Hi, juantoo3,
Sorry to have taken so long. Other things going on. Besides that our conversation has reached a point where I need to think a lot harder to make meaningful responses. The philosopher in me likes that situation; the lazybones does not.
I would hazard a guess that all creatures have some level of experiential learning, certainly any who have through whatever means figured out what is food and what is not, and when it is appropriate to flee. This would include at the very least those critters with minimal brains.
Yeah, even amoebas have to do some learning. Their primitive programming enable them to
taste, i.e., chemically evaluate, things in their environment, but I doubt that that programming is exhaustive. New things will appear and they may adapt their responses to discriminate between good-to-eat new things and bad-to-eat new things. Certainly this learning comes from experience. But the expression "experiential learning" bothers me. How is that different from mere "learning"? In humans it connotes things we learn from experiences of which we are consciously aware, as opposed to things we learn from subconscious experience.
The distinction I would see in using this analogy is that first, the typical home computer does not interface readily between programs without assistance, whereas the human brain (and presumably animal brains in general) tend to cross reference to a great degree. Second, staying with the computer analogy, is that of computing power. I suspect that consciousness requires a great deal of computing power, while “lesser” systems do not require nearly as much. Which is why our “reptilian” brain is sufficient for our autonomic nervous system and the “unconscious” duties performed.
I think you are right here. The point I'd like to emphasize though is the difference between centralized computing based on integrated information, and multiple computing nodes based on local data. Either of these can become more powerful and complex. But nodes in a parallel computing system don't know anything about what the others are doing, and therefore don't take the objectives of the other nodes into account in what they do. They operate on deterministic rules. As these nodes develop information channels between each other, they can develop cooperative feedback loops that evolve into system-oriented decision systems.
Then we step up a notch to our sub-conscious and we have our voluntary systems such as arm and leg movements.
I wonder. I'm inclined to differentiate between reflexive behavior, i.e., deterministic responses of local subsystems, and
subconscious behavior. The latter I take to be subroutines that the brain has figured out how encapsulate and run in the background without conscious involvement, e.g., solving a math or logic or chess or social problem. Ultimately, the subroutine proposes a solution, and it's up to the conscious mind to accept and apply the solution or to realize that it's inadequate and restart the subroutine with modified parameters.
Our consciousness actually requires a great referential library of past experiences and memories to draw from and cross reference. Sensory inputs augment the memory library, which is how a particular smell can activate a distant memory.
Absolutely. This is the power and benefit of storing information in a shared knowledge-base.
I am thinking that “choice” is a rather vague variable, in that the difference between following a smell to food and deciding randomly whether to travel to the right or the left are really two distinct mental processes.
And now we come to the crux of the matter. Note that your formulation falls back to what I have suggested is a false dichotomy: deterministically following a prescribed set of rules or
randomly doing one of a set of non-determined options. The thesis I am proposing involves the following propositions:
- When a person chooses to do A rather than B,
- A's occurrence is not determined by prior conditions. Although those conditions can be necessary for A to happen, they are not sufficient.
- A's occurrence is not random; it is chosen, i.e., made to happen, by the person.
That people do make such choices is really not in dispute, except in the ethereal confines of a philosopher's thought experiment. It is also rare that a choice takes place in isolation from other choices.
Life is a dance, the saying goes. We are constantly making series of choices, adjusting our tactics to suit the results of prior choices. When the free safety follows closely on the heels of the wide receiver, reaches up his hands at just the right moment, grabs the ball, and heads off in the opposite direction, there is no doubt that his interception of the pass is a conscious, choice-driven action. Even though individual elements of the action are performed automatically as the result of much practice, the selection and sequencing of those elements is very much deliberate. It is definitely not random.
Nor is there any available theory that can explain free safety's actions purely in terms of biology. Certainly there are necessary physical and biological conditions, as well as necessary skills acquired through learning. But the activation of those conditions and skills in just the right way on this particular occasion to successfully intercept the pass, that is a person's free and deliberate choice.
Far more complex and wonderful than traveling left or right.
Perhaps, but what is comprehension? How does a critter “know” what is food and what is not when it is hungry, or what is a mate and what is not when it is “in the mood?” How does a critter distinguish between what is a mate in this moment and a competitor for food in the next, or in the case of mantids and spiders what may be a predator in the next? It seems to me there should be some elemental comprehension before one can begin to define “choice,” otherwise I would think such to be random and / or reflexive reaction.
Is "know" the right word? One of the strangest and most interesting phenomena discovered in the last few decades is the ability of molecules to "recognize" and respond to very precise conditions. Certain molecules reconfigure themselves when it encounters another molecule of just the right shape. Amoebas recognize what to eat because their skins are made of molecules that respond to certain molecules in the environment by opening holes big enough to ingest those molecules. This dynamic capability of molecules is the foundation of the emerging discipline of nanotechnology. Surely there is no choice involved in this molecular behavior, but it is certainly a foundation from which true choice is built.
We have to be careful with encompassing terms like “all” and “any.” I am not so sure that the human memory banks are able to actively assert direct control over the autonomic system, for example. One doesn’t “think” an extra heartbeat, one doesn’t “think” one less colonic spasm. This is not to say that the autonomic system cannot be manipulated, as certain adepts of various eastern traditions have demonstrated, but that typically to the average person the autonomic system is pretty well a sealed unit, or at least a one way unit.
I never intended to suggest that conscious processes control everything else, though there are stories of Buddhist and yogi masters that imply that we are able to control more of our bodily processes than we normally expect. As a matter of fact, consciousness often gets in the way of doing what we want. Several years ago there were a number of books on
Zen Tennis or
Zen Golf or
Zen Tiddlywinks. The common theme of these books was to help people overcome
over-thinking a problem and
just do it.
I am not claiming that everything we do is a conscious choice. I am only saying that much is.
In higher order mammals I would agree; they have the capacity, the various programs necessary, and enough “hereditary experience” to facilitate, *if* we are defining consciousness as some form of self-awareness. .... So we really need to define what it is you are trying to define with the term consciousness, it is crucial to the discussion. Simply equating that term with choice I suppose can be done, but then it would confuse the discussion as we proceeded. I perceive consciousness really not unlike that definition China Cat provided earlier, something along the lines of self-awareness in combination with an experiential referential library that allows the human mind to “think” on a level that far surpasses any other animal.
OK, try this:
Consciousness is the integrated awareness of the world in which one must act.
It is integrated in the sense that information from multiple sources is interpreted as being about the same thing. That is, our model of the world includes a number of things, about which we obtain information from many different sensory inputs. It is also integrated in the sense that information from many different sources can be applied to many different actions for many different purposes.
Very well, my bad, and I am certain I bring dismay to my Buddhist friends when I reference self, but I have to work with what I have at my disposal and how I relate and understand things and try to “PC” it later. If I spend too much focus on PC upfront I tend to lose sight of what I am trying to convey, so I would rather at least make some feeble effort and then refine my presentation as I go.
Self-awareness is probably in some form in fairly simple animals, like the mosquito you mentioned. At least by the time the evolutionary chain created brains in fishes, there appears to be some sense of “self” within the greater environmental context. No doubt a simple understanding, but I would think an established referential as to what is food, what is a mate, etc. But how much of this is sub-conscious? How much is intuition / instinct?
Self-awareness emerges when an animal notices that some of the things it senses in its world are constantly present and behave under that animals control. A much more sophisticated version of self-awareness emerges when the animal begins to be aware of its own thinking process.
Note I do not define self-awareness as awareness of a
self, other than the body which appears in the sensed world or the processes of consciousness. The self ain't a thing that wears the body; the self is the conscious, choosing person, with both physical and mental properties and processes.
I doubt that these will stand up to close scrutiny, but they will do for a starting point.
I think the sages of the ages have grappled with the seat of the soul and of the emotions for millenia.
The problem goes away if you acknowledge the person as the whole system rather than something inside the system.
I don’t really know, but I am convinced reasonably well that mind and soul-spirit are two completely differing entities.
Certainly they are different aspects of the system that is a person. I'll need a lot more evidence to treat them as different entities.
I would be interested in seeing this rejection of reductionism by chaos theory.
Actually I should have said that
chaos theory rejects determinism. And most of their arguments are epistemological rather than metaphysical. What they point out is that physical systems are so complex that we can never know enough about initial conditions to predict what is going to happen with any precision. And imprecision about what's going to happen next implies complete lack of control over what will happen tomorrow.
I don’t envision competing with my body. I see behavior as action / activity. In the sense that electrons run around inside the brain I suppose there is activity, but that is the activity of the electrons. Until the activity of the electrons is directed willfully to make my arm pick up a beer, it is not what I consider behavior. I may have random thoughts of jumping off the Empire State building, but it is not behavior until I actually jump.
Agreed! Chisholm used to define the term
basic action as something we can do without doing something else to make it happen. Thus since I pull the trigger on the gun by moving my finger, pulling the trigger is not basic. But since there is nothing I do in order to move my finger, moving my finger is a basic action.
There is an interesting paradox here. There is a chain of physical events in my nerves and muscles that underlie my moving my finger. But I don't know how to make those events happen in just that way without performing the basic action of moving my finger. In other words I make those muscles move in that way by moving my finger. In Aristotelian terms, the moving of the muscles is both the efficient and the final cause of my finger's moving. Note that normally efficient and final cause are opposite: moving my finger is the efficient cause of pulling the trigger (which is the efficient cause of the gun's firing, which is the efficient cause of my enemies dying), while my enemies dying is the final cause of my pulling the trigger.
If I had to create an analogy, I suppose it would be that of a running automobile; in effect I serve the function of the brain, the engine serves the function of the vital organs, and the wheels serve the function of limbs. I can sit in the car all day, but until I turn the steering wheel or step on the gas nothing really happens except the autonomic systems. Now, once I engage a gear and give a little throttle, the car begins to behave in the manner I as the brain direct, but until then the car simply is existing. So unless one considers inactivity as a form of activity, I am a little puzzled.
But the analogy breaks down here, doesn't it. There is a reductionistic explanation of the driver/car system. We can explain what that system does in terms of the conscious choices of the driver operating a purely mechanical system. I don't have to treat the driver/car system as a conscious whole. In the case of the person, we don't have a consensus on an analysis of the whole system into a mechanical (or bio-mechanical) part and a conscious, choosing part.
Namiste.
