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Life Beyond the Manufacturer's Specifications

::overclocked is produced twice a week by Bluejack. For more information about this podcast, vusut Bluejack's website, and further discussion can be found in Bluejack's Blog.
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Mon, 22 January 2007
::oc::Science ( #058, Human Freedom )
#058 -- Free will versus determinism (or fate) is a topic that humans have debated in song and story for as far back in our history as we have knowledge. Is human choice real, or is it illusionary? And if we have choice, what can we do with it? This discussion covers the philosophical, the spiritual, and the scientific aspects of the question from neurology to metaphysics.

Direct download: oc_058.mp3
Category: Science -- posted at: 8:55 PM
Comments[83]
    Another great episode. Bluejack's comments on the material component of the mind/body problem, that it is difficult for humans to understand how one's choices made with a material brain can be traced back to a primal non-material cause (the "decision" that "you" make, where "you" is not your physical self, but your mental self) got me thinking about cognitive closure. When I was in school, I studied an interesting paper by philosopher Colin McGinn on the nature of the mind/body problem - he posited that it is not because of developmental issues that human brains have problems understanding how the physical and non-physical parts of our consciousness (if there are any) interact - he suggests that it is a sort of blind-spot created by the structure of consciousness itself which makes it impossible for us to understand how the system operates and where "we", physical and non-physical, fit into it. Bluejack's comments on the self-referencing supercomputer in his thought experiment dealing with predestination reminded me of this - perhaps our minds are like that computer, and cannot include itself in a deconstruction of physical causes because the mind cannot concieve of itself as physcial and nonphysical at the same time.

    My explanation of this stinks - McGinn's ideas are out there. This site http://www.consciousentities.com/mcginn.htm is pretty good at breaking his ideas down.

    AWESOME episode - I like bringing science into philosophy.

    Also, I've cared for many kittens in my day - they are perhaps the cutest most adorable things ever. Anyone who could sew a kitten's eye closed is one cold motherfucker.

    gs

    posted by: granular_serene on Thu, 1/25 11:25 AM EST

    I have a suggestion for music, I remember in an episode you said goa trance sounded all the same, just by different artists... Try shpongle, the leading artist is named Simon Postford.

    posted by: Noobius on Mon, 1/29 08:41 AM EST

    Disreguard that comment, I am sure you are educated in simon postfords music, I recently listened to a podcast with hallucinogen - twisted - shamanix.

    posted by: Noobius on Tue, 1/30 03:28 AM EST

    Stumbled across this podcast and found it very interesting -- the free will question has also been with me for a while. I found the introduction excellent, with a solid framing of the problem.

    Bluejack didn't have much time to elaborate much on the changing brain structure, but it seemed that he got all the essentials out. I've heard this used before as an argument why the human mind cannot be reduced to a set of rules.

    Here, as before, I wasn't convinced. Assuming that we live in a world described by modern physics and that there are no spiritual dimensions, then the changes to the brain would be just as determined as any other change to the body.

    If, in the absense of this behaviour (brain reconfiguration), we have not free will when we are choosing whether to get a tattoo or a piercing, then why are we free to choose to change our brains?

    We can also consider a simple computer which we can agree isn't free as it is completely constrained by its design in the choices that it makes. Then add to the computer the ability to restructure itself. That ability does not free it from the prior constraints. The old constraints still affect the computers choices in how it redesigns itself.

    An old philosophy professor of mine proposed that humans did have free will because they could change their minds and make different decisions when encountering the same situation as before. In the case of the computer, if you play a new copy of it and expose the second one to the exact same stimuli as the first, you would -- the computer being completely deterministic -- get the exact same behaviour; and therefore the second computer would decide on the exact same changes in its structure.

    Whether we are extremely advanced computers, or have a spiritual side is impossible to tell since we cannot (yet?) conduct an experiment where a person (or a copy of one) will be subject to making a decision in the exact same situation.

    posted by: Martin on Sun, 9/9 12:19 PM EDT

    A very interesting question. It's worth debating whether or not we are constrained to our neurological wiring.

    I'm surprised you didn't bring in the Buddha since he apparently perfected his own re-wiring.

    Really good to hear from you.

    posted by: OsakanOne on Fri, 10/5 03:53 PM EDT


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    Hi Bluejack,

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