Miscellaneous Chatter > Philosophy & Science

Neural precursors of deliberate and arbitrary decisions in the study of voluntar

<< < (2/2)

sciborg2:

--- Quote from: H on March 20, 2019, 06:31:31 pm ---
--- Quote from: sciborg2 on March 20, 2019, 06:19:58 pm ---
--- Quote from: H on March 20, 2019, 04:01:50 pm ---To say that I barely understand the full implication here would be vastly charitable, but I'll venture out on the limb and say this might imply that consciousness is a sort of meditative "agent" in "deliberate decisions."

So, when one thinks, and thinks about thinking, and then acts on that thinking, consciousness does seem to have a role.  So, in this way, perhaps this is the point of consciousness?  A recursive, "calculus" of sorts, to mediate (and influence) the notion of "future" to the notion of action?

--- End quote ---

If by consciousness you mean a metaphysically neutral extended decision making process then yeah if replicated it would be an indication of such.

If you mean something specifically not under Physicalism then I suspect the answer - without saying anything affirming or denying metaphysics - no dice. I say this b/c one of the long standing critics of Libet-type experiments is the physicalist/materialist Daniel Dennet.
--- End quote ---

The heart of the matter being, of course, that I am not sure what I am saying.

It's unclear to me if the sort of recursive thing would not just be another layer of physicalism.  In that sense, I don't know that it would be outside, say, the chain of cause and effect.  However, it does rely then on something non-physical, which is mental representation.  Which, the basis of is likely physical in some sense, but the content of which is not.  So, I don't know what that would count as.

In a nut shell, I should probably let the adults talk about this...

--- End quote ---

Ah you are an adult though in that you are working to reason these things out, and from what I've seen nobody has a good handle on these matters.

Putnam and Popper have made arguments against conceptual thought being reducible to what is usually regarded as physical, at least as moderns define the term.

H:

--- Quote from: sciborg2 on March 20, 2019, 06:39:36 pm ---Ah you are an adult though in that you are working to reason these things out, and from what I've seen nobody has a good handle on these matters.

Putnam and Popper have made arguments against conceptual thought being reducible to what is usually regarded as physical, at least as moderns define the term.
--- End quote ---

Yeah, I think that is the position I'd be likely to take, because it doesn't seem clear to me that there must be a direct and necessary physical mapping of neuronal activity to the content of thought.

So, in a way, perhaps it could be that neuron-group X firing in a particular way in your brain means something in particular, where neuron-group X firing in my brain something different.  If it's true that certain brain parts do align with certain brain function (so group X is associated with moving hand Y) that doesn't necessarily mean that the mental contents are identical.

In this way, perhaps consciousness, as recursive, compounds what likely start as minor differences into demonstrable different behaviors (and mental contents).

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page