Mike
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So_crates, this is from page 1 of this thread. I colored the pertinent lines in red.
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Not a change at all. All of my chapters and the things I said around them focus on free will being natural, and not supernatural. If you think this is a change, you've not read my explanations carefully. Go back and review, so you can catch up on what you missed.
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Does that mean you are unable to place your bet? You do not want to take a stand on free will being natural or supernatural? How about a temporary stand, or a preference? I took the stand that free will was supernatural for many years, but eventually the evidence caused me to change about 9 years ago, and now I believe it is natural.
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When we speak, the idiom of "the five senses" has a figurative meaning, and I think you are getting lost in the minutia of the technicalities. I will not stop using the idiom. It works for everyone but you and a few others who simply want to pick at me and de-rail the topic. I'll bet you can't remember what the context was in which I used the idiom and you wanted to bust me for not knowing enough. Can you remember without looking it up? I doubt it because YOU are the troll here and you were only looking for a way to derail. I like the idiom. I will be using it again.
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I remember having a big argument with my 9th Grade General Science teacher. This was 1964. He said we had an 6th sense: the sense of wetness. I challenged him on that, saying that our sense of wetness is not a direct sense but a deduced sensation. Many argue that Aristotle had it pretty close in the sense that the sense of touch can have several components: temperature, and friction, from which we can deduce wetness. The "sense" of body position can be argued as a component of touch. I like the video you supplied, but it is Philosophy, and I doubt if much can be accomplished by us getting commonly familiar with all the senses and all the components and all the deduced sensations. We hardly do anything logical connected with taste, smell, or touch. Logic seems to be relegated to sight and sound. From that perspective we only have 2 senses. I used to often try to clean windows past Sunset, in the dark. My inspiration was Tommy, the Pinball Wizard who was deaf, dumb, and blind. He used his sense of smell to play pinball. My glass cleaning in the dark went by sound and touch, from many years of experience.
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I never said I represent them; only that I learned from them, and had opportunity to make small contributions. You should focus on the IDEAS I am talking about. You'd have a better time that way, than playing Sherlock Holmes and focused on my life. It's ideas that matter here, not me.
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No contradiction when you realize I am talking about two different focus targets, at two different focus intensities. Take a closer look at the context.
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It's called softballs, not padding. I was making it comfortable to deal with the hidden crescendo: that free will is either natural or super-natural. Have you decided which you believe it is. I am putting my money on natural. Place your bet.
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This is true. These items of free will and determinism are not simple objects at all. But in a sense, processes do exist and are real also. Life is a process. You don’t see any life in an atom; just a neat little machine. All of Chemistry is making even more nifty machines with collections of atoms. Nano-mechanics is now happening where machines start to imitate one cell organisms. All of Biology is wet machinery, that can do some fantastic processes the little atoms cannot do. Science and biology and medicine have progressed much in our time, and more and more processes of the human body are being understood. Broken people are being fixed in lots of ways. I think science can still find more useful information on the human decision making process IF it is natural. If free will is spiritual, then I am wasting my time with minFW. But if it is natural, some if it should be discoverable. I am merely guessing here as to how that discovery process can benefit from a theoretical deterministic free will mechanism. But that is what I have come up with: a deterministic free will mechanism. All the other ideas of free will that I have seen, going back many centuries, avoid the idea of mechanism and biology. Free will has been treated as a semi-miraculous spiritual entity for 1000 years, and it was secularized several hundred years ago by Philosophers to be less religious, but is still anti-science. I am trying to say that free will is natural biology, and that is the bottom line here for my ideas. */*/*/* I haven’t gotten to my response to your response to my response… Like I said it is complicated, but I think there are a few points in there that bear mentioning. … sooner or later. Please tell OldSkool that I am on it, and it is the weekend, and school is out.
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The “five senses” has become an idiom, and no one in Neuroscience blinks when that phrase is used. Any other senses are NOT well known or understood by the non-technical crowd. I noticed you did not offer any new senses for consideration. I am all ears. A grad student friend of mine at UCSD was studying electric fish, that have a sense for electric charge buildup, or something like that. We got into wondering if we may have the same sense, but don’t get to use it often enough to know it’s there. Five senses works for me and all those to whom I am writing.
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No. Not desperate, and not trying to have ulterior motives. Just interested. I was interested in free will versus determinism approximately 4 years before taking the PFAL class. Besides, there IS NO substantial theology we were given by VPW on free will, just those 3 bare tips I got from him that have helped guide me in my research. If ever I was desperate, it was when I started realizing that Roger Penrose, Quantum, and Godel would not be helping me in my studies on free will. I had been counting on all 3, but they all fizzled out around 2002. For several years I didn’t know WHAT I believed about free will. But then an astounding idea came that rescued me. I have never mentioned this here, because it is so strange. But it was the solution to the mirror riddle that inspired minFW about 9 years ago. Oddly, Daniel Dennett tried his hand at the mirror riddle some 35 years ago, so I sent him my solution. He and Douglas Hofstadter (the Godel man) collaborated on a book called “The Mind’s Eye” long ago, and they included a little bit on the mirror riddle. When I sent my mirror solution to Hofstadter he wrote back and told me it was the same solution he came up when he was a teenager. His father won a Nobel Prize in Physics, so I was not too embarrassed. No, not desperate. Yes, very fascinated. */*/*/*/* And ANOTHER THING you all get wrong about me, my position, my morality, and my writing (and BTW there are a lot of things you get wrong!), is my motivation(s) for posting. I do want people to come back to written PFAL to get blessed, but I’ve said that a thousand ways, already. I am not so focused on preaching PFAL as much lately, ESPECIALLY on this Free Will thread. On this thread, and the NT Canon thread, I am exercising my writing skills and my explanatory skills. I am learning to communicate this topic of free will to a different crowd, and that brings me a lot of benefits. With the canon thread, it was pretty much only Walter, Bernita, and Bo Reheard that I ever discussed that topic with, and that was 45 years ago, so my canon writing got a revival and great benefits in that thread. I did this same thing 15 years ago with two threads on the mirror riddle, which had NOTHING to do with PFAL. Then I figured we all needed some comedy relief from the “mike wars” and I think it worked…. a little. One very specific benefit I get from discussing these “unfinished” topics of mine here is boilerplate. Most of my 5 posted chapters came from Facebook boilerplate. I get to generate more here. Twinky invited me to her evidence thread, and when this one runs its course (which I thought it had a few times) then I want to expand my “evidence” horizons. I’ve been eyeing the evidence topic for many years, and have a large “Evidence Archive” folder to review and post. I’ve never read the contents of that folder, until just this morning when I reorganized it and got rid of duplicate files. So, you can relax your PFAL phobia a little. In these threads I am more expanding my horizons.
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This is interesting and I put it in the cue of the responses I am working on. BTW, you prefaced this with OldSkool's scolding me for not responding to your set of questions. I did respond to them the night before, and also received your response to my response. It is getting long and convoluted, but I may find a way to deal with it. I'm doing a lot of my writing off-line to avoid being distracted by posting flurries, especially the disingenuous ones.
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Oh Pa Leeeeeze! I went to this thread on your recommendation, if I remember right. Then, afterwards, I was not so happy that I acted that impulsively without reading more of it first. So I backed off.
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No, you got this entirely wrong. A natural man with no spirit still has free will, and can believe in his heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, and he can say with his 5-senses brain that Jesus is lord. THAT gets him born again and having spirit. Now that 5-senses saying wasn't REALLY saying Jesus is lord, but it is not required for him to REALLY say (via S.I.T.) Jesus is lord to get born again. AFTER the new birth this man, now of body/soul/spirit, can S.I.T. in order to REALLY say Jesus is lord. No double bind at all. It was your jumbled understanding that bound you.
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I answered all of them last night, on page 35 at the 75% point, 14 hours ago. So_crates did not accept my answers in a very long response on page 36, 11 hours ago, and I am in the process of responding to him.
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If the determinism of the universe stated man did not receive spirit (at least for a time) what changed that allowed Jesus Christ to get spirit? The determinism of the universe never stated that, that I know of. Determinism is a 5-senses thing, as is science. They are “ignorant” of all things spiritual. Spirit never comes up in scientific discussions about determinism. I believe Jesus got spirit the same way any other humans got spirit upon them, prior to Pentecost: he prepared his mind for it and was willing to do the work. In the OT it says that if God had His way, all of Israel could have spirit and be able to prophesy. He was willing and able, and Jesus was ready to receive it. */*/*/*/*/*/* If Jesus Christ was a natural man, and as you've stated previously, Natural man is like a beast, the how did he get the free will to do what he had to do to get spirit? If Christ got spirit through water baptism, why don't we? Jesus was a man of body and soul prior to his baptism like natural man, but he was NOT of the lineage of Adam, and not owned by the adversary like all other body and soul humans. So, I hesitate to call him a natural man, in that sense. Either way, he had a human body and that includes all the DNA that grows a brain with decision abilities, and learning abilities, and eventually with some form of Biological free will, which I think may be minFW. This is a natural process. It works in spite of natural men being Biblical brute beasts. Animals have soul, and they can make decisions, and they can learn. These abilities are severely muted in animals compared to humans, so if animals could have any minFW, it would be VERY, VERY minimal. I don’t know of Jesus getting spirit from water baptism, but it does happen around that same time… just after I think. I think he got it by believing and wanting it. */*/*/*/*/*/*/* If God can only communicate with what he is, spirit, how did He impregnate Mary? I am proposing a major SUPPLEMENT for the class, to better explain this idea that God cannot communicate with man any other way than by spirit. I think nearly everyone gets this wrong, so it should be amended in the way the class is run. I would add this to the class coordinator’s syllabus to be read to students or handed out in printed form. God cannot REALLY communicate with man without spirit. God wants deep, detailed, involved discussion with His kids, and that can only be done via spirit. It is much like how “No man can REALLY say that Jesus is Lord, but by holy spirit.” Any natural man can say “Jesus is Lord” but that is a crude mouthing of it only, with no depth and heart behind it. To REALLY say Jesus is Lord mean to do it spiritually, like the Father seeks, via S.I.T. Similarly, God can do all sorts of phenomena to get some small point across. He used phenomena that the children of Israel without spirit could see, but with Moses, who had spirit the communication was rich and detailed, and a two-way conversation at times. With most phenomena that is able to get the attention of a natural man, it also freaks them out, which cuts down on the quality of communication. But with Mary, I think she had spirit. Mary’s family had intense believers in it, with angelic visitations, a miraculous pregnancy, and John the Baptist having spirit in the womb. It looks to me that both cousin Elizabeth and Mary prophesied. */*/*/*/*/*/*/* Angels communicated with Joseph telling him not to worry about Mary, does this mean angels are more powerful than God, as they didn't need the spirit-spirit connection? God often used angels to do His bidding in the OT and a little in the NT. This needed spirit-spirit connection is for RICH communication I explained above. */*/*/*/*/*/*/* At best you won't decode him [Dennett]. You'll offer an opinion on what you think he's saying. Remember all those term papers and dissertations on what the white whale in Moby Dick means? … And, in all probability, he probably writes that way because he's trying to give himself wiggle room if somebody challenges him. … People also often write word salad style so people will read into the text what they want to read into the text. … Writers with nothing to hide, hide nothing. They write clearly and to the point. …Top of Form I mentioned that I am not sure at all what he saying, just guessing in places, and getting some of those guesses confirmed by his videos. As far as Dennett giving himself some wiggle room, there may be something to that. There are two angles to this. The first angle comes from the history of the book. Dennett teases by not revealing his hand very clearly until late in Elbow RoomR. (This seems less the case in Freedom Evolves.) After seeing his strategy and his admissions, another piece fell into place from a clue in the Preface to Elbow Room. The chapters of that book originally were individual lectures held at Oxford University, famously called the John Locke Lectures. As a guest speaker he surely wanted his audience to attend every lecture. Planning his lectures must have included a strong element of wanting to keep the audience coming back after the first lecture. The best way to do that is to not tell the whole story that first night, but dangle some bait, a teaser to keep interest at its highest. So, the early chapters are very far from explanations of DD’s theory, and instead he spends a lot of time on every other thinker’s approach to free will. He seems to be trying to cover the whole subject, including its historic dead ends. On a completely different perspective about Dennett’s brand of FW, is my guess that he may actually offer no model of how his brand of FW (DenFW) works. Instead of proposing a model that incorporates his brand of DenFW, Dennett seems to merely be discussing the POSSIBILITY of such a model existing. The key to remember with this item is that a reader can’t expect Dennett to QUICKLY lay out a blueprint for making his version of FW happen. On that point I tried my best to differ from him, and bring as early as possible the strange timing aspects of minFW. The OTHER ANGLE to Dennett’s holding his cards close to the vest is computer phobia. I dared to come out in my Chapter 3 that I am proposing that in sense we are just robots, VERY sophisticated ones. I am able to talk this way in this Century because of the great advances and great expectations in A.I. compared to when Dennett was preparing his lectures in early 1980s. Computer phobia, fired by the 1968 movie “2001 A Space Odyssey,” was a big deal in our culture. I feel Dennett may have held back to avoid freaking people out.
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I find that difficult to believe, but if true, I’d be VERY happy to have a summary from you how his ideas work in that book. I mentioned in my Dennett chapter that I have NEVER found anyone who could explain “Elbow Room” to me. It is a well known enigma in the academic world, due to Dennett’s great clarity and popularity for other topics. Can you give me pages where Dennett says if he believes in determinism or not? Can you give me the pages where Dennett says if he believes in Libertarian Free Will or not? I can find those answers in his videos, but can’t in his books, though “Freedom Evolves” is a lot more clear on the determinism issue. Can I ask you other questions about “Elbow Room” ? */*/*/* Dennett needs to be decoded, IMO, because for decades NO ONE I know has been able to explain in any detail (to me) how his theory on free will works. Just the opposite has often occurred: many good thinkers have told me they are baffled by his free will theories. My history with Dennett’s FW theory goes way back to the mid-1990s when I attempted to read his first edition (1984) of “Elbow Room.” Looking back on that, I see my path with his FW theory over the decades as confused and strewn with misunderstandings and miscommunications. …mostly my fault Nonetheless, Dennett has also guided and helped me along that path as I produced my theory on FW. I did glean many items from his writings, but have not yet fully seen the “big picture” of what he has in print. It is only in recent years that I have found in Dennett’s videos a much clearer presentation on some of the ideas, compared to his books. */*/* I saw Dennett speak at UCSD around 1995 when he was a guest speaker at the Philosophy Department. He had a bestselling book out at the time, “Consciousness Explained” and everyone had been avidly reading it. The topic of free will did not come up much in that book, but he was so good in explaining things that I wanted to see him and find out more. I wondered if he had worked on free will much. The grad students in attendance that I asked this question of said, “Yeah, he has a book called ‘Elbow Room,’ but nobody understands it.” I got a copy right away. I probably did a much better job of not understanding Elbow Room (ER) than those grad students. …LoL… I did get one thing, though, that totally stuck with me. It’s the subtitle of the book, and some of the references DD made to it in the bewildering text within: “The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting” It had not occurred to me then, that there were alternate varieties of free will out there to compare. Slowly, after that, over the decades I have come to realize that most ideas on free will are tainted by old religion, and then glamorized with modern secular and metaphysical terms, only to be something far removed from actual real life. So, I first started my attempt to “crack the Dennett code” in the mid-1990s, with minimal success. But quickly, I also did savor the wonderful notion that we should pursue the types of free will in our theorizing that are “worth wanting.” */*/*/*/* If you decide to look at Elbow Room again, you may find these workarounds to his dense text style helpful. This is just an outline and each item is expanded in my chapter 4. Item #1 - Pro Determinism, Anti LibFW Item #2 - New Edition to “Elbow Room” Item #3 - Timing is Everything Item #4 - Videos Help Item #5 - Third Party Help Item #6 - Dennett Teases Item #7 - Robotic Performance Denial Item #8 - Label Confusion Item #9 - Dennett’s Bait and Switch Item #10 - Dennett-Harris Debate */*/*/* If you want to check my text here is where that chapter are in this thread: Locations of minFW at GreaseSpot Chap 1 - The Need page 1 at ~ 40% mark Chap 2 - The Theory page 2 20% Chap 3 - Minimal Robot Selves page 2 75% Chap 4 - Origins of minFW (Dennett) page 4 20% Chap 5 - Determinism page 5 25%
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Not quite. I admitted that I TRIED MY BEST to steal it, but it is so hard to understand Dennett that I am not sure if I succeeded. Here... I'll just paste the text here Minimalistic Free Will Chapter 4 - Origins of minFW ########################## I did my very best to steal as many of Daniel Dennett’s ideas as I possibly could, in formulating this theory on minFW. This was NOT an easy heist, because Dennett, who is world renown for clear explanations, is unusually difficult to understand when it comes to the topic of free will. I have found others with this same complaint. This is an odd and complex story; hence it needs its own chapter. But seriously, I really do want to plead guilty to Attempted Plagiarism of Dennett’s ideas on “free will.” It would actually be a happy day for me, to see page numbers and proof that I succeeded in this attempted piggy-back, in building my theory. What I wrote earlier, in previous chapters about minFW was RICHLY lifted from Daniel Dennett, to the best of my knowledge. I mixed in plenty of tiny pieces from other scientists as well, but not nearly enough to be charged with plagiarism. If I understand him right, then what I wrote I got largely from Dennett, as I’ll explain. I’m pretty sure I succeeded in this theft. I say “pretty” sure because this is an ongoing work. I’m still studying his two books on this, “Elbow Room” and “Freedom Evolves.” Dennett needs to be decoded, IMO, because for decades NO ONE I know has been able to explain in any detail (to me) how his theory on free will works. Just the opposite has often occured: many good thinkers have told me they are baffled by his free will theories. There are various reasons that his FW texts are a bit indecipherable, and I have been documenting their workarounds as I discover them. I want to help, because I’ve slowly seen many points of light in his work. Let me tell you more about this long story with Dennett.
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One of the reasons I brought my minFW hypothesis here for review was that for years I was often presenting it to people who were more scientifically oriented and very atheistic, and even communistic. It was just the mix of the people that showed up for those particular Facebook discussion groups. But here people are a less scientifically oriented, and more leaning towards believing in God. As a result I get a different slant of views on my text. I couldn’t discuss any of the spirit issues in Facebook groups because it would be too distracting for them. I wouldn’t be able to discuss the scientific stuff if I brought up anything spiritual whatsoever. I dared to do it here and there but very sparingly. Now here we’ve discussed (in between all of the hooting and hollering) a couple of the spiritual parts of my ideas. I explained a few times why I limited this early draft of my book the most simple situation, which is the body and soul man, with no spirit. But there’s one angle to this whole spiritual perspective that has eluded discussion here. It eluded me too in my thinking, because of the people I was hanging out with in discussing this. But just today I thought new angle I had not thought through. None of us have brought up the idea of Jesus Christ spending his first 30 years as a body and soul man, not having spirit. According to the Bible, and my minFW hypothesis, Jesus had free will before he got spirit. How DID Jesus Christ grow his free will? …if that’s how it works. Or how did he get it installed? …if that’s how it works. One of the fundamental elements of my minFW hypothesis involves trial and error. Did Jesus have to go through trial and error for developing minFW? I’ve often wondered if the very young child Jesus ever had to be scolded or corrected or punished. Did he get the flu? I’ve often thought about him first realizing who he was and what kind of a job he had to do. We’ve been encouraged to do that kind of thinking often. But I never thought through: how did he develop freewill as a very young child growing into the “age of reason” traditionally regarded as fully formed by seven years old, when we usually see children developing their own decision making process. Have any of you parents ever wondered how Jesus developed obedience and will power as a child, as you watched your children grow? I’ve often wondered if Jesus had to be punished as a child but I never heard anybody talk about it. This might be an area where my theory could be falsifiable, because it is centered on trial and error learning. Did Jesus have to use trial and error in his learning as a young child?
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I fully admit all this in my chapter 4. It sounds like you haven't read it.
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I already quoted from that book in my Chapter 4. It is doubtful he said it the same ways as I did, but the idea is there. I like to paraphrase, summarize, or use hyperbole at times. The book is notorious for being dense and hard to understand. Even other superstars in the field complain that Dennett's "Elbow Room" is either overly difficult or nonsense. After decades of complaints he finally re-did it in a 2nd edition, but it still is difficult. He seems to spend a lot of time on other people's ideas and positions, never come out and say what HIS position is. MAYBE he does say it, but it's to much in academic technical lingo, and I miss it. He doesn't condemn Libertarian Free will anywhere, I don't think. Plus he never quite says he believes in determinism. This could be because the book's origins are relatively ancient. This denseness is completely fixed in his videos, which are totally modern. Dennett believes in determinism. Dennett does NOT believe in Libertarian Free Will. Dennett believes in some other kind of "free will worth wanting" as his famous phrase goes. But in both his books and his videos he never comes up with a mechanism that would demonstrate his ideas. I kept looking for it for years, and never found it, so I invented one myself, based on his hints. In my chapter 4 I go into 10 tips for understanding Dennett's position on free will. I've been trying to crack the Dennett code since the mid 1990s. I met him briefly then, and have corresponded with him a little since then. Many thinkers complain about Dennett changing the definition of free will, just like you folks don't like me doing it. I got the idea from Dennett.
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It is in the subtitle of the book. It pops up in LOTS of places. If you want to read it MAKE SURE you get the 2nd edition. The first was pretty bad.
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Oops. I mistook Socrates an d Nathan.
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It sounds like you are STILL aghast. Did you see the subtitle in Dennett's "Elbow Room" yet? His talks about all sorts of ways FW can be defined, and says we should shop around to see which one works best.
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Right. This is NOT finished science; it's the frontier. No one has this stuff nailed down. Carroll says so towards the end. He admits he doesn't know for sure. Here is his last sentence. I totally agree with it (with my bold fonts): "What we have to say is, 'Given the choices I make, what is the future that I'm going to help bring about?' So like it or not, the world that we really know and live in is one where our choices matter. That's where meaning comes from, from recognizing that in the real world of the knowledge that we have and our computational boundedness, we have some responsibility for bringing about what is going to happen next." Old fashioned Libertarian FW would have those bold fonted words different. The "help" would be deleted, and the "some" would be chanted to "total." So, Carroll is departing from classical free will here, like I do. */*/*/*/* Usually, in this big debate, Compatibilism is defined as finding ways Libertarian FW and determinism can be reconciled. I am an unconventional Compatibilist in that I am working on a way to have minFW and determinism reconciled.
