<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:27.2px;color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font size="4"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">If your gut feeling turns out to be correct more often than randomness would allow then I can objectively conclude that mental activity</div> <div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">of some sort has probably gone on in your brain to produce it even if you don't consciously know what it is or you are unable to put your reasoning into words. However you're doing it you're coming up with the correct answer more often than not, and that is a objective fact.</div></font></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:27.2px;color:rgb(34,34,34)"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4"><br></font></div></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:27.2px;color:rgb(34,34,34)"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4"> John K Clark</font></div></div><div style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:27.2px;color:rgb(34,34,34)"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4"><br></font></div></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif">Here's the thing: you engineers and physicists and mathematicians do not have in your background the way behavioral scientists define things, as established by a separate conversation I had with Spike a while back.</font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif">Your paragraph is entirely correct but it fails to specify just what mental process is going on and how you measure it.</font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif">We call it operational definition - you define your terms by the way you measure them. This gives us situations that are puzzling to people outside the professions: in a study we might define intelligence as the score on a standard IQ test. Now that does not tell us at all what intelligence, but it does give us a standard measure that others in the field understand and can use to analyze our study and perhaps replicate it. Some might strenuously disagree that it measures intelligence adequately. Fine. Let them do their own study using other measures.</font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif">Some people might say that in your paragraph above, the terms gut feeling, instinct, and intuition might be used interchangeably, and that does not help us at all to understand each one separately, if indeed they are separate processes.</font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif">Biologists in this group are familiar with a six point definition of instinct (often called species-specific behavior) that nobody who isn't familiar with it will understand, but it is used to try to separate inborn behaviors from learned ones, complex behavior from simple reflexes, and so on. Definitions should tell us what something is, and what something is not. Discriminating.</font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif">I probably should apologize for asking of some of you to define things in a way I am familiar with and you are not. Done. It was not a fair game.</font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif">Ultimately, I am unable to come up any definition of free will that would adhere to the standards of operational definitions. So we leave it to the philosophers, who don't have such standards.</font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif">bill w</font></div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 10:10 AM, John Clark <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:johnkclark@gmail.com" target="_blank">johnkclark@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><span class=""><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 10:03 AM, William Flynn Wallace </span><span dir="ltr" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"><<a href="mailto:foozler83@gmail.com" target="_blank">foozler83@gmail.com</a>></span><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif"> wrote:</span><br></div></span><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><span class=""><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">>> </div>"Instinct", "intuition" and "gut feeling" can be defined quite easily. Stathis</blockquote></div></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"> </blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">> </div>Great - I challenge you to do it.</div></blockquote><div><br></div></span><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4">I'm not Stathis but I'll give it a try. A gut feeling that X is probably true and Y is probably untrue means that a being is unable to consciously access or articulate all the mental activity that led him to that probabilistic conclusion. </font></div><font size="4"> </font></div><span class=""><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">> </div>A problem with your definition of gut feeling is that it cannot be objectively measured.<span style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:27.2px"> </span></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div></span><div><font size="4"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">If your gut feeling turns out to be correct more often than randomness would allow then I can objectively conclude that mental activity</div> <div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline">of some sort has probably gone on in your brain to produce it even if you don't consciously know what it is or you are unable to put your reasoning into words. However you're doing it you're coming up with the correct answer more often than not, and that is a objective fact.</div></font></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4"><br></font></div></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><font size="4"> John K Clark</font></div></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><br></div></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><br></div></div><font color="#500050"><br></font>
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