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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

#61

Post by desiderantes »

hathawsh wrote: post #57
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…

For me, acting as if people possess free will is a conscious decision. When I'm tired, I sometimes slip into my natural mode of thinking of everyone as automatons. I have to choose to believe that people are conscious. I have to remind myself that people are not merely robots, or even if they are, it's self-destructive if I think of them as robots.

You didn't choose to believe, because you don't have free will, remember?

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

#62

Post by lisper »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #56
lisper wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't think the evidence is overwhelming at all. Free will isn't an illusion so much as a misleading oversimplification of a complex concept. The traditional philosophical notion of free will assumes a kind of perfectly rational Platonic ideal of a thinking human who carefully weighs all future options before acting. This is clearly nonsense, and should have been called out as nonsense much earlier in history. In r…

I actually agree with most of what you say here. This is more about semantics than science. But I would put this differently:

> that's still true even if there's a gap between your conscious model of your motivations, and the soup of real motivations that drives you.

I would say it's true because there is a gap, not "even if".

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

#63

Post by ajuc »

Ygg2 wrote: post #50
ajuc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Punishment decreases the odds of repeated offence. It doesn't matter if it's because you have free will, or simply because you learnt not to do that because your internal neural network were taught not to do that or it hurts.

I'm pretty sure I can make a simulation with agents punishing each other. Doesn't mean they have a free will.

> You can't have the notion of blame if you don't have a concept of free will

I have a notion of free will. I just don't believe it's true. I can model beliefs of Muslims without believing in Allah.

> Same way you can't express certain colors, if you lack the words for it.

Bad example. I can express any color I can see with 3 real numbers. There's infinitely many of them and my vocabulary is finite.

> Fun fact, when people read about not having free will, they are more likely to lie/cheat on a test.

And when they drink they are more likely to do stuff they later regret. Environment influences the brain in many ways. Doesn't mean there is a free will.

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

#64

Post by benmowa »

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…

Reminds me of one of my favorite books titled:

Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes, by Charles Seife

One item discussed in the book that we as humans may just be a transport method for the data within DNA to survive time. Because without some replication it would get trapped and cease to exist.

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

#65

Post by hathawsh »

desiderantes wrote: post #61
hathawsh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, acting as if people possess free will is a conscious decision. When I'm tired, I sometimes slip into my natural mode of thinking of everyone as automatons. I have to choose to believe that people are conscious. I have to remind myself that people are not merely robots, or even if they are, it's self-destructive if I think of them as robots.

You didn't choose to believe, because you don't have free will, remember?

If there is no free will, then the word "choose" is not a special word that implies consciousness. The word "choose" simply means particles flow one direction instead of another due to some combination of other particle flows. Therefore, whether I have free will or not, yes I did choose to believe.

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

#66

Post by _Schizotypy »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #48
lisper wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 n…

I don't understand why we would look to physics when consciousness is a product of neurobiology. Yes the principles of chemistry are physical principles and biology is based around chemistry, but that doesn't mean looking at the behavior of particles can explain the entire system besides some minor insight on how parts of it physically interact.

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

#67

Post by bdamm »

ajuc wrote: post #28
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…

> 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 diff…

This philosophical line of thinking is without much basis. In certain Buddhist teachings is the idea that we really only have about 60% free will. That is, 40% of our actions are not something we ever could have done differently, but there's still room for plenty of actual choice. Personally this seems pretty high, but even 10% truly self-directed free will would still be astounding.

There's no scientific understanding of where exactly consciousness is rooted, so if you take that to assume it means there's no such thing as conscious choice, I conclude you are a fatalistic downer who I don't want to hang with.

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

#68

Post by Kapow »

hathawsh wrote: post #57
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…

For me, acting as if people possess free will is a conscious decision. When I'm tired, I sometimes slip into my natural mode of thinking of everyone as automatons. I have to choose to believe that people are conscious. I have to remind myself that people are not merely robots, or even if they are, it's self-destructive if I think of them as robots.

You think everyone else can't make conscious decisions, but you can? That sounds like solipsism, or just a lack of empathy.

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

#69

Post by circlefavshape »

lisper wrote: post #52
pavel_lishin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what _nardi_ is trying to say is that there's no functional difference between having free will, and acting as if you do. What decisions do you make differently with your knowledge that free will is an illusion? What choices do you make differently? (fwiw, I agree with you; I just think it doesn't particularly matter now.)

> What decisions do you make differently with your knowledge that free will is an illusion? What choices do you make differently? Interestingly, my belief in the illusory nature of free will has had a huge impact on my life. I'm a much more laid-back person than I used to be. I don't stress out so much over making mistakes. It has also helped me in a lot of practical aspects of my life. For example, it has helped me…

Erm ... it seems to me that if there was no free will then your beliefs couldn't have any actual consequences at all, they and your cookie cravings are just different aspects of the unfolding of the universe

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

#70

Post by catawbasam »

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.

Given your beliefs. Why bother writing this? What possible point could you have?
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