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It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

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Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#111

Post by tacomonstrous »

amasad wrote: post #106
tacomonstrous wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of your postulates are accurate or well-defined. --I don't know what 'physicalism' means. --Mainstream science doesn't even claim to know what consciousness is, let alone what it can be reduced to. --Science does not operate on the principle of causation. The point is to make falsifiable predictions that can, when verified, be considered as evidence that your hypothesis for how things work might just be how they…

>None of your postulates are accurate or well-defined. >--I don't know what 'physicalism' means. Is "well-defined" a codeword for "I don't understand"? Physicalism is as well-defined of a concept as anything can be. >--Mainstream science doesn't even claim to know what consciousness is, let alone what it can be reduced to. Since you don't understand what is "physicalism" I don't think you're going to get this point.…

>The idea is that everything is reduced to elementary physical structures. Therefore nothing can be extra-physcial, super-natural or otherwise. I.e. non-dualist. Therefore the mind must be reduced to physical structures.

I understand that some people claim this to be a definition, but that hardly makes it one. What's 'extra-physical'? To do this, you must first define what boundaries physicality has. I don't think there is any good definition to be offered here without begging the question.

>So is there anything that is uncaused? When the scientist constructs an experiment do they think "oh what if the billiard ball moved without cause?".

A scientist has a model for certain phenomena that can be verified experimentally. One can call this causality, sure, but that it leads inexorably towards determinism seems far from clear to me.

>Actually "new-agey" thought tries to do the exact opposite: save dualism and free will.

I have no opinion on the question of 'free will' as you frame it. Is it part of the human condition that one's circumstances have a large role to play in how life proceeds? Certainly! I'm just against the view that science has anything to say about it.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#112

Post by narrator »

md224 wrote: post #62

> there is no homunculus (or soul, or separate entity) calling the shots for you, but even if there were a mini-me inside of you making choices, that mini-me would need a mini-mini-me inside of it, ad infinitum. I find it kind of amusing that people think free will is an illusion. It's a great illustration of how you can get people to believe anything, including things that violate their most fundamental perceptions.…

The idea that we can predict human behavior and thus invalidate the concept of free will is that there exists an algorithm that takes less time to run than the future human behavior it predicts will happen in. However, certain biological processes, like protein folding, take exponential time to compute, so we're going to have to make due with approximations for now. Thus, there will always be some aspect of the unknown with regards to human behavior until we get those algorithms to run faster.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#113

Post by adrice727 »

tucif wrote: post #2

What would be a good book to read before this book? Or is it friendly enough for someone new to behavioral science?

I'd say that it's friendly enough. The appendices provide short primers on neuroscience, hormones, and proteins, and help make sense of the rest of the book. I'm about 1/3 of the way through and every day I have something new that I'm excited to tell my wife about.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#114

Post by xor1 »

Learning about Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and the rest of the Cluster B disorders (and their comorbidity) helped me understand ALOT about certain types of behavioral patterns that I previously found completely mind-boggling.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#115

Post by prmph »

md224 wrote: post #62

> there is no homunculus (or soul, or separate entity) calling the shots for you, but even if there were a mini-me inside of you making choices, that mini-me would need a mini-mini-me inside of it, ad infinitum. I find it kind of amusing that people think free will is an illusion. It's a great illustration of how you can get people to believe anything, including things that violate their most fundamental perceptions.…

I think this is the most insightful comment on HN I have read in a long while.

We are limited by the concepts our minds can form. As I commented before, free will could arise from an infinity of antecedents; the fact that we find it difficult to wrap our minds around such a concept does not in any way imply anything about its veracity.

I could not agree more; things like consciousness and free will are very likely to require concepts of almost infinite complexity to model. It is the height of hubris to say something as inane as "science disproves free will", to think we can settle these questions with with glibly, with concepts that are the product of a mere 70-or-so years of mental development

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#116

Post by amasad »

tacomonstrous wrote: post #111
amasad wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>None of your postulates are accurate or well-defined. >--I don't know what 'physicalism' means. Is "well-defined" a codeword for "I don't understand"? Physicalism is as well-defined of a concept as anything can be. >--Mainstream science doesn't even claim to know what consciousness is, let alone what it can be reduced to. Since you don't understand what is "physicalism" I don't think you're going to get this point.…

>The idea is that everything is reduced to elementary physical structures. Therefore nothing can be extra-physcial, super-natural or otherwise. I.e. non-dualist. Therefore the mind must be reduced to physical structures. I understand that some people claim this to be a definition, but that hardly makes it one. What's 'extra-physical'? To do this, you must first define what boundaries physicality has. I don't think th…

>I understand that some people claim this to be a definition, but that hardly makes it one. What's 'extra-physical'? To do this, you must first define what boundaries physicality has. I don't think there is any good definition to be offered here without begging the question.

I get that this question can be recursively applied. It's children's favorite game -- to keep asking "what is ____?". I'm going to guess that you disagree with philosophy as a whole and will keep questioning if anything philosophers discuss is well-defined. If that's the case why are we then discussing philosophy?

EDIT: you can also say "I disagree with physicalism" or "I'm a dualist". But saying all those things are not well-defined is merely a cop-out.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#117

Post by tacomonstrous »

amasad wrote: post #116
tacomonstrous wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The idea is that everything is reduced to elementary physical structures. Therefore nothing can be extra-physcial, super-natural or otherwise. I.e. non-dualist. Therefore the mind must be reduced to physical structures. I understand that some people claim this to be a definition, but that hardly makes it one. What's 'extra-physical'? To do this, you must first define what boundaries physicality has. I don't think th…

>I understand that some people claim this to be a definition, but that hardly makes it one. What's 'extra-physical'? To do this, you must first define what boundaries physicality has. I don't think there is any good definition to be offered here without begging the question. I get that this question can be recursively applied. It's children's favorite game -- to keep asking "what is ____?". I'm going to guess that yo…

We can discuss philosophical notions, but then we are discussing philosophy and not science.

I just have a distaste for bringing science into a discussion where it can be finagled into whatever one finds convenient for the matter at hand.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#118

Post by ux-app »

kleer001 wrote: post #94
ux-app wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've been trying to figure out how to live while minimizing the extent of my personal fabricated narrative. sounds interesting. Do you know of any suggested reading on the topic?

5 dried grams of magic mushrooms. Or listen to 40+ hours of lectures from Alan Watts.

hehe thanks for the tip, but I don't trust my own psyche enough for those kinds of experiments, even though I'm deeply curious of what I'd experience.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#119

Post by ux-app »

personomas wrote: post #107
ux-app wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've been trying to figure out how to live while minimizing the extent of my personal fabricated narrative. sounds interesting. Do you know of any suggested reading on the topic?

>> I've been trying to figure out how to live while minimizing the extent of my personal fabricated narrative. > sounds interesting. Do you know of any suggested reading on the topic? The Bible, there's no better. Jesus preaches and teaches truth, truth will erode this false fabricated narrative.

> truth will erode this false fabricated narrative.

ooh boy, that's a deep rabbit hole. I'm an atheist now, but I was raised in a deeply religious household (fundamentalist christian, family and entire social circle took the bible very seriously).

My experience is that everyone thinks they have the "truth", even though each sect's truth is mutually exclusive from all others (even though they all read from the same book). In addition I found that Jesus' teachings (mostly harmless, mostly obvious) didn't do much to "erode this false fabricated narrative", but rather layered over an additional set of narratives.

I never experienced any deeper insights than this despite a couple of decades worth of heavy indoctrination attempts.

I'm sure you mean well though, so I appreciate your comment.

Re: It’s Complicated: Unraveling the mystery of why people act as they do

#120

Post by wvlia5 »

md224 wrote: post #81
adjkant wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your belief in free will comes from "It's going to turn out to come from something really weird"? That's not convincing either. I don't believe in free will, but I believe that there will always be the illusion because the computing needed to know anything before it happens is far too much, and if you knew, it would add another layer of things you'd need to compute, meaning you still wouldn't know your choice ahea…

How is free will not the same as choice? A lack of free will is an inability to exert agency through choosing. Determinism removes the possibility of choosing. If you have no free will, you can't express yourself... nothing you do will be the product of your desires. Weren't you free to choose the words you wrote in your reply?

You're being quite naive, not understanding what the issue is.

Of course everything you do will be a product of what "you" "decide" to do. In that, completely naive & day-to-day, sense of the phrase, "you" do have "free will".

But how did that "decision" come to be? Was there a cause for it to happen? If so, what caused it? If it was caused by deterministic laws of physics, then that doesn't sound much like "free will". If it was random, it doesn't sound like "free will" either. What is "free will" and how does it start electrochemical reactions in your brain which will result in a movement of your hand? What is "you", which posseses "free will"?

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