[ExI] Humans losing freewill

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Mon Nov 21 18:55:13 UTC 2016


​If your gut feeling turns out to be correct more often than randomness
would allow then I can objectively conclude that mental activity​

​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.

 John K Clark

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.

Your paragraph is entirely correct but it fails to specify just what mental
process is going on and how you measure it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

bill w

On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 10:10 AM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 10:03 AM, William Flynn Wallace <
> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ​>> ​
>>> "Instinct", "intuition" and "gut feeling" can be defined quite easily.
>>> Stathis
>>
>>
>
> ​> ​
>> Great - I challenge you to do it.
>>
>
> ​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.
>
>
>> ​> ​
>> A problem with your definition of gut feeling is that it cannot be
>> objectively measured.
>>
>
> ​If your gut feeling turns out to be correct more often than randomness
> would allow then I can objectively conclude that mental activity​
>
> ​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.
>
>  John K Clark
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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