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Evidence that addictive behaviors have links with ancient retroviral infection

sciencedaily.com

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

#81

Post by bitL »

AngryData wrote: post #77
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…

I believe it. Free will is an illusion, humans are just biological automatons, along with every other animal. Thinking you have free will doesn't change whether or not you actually have free will. Just as someone believing they are intelligent doesn't make them intelligent.

Experiment: you decide to do something and keep doing necessary things, putting all distractions aside, until you get there. Was that decision and perseverance towards the goal given to you by some viral DNA mutation, or is there a chance there might be some free will in you?

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

#82

Post by selestify »

circlefavshape wrote: post #69
lisper wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

His beliefs are also a part of the unfolding of the universe, and as such his beliefs also have consequences even if he has no control over what he actually believes.

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

#83

Post by mattigames »

nardi wrote: post #7
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.

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…

The concept of free-will is so preposterous, baseless like souls or ghosts; because lack of understanding how the brain works doesn't make what happens inside it more metaphysical.

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

#84

Post by milesvp »

ergothus wrote: post #42
x220 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

So, while yes, we have lots of fmri data that suggests our mind makes decisions for us, then convinces us that we made the decision conciously. I suspect it's a mistake to take this to the logical conclusion that we can make no conscious decisions.

Even if consciousness is a complete illusion that our mind fabricated for us, we still seem to have some control over our reactions. I say this as someone who is teaching my children better reactions to what life throws at them, and similarly having to mediate my own responses to mistakes they make.

Even if all this is happening at the margin, that seems to be enough for us to have some profound differences in how successful we are at navigating life.

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

#85

Post by catawbasam »

buckminster wrote: post #37
tudelo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems absurd.

How so? You don't need free will to adapt to feedback.

So if you believed I punched you deliberately, but also believed no action of yours would keep me from punching you again, does that mean you would do nothing?

Even if I called you a coward?

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

#86

Post by lisper »

catawbasam wrote: post #70
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?

I had no choice :-)

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

#87

Post by redwards510 »

nardi wrote: post #7
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.

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…

I don't believe in free will because of a simple thought experiment. Maybe someone with a background in ML can chime in.

Imagine we could perfectly map all your brain's neural connections at an instant in time to software. This is not out of the realm of possibility in the future, right? Now imagine we "asked" that model to make a decision. Any decision. Wouldn't that frozen-in-time model give the same answer every time?

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

#88

Post by lisper »

asey wrote: post #59
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'd argue that there are more than three possibilities. One addition, for example, is that the concept of free will is under-defined and an intelligible conversation can't be had about it. I encourage you to define free will without resorting to synonyms like volition, free choice, and the likes.

Notice that in my OP I was actually very careful to talk about the perception of free will, and not free will itself.

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

#89

Post by paulryanrogers »

benmowa wrote: post #64
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.

The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) actually explores the idea that organisms began as DNA replicating 'machines'.

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

#90

Post by MrEfficiency »

nardi wrote: post #7
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.

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 believe it.

My brain is a collection of experiences and my body is a chemical reaction.

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