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Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

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Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#41

Post by twodave »

lisper wrote: post #34
jschwartzi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funny you should bring up God. Just yesterday I published a formal proof that God is logically incompatible with free will: http://blog.rongarret.info/2018/09/the-last-word-i-hope-on-f... You might find this interesting as well: https://blog.rongarret.info/2018/01/a-multilogue-on-free-wil...

Can't believe I'm being drawn into this, but in my view knowing an outcome doesn't mean controlling it. It simply means knowing it. In the case of your proposed definition of God's omniscience, it helps to picture God existing outside of our timeline. If God can see the entirety of history and the future as if it were a long thread, then it's more like he's watching a video of something that already happened. To Him, in many ways, it already has. So just because you're watching a replay of a football game doesn't mean the outcome was already decided from the beginning. It just means you know the story already because you're operating from a more privileged position in the timeline from which knowing the outcome becomes natural to you.

The fallacy here is in assuming the time perspective of God to be equivalent to our own.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#42

Post by ergothus »

x220 wrote: post #16
woliveirajr wrote: post #2

Every 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…

We aren't just a product of that, we are also a product of human sexual selection and epigenetic inheritance of individually acquired traits. Many of your important traits (such as general intelligence) were acquired in part by conscious processes by your ancestors.

That's a bit circular...I may choose to breed with someone, but i do that because I find them attractive (because DNA tells me what is attractive), because my (known in humans to be inaccurate) risk assessment says it is worth it, etc.

Plus, of the countless decisions I make every day, almost none of them are conscious. I can retroactively justify them as if they had been, but studies show we are far less conscious thinkers than we think we are.

Ultimately, until we resolve the mind-body problem, we cant say that our decisions are based on more than a chaotic soup of interacting proteins and electrical sparks that are only marginally distinct from our environment.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#44

Post by twodave »

colordrops wrote: post #14
lisper wrote: post #6

I 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.

One of many holes in this theory is that the mind that believes it has free will is also the one that created the conceptual model of neurons, so we could also be wrong about that too.

This is, in my opinion, the main flaw with Naturalism. If Naturalism is true, then no truth can be discerned (not even the concept of Naturalism itself). It's an argument for futility. It's actually a pretty dated argument, though. C.S. Lewis even spoke on the subject:

> If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us-like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#45

Post by ajuc »

Ygg2 wrote: post #43
ajuc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. I have no choice, remember?

So you are implicitly presuming free will, based on your behavior.

Why? If I have a free will then I blame you because I choose to.

If I don't have a free will then I blame you because that's how my brain is programmed (which is BTW most probably caused by optimization of social behavior by evolution - it's better for our genes if we punish violent behavior, so that's how our brains are constructed). There's no need to assume free will.

There's no difference in behavior that depends on existence of free will.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#46

Post by nickwalton00 »

lisper wrote: post #34
jschwartzi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funny you should bring up God. Just yesterday I published a formal proof that God is logically incompatible with free will: http://blog.rongarret.info/2018/09/the-last-word-i-hope-on-f... You might find this interesting as well: https://blog.rongarret.info/2018/01/a-multilogue-on-free-wil...

Another similar thought experiment. Assume people have free will. What if you could go in the future, read a book and learn everything that someone did in their life. Would that contradict free will?

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#47

Post by twodave »

There are so many more things than substances to be addicted to. Psychological dependence on certain behaviors can be just as strong as physical dependence on a substance.

It looks like this study is focused on drug addiction which on its own is really intriguing, but I wonder if there would be any evidence in the human genome to predict behavioral addiction.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#48

Post by jonathanstrange »

lisper wrote: post #23
nardi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The first is by far the most likely from a scientific point of view, and the evidence for it is actually pretty overwhelming.

Not really, few physicists have tried to explain consciousness - Roger Penrose being a notable exception - and no physicist has ever sufficiently explained how artifacts like the complete works of Shakespeare come about. They seem to have been invented by Shakespeare but if Shakespeare had no free will to invent them, then were did they come from? While we're at it, where does the continuum and the mathematical structures between real numbers come from? Are real numbers even physically possible? I've read a paper once that argued that they cannot be physically realized, because that would violate the laws of thermodynamics (and a few others, too). What about the rest of mathematics like perfect squares or functions that cannot be computed? Are these illusions?

In a nutshell, there is a whole lot that physics cannot explain, including all of human culture. That's the gist of Popper's three worlds argument. Physicists surely claim that the physical world is closed, but they haven't provided any arguments that go much beyond "human culture is super complex but we believe we could in principle explain it somehow with our theories".

Now Popper argued for some not too plausible dualism, but the central negative part of his argument still stands.

As for explanations, I agree that not many good ones are on the table and maybe the Philosophy of Mind confuses more than it clarifies. My personal favorite speculative theory is a rare form of computationalism, namely the position that some computations might have consciousness as an emergent property when they run on a suitable physical device, and that in theory we could even be able to determine which class of computations these are by mere analytical insight, provided we have the proper conceptual tools. Computationalism is not very popular in philosophy, though.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#49

Post by pegasus »

lisper wrote: post #23
nardi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Roger Penrose begs to differ. See "Shadows of the Mind", where he argues for the third option in your list. Based on scientific evidence, of course.

Re: Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

#50

Post by Ygg2 »

ajuc wrote: post #45
Ygg2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are implicitly presuming free will, based on your behavior.

Why? If I have a free will then I blame you because I choose to. If I don't have a free will then I blame you because that's how my brain is programmed (which is BTW most probably caused by optimization of social behavior by evolution - it's better for our genes if we punish violent behavior, so that's how our brains are constructed). There's no need to assume free will. There's no difference in behavior that depends…

> There's no difference in behavior that depends on existence of free will.

Ah, but you are forgetting a major part of how brain works. Brain models both our own and others behavior. If your brain knows you don't have free will and I don't have free will, it will not fault me for not having a thing I am supposed to not be having.

If it doesn't have free will, brain can assign a response, but not blame. You can't have the notion of blame if you don't have a concept of free will. Same way you can't express certain colors, if you lack the words for it.

Fun fact, when people read about not having free will, they are more likely to lie/cheat on a test. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-...

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