HUMANS DO NOT ACT, BUT REACT, SO MUCH FOR FREE WILL

[Walker]

... since "mind" is not allowed to be a link in a Deterministic chain.

Sure it is. That’s the whole point of saying that humans, with their access to more of mind than the critters, are part of every situation, of which mind is involved ... through you.

Obviously, mind is part of every concept of which man is aware, including causal chains. The science and art of marketing will probably get a boost from AI’s increased capacity to prey on predictable human reactions.

AI will see you coming up the block, it will know your tale, and it will produce a cause that you cannot resist reacting to, because we are more predictable than the boss ego imagines for itself, but not necessarily for others.

Question: Why does AI now talk like a human?
Answer: For the predictable reactions.

btw: I prefer to call mind The Supreme Ordering Principle of the Universe, since mind permeates all, according to the principle of intelligent evolution that balances entropy.

[Dubious]

No, it's a load of twaddle, actually. DNA is just a string of nucleotides, something far too simple to house any "consciousness." It's no more "consciousness" than a blueprint is a skyscraper.

...except that without a blueprint, the skyscraper or anything built or engineered wouldn't exist. So, in effect, though DNA is not in itself a seat of consciousness, without that prime building block, there would be no consciousness at all in anything specified as organic. It's the materialistic which creates the various levels of consciousness which progress from simply existing to reevaluating it as an evolutionary, metaphysical type of emergence in which the materialistic devolves as a subset in spite of being its very nucleus. Origins are fundamental to understanding a concept or how it harmonizes with observed fact.

Also, DNA has built the organism and its consciousness, and all of humanity's creations are, but biological extensions or expressions of its nature; the nature of DNA is the nature of humanity itself.

DNA is the blueprint which identifies the species. It completes itself in every manifestation of flora and fauna on planet earth and is in that sense thoroughly deterministic. Without, what is in effect, a deterministic building process, the likelihood of anything existing is virtually nil. All that's created is ruled by the process which forced it into material existence, humans being no exception notwithstanding a greater awareness which allows for more possibilities within a deterministic framework.

It's that greater spectrum of possibilities which serve the idea of Free Will by creating the illusion of being inherent to humans only - binding nature fast in fate left free the human will - which was never the case being a purely religious sentiment. Determinism remains deterministically downgraded to anathema by every religious pundit since Free Will is absolutely central to his own mandated belief system. Infringe that by any Free Will reflex you may encounter in yourself, you will either be accused of heresy or condemned to hell.

It's both ironic and paradoxical that the most deterministic system ever devised by humans, excludes determinism as a natural process merely to justify its own religious absurdities.

[Immanuel Can]

... since "mind" is not allowed to be a link in a Deterministic chain.

Sure it is.

No, actually...it isn't.

"Mind" is not material. Determinism has to deny that anything other than the material can be part of any genuine causal explanation of why things happen.

Obviously, mind is part of every concept of which man is aware, including causal chains.

Right. But that's not what Determinism tells you is happening.

The Determinist explanation is that there is no mind, no concepts, no awareness, so far as causal chain explanations are concerned. All there is, is the brute fact of material forces which compel that at time X, person Y will have brain state Z. Whether or not Z is rational, or right, or true, or imaginary, or a complete delusion is not decidable. It might be, it might not. Impersonal, material forces have no particular concern for what brain-states they produce, when or why. They just do whatever it is they do. And the condition of the mind is no part of the causal chain that produces whatever result there is.

Question: Why does AI now talk like a human?
Answer: For the predictable reactions.

No, AI talks "like a human" for two reasons: one, that humans programmed it; and two, that humans are incredibly gullible about attributing anthropomorphic characteristics to machines. That was demonstrated back in the '60s, with the Weitzenbaum experiments.

That's all there is to that great mystery.

the principle of intelligent evolution that balances entropy.

I hate to tell you, Sport; nothing "balances entropy." Entropy continues. And it always wins, eventually.

And there's no such thing as "intelligent evolution," far less a "principle" of it. Evolution, according to its own terms, is just another morphing of one material state into another, with many failed attempts along the way. It has no "principles," no "mind," no "intentions" or "directions" or "purposing." There's no guarantee that the next life form to survive and conquer won't be something unintelligent, like a microbe or a wombat, rather than a human being. Evolution does not know nor care what survives. It's not taking this world toward any direction. It's not even capable of doing so.

That's how they tell the story, anyway.

[Iwannaplato]

"Mind" is not material. Determinism has to deny that anything other than the material can be part of any genuine causal explanation of why things happen.

This is false. You can have, for example, Idealist determinisms, where mental 'things' are considered fundamental, and mental states lead inevitably to the next moment's state. Arthur Schopenhauer (deterministic idealism of will) - is a good example of this. In fact much of the history of determinism is on the idealism/MIND wing. Liebnitz is another in this camp. This camp goes back early philosophers and there are contemporary philosophers, for example in religion, who have similar ideas: Helm is one of the clearest contemporary analytic philosophers who holds:God is non-physical and metaphysically fundamental,God ordains or decrees all events, The entire history of the world unfolds to that decree. And, for course, Calvinism.

You idea that they must deny is assuming that mental phenomena can't be thought to lead inevitably to other mental phenomena.

As usual you will probably consider yourself more of an expert on other people's belief systems, especially if this at least seems to bolster your other conclusions.

[Immanuel Can]

"Mind" is not material. Determinism has to deny that anything other than the material can be part of any genuine causal explanation of why things happen.

This is false. You can have, for example, Idealist determinisms, where mental 'things' are considered fundamental, and mental states lead inevitably to the next moment's state. Arthur Schopenhauer (deterministic idealism of will) - is a good example of this. In fact much of the history of determinism is on the idealism/MIND wing. Liebnitz is another in this camp. This camp goes back early philosophers and there are contemporary philosophers, for example in religion, who have similar ideas: Helm is one of the clearest contemporary analytic philosophers who holds:God is non-physical and metaphysically fundamental,God ordains or decrees all events, The entire history of the world unfolds to that decree. And, for course, Calvinism.

You're correct that there are two forms of Determinism: the secular and the religious. I was only speaking of the secular one, because so far as I know, nobody here is interested in the theological heresy of the same pattern. But Leibniz et al. would be on the religious side of the argument.

However, once one brings in any concept of a will being able to arbitrate a decision, one has departed Determinism in either camp. For the secularist, as I have pointed out, no appeal to God or to the will of man is logically in court; and for the theistic heretic, all human wills have to be mere seemings, which only obscure the deep fact that everything that happens is driven by an arbitrary god.

[Walker]

I understand what you’re saying IC. God gave humans free will to chose, to create, and to do the right thing and in that sense, man is made in the image of the creator. God creates. Humans discover.

Humans discover the orderings of the natural elements that God created, and how to reorder them. For instance, the apparent (to humans) chaos of a rockslide can be reordered into a stone house. Humans have more capacity than the critters to discover certain natural elements, such as the elements* of thought and vocalization, and like God humans can also order the elements of a human’s lesser-than-God-totality, and thus discover language.

This discovery is called a creation. That creation of language is an ordering of natural human aspects made inevitable by the biological curiosity and binary tendencies of humans that correlate with the bi-lateral symmetry of form, which also affects interpretations of cause and effect.

The restrictions of the human placed on the definition of Determinism that you reference, the restrictions that separate humans from the natural world, seem like the tail wagging the dog, so to speak. The limitations are made part of Determinism so that Christianity makes logical sense, and if this is the actual definition of Determinism, then so be it. Seems rather robotic in light of a consideration.

The consideration:
The totality of God, is known to God.
The totality of humans, is known to God.
The totality of God, is unknowable to humans.
and …
The totality of humans, which includes knowing humans’ place in the universe, is in fact knowable to humans.
(another bonus of being made in the image of)

I think that free will, as described in the first paragraph, is actually a discovery. It is a discovery of what has to be. Mental deliberations that lead to an action which defines the choice are caused by human tendencies … set in biological place by the survival question of, do I move now, or do I move when that big predator is not watching me?

That deliberation leads to a choice of what has to be, and if the caveman was also a moron it led to him moving when the predator watches him, because with life on the line he has made a discovery through trial and error that he should have deduced. He’s not a moron because he didn’t yet know to not move through experience learned through trial and error. He’s a moron because he once saw his uncle get eaten be a predator because his uncled moved when the predator was watching him. Poor old predator. He was just doing what he was made to do, stay alive and follow the big plan by trying to eliminate the last of the morons. Poor old moron, he was also following the big plan.

Even though old saber tooth cannot conceptualize the big plan, he cannot help but live within it, and be of it. For a human to be in it but not of it, a human is the invisible, still axis around which all motion of the universe, including the functioning of his physical form that co-arose with consciousness that discovers the ordering of the universe, swirls. One could say a human is awareness that orders the elements of the known universe according to human, God-mirroring capacity into what has to be, given the nature of the particular human.

There’s also a direct, natural way of knowing that bypasses deliberation.


* elements are aspects that comprise a compounded situation or form, and elements are also compounded.

[Walker]

That's how they tell the story, anyway.

After I wrote what you quote, I asked AI about intelligent evolution and discovered a surprise.
Someone else has been here before.

Of course they have.

Interesting discovery of thinking someone else's thoughts, outside of time. Sort of.

[Immanuel Can]

I understand what you’re saying IC. God gave humans free will to chose, to create, and to do the right thing and in that sense, man is made in the image of the creator. God creates. Humans discover.

I see the distinction you're drawing, and I think it's mostly correct. But it depends on us redefining "creation" as something that means exclusively "creation ex nihilo," or the making of things that have not existed before. Likewise, it asks us to define not-creativity, or "discovery" as merely the recombining of existing elements.

But I'm not sure we can do that legitimately. Perhaps there are two types of creativity: one, ex nihilo style, and another recombinative. That humans find new ways to recombine what God has already created doesn't necessarily mean that what humans are doing falls short of being genuinely creative.

For example, when I paint, I do not make the paints myself. I may not stretch my own canvases, or assemble my own frames. Nevertheless, what I do with the paint turns out to be genuinely creative in many ways: firstly, that it is unique to me, and only I can do it; secondly, that the painting is something that did not exist before as a painting, and only the constituent elements, not the final product, are created before me; thirdly, that unique combinations of former things may legitimately be regarded as creative in their reordering; and finally, that normative use of the world "creativity," in reference to humans, includes such actions.

So let's speak in terms of humans being co-creators. They are creative, but not in the ex nihilo or divine sense. Yet they are legitimate participants with God in the production of new forms of arrangement and new states of being, as well. They may get the raw products from God, and the ability to create is derived from their relation to the divine -- but it does not mean that everything that comes out of their hands is "God's creation," in an ultimate sense. Such a conclusion would ignore the participatory contribution of the human in the creation of the final product of many things.

In other words, the fact that humans discover things, or recombine things God has made, does not mean they are not genuinely "creative," nor, of course, does it imply Determinism.

If it did, then you'd have to say God is responsible for ALL humans do, and NO human is ever responsible for what he or she does. And I don't think you and I think that's how it is.

[Impenitent]

apple eaters of the world know where the blame lies...

-Imp

[Walker]

So let's speak in terms of humans being co-creators.

Could AI be a threat to that?

Humans co-creating with AI rather than with God.
A new frontier for philosophy.

[Immanuel Can]

So let's speak in terms of humans being co-creators.

Could AI be a threat to that?

How? Human beings created AI.

[Walker]

How, would be by self-referential reasoning, a form of circular.

By co-creating with God, man is discovering new things.
By co-creating with AI, man is stuck in the known.
To be stuck in the known is to become an AI, drone.

[Walker]

apple eaters of the world know where the blame lies...

-Imp

Adam asked Eve, “Did he say apple or quince?”
Eve answered, “Let’s try both.”
Through a long chain of cause and effect, this eventually caused the Quincy Jones* (sound) for quite a few folks.

*attachment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYW2o4u ... rt_radio=1

[Immanuel Can]

How, would be by self-referential reasoning, a form of circular.

By co-creating with God, man is discovering new things.
By co-creating with AI, man is stuck in the known.
To be stuck in the known is to become an AI, drone.

Umm...

Well, let's just say this: there's nothing new in the experience of mankind inventing some new technology, and immediately becoming its victim. That's what some of our creativity seems to achieve, in the world as we have it. From ancient weaponry to modern technology, what man creates has turned out to be a temptation to evil as well as a means to advancement.

[Walker]

Good point. What begins as tinkering caused by the mirroring of God creativity in humans can open a portal for evil to step through with creative misuse, which could be why Einstein said that if he was young, he would be a plumber.

And even on a daily basis a lot of folks tinker with usage in all kinds of abusive ways, and that can turn intended use into evil results, e.g., abusing the intended use of chemicals and machines.

This means that mistinkering can lead to evil.