- David Roemer
- Brooklyn, NY
- United States
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Materialists and those who think humans evolved from animals are irrational.
The human mind is structured like the scientific method. At the lowest level, humans observe things. This requires paying attention. At the level of intelligence, humans ask questions and invent possible answers. At the level of reflective judgment, humans marshal evidence and decide what is true or just probable. The next level is free will, that is, deciding what to do with our bodies.
Materialists say animals pay attention and are intelligent and rational. They don't say, however, that animals have free will. What they say is that free will is an illusion.
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Mitch SMith 50+
Mind is just an extrapolation of reactive processes that define "self".
Self is a pattern that has the property of persistence.
In the very simple self-organising patterns, there is no choice - the process of stimulus to reaction is linear, so there is no "free will" per se.
In the much more complex self-perpetuating systems such as humans, it appears that there are a greater number of pathways for reaction to result in self-persistence - one can eat the orange, or the rabbit, or both. However, those choices will have a path of optimisation such that the self might "feel like eating the orange today, and feel like eating the rabbit the next day". These "feelings" will arise from the internal state of energy - whether they are conscious or not. The sense of free will is illusory.
Rationality is also illusory - because it is relative to a self perspective. If the optimisation is processed in a self, it will be determined, but that determination may not be sensed by an external self. The detection of optimal reaction is also sensitive to framing: rational to one, rational to another, rational to the group, rational to the species, rational to the universe - all can have different "rational" answers.
"Paying attention" is a result of having an optimisation map in excess of the field of primary perception.
Primary field of perception is tied to the field of senses but extends it somewhat using causality maps. THe extension afforded by perception gives rise to an expanded field of agency(options) from which the self gains an expanded field of advantage(the subset of options resulting in self-persistence)
These perceptual maps(information) grow with experience and become too vast fo the sense-bound primary field of perception to process in gestalt - so a finite field of attention arises that is prompted by current sensory input and ambient map associations. For human self structure check the TED talk by Damasio.
David Roemer
Mitch SMith 50+
I presume that you are not on a low-calouie diet simply to torture yourself?
What people get confused about is when they contemplate the loss of their "free will" and equate that with a loss of freedom.
You, and all living creatures will do exactly the optimal thing according to the options you perceive and not anything less.
Freedom does not equate to free-will it equates to your field of agency.
It is your field of agency that directly determines your chances of survival - if it is threatened or reduced, you will feel mortal fear.
Because it is your field of agency from which your optimal options arise.
We make a man a slave by reducing his agency to include only what the master wants - on threat of death.
It is your mortal fear that makes you stick to your diet - not free will.
David Roemer
What evidence is there that fear causes me to stick to my diet, not my decision to diet?
Mitch SMith 50+
This is just a list of your constraints.
You do what you determine as your optimal path - between your constraints towards your survival there is only one optimal path at any given time.
Since you also include the word "God" I presume you also intend to survive beyond body-death.
Your inclusion of the phrase "responsible for my actions" indicates an acknowledgement of the threat that others pose to your field of agency.
This is all understandable.
John Dunbar 10+
Your low calorie diet has to do with some sort of fear or pain associated with you being overweight. I probably wont be able to say it as well as Mitch but id like to invoke freud into this argument. The pleasure principle is the idea that humans seek pleasure and avoid pain. Freud claimed this was not realistic and im sure you could think of many examples that show how seeking pleasure could kill you quite quickly and defeat the purpose of these base survival mechanisms. Therefore, he posited the reality principle, which seeks pleasure and avoids pain in connection with the truths of the external world. To summarize, you are on a low calorie diet for one of two reasons you see the outcome of this diet as a pleasurable outcome or you seek to avoid the pain of not being on this diet. Your diet is a product of being guided by unconscious forces that in the healthy brain wish to be social, replicate life, and survive.
David Roemer