Re: Free Will and more of that irrelevant quantum theory crap

[Hisoka44be]

thanks

[noliketoregister]

I choose free will. But a transistor may be destroyed by a sufficient breakdown voltage and allow the current to reverse direction. '-'

[pyrrho314]

nothing is absolute.

[TJae1]

how about the comment.

[pyrrho314]

nope not even the comment.

since you won't even tell me what is pertinent about something you claim is pertinent, I see it's impossible to drag information out of you that ought to be handy, and as easilly said as "it's pertinent" over and over.

[TJae1]

Nothing is absolute, is an absolutist comment; eh?

[pyrrho314]

no.

[pyrrho314]

>Nothing is absolute, is an absolutist comment; eh?

no, because the full statement is "no human concept can be absolute". Perhaps from the point of light they are absolute, I wouldn't know.

[TJae1]

the human insert, changes the comment; So, yes, I suppose.

[theosophers]

There are field effect transistors which are bidirectional, and allow modulation of alternating currents.

[noliketoregister]

I was using the transistor as a metaphor for how my choice of free will could be overridden given enough opposition.

[pyrrho314]

yes... like the force of magnetism is overcome by random distribution... probably it takes careful work for a living being to keep the will aligned enough to affect at all generally cuasal interactions.

[noliketoregister]

Remember the movie Dirty Harry and the line 'A man's got to know his limitations?' I'm paraphrasing. I think it's the last line in the movie. Anyway, my point is that free will has limits, we can only affect causal interactions within the limits of our capabilities, when we exceed those limits it can actually be fatal. When the external world (lets call it that) creates too much opposition to the will, then the will fails and the external world directs the individual.

[pyrrho314]

all true

[noliketoregister]

I bet you hate it when you can't get a good argument going? lol. Anyway, you previously replied that nothing is absolute, and this caused a bit of a backlash, but to me it was a statement that was not just semantically cogent, but logically self refuting, so therefore being subject to Godel's theorem of incompleteness, accurate and incontestable, the statement itself admitted of limitations to it's own self.

I personally like the way you make me have to think. That's a rare quality today.

[guitaoist]

niiiice.. let's see if he listens 2 us.:)

[TWITfromURANUS]

I'm similar to you in that I am open to exploring ideas about will, determinism, etc...

I believe it's an act of supreme arrogance by some folk (like Gary) to rage about people's 'idiocy' because they 'can't see' what he's saying. Of course we can understand cause & effect -THAT is what ANY fool can grasp (& cling to, to make their world feel safer [because they 'understand']).

Just because you can't imagine anything else, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, GARY.

[pyrrho314]

yep

[EverettsVLOG]

explaining human behavior in terms of willpower and quantum mechanics is simlar to explaining how a transistor works by referring to the electron's desires and family relationships with other electrons.

[pyrrho314]

nice try but no, we will explain everything in terms of everything else without restriction.

[EverettsVLOG]

explain everything in terms of everything else without restriction? So to explain a ball dropping by referring to ghosts or the universe's will etc.? Its bogus... if science worked this way we would never figure anything out, the extraneous ontolgoical commitments would be immense.

[pyrrho314]

define ghosts. Yeah, try it, I think you won't have to spend much time on it. But perhaps think of the context of this... yes we will explain behavior in terms of neurochemicals, and the neurochemicals in terms of QM, and then explaining the choice in terms of QM, and choice in terms of neurochemicals.

Everything in terms of everything else in the system.

The problem... by objective standards you DON'T ever figure anything out. But by relative ones, you do.

[EverettsVLOG]

i feel like your obfuscating on this point. define ghost? an immaterial conscious being named dilbert that makes everything attract each other by a 'dilberational' force. are you saying this is jsut as good an explanation as any other? My argument against your 'will' idea is that is is a terrible explanation compared to other available ones.

[pyrrho314]

all you are arguing is putting somethings in terms of other things, will not work as well as putting them in terms of something else. In fact we tried the "world is made of ghosts and spirits" thing, but we also tried "the world is comprehensible and regular" and the latter is just much more useful. It's by doing them all and comparing them we come to prefer one more than another.

[EverettsVLOG]

no, nobody has ever posited the dilbert ghost before. you are reasoning from analogy here. if you want to reason loosely from analogy then all i need to do is show that 'will' is much more similar to 'ghosts' than molecular explanation. and it is.

[pyrrho314]

if someone finds it fruitful they can tell the story in any terms they like, it may only be fiction, and may be bad fiction. I am trying to tell terms according to an ascetic that appeals to me... with larger things told in terms of smaller things, and dependencies aligned.

[EverettsVLOG]

right, im arguing that will may be a fiction much like saying the sun wants to rise is a fiction. i think it is safe to suppose all explanatory devices to be fictions unless they pass some sort of stringent critera... and i do not see 'will' passing any reasonable set of critera

[dartplayer170]

Everett, does 'life' pass stringent criteria?

[jogayot]

ha ha... i've been behind recently, but i'm glad i've clicked on this thumbnail. there is somthing to be said about the fact that inmendham can not admit free will if he wants to convinve people to "follow" him...

[fijberto]

are dreams considered random to some degree?

[pyrrho314]

interesting question but I don't think so, in general, the random stuff in dreams seems to be a consequent of your emotions... it seems random but the guy with the cake and crab hands was probably a metaphor for an emotion, or possibly, signs of bad digestion... still "causal".  But what do you think?

[fijberto]

I think the general theme/plot of the dream are probably not random as they tend to correspond to some kind of desire or fear or memory or something of that nature however I find within a dream certain objects and such are out of place and I wonder if there isn't some kind of randomness to that. Maybe the mind has some kind of random generating function ,much like the one used in computer programs, to manufacture dreams.

[TJae1]

1 comment, is 1 comment more.

[pyrrho314]

please, do you know anything about the concept signal to noise? now THERE is an important measure.

check wikipedia.

[TJae1]

... I'm here 4 ya, pyrrho XD

[TJae1]

1% & countin'

[TJae1]

Evolution (tis, tis) Luv this :D

[TJae1]

pyrrho @ 60; he's jerry lewis :P

[DJBerber]

Experience causes thoughts, those thoughts spark chemical processes and cause emotions and action and can be attributed to the cells and their products to cause this function but it useless to say randomness would affect it, we are slowly understanding how the human brain really works, but until you get to the smallest of particles of anything randomness is useless, and I feel has more to do with probability of placement in space time of those particles, but we have will over the larger pieces.

[yeahwotevaman]

LOL @ the last bit.

I'm not so sure about your idea of will power though. I base individual autonomy on the fact that all individual living organisms have an agenda specific to them (the primary one being to survive). In order to eat a steak for example you must subjegate a cow into becoming your food. The same applies to human on human predatory behavior and authoritarianism. It all involves someone deciding that somebody else is little more than an object to be used by them.

[2bsirius]

I've finally found something I STRONGLY disagree with you about...I don't agree with Inmendham btw...I might try to make a video about my misgivings on this...That's the best way to see exactly what your position is and where my thinking may or may not be flawed...The fun in this is figuring it out, and not in being right about everything...You seem to know that, so even though I disagree on this, I'm willing to concede that it may be because I don't fully understand your postion...

Interesting

[pyrrho314]

bring it on!!!! rumble in the jungle!!  j/k... cool, differences make conversation.

[2bsirius]

It also makes wars, but not in this case.

[mavidbabae]

i dont know what to believe here, but i dont want to make my choce based on what i FEEL sounds right, i struggle with the FREE WILL concept these days, i felt a while ago that we have 0% free will as we dont control the environment and ppl we interact with from birth, urm but i think we have a tiny bit of free will now, i think it is more to do with how u handle a suituation than an actual decision however, i dont know about this quontum physics though

ty for video , interesting as always

[Geodge]

Hey, the bubblegum is perfectly suitable - when you're responding to Inmendham, it's important that you dress accordingly :)

Pyrrho-your videos always sound like they're performed at the edge of a lake, under a starry sky, before an audience of 9 million frogs. "Coming to you from the Moonlit shores of Camp Tippecanoe" Only thing missing are the s'mores.

[TJae1]

That's what I implied; finally.

[TrexXanChen]

or you might have taken my comment a little too seriously

[TrexXanChen]

your argument is invalid because your face is bubblegum

[pyrrho314]

lol, I had to match the troll faces of inmendham and this is all I could do. I understand it means the will is enslaved, not free, but then all that means is it's time for the uprising

[TJae1]

Lol, WtF.

[TrexXanChen]

but in all seriousness, i'm open to the possibility that some kind of indeterminacy exists, but if it does, i'm not yet able to comprehend how it equates with the kind of free will most people seem to think we have. if i were to approach someone and ask if they believe in free will, they would most likely say yes, but if i rephrased the question and asked them if they believe that they can make a choice completely unaffected by any determining factors, they might change their mind.

[TrexXanChen]

and even if they do have the ability to select an option completely at random, against any kind of inclination they have, doesn't that mean that it is only because either randomness has become a natural part of their personality, due to deterministic reasons, or because randomness simply exists as some kind of built in component to nature, in which case, how can they take credit for it?

[pyrrho314]

what if there is no randomness, just the will of somone elses choice that YOU can't predict. Then the question about selection is answered... it's perspective, one persons choice is anothers "random" event. Particles have no cognitive machinery, nothing to base a choice on, and so show statistical regularity, aka randomness.

[yeahwotevaman]

AD HOMINID!