same as saying he actually made one.
I have a problem with describing mental processes as 'fictions'.
Brains and neurology - those are things with an objective reality. I don't think mental processes are in the same class.
We can be wrong about physical reality - e.g. when we dream that someone spoke to us and shook us and then there were hours of dream events, and we were shaken in an earthquake and then God spoke to us in a loud voice and said 'Get the fuck up! It's your turn to make breakfast!', we are wrong about the physical events but we are not wrong about the mental events. We really did have that dream. And we really do make decisions and see the colour red and fall in love.
But then I'm back to the 'the language we're using is inadequate' thing.
I would argue that mental events are physical events as well.
Anyway, you can be wrong about mental events, you may misremember your dream, for instance. Mental processes are just as much objective realities as every other physical process.
I am arguing, of course, from a position of strict materialism but you will not find a neuroscientist today who doesn't.
I get the strict materialism. I do.
But it seems like there are two different ways to be wrong about your dream. One is to misremember the dream, in the way that I misremember someone's phone number. The other is for the dream to apparently reflect the physical processes involved in a way that does not mirror those events, e.g. dreaming that something physical caused a dream when actually the event was at the end of the dreaming period and you edited it into the dream, altering the dream experience. Dreaming is something we perceive as broadly temporal, a narrative, but evidence shows us that this is not the case - it is something more akin to a confabulated memory.
So there are two classes of 'wrong' here - misremembering in the normal sense, and confabulation. But since the only type of dream that has ever existed is confabulated, how can we say we are incorrectly dreaming? We have always and only dreamed in this way. No other kind of dreaming exists. What is wrong about it?
This gets back to what I said before: it's a matter of your account being consistent with external reality. When you say that while you were in the act of dreaming you went through some sort of temporally linear narrative, you are wrong about what happened, factually. If you make the statement "I experienced it as a temporally linear narrative" you'd be making a true statement. "I made a decision" is a truth statement that has far-reaching implications about the nature of the universe, if the nature of the universe is inconsistent with these implications then "I made a decision" is false. Surely he had the experience of making a decision, this is not the same as saying he actually made one.
Yep, that's fine. But my point still stands. Decision-making, just like the colour red, has no referent outside our minds. You can't say something's objectively red or not. You can't say something's objectively not a decision, because decisions are solely mental phenomena. Trees and stars and bosons and chairs and yes, computers, don't have decisions.
Another, flawed, way to put it is that 'I had the experience of making a decision' and 'I made a decision' are actually the same thing.
To what end? I mean, it seems a bit useless if I must engage in a decision making process, that I somehow have to be trying to remind myself that I'm not really making any sort of decision.
Ah, but this isn't the case you need to understand it for, it's useful for us to believe that we make our own decisions. Instead look at another person and their actions. Do you blame them for deciding to carry out an action? Or do you look at the antecedent causes of those actions and address it that way? This is a completely way different way of looking at behavior. Furthermore, it's nearly always worthwhile to understand something in and of itself. I just can't comprehend supporting the position that we should be blissfully ignorant concerning what really goes on in our brains "so long as it works". Which, I suppose brings up another problem: deficiencies of consciousness and how understanding actual mechanism of consciousness helps to solve these problems.
Of course not. If you eliminate choice, then you've also totally destroyed moral responsibility. It doesn't make sense to see anyone as any more morally culpable for their actions as a tree falling on your house. It's not the tree's fault that it fell, it was just obeying physical laws.
And I'm sure that you are totally comfortable with a world where no one is worthy of moral praise or blame.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
To what end? I mean, it seems a bit useless if I must engage in a decision making process, that I somehow have to be trying to remind myself that I'm not really making any sort of decision.
Ah, but this isn't the case you need to understand it for, it's useful for us to believe that we make our own decisions. Instead look at another person and their actions. Do you blame them for deciding to carry out an action? Or do you look at the antecedent causes of those actions and address it that way? This is a completely way different way of looking at behavior. Furthermore, it's nearly always worthwhile to understand something in and of itself. I just can't comprehend supporting the position that we should be blissfully ignorant concerning what really goes on in our brains "so long as it works". Which, I suppose brings up another problem: deficiencies of consciousness and how understanding actual mechanism of consciousness helps to solve these problems.
Of course not. If you eliminate choice, then you've also totally destroyed moral responsibility. It doesn't make sense to see anyone as any more morally culpable for their actions as a tree falling on your house. It's not the tree's fault that it fell, it was just obeying physical laws.
And I'm sure that you are totally comfortable with a world where no one is worthy of moral praise or blame.
i don't think that the elimination of choice, or rather the way we currently conceive of choice, destroys moral responsibility at all. if anything it makes it more useful.
responsibility is simply locating the individual within the causal chain. the fact that their actions have antecedents does not mean they did not act the way they did; it simply means that they acted that way for a reason. to condemn someone as immoral, for example, simply becomes a synonym for "the influences and context which have determined your decisions and actions have shaped you into something harmful or dangerous," which would in fact foster compassion and understanding, and encourage a method of dealing with such immorality that addresses those flawed antecedents rather than condemning a person to satisfy our retributive urges. to assign moral responsibility, to advise someone that they are immoral and work to change that, is to become one of those factors that dictates future decisions (hopefully). you chop down the tree before it falls on your house, or construct a brace, or reinforce your house; you interact with the system in such a way as to influence it so that it no longer produces harmful results.
To what end? I mean, it seems a bit useless if I must engage in a decision making process, that I somehow have to be trying to remind myself that I'm not really making any sort of decision.
Ah, but this isn't the case you need to understand it for, it's useful for us to believe that we make our own decisions. Instead look at another person and their actions. Do you blame them for deciding to carry out an action? Or do you look at the antecedent causes of those actions and address it that way? This is a completely way different way of looking at behavior. Furthermore, it's nearly always worthwhile to understand something in and of itself. I just can't comprehend supporting the position that we should be blissfully ignorant concerning what really goes on in our brains "so long as it works". Which, I suppose brings up another problem: deficiencies of consciousness and how understanding actual mechanism of consciousness helps to solve these problems.
Of course not. If you eliminate choice, then you've also totally destroyed moral responsibility. It doesn't make sense to see anyone as any more morally culpable for their actions as a tree falling on your house. It's not the tree's fault that it fell, it was just obeying physical laws.
And I'm sure that you are totally comfortable with a world where no one is worthy of moral praise or blame.
i don't think that the elimination of choice, or rather the way we currently conceive of choice, destroys moral responsibility at all. if anything it makes it more useful.
responsibility is simply locating the individual within the causal chain. the fact that their actions have antecedents does not mean they did not act the way they did; it simply means that they acted that way for a reason. to condemn someone as immoral, for example, simply becomes a synonym for "the influences and context which have determined your decisions and actions have shaped you into something harmful or dangerous," which would in fact foster compassion and understanding, and encourage a method of dealing with such immorality that addresses those flawed antecedents rather than condemning a person to satisfy our retributive urges. to assign moral responsibility, to advise someone that they are immoral and work to change that, is to become one of those factors that dictates future decisions (hopefully). you chop down the tree before it falls on your house, or construct a brace, or reinforce your house; you interact with the system in such a way as to influence it so that it no longer produces harmful results.
Just look at the example of the tree destroying your house. You don't blame the tree right? It's not an "evil" tree, is it? Why?
I think that the reason why is that the tree isn't seen as responsible for its actions. It could not have done other than as it did. So the tree is no more culpable than the wind that blew it over, than the sun for heating air and causing weather patterns.
There's something qualitatively different about a human being destroying your house. Now, they might have done such on accident, which is generally seen as morally blameless, but say that they did it intentionally. Intention changes the picture a bit. Intention means that someone made a choice, they chose to act in a particular way and not another. The tree doesn't make a choice, the person does. That, I think, is the root of why we assign moral blame to the person and not the tree. Otherwise, what is the reason why the tree isn't responsible?
Certainly if we are not capable of choosing, it isn't as though we aren't going to have preferences for some actions and not others. In fact, we'll likely punish some actions and not others, we couldn't do otherwise. However, our preferences will be arbitrary, a product of some manner of chance (unless you're going to get wacky and suggest some sort of design, but you wouldn't do that, would you?). Most importantly, there will be no justification for us to punish those behaviors, because the people performing them aren't responsible for it. We don't punish involuntary actions, we may try to control them for people's safety or comfort, but we don't punish them.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Punishment is only valuable or worthwhile if it controls behaviours for people's safety or comfort, in your words. Punishment for any other reason is not justified, nor should we attempt to justify it. That's the point; a better, more compassionate model of justice can be constructed if you see choice as an event in a causal chain like any other. Ideally, a person who acts immorally should be treated like a falling tree - just a vastly more complex system. Punishment (or any sort of preventive measure) is just a way of manipulating the system to prevent the harmful effects from occurring, just as it would be when we intervene with any other, less complex system, like a tree falling, or a pet acting out. The only distinction between our reaction to a voluntary act versus an involuntary act should be the difference in how to best prevent it in the future.
There is no inherent value to punishment, only whatever value it can produce by being useful. That is the only justification it needs, and that is the only justification that we should ever attempt to assign to it.
Punishment is only valuable or worthwhile if it controls behaviours for people's safety or comfort, in your words. Punishment for any other reason is not justified, nor should we attempt to justify it. that's the point; a better, more compassionate model of justice can be constructed if you see choice as an event in a causal chain like any other. Ideally, a person who acts immorally should be treated like a falling tree - just a vastly more complex system. Punishment (or any sort of preventive measure) is just a way of manipulating the system to prevent the harmful effects from occurring, just as it would be when we intervene with any other, less complex system, like a tree falling, or a pet acting out.
There is no inherent value to punishment, only whatever value it can produce by being useful. That is the only justification it needs, and that is the only justification that we should ever attempt to assign to it.
I shouldn't have used the word punish, I should have used blame.
I'm talking about blameworthiness, not the social activity of punishment (as we don't necessarily punish all actions that are immoral).
There is no dichotomy between blame and compassion. Like, if I find that someone is responsible for something immoral, I can still feel compassion in numerous ways. So this whole notion that somehow by eliminating the very ability to assign moral fault we are now allowed to be compassionate is silly. They are not opposed. I can still pity the guy who does something wrong because perhaps he had poor moral instruction, or he lost control, or what have you.
Really the whole notion here is that the tree is not responsible for its actions, because it has no control over them. If human beings are like trees, and they have no control over their actions (in that they cannot choose to do one action over choosing to do another), then they too are not responsible. Then it becomes rather silly to assign any sort of moral blame to them.
Hell, it becomes silly to assign any sort of moral praise as well. If people cannot help but do bad things, then some people deserve no praise for doing good things beyond some sort of conditioning to get them to do it more.
All we would be doing is rewarding and punishing on the basis of arbitrary preferences.
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I hadn't heard of confabulation before this thread, and it blows my mind.
Like, split-brain is fairly weird condition but the confabulation aspect of it, to me, utterly undermines my perception of what makes a person because the conscious recall in no way indicates that the reasoning may be faulty.
But, if you think about it, confabulation isn't really all that surprising. It just mean that our perception of our thought making process isn't special, when compared with the rest of our perception. When the brain does not have correct information to populate our sensorium it just goes ahead in fills in what it thinks is correct. This sort of thing is the basis for all sorts of illusions. There's the blind spot caused by the optic nerve attaching to the front of the retina, or whatever, which we never notice. What we see, can change what we hear, as with the McGurk Effect. Our depth perception is cobbled together out of like a dozen different tricks our brain uses.
All this stuff means is that there is a hugely complicated process going on when we make decisions, and once it is done our consciousness gets updated about it, and that when our brain doesn't have enough information about why we made that decision, it just fills in what seems to sound good, what seems to fit with our past experiences, what meets our prejudices--just like it does all of our other sense.
I don't really think there are huge philosophical repercussions based on this. Nothing is any more or less determinate. I am all of my bits. My environment is everything I interact with. These are simple hierarchical definitions that relatively simple components of computer programs are capable of working with, so I don't see why the far more complex computer that is a human brain would have a big problem with them. I don't understand why people have issues talking about self. I don't see how this changes anything to do with free will, or how the existance or non-existance of free will effects any aspect of someone's life.
This is neat though, and really it does kinda effect how people understand the decisions they make. It's pretty likely that this is the functional basis for a lot of bias. Not only does ignorance lead to bad decisions, the people making those decisions have no real idea how they are making them or just how bad they are. There brain just smooths over the missing stuff, accepts the bad information it thinks is right, and creates a totally believable experience that matches what it expects--which I don't believe would surprise anyone that's had to deal with people much.
I never really understood that "which of these is longer" trick questions. I always measure them with my fingers, or, if I can't use my fingers, I draw lines with my eyes. It's pretty obvious that, once you don't glance at that picture that they're equal size. If I just casually glanced at it though, I'd probably say the top is longer.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I believe consciousness is a narrative process, by which we construct an explanation of what we are doing and the reasons we are doing it. However, and this is important, consciousness does not actually have privileged access to our decision making process. That is to say, the reasoning that we consciously come up with for our actions has no necessary relationship with the reasoning our decision making process actually uses. I think that the mechanism of our decision making processes are actually untranslatable, or so difficult to translate into a symbolic system that our brains have developed a system for looking at our perceptions, feelings, and actions in order to work backwards to the causes of these things. Essentially your conscious process is given access only to what we perceive, what we feel, and what course of action we have decided upon and then is forced to "confabulate" a reasoning behind it. You do not make conscious decisions, rather your consciousness is a sort of PR guy for your brain, attempting to come up with a communicable explanation for what it is doing. Your consciousness is only making its best guess of what is actually going on in your brain.
I think this makes a lot of sense.
And I think there's something to be said for figuring out ways to try and perceive one's own consciousness. I'm not sure if it's even possible, really. But I've become rather interested recently in trying to feel out the walls of my own consciousness via meditation. (Secular meditation for me, though, none of that religious nonsense.) I try and quiet my mind, notice that I'm having thoughts and feeling sensations, and try and turn those off and not think anything. I try and turn off the running stream of conscious words for a bit.
I'm not very good at it, though. I get distracted easily. My brain-mouth is way too fucking loud.
Oh and a big reason why I've been more interested in this stuff is I discovered Sam Harris's blog. (He's a neuroscientist/writer.) There's a number of interesting articles there about consciousness, free will, etc. http://www.samharris.org/
I never really understood that "which of these is longer" trick questions. I always measure them with my fingers, or, if I can't use my fingers, I draw lines with my eyes. It's pretty obvious that, once you don't glance at that picture that they're equal size. If I just casually glanced at it though, I'd probably say the top is longer.
Of course, this really plays into the discussion at hand about decision making. If your mind was a sort of tabula rasa, and hadn't been prepped for the illusion by whoever introduced you to it(say a teacher demonstrating it in a psych class, with the preface that you would be talking about illusions or just any old person asking you to do the rather unusual task of comparing the length of two lines) your response would probably be that one line was longer than the other. However, realistically, when you look at the line illusion, you know you are being asked to do something outside of the realm of your typical experiences. Rather than assume that the lengths are what they appear to be, you look at it analytically, create extra points of reference and arrive at the accurate answer.
You more or less recognize that something strange is about to occur, and set up a sort of sanity check logical feedback loop, where you take information about your setting based on your past experiences and use that to compare what your gut instinct is, and overrule that sort of basic response. You are forcing the part of the mind responsible for creating a nice logical(typically associated with the frontal lobes, IIRC) story to come online, a do work making sure what the rest of the mind tells it really does make sense.
This is roughly comparable to making judgements where you know you are somewhat ignorant versus making an everyday judgement where you think you have all the information, where your mind does the confabulation deal filling in what it thinks is right after the fact.
Sam Harris is a great writer and really has done a lot of nifty case studies about all sorts of different neurological and psychological stuff. Reading his stuff really reinforces the idea of just how much we can learn about the mind by looking at the cases where it has some sort of dysfunction. Didn't know he had a blog, I'll have to give it a perusal.
When I first saw those back when I was a kid, I did indeed measure them. The person told me I was a cheat. So I measured with invisible lines. It just seemed natural to do it that way, why would I just guess because one was a different shape and looked bigger? I don't know.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
When I first saw those back when I was a kid, I did indeed measure them. The person told me I was a cheat. So I measured with invisible lines. It just seemed natural to do it that way, why would I just guess because one was a different shape and looked bigger? I don't know.
That one is pretty susceptible to just being careful and/or observant. The one with the cylinder on a checkerboard is a good deal harder as it's nearly impossible to make your brain cooperate even once you know the trick. I'm sure you've seen it, but let me see if I can rustle up a picture...
Ah well, that's not so much an optical illusion as actually an optical exploit.
I got sploits in my eyes!
Anyway. It's not in keeping with the Kantian rhetoric and "does it really matter" direction of the bulk of this thread, but I think the implications of confabulation and the many well-documented problems our perceptive apparatus has are interesting. I mean, they're medically and psychologically interesting, but as "what if" fodder they're the bees knees. There could be horrible, Lovecraftian horrors standing out front of every Starbucks ringing bells with too many angles through arcs of strange dimension and we'd all just walk past with our lattes while making up perfectly reasonable explanations for why we don't step in the place they're occupying; our brains simply refusing to let our conscious minds know that they're there.
If you can fool yourself into believing that your hand isn't your own, or that you have some justifiable reason for doing something that only the silent hemisphere of your brain has an awareness of, then just think of all the things you may be completely wrong about!
Got to plug Peter Watts in this thread, especially his novel Blindsight, which deals explicitly with this concept. It posits, among other things, that ego-consciousness is essentially a waste of the brain's resources, that could be put to better use.
I would assume that it probably has a role as a feedback mechanism. If all you do is just carry out subconscious decisions through a complex neural network, then your brain has no real way of knowing whether those decisions actually worked. Consciousness could serve as a step to test whether what you're doing is reasonable, and reinforce or suppress the subconscious pathways that were used for that decision.
I would assume that it probably has a role as a feedback mechanism. If all you do is just carry out subconscious decisions through a complex neural network, then your brain has no real way of knowing whether those decisions actually worked. Consciousness could serve as a step to test whether what you're doing is reasonable, and reinforce or suppress the subconscious pathways that were used for that decision.
Yes, and the other important application is social interaction. It allows you to translate your thoughts and actions in a way that can be expressed by language, as well as place yourself relative to society. I might argue that consciousness is actually a prerequisite for language (a funny thought since a significant school of thought historically was the other way around).
The problem with the 7 second experiment is that it assumes long decisions. People can and obviously do make split second decisions from stimuli that is received on a second to millisecond scale of time. If they all made decisions 7 seconds prior, then people would need to see the future to do so. A more accurate interpretation of the results is that people analyze data for certain calculations where the outcome becomes almost certain for a human of that particular configuration.
A similar decision would be wether our not someone opens a door. If the person gains the knowledge that there is a ferocious lion behind the door then there is an almost 100% likelihood that they will not open the door. decisions can be predicted 7 seconds in advance not because people make up their minds seven seconds in advance but because the decision to press the button with one hand or the other becomes trivial for a rational person after certain calculations are made
The problem with the 7 second experiment is that it assumes long decisions. People can and obviously do make split second decisions from stimuli that is received on a second to millisecond scale of time. If they all made decisions 7 seconds prior, then people would need to see the future to do so. A more accurate interpretation of the results is that people analyze data for certain calculations where the outcome becomes almost certain for a human of that particular configuration.
A similar decision would be wether our not someone opens a door. If the person gains the knowledge that there is a ferocious lion behind the door then there is an almost 100% likelihood that they will not open the door. decisions can be predicted 7 seconds in advance not because people make up their minds seven seconds in advance but because the decision to press the button with one hand or the other becomes trivial for a rational person after certain calculations are made
Only the 7 seconds only refers to the earliest point in time that you can see the brain activity that leads to the decision. Earlier experiments looked at a much smaller window of time and discovered the readiness potential just before conscious awareness. I don't think it's at all implied that 7 seconds are necessary before conscious awareness of any decision or anything like that, simply that 7 seconds was observed at the leisurely pace of the experiment, surely split-second decisions can occur.
At any rate, I can't imagine what sort of data a person would get that would make an arbitrary decision between right and left hands trivial. It seems hard to come up for a reason why it would be obvious for them to pick one or the other in the experimental situation granted they aren't just favoring one hand for one reason or another.
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I can't help but think that even if our decisions are causally determined, it's irrelevant because we are sort of forced to believe that we are free while we are making a decision. It's interesting because it sort of renders the issue of determinism as kind of trivial, because we can't really function without the notion that we are making choices with a degree of freedom.
Of course, I haven't really studied much mind or decision theory, so this isn't really my area. Like, I have next to nothing on it in the 20th century aside from some Gilbert Ryle, a little Searle, and a bit of Chalmers.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Not necessarily; it might be that consciousness is necessary for propositional content, and hence that no pre-conscious signal could be propositionally articulated. Classical empiricists had theories of content (and thought) like this, where the basic constituents of meaning were conscious sensations and demonstratives targeting them. But this might be a weak reply on my part. After all, people who are into drawing dramatic conclusions from this sort of neurological research are likely not going to be very friendly to classical empiricist theories of content and thought. They're more likely to go in for some sort of externalist, evolutionary semantics a la Ruth Millikan.
I think my original question still has force, though: by virtue of what do these "decision-specific neurological signals" count as being decision-specific in the first instance, and as constituting a pre-conscious decision in these specific situations where we find them? This is going to depend on a substantive theory of mind, meaning, and mental content. And it is not at all obvious that any reasonable theory of mind, meaning, and mental content is going to agree with diagnosing these neurological events as pre-conscious decisions.
See, but what I'm arguing here is that you do nothing consciously, your consciousness is purely observational. Logic and restrained thinking are, themselves, separate modules apart from consciousness (though likely modules that very often recruit narratives established by consciousness as inputs). You must imagine it as a sort of feedback loop, consciousness is constantly updating its narrative which is fed back to other modules to act upon.
I agree absolutely with everything that was said here, with only a few caveats ("no sentience" can be "redefined sentience", etc). I think that using "decision-making processes" was perhaps a mistake in the OP, but what I was attempting to describe was whatever processes that lead to behavior, whether these can be accurately described as "decisions" or not. And to expand:
MrMister said
And I think this is very interesting, because the way I envision it is like this: our "behavior-causing processes" (which I confusingly referred to as "decision-making processes" previously) do not make decisions in this sense at all. Rather, they are much as Paladin described them, the simple cause and effect of vast populations of neurons summing synaptic inputs and firing if over a threshold. 'The space of reasons', the semantics attendant to a propositional structure, and so on are all products of the narrative that the conscious process builds to describe them, after the fact. The entire point of the conscious process is then to look at what the brain has done and articulate it. The "decision" happens before it is even understood to be a decision.
Like, split-brain is fairly weird condition but the confabulation aspect of it, to me, utterly undermines my perception of what makes a person because the conscious recall in no way indicates that the reasoning may be faulty.
I suppose in many respects though, our day to day experiences indicate this rather strongly if you look for them: the human eye for example has a fairly big blind spot. But if you go looking for it - if you draw a dot on a piece of paper and gradually shift your gaze, the crazy thing is that the image you see is not something going out of your field of view - instead what you see is apparently just a continuous blank sheet of paper.
Which would seem to me to be some day-to-day confabulation: what's in an area I actually can't see is being invented by my conscious brain, and were it not for the foreknowledge that this is expected I would have no idea anything was wrong.
Which does start to make me think that if you could get a brain enhancement, that would be an awesomely useful one: something that checksums neurological information and flashes a great big warning if a set of links go down or send unusable information.
This is unhelpfully circular, though. It's a decision signal. By virtue of what? By virtue of requiring a decision. But then by virtue of what does it count as requiring a decision? As far as I can tell, so far the answer has been: by looking at which signal fires, we can fully predict one's later picking of the blue or the red splotch--that is by virtue of what it counts as a decision signal. But this is a 'decision' only in the sense that everything was decided long ago by the starting conditions of the universe. One needs a further explanation for why it is also a decision in the sense relevant to human action; that it is, despite being fully unconscious, a mental event of mine which constitutes a decision I made, albeit unconsciously.
I mean, isn't the obvious conclusion to draw that a decision never happens?
Except this is unsatisfying because I made a decision earlier today.
I mean, you can tell me this is all illusory, and that I don't really make any decisions, but that doesn't seem to jive with experience we have. I have experience with lots of decisions every day.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
the point of the Libet argument doesn't rely crucially on how much earlier the decision-point is, as long it is conceded that a decision is in fact made and that it is in fact occurring too early to be argued to be concurrent or postcedent with conscious awareness
arguing that the causal chain stretches far earlier rather bends the common understanding of making decisions in daily life, though. This is not a point about determinism; rather the point is whether awareness is the causal intermediary or the causal effect (so to speak) within the temporal sequence of making decisions (a process which may be ultimately deterministic or non-deterministic in nature and this would be irrelevant to the point at hand).
And how I choose to explain this is that you have a conscious process that has the job of going through all the things that it observes concerning your perceptions, feelings, and actions and comes up with a story regarding what "decisions" you made and why.
A story that, ultimately, is important for informing your future behavior as well as for communicating with other humans.
It is something of a convenient fiction, in much the same way as color constancy or other similar optical illusions.
Right, you say that it's all an illusion, and that when I seem to be going through the process of making a decision, I'm really not. But now you're questioning experience. That's not exactly a safe road, as that's the same kind of reasoning that people used in the early days of science to question whether empirical observation was a source of knowledge at all. If I can't trust my own observation of my actions, then why should I trust the observations that are made that lead to the scientific advances that we're using to question my observation? Either observation works, or it doesn't. Optical illusions are far different than what we're talking about here. The closest that you could come would potentially be talking about hallucinations, but even then it isn't something that is sensory input. It isn't my senses being fooled into believing that I'm making a decision.
I actually think that Kant has an interesting line on this with respect to decision making. Even if it is the case that we don't make decisions, it's kind of a trivial thing because we have to think that we make them. We can't function in a way where we aren't freely making decisions between options. If it is fiction, it's a necessary one that we can't get out of.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I don't exactly want to get into the philosophy of science and epistemology, but I would argue that there are extremely many cases where going against intuition or perception is the only way to yield the truth. One excellent example might be Capgra's delusion.
EDIT:
In regards to Kant, I agree that in day to day life you have to think that you make decisions, in face I would argue it's impossible to believe otherwise on a practical level, your brain just won't do it. It's like looking at an optical illusion and attempting to will yourself to see it correctly. You have no ability to prevent your conscious module from working in this manner.
EDITEDIT:
I would also argue that this does not make it nearly "trivial". Just because we're stuck with this illusion doesn't mean that we can't take into account the actual truth.
To what end? I mean, it seems a bit useless if I must engage in a decision making process, that I somehow have to be trying to remind myself that I'm not really making any sort of decision.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
It is about the nature of these things. The actual physical processes that are involved in our cognition. Thinking isn't what we think it is. Or what we think we think it is.
That doesn't mean it goes away. Just that we are learning more about how thinking works. Which was always going to need to happen anyway - it's clear that the free-will 'debate' shows that our concepts of mind and decision-making are deeply flawed.
I think a lot of the problem here is that our language for describing mental processes is inadequate. We make 'decisions', which don't happen anywhere except within our minds. I don't mean I don't think they exist - I mean that they have no analogue, no referent outside our brain. We are intimately aware of our subjective experience of decision-making but that's not enough to be able to communicate it well. For example we're talking about illusions here but these aren't illusions, because we're not talking about improperly perceiving physical events - we're talking about 'improperly' perceiving mental events. And since it's the mind that is the organ that perceives the mind, I don't know we can really say there is a 'proper' way to perceive our mental processes.
Which is unhelpful of me - so does anyone know philosophers etc who are exploring other vocabularies to describe consciousness and cognition? E.g. words for 'sense' or 'perception' that are used for mental processes and self-observation of our mind rather than the observation of the external physical world?
Well, arguably there is not a 'proper' way to perceive physical events either. Rather, it's a matter of whether the conclusions you draw from how you perceive physical events actually reflect the external world. Likewise with the perception of mental events.
I would never use the word 'illusion' to describe consciousness either, because it's actually working as exactly as intended. The concern is over whether or not the way we intuitively believe our mind works has any relationship to the reality of how our mind works. I would say that the fact that consciousness works the way it does is actually a vitally important part of how we function, much like how our perception of color constancy may not reflect reality but it is still incredibly useful. As I was saying previously, these are useful fictions.
Ah, but this isn't the case you need to understand it for, it's useful for us to believe that we make our own decisions. Instead look at another person and their actions. Do you blame them for deciding to carry out an action? Or do you look at the antecedent causes of those actions and address it that way? This is a completely way different way of looking at behavior. Furthermore, it's nearly always worthwhile to understand something in and of itself. I just can't comprehend supporting the position that we should be blissfully ignorant concerning what really goes on in our brains "so long as it works". Which, I suppose brings up another problem: deficiencies of consciousness and how understanding actual mechanism of consciousness helps to solve these problems.
Brains and neurology - those are things with an objective reality. I don't think mental processes are in the same class.
We can be wrong about physical reality - e.g. when we dream that someone spoke to us and shook us and then there were hours of dream events, and we were shaken in an earthquake and then God spoke to us in a loud voice and said 'Get the fuck up! It's your turn to make breakfast!', we are wrong about the physical events but we are not wrong about the mental events. We really did have that dream. And we really do make decisions and see the colour red and fall in love.
But then I'm back to the 'the language we're using is inadequate' thing.
I would argue that mental events are physical events as well.
Anyway, you can be wrong about mental events, you may misremember your dream, for instance. Mental processes are just as much objective realities as every other physical process.
I am arguing, of course, from a position of strict materialism but you will not find a neuroscientist today who doesn't.
EDIT:
A very good example of being wrong about mental events: the confabulation examples.
I get the strict materialism. I do.
But it seems like there are two different ways to be wrong about your dream. One is to misremember the dream, in the normal way that I misremember someone's phone number. The other is for the dream to apparently reflect the physical processes involved in a way that does not mirror those events, e.g. dreaming that something physical caused a dream when actually the event was at the end of the dreaming period and you edited it into the dream, altering the dream experience. Dreaming is something we perceive as broadly temporal, a narrative, but evidence shows us that this is not the case - it is something more akin to a confabulated memory.
So there are two classes of 'wrong' here - misremembering in the normal sense, and confabulation. But since the only type of dream that has ever existed is confabulated, how can we say we are incorrectly dreaming? We have always and only dreamed in this way. No other kind of dreaming exists. What is wrong about it?
I would classify that confabulation as being wrong about physical events.
I agree that of course the world is atoms and so on. But I'm sure you know what I mean, because professional philosophers have said it better than me - the internal mental world is a real thing too, regardless of its connection to the physical world. Nothing is physically 'red'. Red is purely an experience. EM Wavelengths are physical, and we talk to each other about things being red. How can I be wrong about something being red? Because everyone else disagrees? That's not scientific at all - objective reality isn't democratic. Or is it?
I think the 'confabulations' of consciousness are to perfectly integral to our consciousness that they are a part of science and 'fact'.
This gets back to what I said before: it's a matter of your account being consistent with external reality. When you say that while you were in the act of dreaming you went through some sort of temporally linear narrative, you are wrong about what happened, factually. If you make the statement "I experienced it as a temporally linear narrative" you'd be making a true statement. "I made a decision" is a truth statement that has far-reaching implications about the nature of the universe, if the nature of the universe is inconsistent with these implications then "I made a decision" is false. Surely he had the experience of making a decision, this is not the same as saying he actually made one.
Yep, that's fine. But my point still stands. Decision-making, just like the colour red, has no referent outside our minds. You can't say something's objectively red or not. You can't say something's objectively not a decision, because decisions are solely mental phenomena. Trees and stars and bosons and chairs and yes, computers, don't have decisions.
Another, flawed, way to put it is that 'I had the experience of making a decision' and 'I made a decision' are actually the same thing.
Of course not. If you eliminate choice, then you've also totally destroyed moral responsibility. It doesn't make sense to see anyone as any more morally culpable for their actions as a tree falling on your house. It's not the tree's fault that it fell, it was just obeying physical laws.
And I'm sure that you are totally comfortable with a world where no one is worthy of moral praise or blame.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
i don't think that the elimination of choice, or rather the way we currently conceive of choice, destroys moral responsibility at all. if anything it makes it more useful.
responsibility is simply locating the individual within the causal chain. the fact that their actions have antecedents does not mean they did not act the way they did; it simply means that they acted that way for a reason. to condemn someone as immoral, for example, simply becomes a synonym for "the influences and context which have determined your decisions and actions have shaped you into something harmful or dangerous," which would in fact foster compassion and understanding, and encourage a method of dealing with such immorality that addresses those flawed antecedents rather than condemning a person to satisfy our retributive urges. to assign moral responsibility, to advise someone that they are immoral and work to change that, is to become one of those factors that dictates future decisions (hopefully). you chop down the tree before it falls on your house, or construct a brace, or reinforce your house; you interact with the system in such a way as to influence it so that it no longer produces harmful results.
Just look at the example of the tree destroying your house. You don't blame the tree right? It's not an "evil" tree, is it? Why?
I think that the reason why is that the tree isn't seen as responsible for its actions. It could not have done other than as it did. So the tree is no more culpable than the wind that blew it over, than the sun for heating air and causing weather patterns.
There's something qualitatively different about a human being destroying your house. Now, they might have done such on accident, which is generally seen as morally blameless, but say that they did it intentionally. Intention changes the picture a bit. Intention means that someone made a choice, they chose to act in a particular way and not another. The tree doesn't make a choice, the person does. That, I think, is the root of why we assign moral blame to the person and not the tree. Otherwise, what is the reason why the tree isn't responsible?
Certainly if we are not capable of choosing, it isn't as though we aren't going to have preferences for some actions and not others. In fact, we'll likely punish some actions and not others, we couldn't do otherwise. However, our preferences will be arbitrary, a product of some manner of chance (unless you're going to get wacky and suggest some sort of design, but you wouldn't do that, would you?). Most importantly, there will be no justification for us to punish those behaviors, because the people performing them aren't responsible for it. We don't punish involuntary actions, we may try to control them for people's safety or comfort, but we don't punish them.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no inherent value to punishment, only whatever value it can produce by being useful. That is the only justification it needs, and that is the only justification that we should ever attempt to assign to it.
I shouldn't have used the word punish, I should have used blame.
I'm talking about blameworthiness, not the social activity of punishment (as we don't necessarily punish all actions that are immoral).
There is no dichotomy between blame and compassion. Like, if I find that someone is responsible for something immoral, I can still feel compassion in numerous ways. So this whole notion that somehow by eliminating the very ability to assign moral fault we are now allowed to be compassionate is silly. They are not opposed. I can still pity the guy who does something wrong because perhaps he had poor moral instruction, or he lost control, or what have you.
Really the whole notion here is that the tree is not responsible for its actions, because it has no control over them. If human beings are like trees, and they have no control over their actions (in that they cannot choose to do one action over choosing to do another), then they too are not responsible. Then it becomes rather silly to assign any sort of moral blame to them.
Hell, it becomes silly to assign any sort of moral praise as well. If people cannot help but do bad things, then some people deserve no praise for doing good things beyond some sort of conditioning to get them to do it more.
All we would be doing is rewarding and punishing on the basis of arbitrary preferences.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
But, if you think about it, confabulation isn't really all that surprising. It just mean that our perception of our thought making process isn't special, when compared with the rest of our perception. When the brain does not have correct information to populate our sensorium it just goes ahead in fills in what it thinks is correct. This sort of thing is the basis for all sorts of illusions. There's the blind spot caused by the optic nerve attaching to the front of the retina, or whatever, which we never notice. What we see, can change what we hear, as with the McGurk Effect. Our depth perception is cobbled together out of like a dozen different tricks our brain uses.
All this stuff means is that there is a hugely complicated process going on when we make decisions, and once it is done our consciousness gets updated about it, and that when our brain doesn't have enough information about why we made that decision, it just fills in what seems to sound good, what seems to fit with our past experiences, what meets our prejudices--just like it does all of our other sense.
I don't really think there are huge philosophical repercussions based on this. Nothing is any more or less determinate. I am all of my bits. My environment is everything I interact with. These are simple hierarchical definitions that relatively simple components of computer programs are capable of working with, so I don't see why the far more complex computer that is a human brain would have a big problem with them. I don't understand why people have issues talking about self. I don't see how this changes anything to do with free will, or how the existance or non-existance of free will effects any aspect of someone's life.
This is neat though, and really it does kinda effect how people understand the decisions they make. It's pretty likely that this is the functional basis for a lot of bias. Not only does ignorance lead to bad decisions, the people making those decisions have no real idea how they are making them or just how bad they are. There brain just smooths over the missing stuff, accepts the bad information it thinks is right, and creates a totally believable experience that matches what it expects--which I don't believe would surprise anyone that's had to deal with people much.
I think this makes a lot of sense.
And I think there's something to be said for figuring out ways to try and perceive one's own consciousness. I'm not sure if it's even possible, really. But I've become rather interested recently in trying to feel out the walls of my own consciousness via meditation. (Secular meditation for me, though, none of that religious nonsense.) I try and quiet my mind, notice that I'm having thoughts and feeling sensations, and try and turn those off and not think anything. I try and turn off the running stream of conscious words for a bit.
I'm not very good at it, though. I get distracted easily. My brain-mouth is way too fucking loud.
Oh and a big reason why I've been more interested in this stuff is I discovered Sam Harris's blog. (He's a neuroscientist/writer.) There's a number of interesting articles there about consciousness, free will, etc. http://www.samharris.org/
Of course, this really plays into the discussion at hand about decision making. If your mind was a sort of tabula rasa, and hadn't been prepped for the illusion by whoever introduced you to it(say a teacher demonstrating it in a psych class, with the preface that you would be talking about illusions or just any old person asking you to do the rather unusual task of comparing the length of two lines) your response would probably be that one line was longer than the other. However, realistically, when you look at the line illusion, you know you are being asked to do something outside of the realm of your typical experiences. Rather than assume that the lengths are what they appear to be, you look at it analytically, create extra points of reference and arrive at the accurate answer.
You more or less recognize that something strange is about to occur, and set up a sort of sanity check logical feedback loop, where you take information about your setting based on your past experiences and use that to compare what your gut instinct is, and overrule that sort of basic response. You are forcing the part of the mind responsible for creating a nice logical(typically associated with the frontal lobes, IIRC) story to come online, a do work making sure what the rest of the mind tells it really does make sense.
This is roughly comparable to making judgements where you know you are somewhat ignorant versus making an everyday judgement where you think you have all the information, where your mind does the confabulation deal filling in what it thinks is right after the fact.
Sam Harris is a great writer and really has done a lot of nifty case studies about all sorts of different neurological and psychological stuff. Reading his stuff really reinforces the idea of just how much we can learn about the mind by looking at the cases where it has some sort of dysfunction. Didn't know he had a blog, I'll have to give it a perusal.
That one is pretty susceptible to just being careful and/or observant. The one with the cylinder on a checkerboard is a good deal harder as it's nearly impossible to make your brain cooperate even once you know the trick. I'm sure you've seen it, but let me see if I can rustle up a picture...
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/lum_adelsonCheckShadow/index.html
I got sploits in my eyes!
Anyway. It's not in keeping with the Kantian rhetoric and "does it really matter" direction of the bulk of this thread, but I think the implications of confabulation and the many well-documented problems our perceptive apparatus has are interesting. I mean, they're medically and psychologically interesting, but as "what if" fodder they're the bees knees. There could be horrible, Lovecraftian horrors standing out front of every Starbucks ringing bells with too many angles through arcs of strange dimension and we'd all just walk past with our lattes while making up perfectly reasonable explanations for why we don't step in the place they're occupying; our brains simply refusing to let our conscious minds know that they're there.
If you can fool yourself into believing that your hand isn't your own, or that you have some justifiable reason for doing something that only the silent hemisphere of your brain has an awareness of, then just think of all the things you may be completely wrong about!
Yes, and the other important application is social interaction. It allows you to translate your thoughts and actions in a way that can be expressed by language, as well as place yourself relative to society. I might argue that consciousness is actually a prerequisite for language (a funny thought since a significant school of thought historically was the other way around).
A similar decision would be wether our not someone opens a door. If the person gains the knowledge that there is a ferocious lion behind the door then there is an almost 100% likelihood that they will not open the door. decisions can be predicted 7 seconds in advance not because people make up their minds seven seconds in advance but because the decision to press the button with one hand or the other becomes trivial for a rational person after certain calculations are made
Only the 7 seconds only refers to the earliest point in time that you can see the brain activity that leads to the decision. Earlier experiments looked at a much smaller window of time and discovered the readiness potential just before conscious awareness. I don't think it's at all implied that 7 seconds are necessary before conscious awareness of any decision or anything like that, simply that 7 seconds was observed at the leisurely pace of the experiment, surely split-second decisions can occur.
At any rate, I can't imagine what sort of data a person would get that would make an arbitrary decision between right and left hands trivial. It seems hard to come up for a reason why it would be obvious for them to pick one or the other in the experimental situation granted they aren't just favoring one hand for one reason or another.