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Wind Shlavitor on 09 July 2009
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Final-Fan said:

But for your comparison to hold up (theory of evolution is like programming, consciousness can't be programmed so neither can evolutionary theory account for consciousness) it is assumed that the programmer has perfect knowledge of physical and chemical laws, etc., so the objection of unknown or incomplete laws doesn't hold up.  This is because the point of talking about AI in this discussion is the comparison to evolution according to current theory.  Evolution is happening by itself, without an actual programmer (let's not get onto the God/ID side of things right now...), so the objection of lack of knowledge or skill on the part of the programmer is completely irrelevant, I think. 

For talking about randomness, firstly, are you now saying that you suspect that free will is dependent on randomness?  Secondly, again, that is a limitation of programming (at least as far as we know) that you just said does not apply to biological evolution. 

... oh wait, never mind, now you're saying that consciousness might be programmable but we'll never know.  But doesn't this mean you're abandoning the analogical disproof of the adequacy of evolutionary theory? 

3.  So now you're back to asserting that you have free will without evidence other than, possibly, your feeling that you have it. 

-If everybody has access to this evidence, then you ought to be able to explain it. 

FInally, on evidence you're mistaken, I was referring to where you said things like "Of course some have some ideas, but it always fails to be detailed and convincing at the same time, and usually doesn't try to go out from causal explanations."  To me, this meant that people had submitted explanations and evidence that you found insufficiently compelling, without outright believing they were wrong in the evidence.  So if there's a bunch of evidence that would tend to point in the opposite direction from your position, but you don't feel that there's enough to justify saying you're definitely wrong, then that would be 'evidence you're mistaken that doesn't constitute proof' in your estimation. 

 

I didn't mean that Free Will is possible because of randomness, but meant that the randomness in quantum physics is unexplainable via causality, and from what I can tell, so is free will, thus free will seems only possible because of this type of factor ( non-causality ).

The programmer does not need perfect knowledge of those laws if he knows what computers can and cannot do.  The laws aren't incomplete, the theories we have are. You don't have to have perfect knowledge to understand the theory of evolution and what is assumed from it. And just like many academic scientists assume causality in the theory of evolution, that's why they assume that you can exactly simulate the human mind on computer; which is wrong.

Abandoning? No it's just because I always like to leave room for error and that is why I was leaving the possibility of consciousness being programmable, but really, I don't think it is. I haven't dropped my position on this topic (analogical disproof of the adequacy of evolutionary theory)

"If everybody has access to this evidence, then you ought to be able to explain it. "

- If I had the capacity, yes.  I don't remember in what language it was.. but they had like 6+ different words for the feeling of anger, each meaning a different kind of feeling, but in english we only have 1 (anger). Well there's 'mad', but it has basically the same meaning.  The best I can do is tell you that the 'experiencing' that you feel and the freedom of choice(free will) that you have are not like anything that computers can achieve. We do base our decisions on factors, but inherantly, we are not limited to those factors - Computers are; you can trace the logic in the code and every single action can be traced to pre-put conditions and formulas, as complex as they are - there is no experience in the treatment of these functions.


As for "Evolution is happening by itself". Well that doesn't matter because in theory of evolution, you can trace back every development and find the associated 'trigger' (action reaction); in other words you can trace back just how every development has come to be, and since dna acts like code, in this case you can trace just how all the 'code' was 'programmed'.

But I understand why you said that, because it wouldn't make sense if in reality it was exactly like a computer right? Right ;)

You have to understand that I only bring about the programming analogy because that's how Academic Science think with the Theory of Evolution. See that's my complaint, their thinking is too much like computer science. I don't think it's fine to ignore non-causal components when it comes to life, just because you don't understand it. (such as quantum physics)

edit: I meant such as IN quantum physics, because obviously multiple area of quantum physics deals with causality.

I have to tell you though, it's a bit hard to debate about certain things, since we understand things a bit differently...