[Wittrs] Re: Is the brain a hammer?
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 02 May 2010 02:40:10 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "BruceD" <blroadies@...> wrote:
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:
>
> > Is the brain a hammer?
>
> It is more useful to think of the brain as a hammer that I wield, well
> or poorly, then think of it causing the nails to be driven where the
> concept of mistake has no grip
>
If you think so then we are nowhere near agreement. I can pick up and wield a
hammer, applying it to one thing to produce a result. Do you wield your brain
to render yourself conscious? Do you seriously think that is a sensible
locution? (If you think it is then I would suggest that any sort of linguistic
nonsense would pass this particular muster and then there's no way to go on
here.)
> You deny these
>
> > That we are programmed computers (in the sense of being automatons).
>
> Make freedom consistent with causality
>
Why do you think it is denied? You seem to imagine that a causal claim is a
claim that we are like clocks, predictable, if rather complex, machinery. But a
physical universe is not necessarily a totally predictable one and freedom is a
function of not knowing outcomes and making choices in the absence of that
knowledge. Sufficient complexity for that (well beyond the mechanism of even a
highly complex clock) is all that's required, even if one thinks they can
imagine some godlike perspective from which all is known and all pre-ordained.
But even if such a perspective were possible, made any sort of sense, it is so
totally beyond us as to be irrelevant to our condition.
I am also reminded of that paper Peter Brawley directed us to on Analytic in
which a case was made that with parallel processing unpredictability was
introduced into a limited system because of the possibility of interactivity.
How much more unpredictability in a system that has no comprehensible limits,
such as the universe? And isn't the brain said, at least by some, to be the
most complex of things known in the universe?
> > That this is best described as a causal chain.
>
> A causal account without a chain is an account too soon aborted.
>
> bruce
>
>
A slogan, nothing more.
SWM
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