Earlier quoted context omitted.
> as if they and others around them possess free will. How would we "act as if they don't" ?
If I punch you, will you blame me?
I don't blame you because you had a choice. I blame you to discourage future punches.
Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection
21–30 of 229 posts
Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection
#22Link to PNAS research paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/09/19/1811940115 Human Endogenous Retrovirus-K HML-2 integration within RASGRF2 is associated with intravenous drug abuse and modulates transcription in a cell-line model Not all humans have the same HK2 viruses in their genomes. Here we show that one specific uncommon HK2, which lies close to a gene involved in dopaminergic activity in the brain, is…
Does this mean you could be tested for the specific gene?
Sounds that way to me: they're looking at a specific uncommon HK2
Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection
#23I have some bad news for you: your perception of free will is a by-product of your ignorance of how your brain works. Every decision you think you make is actually just a bunch of neurons firing, and those neurons were built by your DNA.
No one actually believes this, including you. You may say you do, and even think you do, but you don’t. Everyone acts as if they and others around them possess free will. We act that way because that’s what we believe. Honestly, I don’t think we understand enough about consciousness and how it arises from physical brains/bodies to make such an extraordinary claim like “there is no free will,” when the entire history…
> No one actually believes this, including you.
I'm pretty sure that I'm in a better position to know what I actually believe than you are, and I'm telling you, I really do believe this. There are only three possibilities: either free will is an illusion, or dualism is true, or consciousness is the result of unknown new physics. The first is by far the most likely from a scientific point of view, and the evidence for it is actually pretty overwhelming.
But just because it's an illusion doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't live your life as if it were real. It's a very compelling illusion as long as you don't know how the trick is done, and so far, we don't.
Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection
#24Every time I find interesting (and frighting) that we are nothing but a collection of ourselves and virus and bacterias, written down to our DNA and RNA or living together with close dependence deep in our guts (literally). Going further, a lot of what we do unconciously is just what a virus or something else "did" to survive or spread in the past, and our free will isn't that free... Edit: "did" wasn't meaning that…
Is that like saying “we are nothing but atoms”?
I agree that atoms are necessary, but how do we know they are sufficient for consciousness?
Can you prove the “nothing but” part?
Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection
#25Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection
#26I have some bad news for you: your perception of free will is a by-product of your ignorance of how your brain works. Every decision you think you make is actually just a bunch of neurons firing, and those neurons were built by your DNA.
Actually free will is one of those delicious unanswerable questions that everyone has a different answer for. Think about this for a moment -- what would be different about the world or human behavior if we had free will versus if we didn't?
Talking about free will is just another way to have a conversation about God.
Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this mean you could be tested for the specific gene?
About 20% of the human genome is endogenous retroviruses. We've all got them, and there is significant evidence that they become more active in old age, and may be a factor in dementia and other illnesses.
They are also essential to forming the placenta:
Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection
#28I have some bad news for you: your perception of free will is a by-product of your ignorance of how your brain works. Every decision you think you make is actually just a bunch of neurons firing, and those neurons were built by your DNA.
No one actually believes this, including you. You may say you do, and even think you do, but you don’t. Everyone acts as if they and others around them possess free will. We act that way because that’s what we believe. Honestly, I don’t think we understand enough about consciousness and how it arises from physical brains/bodies to make such an extraordinary claim like “there is no free will,” when the entire history…
> We act that way because that’s what we believe.
Don't assume we have a free will when debating if we do :)
If we don't have a free will, then the fact that we believe in free will is irrelevant, and you cannot deduce that we believe in it from the fact that we act as if we believed in it.
Free will is most probably a quirk of language, an answer to a misleading question based on wrong assumptions. There are no difference in the state of universe no matter if there is free will or not.
Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection
#29[deleted]
Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> as if they and others around them possess free will. How would we "act as if they don't" ?
If I punch you, will you blame me?
That depends. Do you suffer from schizophrenia? Did I provoke you? Was it an accident? There are a lot of circumstances under which I would not blame you.
If you punched me without provocation, with no evidence of mental illness, and did it "deliberately" [1] then I will "blame" you because that's the only way I know of to defend myself against future attacks.
[1] Note that "deliberately" in a world without free will just means "as a result of unknown causes inside your brain". The more we learn about how the brain works, the fewer pathological behaviors can be labeled "deliberate". "Free will" is a sort of "god-of-the-gaps" if neuroscience.