BREAKING NEWS: Sarah Palin says something.

Originally posted by inimalist
this is sort of what I meant by the conflict between scientific findings in psychology and the assumptions of Western philosophy.

What we believe about individual people, in terms of the west, in terms of judicial "fault" and illegal "motives" for actions (in the Canadian judicial system known as mens rea) are based on what I would call a "rational actor" theory of man, where we assume that people, even sane ones like ourselves, calculate and are motivated by rational goals that we can justify and that we have some sort of will over our bodies and our mind. However, when tested empirically, we find much the opposite, and if you want, I can outline a bunch of these things. For instance, what you believe to be a constant, ongoing "stream of consciousness" is really part of your left brain assembling the best story from the available evidence around you, with predictable biases, and able to be tricked in specific ways. Also, when you think you are motivated to do something, your body has already prepared to do it, a significant amount of time before you are even aware of your desire to do it, meaning that your "subconscious" has already planned and prepared actions for you, long before the "conscious" mind is ever aware that you even wanted to act.

Questions about dualism, and free will, and of the "rational individual" sort of become almost nonsensical in this perspective.

That being said, I would never suggest that individual people can't or shouldn't be held responsible for their actions. Whether or not psychology suggests that you have no free will is no more relevant than whether atomic physics suggests you have free will, when considering the law. imho, the law should only be used against those who prove a threat to society, thus it is justified to take away their freedom, so to protect citizens, dangerous people must be dealt with in some way, regardless of the existance or nonexistance of free will.

Ultimately, though, from my view, if you decided to buy a gun and shoot people tomorrow, "responsibility" would be on the cascade of factors that lead to that decision, be they internal in response to external, or external in response to internal, or whatever. Your behaviours cannot be removed from the environment they occur in. Every thought you have is, in some way or another, influenced by the environment you are in, and to some degree, vice versa. In terms of the law, you should probably be forced into some sort of psychological evaluation and/or inprisoned, regardless of who or what might be at fault.

thats exactly it though. There is no place where the "person" begins. an organism cannot be define outside of its environment. Everything you do or think is influenced by what is going on around you. There is no "you" that exists independently.

hrm. so you really are claiming we are simple automatons, unable to actually claim any control over any action. you keep saying the 'person' is a part of this grand unification, yet in the same breath you say the person's every thought and action is dictated by the environment and that we have no say or can't even realize that we, as 'individuals' don't exist. i may impact the environment around me, but any impact i have is BASED on what the surrounding environment dictates i do. it doesn't sound like the 'person' is a 'part' of this system at all, but is rather an unwitting victim who, even if he is aware of it, can't do anything about it anyway. we're discussing this issue, but everything i say is simply a product of what's around me. i'm only a tool in a much larger system. it eschews responsibility for any individual act. to accept it as true would also set the catholic faith to go into cardiac arrest. beyond all that though, i find that few, frankly, depressing. 🙁

Originally posted by leonidas
hrm. so you really are claiming we are simple automatons, unable to actually claim any control over any action. you keep saying the 'person' is a part of this grand unification, yet in the same breath you say the person's every thought and action is dictated by the environment and that we have no say or can't even realize that we, as 'individuals' don't exist. i may impact the environment around me, but any impact i have is BASED on what the surrounding environment dictates i do. it doesn't sound like the 'person' is a 'part' of this system at all, but is rather an unwitting victim who, even if he is aware of it, can't do anything about it anyway. we're discussing this issue, but everything i say is simply a product of what's around me. i'm only a tool in a much larger system. it eschews responsibility for any individual act. to accept it as true would also set the catholic faith to go into cardiac arrest. beyond all that though, i find that few, frankly, depressing. 🙁

Originally posted by Mindship
How Tao of you.

Warhammer 40k has nothing to do with it

Originally posted by The MISTER
Then the distinction between individuals must be how well they self-program. I agree with you on everyone and everything being forced to respond to the circumstances at hand. Obviously people have shown enough ability to control their impulses that it is expected in most civilizations. When individuals fail to be able to control impulses that society deems extremely dangerous they should be presented as either responsible or not responsible enough to be held solely accountable. I have to admit though that there's no denying the connection in the "Tiller the baby killer" murder. Also the connotations concerning the term " Take them out " are unmistakable. That's f***ed up.

the thing is, there is no "self-programmer". What you experience as your "self" is really just constructed from many other sensory/memory/cognitive systems.

"controlling" your "impulses" relies much less on "rational thought" than it does on preconscious simulations of sensory consequences weighed against previous expectations and desires.

In fact, the reason most people "choose" not to be violent almost certainly comes from our genetics and our normal interactions in society, not some idea that we are "good" people who want to do "good" things. It is these genetic biases and experiences that lead us to believe that "good" is peaceful coexistance, not the other way around.

Originally posted by The MISTER
Don't get too down, we aren't as predictable as that! The evidence lies right here in this forum. Humans create and share new ideas all the time. Our ideas are influenced by our environment but we can take individual credit for our personal views. We constantly strive to create a new idea, one that is unique and very much our own. The words in this post could not have been created by another Mister, nobody could predict my post exactly. This ability to create new things breaks us out of being automatic creatures. I just created something new and new things have unpredictable effects on the ideas they may cause to be created.

I hate to say it, but we ARE as predictable as that. When we can reduce the amount of variability in a system, human behaviour is very predictable.

Think of it like this. Imagine you had a machine. Instead of being made of 200 000 parts, like a giant tractor or something, imagine it is built of billions of parts, and can constantly change how these parts are assembled in order to deal with incomming stimuli.

Now, compare this machine to a computer, which only has a keyboard and maybe a webcam as "input" devices. You and I have millions of sensors that input information in our skin, nose, ears, eyes and tongue.

The reason I can't predict what you are about to do is a matter of numbers, not a matter of you being unpredictable. I suppose it would be a waste of time to ever try and calculate such a thing (who cares if we could say "THE MISTER will say "X" in reply to this", its really not an important question).

I know this depresses Leo, but the fact is, we are sort of automatons. Though, maybe we should be happy our brain makes us feel we are not...

Originally posted by leonidas
hrm. so you really are claiming we are simple automatons, unable to actually claim any control over any action. you keep saying the 'person' is a part of this grand unification, yet in the same breath you say the person's every thought and action is dictated by the environment and that we have no say or can't even realize that we, as 'individuals' don't exist. i may impact the environment around me, but any impact i have is BASED on what the surrounding environment dictates i do. it doesn't sound like the 'person' is a 'part' of this system at all, but is rather an unwitting victim who, even if he is aware of it, can't do anything about it anyway. we're discussing this issue, but everything i say is simply a product of what's around me. i'm only a tool in a much larger system. it eschews responsibility for any individual act. to accept it as true would also set the catholic faith to go into cardiac arrest. beyond all that though, i find that few, frankly, depressing. 🙁

I think the problem is that you are trying to base your moral and political feelings off of neuroscience

who is responsible for what? well, like, if you asked me, "inimalist, did you write a post on the KMC boards?" my answer isn't going to be "no, as there is no indivisible inimalist who chooses to do things, it was simply the consequence of my life experience up until that point that necessitated the actions my motor, linguistic and memory systems to post that message".

science, in any of its forms, does not provide those types of answers, and it is really irrelevant to appeal to them when trying to assess something like guilt.

In the end, sure, you might be right. I think you are still just jumping from one extreme to the next (for instance, you seem to think that the person is simply a victim of their conditions, which is not the case, your genes and personal history inform how your environmental context affects your bahaviour. The "you" is just as important, even if it is itself a construct of past experiences and genetics).

Ultimately, yes, the idea of a "ghost in the shell", or "thinking rational actor" wont hold up. I tend to see it as nearly mystical, the way our brains construct our experiences and the world around us, not depressing at all. Save the universe itself, the human brain is the most complex thing in the universe.

Originally posted by inimalist
Warhammer 40k has nothing to do with it

the thing is, there is no "self-programmer". What you experience as your "self" is really just constructed from many other sensory/memory/cognitive systems.

"controlling" your "impulses" relies much less on "rational thought" than it does on preconscious simulations of sensory consequences weighed against previous expectations and desires.

In fact, the reason most people "choose" not to be violent almost certainly comes from our genetics and our normal interactions in society, not some idea that we are "good" people who want to do "good" things. It is these genetic biases and experiences that lead us to believe that "good" is peaceful coexistance, not the other way around.

I hate to say it, but we ARE as predictable as that. When we can reduce the amount of variability in a system, human behaviour is very predictable.

Think of it like this. Imagine you had a machine. Instead of being made of 200 000 parts, like a giant tractor or something, imagine it is built of billions of parts, and can constantly change how these parts are assembled in order to deal with incomming stimuli.

Now, compare this machine to a computer, which only has a keyboard and maybe a webcam as "input" devices. You and I have millions of sensors that input information in our skin, nose, ears, eyes and tongue.

The reason I can't predict what you are about to do is a matter of numbers, not a matter of you being unpredictable. I suppose it would be a waste of time to ever try and calculate such a thing (who cares if we could say "THE MISTER will say "X" in reply to this", its really not an important question).

I know this depresses Leo, but the fact is, we are sort of automatons. Though, maybe we should be happy our brain makes us feel we are not...

Originally posted by inimalist
I think the problem is that you are trying to base your moral and political feelings off of neuroscience

lol

nah. i was mostly playing devil's advocate. while i understand what you're saying in regards to the system, my own sense of 'selfness' is still quite in tact. 🙂

who is responsible for what? well, like, if you asked me, "inimalist, did you write a post on the KMC boards?" my answer isn't going to be "no, as there is no indivisible inimalist who chooses to do things, it was simply the consequence of my life experience up until that point that necessitated the actions my motor, linguistic and memory systems to post that message".

😂

whew. 😉

science, in any of its forms, does not provide those types of answers, and it is really irrelevant to appeal to them when trying to assess something like guilt.

i agree with this. the practical impact of what you have been saying is difficult to gauge, and pretty much useless when dealing with things like guilt and the necessity or lack thereof of being faced to remove someone from society for society's own good.

In the end, sure, you might be right.

yes! 😄

I think you are still just jumping from one extreme to the next (for instance, you seem to think that the person is simply a victim of their conditions, which is not the case, your genes and personal history inform how your environmental context affects your bahaviour. The "you" is just as important, even if it is itself a construct of past experiences and genetics).

i was just sort of trying to paraphrase what you were saying. may not have done a great job of it. but to continue with what you were claiming, my personal history only affects things around me because it in turn was shaped by the environment! it's completely chicken and egg. genes came first--it just seems to me that they play a larger role in HOW we--as individuals--react to the environment in which we grow. you said there is no antecedant, but i think genes and genetics are the origin. environment can and obviously does impact us enormously, but that initial sense of self that our genes compose, is what determines it's impact on us. i guess i see an underlying sense of self in this system of yours that you don't. could be completely wrong, but alas, that notion is comfortable for me. 🙂

Originally posted by The MISTER
You can break us down to "parts" but that doesn't make us automatons. The reason people can't predict others is because of the numbers....and therefore is a matter of them being unpredictable. You could force predictability to a point (put someone in a cage), but even then it can't be assured when dealing with humans. I've said it before, that a simple ink blot test would prove the unpredictability of human ideas. You're right it would be an exercise in futility trying to calculate exactly what someone else is going to say about something. That is the definition of unpredictable. And I'd agree that we're "sort of" automatons...just not automatons in totality. There's a lot involved in that "sort of"...It's like saying someones sort of dead. I guess they're not dead then.

i'm sure inimal could attest--studies have shown that en masse we are far more predictable than as individuals. as for the rest, i tend to agree. it's 'sort of' (heh) what i was saying above...)

You are confusing unpredictable to you (or me, or every human) with absolutely unpredictable. It's in the same way unpredictable as a computer generating a random number is. To you and me it's unpredictable, but it is completely based on what happens, and in the same circumstances it would always be the same number.

Though, if I may butcher a scientific theory, cause I don't actually understand it, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, to be exact, perhaps a certain unpredictability is actually a trait of our universe, at least of its smallest components.

Originally posted by The MISTER
You can break us down to "parts" but that doesn't make us automatons. The reason people can't predict others is because of the numbers....and therefore is a matter of them being unpredictable. You could force predictability to a point (put someone in a cage), but even then it can't be assured when dealing with humans. I've said it before, that a simple ink blot test would prove the unpredictability of human ideas. You're right it would be an exercise in futility trying to calculate exactly what someone else is going to say about something. That is the definition of unpredictable. And I'd agree that we're "sort of" automatons...just not automatons in totality. There's a lot involved in that "sort of"...It's like saying someones sort of dead. I guess they're not dead then.

I don't mean it would be an excersize in futility, but it would be entirely uninformative. its like, there are 2 types of questions one could ask, a question of numbers or a question of theory. In theory, if we could view the activity in each of your neurons, we could make very detailed predictions about how you would behave, but what relevance is this to any question of theory? It isn't telling us how the systems work, we aren't learning anything else about cognition, we are just watching, essentially, dominos fall into place.

your example of the ink blot is actually perfect. The numbers question is "what will the person see if we show them this blot", and, if we had the technology, we could watch the light hit your photoreceptors, we could follow the activation that caused in your optic nerve, all the way back to your visual cortex. We could follow the "what" and "how" processing streams (what: located in the temporal cortex, contains information pertaining to the identity of objects, how: parietal cortex, processes stimuli for attentional relevance and how you might interact with it), through the thalamo-cortical tracts (emotional/affective processing prior to conscious awareness) [or fronto-parietal... I'm just name dropping now I assume], into your pre-motor areas, which prepare you to make the action of giving your answer. There would be some linguistic and memory stuff too, but those are more distributed networks that would be included in these other systems...

and in the end, we should be able to give a good estimation of what you are going to say in response to the ink blot. In fact, fMRI studies have shown that researchers can look at scans in very controlled scenarios and determine, before a subject would be aware, how they will answer a yes/no question.

And while this is totally interesting, as the ink blot prediction would be, it offers scant in terms of understanding these systems themselves. There is no experimental manipulation, there is no test. You are just looking at it. A much more interesting question about ink blots would be "why do you see X instead of Y, and what can we do to bias X or Y, and what does it mean on a neuronal level to see X or Y", because these include a manipulation that would inform the way we theorize about how the brain works.

Its like people who say "oh, we could calculate the atomic spins of all the atoms in a bird and we would know when it is going to fly off", well sure, but how usefull is that information?

Originally posted by inimalist
Its like people who say "oh, we could calculate the atomic spins of all the atoms in a bird and we would know when it is going to fly off", well sure, but how usefull is that information?

Originally posted by leonidas
lol

nah. i was mostly playing devil's advocate. while i understand what you're saying in regards to the system, my own sense of 'selfness' is still quite in tact. 🙂

this actually becomes one of the biggest questions in neuroscience. If we are really just comprised of these systems, the same way animals are, why is it we seem to have this awareness of self that, by and large, most animals don't seem to have.

Why is it that we need to have this sense of "self", why do we feel like we are sitting behind our eyes, looking out at the rest of the world, when in fact, everything we "see" out there, is really a simulation within our visual processing areas.

Like, what use does feeling dualistic have to a non-dualist organism, or is that experience simply a by-product of the other things we have evolved, like intimate social empathy and language?

Originally posted by leonidas
i agree with this. the practical impact of what you have been saying is difficult to gauge, and pretty much useless when dealing with things like guilt and the necessity or lack thereof of being faced to remove someone from society for society's own good.

to me, the practical importance comes when dealing with rhetoric, rather than situations. "Guilt" really shouldn't matter in absolute terms, because we remove people from society because they are a threat to others. I don't believe in punitive justice anyways, so I don't think "non-crazy" criminals deserve poor treatment, and obviously I would extend this to people with medical conditions.

Its more important when people try to blame one thing or another, in order to further a political agenda. We have seen people claim that Lauchner is proof that we need more gun control, or less gun control, or that Palin/tea party is the responsible actor in the situation. I would apply neuroscience here to say, simply, we can't identify what specifically the issue was, but rather, we can point to things that may have caused it, and we can decide if it is reasonable for politicians to tell people to take others "out", but we really can't say for sure that it was that rhetoric that caused the event in the first place.

Originally posted by leonidas
i was just sort of trying to paraphrase what you were saying. may not have done a great job of it. but to continue with what you were claiming, my personal history only affects things around me because it in turn was shaped by the environment! it's completely chicken and egg. genes came first--it just seems to me that they play a larger role in HOW we--as individuals--react to the environment in which we grow. you said there is no antecedant, but i think genes and genetics are the origin. environment can and obviously does impact us enormously, but that initial sense of self that our genes compose, is what determines it's impact on us. i guess i see an underlying sense of self in this system of yours that you don't. could be completely wrong, but alas, that notion is comfortable for me. 🙂

ok, so the first concept is that of "neuroplasticity". Basically, when you are born, you have roughly 3 times as many neurons as you will have when you finish development. This is because, your brain only assembles in response to stimuli signals. So, light hits your eyes, which releases horomones that cause neurons to connect in ways that create your visual cortex, etc. However, all of this is dependant upon your genetics. The horomoes are only released because your optic receptors have the genetics to produce them, and only assemble your visual pathways because the neurons that becomes those pathways have the genetics to produce them. In all things with the brain, it takes the environment acting upon neurons that causes them to express various genetic functions that allow for our neurons to assemble in genetically specified ways. The exemplary study here was done on kittens. They were raised in an environment devoid of horizontal lines (good luck getting ethics to do this anymore...), and therefore never developed the ability to see them. Further studies with rats have shown that introducing animals into a stimuli rich environment causes the brain to reorganize in accordance with that stimuli.

I know it is a weird concept, especially given how important the "nature vs nurture" debate has been in our society, but the science is pretty much clear at this point. Nature vs nurture is Nature and nurture. you are right, it is entirely a chicken and egg thing, and this type of plastic deveopment begins even in the womb, so your genes are expressing themselves based on what you experience long before you ever really are in a "social environment".

Further, there are these things called epigenetics. I'm not a biologist, so someone could probably do this better than I, but essentially, ALL of your genes express themselves differently when exposed to various environmental conditions, and these expression can hold accross generations. So, the way your brain organizes is almost certainly related to how the genes in your parents' and grandparents' brains expressed themselves and organized. Genes aren't the "opposite" or "mirror" of the environment, but an integrated part of it.

Originally posted by Bardock42
See, I think that's where the uncertainty comes in. We couldn't, no one could, it's impossible.

I really can't argue with that... Other than to say the processes of the brain, rather than the processes of sub atomic particles, seems to rely on a level of predictability. If our ion channels were "uncertain", communication from one neuron to the next would be essentially random.

Originally posted by Bardock42
You are right with GTA4 of course, but that's a problem with the whole open world, choice is yours thing. Nico Bellic definitely had potential, and his cutscenes are good, but a game completely centered around indiscriminate murder is not the best place to tell his story, gameplay wise.

I was thinking about this again. I think they did a way better job in Red Dead, but ultimately, I think its because they created a world where murder was somewhat acceptable. I certainly didn't kill as many civilians in Red Dead as I did GTA, but killing people didn't seem as much of a stretch for the character, I suppose, because he [marsden] implicitly accepted that bad people should die, and there wasn't really any other system of "law enforcement"

Originally posted by Bardock42
Though, if I may butcher a scientific theory, cause I don't actually understand it, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, to be exact, perhaps a certain unpredictability is actually a trait of our universe, at least of its smallest components.

Originally posted by dadudemon
That's pretty much what I said. Except, I took it a slight step further and indicated that certain triggers can causes processes to start operating in that small percentage of explicit awareness.

Unless, of course, you disagree and are saying that there are no triggers but just random occurrences? Because I was under the impression that "conscious" execution required triggers to move from "subconscious" to "conscious."

well, first, I didn't say "explicit awareness" as a stand-in for "consciousness", the two terms mean very different things, and while there are problems with "awareness", it isn't nearly as problematic as "consciousness"

secondly, sure, I suppose you might call them triggers, but it isn't as simple as that. a "trigger" would be based on a huge array of attentional evaluations in a scene, themselves based on local and past context, and even then, there are things which we are not explicitly aware of that we can react to and behave in the presense of.

Originally posted by dadudemon
I think the way I described it is great. lol

What I was describing is not a single system, but a set of smaller systems comprising the "super-system (the brain machine)." The activities in the olfactory cortex are a different "sub-system" of brain than the activities in somatosensory homonculus. Each have triggers that bring processes to "conscious thought" but most of the time, stimulus is ignored and left as a "background process." For example, you are not aware for the most part, of all the sensory taking place all over your body where you clothes are making contact with your flesh. However, a trigger, as I'm calling it, would be a strong itch. It jumps from the background into conscious thought and you scratch it, satiating the itch.

Also, about items controlled outside of the conscious/subconscious labels: those would primarily executed in the brain stem: the primitive portion of our brains. Now, the processes "working" in the main portions of our brain (ie frontal, occipital, parietal, and temporal lobes and so forth) can certainly affect the processes run primarily by the medulla oblongata such as the "conscious" perception of danger. So, your heart is not a subconscious or conscious action: it is external of those constructs and is, instead, an automated process. However, the conscious can affect those lower brain functions, but almost always not in a detrimental way. There's "fail safes" to protect against the conscious, or as you put it: explicit awareness.

Look, I'm not saying you are... wrong. The language you use here is similar (errr...) to what is used in journals, and even to what I'm using to explain other concepts in the thread.

If you want to define things as autonomic, put arbitrary lines in the brainstem (btw, saw a talk last month about emotional processing in the spinal cord itself), sure, I can't say that is factually incorrect.

What I can say, though, is that is a view of neuroscience that is quickly being overturned. Its like when we were talking about the computer model, sure, you can use those terms to get a decent understanding of what is going on in the brain, but when you reduce it to systems neuroscience, it doesn't hold up. Do people still use it? sure, how else do we talk about or communicate this to even other specialists? Like I said, most complicated thing in the universe, save the universe itself. We need something. The same way "evolution" made biology make some sense, and the way some "unified field theory" will make physics make sense, we need something like that in neuroscience, even if we know that we are starting from a point that is fundamentally in error.

Originally posted by dadudemon
And, yes, my example of itches were bottom-up. And, from what I understand about cognitive neuroscience, you're heavily steeped in that type of study because you do research into visual cortex and psychology.

actually, I'm doing my master's now, and I've moved to the integration of visual attention/eye gaze with action, how we combine visual information with how we move/behave, eye-hand coordination stuff.

Have you guys heard of 'holons'? Your discussion reminds me of Koestler's term/observation.

One of my favorite words/concepts.

Originally posted by Mindship
Have you guys heard of 'holons'? Your discussion reminds me of Koestler's term/observation.

One of my favorite words/concepts.

nice. had heard the word once upon a time, but never would have remembered and had to look it up. very apt indeed. gives me a headache to think about, but.... apt.

Originally posted by leonidas
nice. had heard the word once upon a time, but never would have remembered and had to look it up. very apt indeed. gives me a headache to think about, but.... apt.

Originally posted by Mindship
Have you guys heard of 'holons'? Your discussion reminds me of Koestler's term/observation.

One of my favorite words/concepts.

from the wiki, he seems to not apply the concept to individuals themselves, but to society.

I'm in general agreement that there are no non-arbitrary divisions between things, but one also has to deconstruct what these arbitrary sub components are themselves comprised of. It seems to me that the term attempts to place the self as part of the whole, whereas I would argue that the self is a "holon", and in fact, the brain would be comprised of billions of "holons" (for instance, our visual system could easily be described as millions of visual systems working together).

I'm also not entirely fond of phrases that could be "anything" (why memes just don't work as a tool of causal explanation), but it seems like an interesting idea. Any suggested reading outside of Wiki?

Originally posted by inimalist
I'm in general agreement that there are no non-arbitrary divisions between things, but one also has to deconstruct what these arbitrary sub components are themselves comprised of. It seems to me that the term attempts to place the self as part of the whole, whereas I would argue that the self is a "holon", and in fact, the brain would be comprised of billions of "holons" (for instance, our visual system could easily be described as millions of visual systems working together).

I'm also not entirely fond of phrases that could be "anything" (why memes just don't work as a tool of [b]causal explanation), but it seems like an interesting idea. Any suggested reading outside of Wiki? [/B]

YouTube video

an interesting analysis, to bring this back on topic to some degree