Neuroscience: Thou art That

What needs do mythology and religion serve in today's world and in ancient times? Here we discuss the relationship between mythology, religion and science from mythological, religious and philosophical viewpoints.

Moderators: Clemsy, Martin_Weyers, Cindy B.

Og
Associate
Posts: 318
Joined: Tue Mar 13, 2007 4:00 am
Location: Austin, TX

Neuroscience: Thou art That

Post by Og »

I'm a physicist and engineer by training and went to get my PhD in the field of Biophysics with a focus in neurobiology and behavior. So I came to the biological problem with the eyes and mindset of an engineer.

To me, it's clear that the notion of free will is false. In the same way that a surgeon can stimulate your open brain on surgical table to produce behaviors outside your control, once you're sewn up and moving about in the world, the same kind of stimuli are being applied. In the "walking about in the world" case, these stimuli are those from your sensory neurons and there are tens of millions of them into your brain in a complex pattern. But still, your neural tissue is stimulated by sensory signals and adapts to these stimuli.

Every single element of your brain is a deterministic machine that responds in a given way to inputs and the product of the massively complex network of 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections between them (all with dynamic features that respond to input signals) that produce higher order computation and awareness.

Every individual is a product of the environment that they are part of as they grow from birth to death. The behavior is complex, but the notions of free will and of choice and of good and evil are all clearly illusions under this realization that modern neuroscience is bringing. Free will and biochemistry just plain don't mix. The brain is effectively a highly complex and adaptive feedback control system and computation and storage unit with high bandwidth sensory inputs for a variety of external signals.

I think this realization that modern neuroscience is amazingly important. The fact that my neurons aren't enfolded in your skin doesn't mean that we are somehow a different process. In the same way that one cell in your brain is connected to another by electrochemical connections, you and I are connected right now via this post as you are connected to your friends by pressure waves and photon reflections when you are in their physical presence.

This systems behavior perspective on things gives scientific teeth to the notions that campbell liked so much from hinduism. The notion of the Jeweled net of Indra is quoted often in Campbell's work from the avatamsaka sutra. The notion of an infinite net of perfectly polished jewels that reflected each other jewel such that within every jewel was contained the entire universe.

The work that he often quotes from Schopenhauer where altruism is due with an identification with another also applies. The realization that you and they actually ARE one. Tat Tvam Asi (thou art that). We are all part of the process of the universe and are as eternal as everything else in existence.

I think it's really cool what is happening as engineers begin to apply mathematics and computer science to neural networks. It provides a forefront of science addressing important questions about being.

The moral consequences of this realization are amazing. We are no longer driven by guilt or regret since the reality is that events couldn't have happened any other way. We can direct our lives into the future by reason instead of by fear and desire. We can realize that our enemies are part of the same process that we are (in fact that EVERYTHING is). Our sense of self gets expanded to include all of the universe.

This seems like what they describe as nirvana to me. It's at the apex of the pyramid on the dollar bill where the eye of god is and there are no pairs of opposites. It's sitting under the tree of eternal life in the garden of eden free from the binding of good/evil, fear/desire, birth/death, choice, etc.

Campbell has been an immensely important guide as throughout my life. At first it was just vicariously through star wars and the matrix and such. Now as my realizations of neuroscience and systems engineering have evolved, campbell's direct works have expressed ideas of the unified myth of man and the hero's journey that are exactly in line with the realization that we are all one gigantic process of extremely complex interconnected things and that the boundary between you and me is one that is reasonable but arbitrary!

Very cool stuff to me.

tat tvam asi
Associate
Posts: 470
Joined: Sat Apr 29, 2006 11:49 am
Location: Eternity

Post by tat tvam asi »

Well done.

Aireal and I are looking at the work of Milo Wolff at www.quantummatter.com This goes into neuro-science speculations that stem from understanding matters wave structure. All in all, the summary is that everything is connected to everything else. That's the ultimate overview of what stems from the quantum wave research.

This is cool, considering that our mythologies are the result of our experiencing the conflicting biological energies of the human body, which is itself a wave structure of space. One of the philosophies here is that the idea's of oneness between all things likely stems from the oneness of space itself.


Milo Wolff

"... Buddhist thought is tremendously rich in the area of human consciousness and its connectedness with nature. Notions of the interconnectedness of all phenomenon occur in many spiritual contexts. For example, there is the doctrine that all living creatures in the world have an inner or psychological being. This is based on the idea that there is one fundamental, universal substance of life. Spinoza also taught that spiritual phenomena are attributes of one underlying substance.

Scientific evidence of the origin of consciousness or the substance of life is difficult to isolate. Thus these ideas are regarded as speculative. Nevertheless, speculation is often productive, and a powerful motive force for scientific inquiry as well as a guide in religious life. However scientific results only happen when you are 'clever enough' to create models and/or hypotheses based on one or more implications of your speculation which are capable of being tested. Caution is needed before drawing conclusions. You shouldn't write checks with your speculations, that you can't cover with your science!

There are other reasons for focusing on matter waves. The funded Human Genome Project ambitiously proposes to completely unravel four billion genes of human chromosomes which determine the structure of our bodies. This structure is the hardware of our body computer. Where is the software? We are born with many built-inemotions and survival mechanisms which are 'software programs'. Like consciousness, they occupy our mind but have no identified physical location. Since our unconscious brain and its peripherals are the 'cpu' of our bodycomputer, then matter waves could be their internal communications mechanism. These waves are not limited in their range, so it becomes conceiveable that 'external mind-to-mind and mind-to-matter communication' can also occur. Survival is the primary goal of each organism thus internal communication would be the predominant role waves while external communication would be rare. This may explain the greater effectiveness of meditation.

Although many mathematicians and scientists, including Schroedinger, deBroglie, and Einstein, have advocated a 'wave structure of matter', one of the more interesting was Hans Tetrode who made a prediction that upstages the EPR effect. I will tell his story and in the process describe the new Matter Wave Structure of Particles. Then it is up to the professional 'neuro-psychologists' to make further connections with consciousness."



tat tvam asi/space

Aireal
Associate
Posts: 156
Joined: Tue Jun 20, 2006 5:58 pm
Location: Mayfield, Ky.

Post by Aireal »

Og

Fascinating topic.

Neuroscience has always intrigued me. I must admit however that I never considered free will in this manner before. If I was not a walking oxymoron, this might be easy to answer, but it is not.

Most people that know me think I am a nice guy, friendly, caring, all that. They are wrong, that is the person I try to be. I am an evil S.o.B. at heart. I care little for people or mankind in general. Yet I have risked my life to help others, even strangers. I have no doubt I would lay down my life for another, even though I consider my life far more valuable than theirs.

Is this hardwired into my brain?

I understand, more so than many, the interconnections between all life and matter. Is this the root cause of my unselfish actions?

Until the time of my "Vision of the One" that I related elsewhere on this forum, I was as evil as a man could get. Other humans only existed as tools for my use at best. Before this point, I was more likely to kill someone than help them.

Did the vision also change the chemistry of my brain?

Does electrochemical impulses give rise to thoughts?
Does thoughts give rise to electrochemical impulses?
Or are they connected on a level we do not understand yet?

On more than one occasion have have found my hand around someones windpipe, and stayed my hand short of ripping it out.
Was that an example of free will, or was I helpless as an electrochemical war raged in my brain, and a course of action decided?

If we truely do not have free will, then our legal system comes crashing down. People like Dommer and Hannibal are not criminals, they just have a neurochemical imbalance. They would be free of guilt in even the most horrible of crimes. I could slay others freely, without guilt, truely Nirvana for me, but not the Nirvana I want.

So I think I have reached a decision on this.

We have free will. If you define free will as the ability to resist the neurochemical impulses of our brain, and decide on a different course of action.

So it really comes down to how do we define free will in light of our current understanding of the electrochemical processes of the human brain.


Tat

Didn't we have someone on our forum that was writing a book on this subject? I don't remember who or the details.

Charles

tat tvam asi
Associate
Posts: 470
Joined: Sat Apr 29, 2006 11:49 am
Location: Eternity

Post by tat tvam asi »

Yeah, there was a guy who was interested in how the wave structure of matter relates to neuro-science - Thomas, I believe. He held a similar view of free will as an illusion. I think that Geoff turned the conversation towards non-determinism. Here's the summary of how wave physics applies to the idea of free will:

The Problem of Free Will & Determinism

"The problem of Free Will vs. Determinism has puzzled philosophers for thousands of years. It is a profound problem for without Free Will there can be no morality, no right and wrong, no good and evil. All our behaviours would be pre-determined and we would have no creativity or choice. Common sense (and most importantly, Darwinian Evolution) suggests that we do in fact have Free Will, that we can decide and determine our futures within the limits of physical reality. However, the only absolute way to solve this problem of Philosophy is to know what exists and how it is interconnected, i.e. True Knowledge of Reality.
Recent discoveries on the Properties of Space and the Wave Structure of Matter (WSM) confirm that we can know and understand the physical reality of the world which we experience, and thus explain how we can have 'limited free will' in a necessarily connected universe.

It is important to appreciate the difference between a Necessarily Connected Universe, which ours is, (due to Space and its interconnected wave-motions) and a 'Deterministic Universe' which requires knowledge of the 'initial conditions' from which things, being necessarily connected, can then be 'determined'.
Stated simply, an Infinite system can never be 'pre-determined'. We live in a finite and 'Necessarily Connected' observable Universe, but because it is within an Infinite Space, and continually has waves flowing into it that have come from Infinity, they can never be 'pre-determined'. See Cosmology This explains the uncertainty of Quantum Theory and that we can never exactly know where each successive In-Wave will meet at its wave-center 'particle', thus we can never exactly know both the future motion (momentum) and position of the ‘Particle’ (i.e. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle).

This is very important as it also explains why we can have 'limited free will', and thus live as moral creatures creating better futures for ourselves and our society (a very important thing). We should also emphasize that our free will is limited by this necessary connection of matter. We do not have the freedom to defy gravity and make ourselves float upwards, but within the constraints of necessary connection there are still many possible futures. We can choose to read this, or we can decide to stop reading it. Both are possible futures that obey the laws of physics and the necessary connections between things. Thus Spinoza is both right and wrong when he writes;

"There is no mind absolute or free will, but the mind is determined for willing this or that by a cause which is determined in its turn by another cause, and this one again by another, and so on to infinity." (Spinoza, 1673)

His error was to not understand how lack of pre-determined knowledge in an infinite though necessarily connected system causes chance and limited free will." - Geoff Haselhurst



tat tvam asi/space

nandu
Associate
Posts: 3395
Joined: Fri May 31, 2002 12:45 am
Location: Kerala, the green country
Contact:

Post by nandu »

Sorry if I am digressing, but human consciousness has always been a subject which fascinated me. Since I have very limited knowledge of biology, my ideas are very hazy. So bear with me if I commit some bloomers.

It seems to me that "free will" is inextricably connected with our individuality - our "I"-ness. What is "I"? What makes up my individual personality? We are all a few dollars' worth of chemicals. So what gives the spark of life? And what makes each one of us unique?

Where does the mind exist? Is it part of the brain or does it exist separate from the brain? If mental activity is a set of electrical signals rushing up and down through the brain, would it be possible to create a mind artificially by duplicating this activity?

And since I experience everything through the medium of the "I", isn't my reality a manufactured one? So are we not necessarily creating our realities?

Nandu.
Loka Samastha Sukhino Bhavanthu

Og
Associate
Posts: 318
Joined: Tue Mar 13, 2007 4:00 am
Location: Austin, TX

Post by Og »

Thanks for the replies everyone. I see many misconceptions about what I'm talking about. let me try to address them.
Aireal wrote:Most people that know me think I am a nice guy, friendly, caring, all that. They are wrong, that is the person I try to be. I am an evil S.o.B. at heart. I care little for people or mankind in general. Yet I have risked my life to help others, even strangers. I have no doubt I would lay down my life for another, even though I consider my life far more valuable than theirs.

Is this hardwired into my brain?
EVERYTHING is hardwired into your brain. There are 100 billion neurons in your brain with 100 trillion connections between neurons. Think of this as on the scale of the number of trees in the amazon rainforest connected by the number of leaves on the trees in the amazon rainforest's worth of adaptive connections.

ALL human behavior is a product of this. The notion of competing wills within your mind that you express is exactly the interplay between computational units in your brain. The brain is a highly complex computer with highly complex sensory inputs. It is quite different in scale from a computer that you might be typing this message on right now. It's also quite different in construction, but the basis of the behavior of EVERY cell in your brain is identical to the components in a computer.

Your brain is a hardwired machine. Software, per se, is not real in any sense. Software is a pattern on a disk. It's created by a computer or by a person and then the pattern of electrons is translated into patterns on the processor and the behavior of the processor is now governed by this new pattern. The notion of a distinction between hardware and software is an illusion. It's a distinction that helps us interact with the system. Your brain IS hardwired, but that doesn't mean that it is not adaptive to its environment in complex ways. There are many examples of systems created by man that adapt. Cruise control is a good example of this. Your car adapts the behavior of the accelerator to meat a target speed. In us, this is what is happening all the time. On a massive scale for everything in your life from love to buying a home to brushing your teeth.

Everything you experience and think and do and stop yourself from doing are all part of the computation of your brain. There is no "you" that modifies your brain behavior. The "you" that stops yourself from acting is a part of your brain that counteracts the behavior of another part of your brain. There are options available and your brain selects the one that ends up being your behavior based on its structure.

It's massively complex and I don't want you to think that it's something as simple as the computers we have today.

What this means is that the connections between your cells and the cells themselves define who you are. And the connection between me and you is identical in nature to the connection between each of your cells. Signals are transduced via the internet, phone, sound, vision, chemistry, etc... The notion of an individual is as arbitrary as the notion of software versus hardware. Software doesn't actually exist as something separate from hardware. In all cases, software IS expressed in hardware. The distinction is arbitrary and helps us interact with the computer.

There is a reason for a distinction between you and me just as there is a reason for a distinction between the air around a chair and a chair itself. But that doesn't mean they're actually ultimately separate processes.
Did the vision also change the chemistry of my brain?

Does electrochemical impulses give rise to thoughts?
Does thoughts give rise to electrochemical impulses?
Or are they connected on a level we do not understand yet?
Brain states are conscious/thought states. Electrochemical impulses ARE thoughts, they don't give rise to thoughts. The notion of dualism is false. There are a large volume of brain lesion studies that are treated ad nauseum (notably in Carl Sagan's "Dragons of Eden" amongst many others) where losses in physical material correlate with losses in certain behaviors in a repeatable fashion.

The process is massively complex, but it is clear that every component of your brain is a deterministic machine driven by the chemical concept of mass action (the law of large volume of particles).
If we truely do not have free will, then our legal system comes crashing down. People like Dommer and Hannibal are not criminals, they just have a neurochemical imbalance. They would be free of guilt in even the most horrible of crimes. I could slay others freely, without guilt, truely Nirvana for me, but not the Nirvana I want.
In all cases, good and evil are entirely relative. They are illusions. They are just like the immune system of your body. The notion of evil labels elements for extraction in the same way that your immune system labels things in your body that are foreign invaders. Basically, to me, this is what the eden story talks about. There are plenty of animals with virtually or actually no immune system at all. We have one. I think the development of good and evil as ideas was a development of the immune system of a population of humans.

But if you do accept that we do not have free will then you also CAN NOT accept that Dhammer and others are NOT criminals. They are still criminals. There is no notion of an individual unable to control their actions under this realization. Thinking that there is some poor soul riding in a machine that they're unable to control is false. The idea of self is an illusion.

The only reason for good and evil to exist is to provide social stability and survival. Without survival there can be no other purposes in life. This is the only reason for good and evil to exist. So under this realization, you can say that Dhammer is an element of instability. So you trim him from the population as you would trim an errant branch on a hedge. The point is that you substitute reason for emotional drives for decisions. Sure there's no individual dhammer and the notion that dhammer is evil just means that he's no good for the health of the society.

What is the health of a society? It's a complex question, and in my opinion, this should be the point of a representative government.
We have free will. If you define free will as the ability to resist the neurochemical impulses of our brain, and decide on a different course of action.

So it really comes down to how do we define free will in light of our current understanding of the electrochemical processes of the human brain.
There is no such thing as something other than your brain that can "resist" a neurochemical impulse. From cell to coupled cell, signals propagate through your brain. Your experience of resistance of an impulse is your relatively newly developed neocortex expressing it's behavior in parallel with baser elements of your psyche. In both cases, they are electrochemical impulses. Depending on your life experience and your upbringing and your genetics, you will respond in a certain way and your brain will be structured in a different way.

This is the basis for systems engineering. A causal system's state is defined by it's current structure and the effects of all previous states. This is what the brain is, it's just MASSIVELY complex.

But in the end, it is a deterministic machine.

Og
Associate
Posts: 318
Joined: Tue Mar 13, 2007 4:00 am
Location: Austin, TX

Post by Og »

Yeah, there was a guy who was interested in how the wave structure of matter relates to neuro-science - Thomas, I believe. He held a similar view of free will as an illusion. I think that Geoff turned the conversation towards non-determinism.
Mass action rules biological events. The brain is a computer that uses chemical potentials instead of electrical potentials (as current PCs do) to carry out its computations. This is not to say that quantum events do not matter. What is expressed in mass action is the ensemble of thousands to trillions or more orders of magnitude of quantum particles. But quantum randomness is not an effect that changes the way brains work.

We are behaving organisms. The deterministic structure of our neural networks defines our behavior. These networks adapt to our environments in highly complex ways.

The universe is CLEARLY indeterminant as you mentioned. Quantum mechanics illustrates this in a repeatable fashion. That we are some sort of element that can be a cause without an effect is false. Free will is non-existent in a limited or an unlimited form.

Og
Associate
Posts: 318
Joined: Tue Mar 13, 2007 4:00 am
Location: Austin, TX

Post by Og »

nandu wrote:Sorry if I am digressing, but human consciousness has always been a subject which fascinated me. Since I have very limited knowledge of biology, my ideas are very hazy. So bear with me if I commit some bloomers.

It seems to me that "free will" is inextricably connected with our individuality - our "I"-ness. What is "I"? What makes up my individual personality? We are all a few dollars' worth of chemicals. So what gives the spark of life? And what makes each one of us unique?
It's all in the pattern of the chemicals. This is what evolution has taken billions of years to produce. You can follow a signal from one cell to another on down the line in a highly complex pattern in the brain. "I"ness is a product of each of these complex machines having a totally unique path through existence. They are an expression of their environment.

Alan Watts says "As the ocean waves and apple trees apple, the universe peoples."
Where does the mind exist? Is it part of the brain or does it exist separate from the brain? If mental activity is a set of electrical signals rushing up and down through the brain, would it be possible to create a mind artificially by duplicating this activity?

And since I experience everything through the medium of the "I", isn't my reality a manufactured one? So are we not necessarily creating our realities?

Nandu.
The mind is the brain. Your visual experience, for example is a product of your eyes and your visual cortex and various other higher processing areas that extract objects and give them meaning. Your thoughts about dreams and hopes and aspirations have to do with your brain understanding possibilities for your behavior and having an idea of what is generally desirable. Then it processes this information an makes "choices" which are the product of computations so they are really just "results" instead of "choices."

The reality you experience has to do with how your brain interprets your world. I know schizophrenics that see shadow people and demons on the streets that stare at them. We tend to be able to get a solid picture of reality by having consensus of experience amongst many brains in a repeatable manner (this is what science is).

We do not have a model that can compute the entire human brain's behavior (and thus reproduce a human), but we have a model for every component of the brain and how they work.

Then there are mathematical models of complex systems arising from simple algorithms (mainly expressed in the mathematics of cellular automaton) that give us a framework to understand the behavior of cell based systems such as the brain and the body.

But the notion that the mind is separate from the matter is clearly false. The mind is a connection of 100 billion neurons and supporting cells and a huge number of complex interconnections that produce the massive information storage, computation, and sensory processing unit that we call I.

nandu
Associate
Posts: 3395
Joined: Fri May 31, 2002 12:45 am
Location: Kerala, the green country
Contact:

Post by nandu »

Og,

Your explanation is very lucid and scientific, but it does not explain life, love, art, poetry and a million other things. The answer that scientists usually give, that "we are working on it, it will become transparent in the future", has lost its credibility for me.

You say "I" am the hardware: software is indistiguishable, as it is only a pattern. But if we load, say, Microsoft Excel into any computer, it will work the same. Why is the same not possible with human beings? Why does individuality arise?

Nandu.
Loka Samastha Sukhino Bhavanthu

Aireal
Associate
Posts: 156
Joined: Tue Jun 20, 2006 5:58 pm
Location: Mayfield, Ky.

Post by Aireal »

Og

Thank you for the detailed response to my question. It seems to me it comes down to how you define free will. I have a limited understanding of the brain. Your description of the number of connections between neurons is accurate, but the whole picture is even more complex when the number of neural transmitters, inhibitors, etc. are taken into account. At one time I even worked on a prototype for a combined analog/digital computer modeled on the brain. We know much more than we did back then. But back to the point.

The way I understand your explanation, we have free will.

You said "Electrochemical impulses ARE thoughts, they don't give rise to thoughts." I totally agree, and "There is no notion of an individual unable to control their actions under this realization. Thinking that there is some poor soul riding in a machine that they're unable to control is false." Absolutely, but to me that is free will.

That means that the thoughts of others, when read, seen or heard, become electrochemical impulses in the brain.

Language is the main means of transmitting thoughts between people. Thus Language is "software" for the transfer of thoughts between people.
So is art.

These new electrochemical signals may be in conflict with the ones we already have for a given situations. To kill or not to kill. When the situation next comes up, a new option is available that is in conflict with the old one, and its outcome. You admit that it is a complex process involved in choosing one course of action over another.

But at its heart is one idea verses another idea. Call them thoughts, electrochemical impulses, the concept is the same.

The process of choosing between options based on the information one has is free will. It is just a question of degree.

From a simple robot that seeks the light to keep its charge and stay "alive", to the fox that gives up the chase when the rabbit enters heavy brush, or the man thinking about a change of jobs, its just a question of degree.

One day robots may have "free will" long before their 'brains' are as complex as ours.

Charles

Og
Associate
Posts: 318
Joined: Tue Mar 13, 2007 4:00 am
Location: Austin, TX

Post by Og »

nandu wrote:Og,

Your explanation is very lucid and scientific, but it does not explain life, love, art, poetry and a million other things. The answer that scientists usually give, that "we are working on it, it will become transparent in the future", has lost its credibility for me.

You say "I" am the hardware: software is indistiguishable, as it is only a pattern. But if we load, say, Microsoft Excel into any computer, it will work the same. Why is the same not possible with human beings? Why does individuality arise?

Nandu.
It certainly does explain all these things. The brain is a generalized computation device with a large storage capacity and broad spectrum of inputs about the world (tens of millions of analog sensory inputs).

"I" is the hardware. Software is a term that describes the behavior of the hardware. It is not real. It's like saying that you see a person in a painting of a person. There's no real person there. What you're describing as a person is a pattern of the hardware.

No two humans are alike, Nandu. Individuality arises because each of us starts off with a slightly different brain that has been constructed in the womb. Then as we grow up each and every one of us has unique experiences that cause our brain to adapt. Don't think in terms of computer software that is generally fixed and unable to change. Think of a computer that is designed to respond and change in its environment. Think of a black box with tens of millions of high bandwidth inputs and a wide variety of complex outputs. The interior is an adaptive system that changes to match many of the possible patterns of coupled input lines and to interact with it's environment in response to these things.

Art and poetry and love are expressions of this system. It's massively complex and just like the fingerprint, the brain is even more complex and this is why (just as there are no 2 fingerprints alike) there are no two brains ("I's") alike. It's not different in "kind" from a computers.. It's different in "scale" and complexity and organization from a PC today.

Metta,
-Og

Og
Associate
Posts: 318
Joined: Tue Mar 13, 2007 4:00 am
Location: Austin, TX

Post by Og »

Thanks for the response Aireal.
Aireal wrote:Your description of the number of connections between neurons is accurate, but the whole picture is even more complex when the number of neural transmitters, inhibitors, etc. are taken into account. At one time I even worked on a prototype for a combined analog/digital computer modeled on the brain. We know much more than we did back then. But back to the point.
I agree, it is massively complex. But not something different in kind than a computer that we are familiar with.
The way I understand your explanation, we have free will.

You said "Electrochemical impulses ARE thoughts, they don't give rise to thoughts." I totally agree, and "There is no notion of an individual unable to control their actions under this realization. Thinking that there is some poor soul riding in a machine that they're unable to control is false." Absolutely, but to me that is free will.

That means that the thoughts of others, when read, seen or heard, become electrochemical impulses in the brain.

Language is the main means of transmitting thoughts between people. Thus Language is "software" for the transfer of thoughts between people.
So is art.

These new electrochemical signals may be in conflict with the ones we already have for a given situations. To kill or not to kill. When the situation next comes up, a new option is available that is in conflict with the old one, and its outcome. You admit that it is a complex process involved in choosing one course of action over another.
I think my point is that there's no difference between you listening to a person talk and a signal going between cells in your body. In the same way chemicals are transduced into electrical signals from one cell to another, photons or pressure waves between you and me are converted into electrical signals and then propagated through our network.

The brain is an immensely complex network of deterministic components, but the human race is a massively more complex network of deterministic components. Just as your brain has a spinal cord or a corpus collosum (the connection between the hemispheres), the body has the internet or a telephone or sound waves or whatever to communicate between neural networks.

This is the essence of my "thou art that" title to this thread. Just as each element of your brain is connected in a deterministic way (i.e. your 100 billion neurons) such that it produces you (and no individual component of them has free will) so does the entire environment we reside in, interact with us. The distinction between you and me and the air and whatever else is arbitrary. It's one we use in order to produce our individual behaviors, but when it boils down to it, just because my skin doesn't enfold your neurons doesn't mean that we're not part of the same process. We are.

All of this notion of signals coming in from the outside and signals being on the inside is all a deterministic process. You can't control what you see or hear other than by moving away from it or plugging your ears or closing your eyes. But what made you decide to do this act of censorship? It was your brain. Which is a product of what you see/hear/etc throughout your entire life.

The notion that you and I are distinct is as arbitrary as the notion that two cells in your body are distinct entities. The boundary in that example is a 4 nanometer thick layer of 2 lipids (the cell membrane). It's arbitrary. Signals propagate across the membrane. it's just a wall. There's no reason that on one side you should consider it some real individual compared to what's on the outside other than in an arbitrary manner that lets us be what we are (i.e. human beings).

You and I. no distinction. Tat Tvam Asi. It's why when you put stem cells near other types of cells they take on the characteristics of those cells. Because everything is a product of its environment. Chemical gradients and such are what define us, but the distinction is arbitrary. Signals go in there and out there and back over there and are processed and changed by this and that... etc etc.. This is the nature of the universe, not "choosing" or being "good or evil" or being "born or dead"... These are all as illusory as something like the spell checker in microsoft word.. They're a concept like software.

But at its heart is one idea verses another idea. Call them thoughts, electrochemical impulses, the concept is the same.

The process of choosing between options based on the information one has is free will. It is just a question of degree.

From a simple robot that seeks the light to keep its charge and stay "alive", to the fox that gives up the chase when the rabbit enters heavy brush, or the man thinking about a change of jobs, its just a question of degree.

One day robots may have "free will" long before their 'brains' are as complex as ours.

Charles
Choosing between options is as illusory as good and evil. Choice is a myth. What happens is an equation. There is no separate entity that can somehow pick one thing over another outside of causality. What happens is that several options are put into a box. This box then does it's equation on the options by comparing them to other internal concepts (call these your value system and fears and desires) and the output is behavior (that you call choice).

Choice is a null word. It's an illusion. It can't fit with biochemistry. Chemical cascades of particles driven by entropic forces can not produce something that is an effect without a cause. We are highly complex, but the notion of choice is another illusion just like the notion of software. It describes what it appears to be but it is not an accurate description of exactly what is going on.

Ironically, choice is what I would consider an "anthropomorphization" of the anthropos :)... In the same way a hurricane is complex and people might say that it "decided to turn north" or something, a human being makes choices.

nandu
Associate
Posts: 3395
Joined: Fri May 31, 2002 12:45 am
Location: Kerala, the green country
Contact:

Post by nandu »

Og,

I don't dispute "Thou art that". My only disagreement is what constitutes "that".

In my opinion, "I" is not the hardware: it's the software. In fact, everything is the software.

What is matter? Science has so far not provided any satisfactory, conclusive answer to this. What we perceive as solid is in fact mostly empty space. Atoms contain a nucleus of protons and neutrons with electrons in orbit: what exists between the nucleus and electrons is only magnetic force.

As we delve deeper and deeper into quantum theory, even the subatomic particles become phantasmagorical, with their existence never certain.

The view of the world posited by science is in fact only a model which explains the observed phenomena satis factorily. When the model gives unreliable results, we are forced to formulate a new model, as classical physics moved into relativistic and quantum paradigms. We can never say that the model is THE true picture.

Now, I am going to turn your proposition on its head: "I" is not the brain, but the brain, the body and the entire universe is the "I"-or consciousness. Matter "exists" only because we perceive it. Instead of consciousness being derived from matter, I argue that matter is derived from consciousness.

The whole universe is one huge consciousness, from which matter, mind, time and energy are derived. The ironic thing is that we are conscious because of the "I", but it prevents us from the realisation of the big picture of which all of us are parts. The absolute dissolution of "I" is required for us to reach that super-consciousness; Vishnu dreaming the dream of the universe while asleep on the cosmic serpent.

Then comes the realisation of Aham Brahma Asmi.

Nandu.
Loka Samastha Sukhino Bhavanthu

Aireal
Associate
Posts: 156
Joined: Tue Jun 20, 2006 5:58 pm
Location: Mayfield, Ky.

Post by Aireal »

Og

You stated ""There is no notion of an individual unable to control their actions under this realization. Thinking that there is some poor soul riding in a machine that they're unable to control is false."

But if we are able to control our actions, then we have "free will" period.

It does not matter that the brain is a determinist biological computer. The sum of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

I recently saw a show called "robosapiens" that delved into the brain and current research in that area. One of the leading scientists who was interviewed cautioned against comparing the brain to current computers.

The Brain also has aspects of analog computers and even some aspects of quantum computers and holographic memory. Thus a comparison to digital computers are misleading.

I have worked with analog computers back in the early days, trust me, they are nothing like digital computers. Holographic memory systems have always interested me. Self learning neural networks are another item that I am sure you are aware of also. Quantum computing? Well we ain't there yet, so who can say. Advances in both A.I. and computers will lead to "Free Will" even if its 'brain' is a deterministic hardware design.

Little Feather

nandu
Associate
Posts: 3395
Joined: Fri May 31, 2002 12:45 am
Location: Kerala, the green country
Contact:

Post by nandu »

Aireal wrote:I recently saw a show called "robosapiens" that delved into the brain and current research in that area. One of the leading scientists who was interviewed cautioned against comparing the brain to current computers.
IMO, comparing the brain to any computer will fail to give the correct analogy. A computer works on a system of zeroes and ones... yes's and no's... blacks and whites. To solve any problem by computer, it has to be broken down into the barest detail, a level where it can be analysed as yes and no. This is the whole challenge behind programming.

The computer is just that: a computing tool. It's not artificial intelligence. We are nowhere near that. A computer does not have intuition, emotion, likes or dislikes. It performs certain duties based on certain instruction. However complicated it may be, broken down to the lowest level, this is what a computer is.

Nandu.
Loka Samastha Sukhino Bhavanthu

Locked