Even in classical physics determinism required additional supplementary assumptions which were not fully proven or accepted. If time has a definite begining then that itself is an issue. If there are point singularities whether particles or anything else that poses a problem. If there were anywhere a potential function with a sharp curve, or if there were inelastic collisions, determinism would fall apart. But then there is simply that the basic laws are no longer believed to be deterministic, as FakeMcCoy says
How would it be possible to derive the subjectivity of a system from a system of equations? No one has a clue. You can get lots of behavior from a physical theory that uses mathematical modeling, but very little that would give you any inclination that systems that exhibit those behaviros have minds.
First of all, I'm not sure what you mean by "subjectivity" in this context. If you could explain what you're trying to say, or rephrase, it would be helpful.
It seems like you're saying that we can explain behavior with biology, but not "minds"? I would then have to ask you, what do you think a 'mind' is?
You of course already know, or if you like, take on faith, as a matter of experience and induction that certain systems are subjective. But how could from a physical theory, you show this?
You, at least, with current methods can't. Thus it is unexplainable from the vantage point of physical theory. I don't see how without a drastic restructuring of the underlying assumptions it would be possible.
You don't see how it would be possible to explain the mind using the natural world? I'll ask again, do you think we're dealing with the supernatural here? If we're not, then we're back to physical processes.
This is what I am arguing. Not that certain configurations of matter aren't subjective. Clearly they are. But that we know they are isn't really a part of scientific knowledge, at least not scientific knowledge that is predicated on a reductive physical theory
Again, I have no idea what you mean here when you say 'subjective'.
A physical theory is capable of explain parts of minds but not all at least not currently. Maybe in the future it will be capable of explaining all, maybe it won't, at least not without fundamental foundational revision. Those parts Chalmers refers to as the easy problems of mind or the soft problems of mind. This is the problems of connecting the information processing done by neural networks or the dynamics of neural networks to the patterns of behavior that arise in organisms. This is not the problem of showing how subjectivity arises from those neural networks. Two different problems.
I am using subjectivity here as: Awareness of ones own existence as a being. Or awareness in general. Awareness in general is sometimes termed first order subjectivity or first order consciousness or primary consciousness and awareness of oneself as a distinct being is second order.
Awareness of ones own existence as a being. Or awareness in general. Awareness in general is sometimes termed first order subjectivity and awareness of oneself as a distinct being is second order.
So rocks and tables we usually don't believe have minds.
But we believe dogs and cats do.
So you're using it as a synonym to sentience or consciousness?
A physical theory is capable of explain parts of minds but not all at least not currently. Maybe in the future it will be capable of explaining all, maybe it won't, at least not without fundamental foundational revision. Those parts Chalmers refers to as the easy problems of mind or the soft problems of mind. This is the problems of connecting the information processing done by neural networks or the dynamics of neural networks to the patterns of behavior that arise in organisms. This is not the problem of showing how subjectivity arises from those neural networks. Two different problems.
And some scientists have hypothesized that consciousness and the mind are just a manifestation of the brain's functions. The point is that we have no reason to think that there is anything going on that can't be explained by the physical brain. If you want to say there's something beyond the brain, you have some explaining to do.
I disagree. The mind in the substantial sense, is the sense of self awareness, and that there is awareness compared to no awareness or that you aren't a behavioral zombie which is just a bag of flesh which acts out the behaviors that you do. Neuroscience has nothing to say about this. There is not even a sketch of a theory of how a physical process at the level of the brain becomes linked up to a felt subjectivity.
Couple things:
1) Most importantly, you are straw manning my position. Neuroscience is young and quite crude, and I don't want to have a dcartist-style "you don't know everything, therefore you know nothing" debate. I only assert that the subjective sense is in the physical brain somewhere; I assert nothing further, certainly not an explanation of how it works in terms of raw physical neurochemistry.
I say only that it is in the brain; how do I know that much? Because of evidence that has been collected since at least the time of Phineas Gage indicating that individuals who have pieces of their brains damaged can and do exhibit radically different outward evidence of their subjective selves than they did before the damage.
That evidence weighed against evidence for the negative proposition -- which is nil -- leads me to support the proposition in question.
2) You don't seem to have any basis for distinguishing a "Behavioral zombie" from a non-behavioral zombie. Certainly nobody outside the behavioral zombie's body could know -- but could the behavioral zombie himself even know? Could he not be endowed with a zombie subjective sense that injects, deterministically, the same subjective impulses into his brain that a non-zombie would have received?
3) I don't need this assertion for this debate and I don't feel like arguing about it, but I think you're just wrong about the details of the neuroscience. VS Ramachandran in particular has done extensive studies on brain patients with damage affecting their subjective sense. I think it's more accurate to say that while surely not everything is known about the subjective nature of the mind, neither is it the case that nothing is known about it, as you seem to be asserting.
In a sense, skinner was right despite how reviled he is these days. He knew that you couldnt link a physical process to any kind of felt inner sense. Well, you can give a phenonemonological account but not how that sense actually arises from a process that does not possess the sense. At least not with current scientific assumptions and methodologies. All the science can do is give a statement in terms of a behavior and how it is correlated to a physical process.
People try resolving the issue with emergent systems but I have never been convinced by that approach.
This all sounds like the standard (very bad) argument about emergent phenomena. You know how it goes. Some proponent of mysticism blithely asserts without argument that a thing can't obtain a property that its parts don't have except in some mystical fashion. Well, that is of course wrong. A car has the property of driver-directed locomotion, yet none of its individual parts do. Is the car's locomotion therefore mystical? No. It's explained without remainder in terms of the parts, for those who care to examine their interrelationships closely enough.
Yet most people live day-to-day in a state of mind where (A) they don't know the explanation at all and yet (B) they don't regard the phenomenon as mystical.
They are simply renaming something which is currently still fundamentally a mysical thing. By mystical I mean there is no explanation and that no one even has a rudimentary sketch of an explanation.
That's not what "mystical" actually means though. We have a pretty good phrase for indicating when we don't know how something works. It's "I don't know how that works."
Saying "that's mystical" is saying rather more: you're saying you don't know how it works, but you're quite sure it isn't by way of the normal, mundane operation of the laws of physics.
And that is an assertion about the subjective brain that is wholly unsubstantiated.
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A limit of time is fixed for thee
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
You don't see how it would be possible to explain the mind using the natural world? I'll ask again, do you think we're dealing with the supernatural here? If we're not, then we're back to physical processes.
We can't completely explain how the mind works, but what we can do is use the scientific method and logic to say with 99% certainty that it's not deterministic, or at least not completely.
If you said determinism exists, you would first have to find the source of the chain of the events, which even if the big bang exists, we can't prove for sure that it happened without observing it or 1, then we have to show that all events can be traced back to that source, and then we have to prove that there is no previous source or other thing causing the source to be the source. Like if I said that an action happens and tried to say it was deterministic, I would have to say "Because object x moved in motion y with an energy of z at angle a which was caused by the gravity of angle c with a mass of b at distance d which was created by...which was created by...which was created by..." and no matter what, you would always have to keep asking "Well why did THAT thing do what it did to cause everything else to do what it did?", and if you found an answer, you'd ask the same question.
And on top of all of that, you have recent findings in quantum mechanics which not only show that it is currently impossible to be completely certain even of a particle's position, but also that at the lowest possible level of matter, since matter and energy are quantized and so there is a limit to how small things can get, that source is not deterministic, there is no lower level causing the source to do what it does, its just random, and the events above it are also random as you cannot completely trace how energy moves from particle to particle within a system. Either way, with a source or without, determinism loses. It's either an infinite paradox, or it comes face to face with something of which it is impossible explain why it acts how it acts, eventually you get to such a small atomic scale that things happen for no particular reason, they are just inherently random.
And on top of all of that, you have recent findings in quantum mechanics which not only show that it is currently impossible to be completely certain even of a particle's position, but also that at the lowest possible level of matter, since matter and energy are quantized and so there is a limit to how small things can get, that source is not deterministic, there is no lower level causing the source to do what it does, its just random. Either way, with a source or without, determinism loses. It's either an infinite paradox, or it comes face to face with something of which it is impossible explain why it acts how it acts, eventually you get to such a small atomic scale that things happen for no particular reason, they are just inherently random.
You are confusing the thesis of universal deterministic physics (which, as you say, is probably not true) with the determinism of particular systems. Computers, for instance, are deterministic subsystems -- even if the universe is not.
The question as concerns the human mind then becomes the following: is the human mind, regarded as a subsystem of the universe, internally deterministic? That question is not answered in the negative by quantum indeterminism, because so far, all the pieces of the brain that we know about are too large to avail themselves of it.
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A limit of time is fixed for thee
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
You are confusing the thesis of universal deterministic physics (which, as you say, is probably not true) with the determinism of particular systems. Computers, for instance, are deterministic subsystems -- even if the universe is not.
Computers reside within the universe and are therefore subject to the physics of the universe. Part of the current physics of the universe is that matter is not 100% deterministic. You can't have the universe be non-deterministic and a computer be completely deterministic, otherwise that would mean a computer isn't part of the universe, which if that were the case, how would you have a computer in the first place? A computer can have tasks that it tries to perform, but why do you think glitches occur? Or why do you think they break? Even the tasks they try to perform aren't always what you want them to be. Current computers complete tasks which are governed by 1s and 0s which are switches created by the motions of electrons in specific small areas.
The question as concerns the human mind then becomes the following: is the human mind, regarded as a subsystem of the universe, internally deterministic? That question is not answered in the negative by quantum indeterminism, because so far, all the pieces of the brain that we know about are too large to avail themselves of it.
The human brain is made of matter and energy, which are not deterministic. With our current evidence, a mind comes from a brain, which means a mind cannot be deterministic. It's sort of loose what the mind actually is, but whatever it is, we've only seen it for sure in things that have a brain, so there's a pretty good chance we can say that the mind is the result of the brain.
And then, you still have to consider the paradox of infinite causation. What's causing the thing to cause someone to think what they think? And what's causing that thing to cause that thing? You'd never be able to answer it anyway.
The concept of determinism has been around for hundreds of years, I think it's time for it to retire.
say only that it is in the brain; how do I know that much? Because of evidence that has been collected since at least the time of Phineas Gage indicating that individuals who have pieces of their brains damaged can and do exhibit radically different outward evidence of their subjective selves than they did before the damage.
I don't buy the in the brain story. The brain is part of the nexus of factors that give rise to it. But I could change an environment and produce a drastic change in subjectivity. Removing someones limbs can permanently alter their subjectivity. The brain has a unique role to play, but to me is erroneous to locate it in the brain. I don't see it as having a location. Trying to locate consciousness is really just a form of the now discredited practice of phrenology. Some studies in the 70s located a few feet above behind and to the right of your head.
All of cognitive science doesn't agree that consciousness or the mind is "located in the brain". The short of it is that there doesn't appear to be consciousness without bodies existing in environments. In this sense it is a diffusive property. We can change your body and your environment and change your subjective state. It doesn't really make sense to locate that property any more than it makes sense to locate the property of your example of the car having the property of driver directed locomotion. You may look for example at Chalmers and Clarks extended mind for one level of argumentation against the location of mind. For example you use tools like external computational devices to augment your own memory and cognitive processes, and they form a part of your "extended" mind. Prior to this you use non electronic tools, whether it be walking sticks to sense the detail on the ground or spectacles to correct your visual subjectivity.
I never said that the brain has nothing to do with one's state of subjectivity, just that how a physical state dynamics actually GIVE RISE to is not known. Why do some blobs of matter have a subjectivity? Why does some particular level of complexity of organization of matter have consciousness? That we can change the brain and in a predictable manner change one's subjective sense doesn't give us a clue of how that particular dynamics has a subjectivity at all as compared to none, that that an organization of a physical process coupled with its environment should have a subjectivity.
That evidence weighed against evidence for the negative proposition -- which is nil -- leads me to support the proposition in question.
2) You don't seem to have any basis for distinguishing a "Behavioral zombie" from a non-behavioral zombie. Certainly nobody outside the behavioral zombie's body could know -- but could the behavioral zombie himself even know? Could he not be endowed with a zombie subjective sense that injects, deterministically, the same subjective impulses into his brain that a non-zombie would have received?
Not in any formal sense, but neither of us would be having this discussion if we weren't reasonably certain that the other didn't have a mind in the subjective sense. It's a paradox of sorts. It's taken on faith by the induction that if you are similar enough to me in terms of your outward displays that you must similarly have a mind. There is nothing that we are more certain of.
But, presumably a criterion for knowledge is having a mind in the sense of some form of awareness. If the behavioral zombie somehow manages to have a subjectivity or awareness then it is definitionally not a behavioral zombie. I don;t know what it means to inject a subjective impulse into his brain. If it has subjectivity it is not a behavioral zombie.
3) I don't need this assertion for this debate and I don't feel like arguing about it, but I think you're just wrong about the details of the neuroscience. VS Ramachandran in particular has done extensive studies on brain patients with damage affecting their subjective sense. I think it's more accurate to say that while surely not everything is known about the subjective nature of the mind, neither is it the case that nothing is known about it, as you seem to be asserting.
This is not my assertion.
Let's be clear. We could discover many mental laws or facts concerning the subjective nature of the mind, even if we don't know how the subjective nature of the mind arises. We could find many brain damages, and neuroatypical state and how they correlate in a very precise manner to a change in subjectivity without knowing how as a whole an being has a subjectivity whatsoever.
But presumably a successful account of mind should be able to give us this account, which it has not. It is an unsolved problem.
Anyhow, you raise good points, and I appreciate them.
You never said that you are totally fine with criminals (or, as you prefer the NS lingo, "cancers") and the occasional innocent intentionally suffering, and even believe prisoners are generally treated too well? Interesting, you obviously have an evil twin...
I guess someone needs reading lessons.
I have specified that the cancers I talk about are repeat offenders of child molestation, rape and murder. People that will never be a functioning part of society ever again. People that will never be able to be rehabed and placed back into society.
I have stated numerous times, prisons should only house those that is felt have a chance to be rehabilitated and re-entered into society. If someone doesnt fit that, put them to death. Limit the appeals process so it doesnt cost what it does now.
If 1 person slips thru that type of screening, so be it we have done away with 9 cancers. I dont have a problem with that. Its called collateral damage and as a society we use it every day.
The needs of the many out weight the needs of the few. No one person is more important then the group.
I didn't rape that woman, my ***** did it! Reductionism doesn't work there, so why would it work here?
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"If you're Havengul problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems and a Lich ain't one." - FSM
"In a world where money talks, silence is horrifying."
Which would already be bad enough. But your homicidal mania also covers the mentally ill, repeat offenders in general, and basically everybody else whom you consider a "burden" under your stated Social Darwinist ideals. Even for those who you want to generously let live (well, for now...), you have repeatedly stated that you consider anything else than some dungeon fantasy as "cuddling".
And now you want to tell me you were just being sarcastic when you claimed doctors were looking for ways to eradicate responsibility and let aggressively insane people roam the streets. Sure
You should be thankful that is not done practice. Otherwise, given the damage the world took last time somebody decided to get rid of "cancers", "burden existences", and "vermin", one would have to think about preemptive measures against individuals advocating something similar...
If you can honestly tell yourself society is better today then it was 30 or 40 years ago, then more power to you. I personally dont like the direction the country is going. This is my last post aimed at your attacks on me and my beliefs. Enjoy the world you coddling has created. I hope you enjoy paying for it all.
If you can honestly tell yourself society is better today then it was 30 or 40 years ago, then more power to you. I personally dont like the direction the country is going. This is my last post aimed at your attacks on me and my beliefs. Enjoy the world you coddling has created. I hope you enjoy paying for it all.
It's hard to classify better, but the world is actually getting less violent as time goes on. Statistically, less people are actually committing murders or robbing others. Even though there are wars right now, there was plenty of wars before as well. Tensions between most of the world are definitely less hostile now than 30-40 years ago, there's no longer a Cold War.
If you can honestly tell yourself society is better today then it was 30 or 40 years ago, then more power to you. I personally dont like the direction the country is going. This is my last post aimed at your attacks on me and my beliefs. Enjoy the world you coddling has created. I hope you enjoy paying for it all.
Even if we ignore all of the other social gains in that time period, you realize there's less crime now, right?
Do you have any evidence for that? Particularly that first sentence, wherein you assume that the reason that criminals break the law is that they need a hug.
Not if prison terms are at an all time length.
Harkius
The major talk is recitivism, the Quakers had closer to ideally what probably the anarchists talk about. Where someone does wrong by a community and is forced to give back to that community, but is also trained and socialized at the time as penance is given. This also occurred through much of the old colonial justice system when it was mostly effective, where the person would be fined and then forced to undergo job training.
And this is in part where some people like Shining Blue Eyes seemed to miss out on the opportunities about prisons being evil, is that the current system marks a person for eternity as a felon. This creates a negative feedback loop, especially for someone who has already repaid her debt to society, to then face stiffer penalties for years to come. Especially with the fining system we use today to cover court costs, but lack the colonial institutional and economic infrastructure to absorb that person into the system to pay it off. This creates a negative feedback loop for "easy money," makes for a great Oceans 11 sequel but bad for a lot of low time thugs going back to the old ways to get some money. So the real George Clooney goes to Darfur or the red carpet, the other guy is a guest of the government tossing salads.
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Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Do you have any evidence for that? Particularly that first sentence, wherein you assume that the reason that criminals break the law is that they need a hug.
Harkius
I also think that the issue is more complex than it's being made-out to be. There is a movie called "The Bad Seed", it's in black and white, and in that movie there's a psychopathic child that was born. Throughout the movie, the adults were all saying that people were only ever evil as a product of their environment, but the child lived in a sublime environment but still killed people. It isn't really about a hug, it's about how criminals actually view things. With psychopathic disorders, the parts of the brain that normally say " don't hurt other people" or "society helps you" don't exist or are mutated, and because of that, how they actually view people or whether they even view them as living things and not objects is different. On top of all the genetic stuff which has a wide variety of levels and the environmental stuff, there's habitual patterns as well, such as that if you are in a pattern of being around violence, you will get desensitized to it and thus not recognize it exactly the same way as other non-desensitized people, and will be more use to violence thus making it easier for you to be violent, at least if your not careful about it. If you can consciousness make yourself not do anything violent I guess it would be fine, the but severity of which would depend on how much time one has been in the habit. It's actually a pretty complex issue, and it's why there are people specifically in criminal psychology divisions.
Prison system is so corrupt, that words can't do it justice.
While I am sure there are some fine people who work in Department of Corrections, I'd say that in 25+ years of interacting with a random sampling of guards working in the system, out of maybe 50 I've met in 4 states in 25 years, there are maybe 10 I'd have trusted not to bash my head in for $50.
Consider:
You know how people talk about people going into police force for the wrong reasons? Power tripping etc.? What would motivate most people to go into dept of corrections?
Taking the police comparison further: do you see how police interact with citizens vs how they act with KNOWN perps? What if EVERYONE were a perp?
I once sat down with two DOC guys escorting an ICU patient who was there to get some bowel surgery. They just sat there talking with me about how cool it was when they bashed the face of some "con" who was clearly up to something. The way they said it lead me twice as scared of them as I was of the guy handcuffed to the gurney.
Consider Abu Graib: remember how being made into a prison guard can transform otherwise mostly good people who signed up to be soldiers and defend their country, into monsters who are mistreating their prisoners? Well the prison system is the same thing... Minus the "mostly good people" going into it.
Unlike the police force, where accountability is paramount, there is very little accountability in prison: videotape or files just "disappear". The guards form small gangs or alliances under corrupt leadership covering up each others corruption. The Internal Affairs or other accounting agencies are a joke compared to the INternal affairs for cops. The IA for cops is an independent agency that is widely hated and feared by cops. The IA for prison guards in many areas is part of the same system. I dont want to repeat the specifics of stories I've heard for fear of repercussions to people I've known.
Consider the drug trade in prison: that cannot exist unless a huge percentage of the DoC officers are just corrupt as HELL, and assist in the importation of all of it.
Talking with so many bad officers (and a few good ones) the picture is clear. The prison system sucks, and it's a giant money making exercise without accountability, and nobody in govt gives a ****, because it's just cons.
Cons get SET UP to be raped or even killed. Guards let people gang rape rhe newbie under a blanket in the middle o the room and joke about it. Guards even get set up to be raped or killed themselves. You've read it in the news before. remember Platoon with Tom berenger and Willem Dafoe? Where one accuses the other of some corruption that could result in charges or loss of job? And one let's the other get killed or sets him up to get killed? It's EXACTLY like that. Exactly.
I wonder if when we privatize prisons, if it will (a) be less lacking in accountability - it couldnt be more (b) prison guards will be more or less corrupt (c) whether it will cost more.
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First of all, I'm not sure what you mean by "subjectivity" in this context. If you could explain what you're trying to say, or rephrase, it would be helpful.
It seems like you're saying that we can explain behavior with biology, but not "minds"? I would then have to ask you, what do you think a 'mind' is?
I'm not sure what you're asking.
You don't see how it would be possible to explain the mind using the natural world? I'll ask again, do you think we're dealing with the supernatural here? If we're not, then we're back to physical processes.
Again, I have no idea what you mean here when you say 'subjective'.
I am using subjectivity here as: Awareness of ones own existence as a being. Or awareness in general. Awareness in general is sometimes termed first order subjectivity or first order consciousness or primary consciousness and awareness of oneself as a distinct being is second order.
So rocks and tables we don't believe have minds.
But we believe dogs and cats do.
So you're using it as a synonym to sentience or consciousness?
And some scientists have hypothesized that consciousness and the mind are just a manifestation of the brain's functions. The point is that we have no reason to think that there is anything going on that can't be explained by the physical brain. If you want to say there's something beyond the brain, you have some explaining to do.
Couple things:
1) Most importantly, you are straw manning my position. Neuroscience is young and quite crude, and I don't want to have a dcartist-style "you don't know everything, therefore you know nothing" debate. I only assert that the subjective sense is in the physical brain somewhere; I assert nothing further, certainly not an explanation of how it works in terms of raw physical neurochemistry.
I say only that it is in the brain; how do I know that much? Because of evidence that has been collected since at least the time of Phineas Gage indicating that individuals who have pieces of their brains damaged can and do exhibit radically different outward evidence of their subjective selves than they did before the damage.
That evidence weighed against evidence for the negative proposition -- which is nil -- leads me to support the proposition in question.
2) You don't seem to have any basis for distinguishing a "Behavioral zombie" from a non-behavioral zombie. Certainly nobody outside the behavioral zombie's body could know -- but could the behavioral zombie himself even know? Could he not be endowed with a zombie subjective sense that injects, deterministically, the same subjective impulses into his brain that a non-zombie would have received?
3) I don't need this assertion for this debate and I don't feel like arguing about it, but I think you're just wrong about the details of the neuroscience. VS Ramachandran in particular has done extensive studies on brain patients with damage affecting their subjective sense. I think it's more accurate to say that while surely not everything is known about the subjective nature of the mind, neither is it the case that nothing is known about it, as you seem to be asserting.
This all sounds like the standard (very bad) argument about emergent phenomena. You know how it goes. Some proponent of mysticism blithely asserts without argument that a thing can't obtain a property that its parts don't have except in some mystical fashion. Well, that is of course wrong. A car has the property of driver-directed locomotion, yet none of its individual parts do. Is the car's locomotion therefore mystical? No. It's explained without remainder in terms of the parts, for those who care to examine their interrelationships closely enough.
Yet most people live day-to-day in a state of mind where (A) they don't know the explanation at all and yet (B) they don't regard the phenomenon as mystical.
That's not what "mystical" actually means though. We have a pretty good phrase for indicating when we don't know how something works. It's "I don't know how that works."
Saying "that's mystical" is saying rather more: you're saying you don't know how it works, but you're quite sure it isn't by way of the normal, mundane operation of the laws of physics.
And that is an assertion about the subjective brain that is wholly unsubstantiated.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
We can't completely explain how the mind works, but what we can do is use the scientific method and logic to say with 99% certainty that it's not deterministic, or at least not completely.
If you said determinism exists, you would first have to find the source of the chain of the events, which even if the big bang exists, we can't prove for sure that it happened without observing it or 1, then we have to show that all events can be traced back to that source, and then we have to prove that there is no previous source or other thing causing the source to be the source. Like if I said that an action happens and tried to say it was deterministic, I would have to say "Because object x moved in motion y with an energy of z at angle a which was caused by the gravity of angle c with a mass of b at distance d which was created by...which was created by...which was created by..." and no matter what, you would always have to keep asking "Well why did THAT thing do what it did to cause everything else to do what it did?", and if you found an answer, you'd ask the same question.
And on top of all of that, you have recent findings in quantum mechanics which not only show that it is currently impossible to be completely certain even of a particle's position, but also that at the lowest possible level of matter, since matter and energy are quantized and so there is a limit to how small things can get, that source is not deterministic, there is no lower level causing the source to do what it does, its just random, and the events above it are also random as you cannot completely trace how energy moves from particle to particle within a system. Either way, with a source or without, determinism loses. It's either an infinite paradox, or it comes face to face with something of which it is impossible explain why it acts how it acts, eventually you get to such a small atomic scale that things happen for no particular reason, they are just inherently random.
You are confusing the thesis of universal deterministic physics (which, as you say, is probably not true) with the determinism of particular systems. Computers, for instance, are deterministic subsystems -- even if the universe is not.
The question as concerns the human mind then becomes the following: is the human mind, regarded as a subsystem of the universe, internally deterministic? That question is not answered in the negative by quantum indeterminism, because so far, all the pieces of the brain that we know about are too large to avail themselves of it.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Computers reside within the universe and are therefore subject to the physics of the universe. Part of the current physics of the universe is that matter is not 100% deterministic. You can't have the universe be non-deterministic and a computer be completely deterministic, otherwise that would mean a computer isn't part of the universe, which if that were the case, how would you have a computer in the first place? A computer can have tasks that it tries to perform, but why do you think glitches occur? Or why do you think they break? Even the tasks they try to perform aren't always what you want them to be. Current computers complete tasks which are governed by 1s and 0s which are switches created by the motions of electrons in specific small areas.
The human brain is made of matter and energy, which are not deterministic. With our current evidence, a mind comes from a brain, which means a mind cannot be deterministic. It's sort of loose what the mind actually is, but whatever it is, we've only seen it for sure in things that have a brain, so there's a pretty good chance we can say that the mind is the result of the brain.
And then, you still have to consider the paradox of infinite causation. What's causing the thing to cause someone to think what they think? And what's causing that thing to cause that thing? You'd never be able to answer it anyway.
The concept of determinism has been around for hundreds of years, I think it's time for it to retire.
I don't buy the in the brain story. The brain is part of the nexus of factors that give rise to it. But I could change an environment and produce a drastic change in subjectivity. Removing someones limbs can permanently alter their subjectivity. The brain has a unique role to play, but to me is erroneous to locate it in the brain. I don't see it as having a location. Trying to locate consciousness is really just a form of the now discredited practice of phrenology. Some studies in the 70s located a few feet above behind and to the right of your head.
All of cognitive science doesn't agree that consciousness or the mind is "located in the brain". The short of it is that there doesn't appear to be consciousness without bodies existing in environments. In this sense it is a diffusive property. We can change your body and your environment and change your subjective state. It doesn't really make sense to locate that property any more than it makes sense to locate the property of your example of the car having the property of driver directed locomotion. You may look for example at Chalmers and Clarks extended mind for one level of argumentation against the location of mind. For example you use tools like external computational devices to augment your own memory and cognitive processes, and they form a part of your "extended" mind. Prior to this you use non electronic tools, whether it be walking sticks to sense the detail on the ground or spectacles to correct your visual subjectivity.
I never said that the brain has nothing to do with one's state of subjectivity, just that how a physical state dynamics actually GIVE RISE to is not known. Why do some blobs of matter have a subjectivity? Why does some particular level of complexity of organization of matter have consciousness? That we can change the brain and in a predictable manner change one's subjective sense doesn't give us a clue of how that particular dynamics has a subjectivity at all as compared to none, that that an organization of a physical process coupled with its environment should have a subjectivity.
Not in any formal sense, but neither of us would be having this discussion if we weren't reasonably certain that the other didn't have a mind in the subjective sense. It's a paradox of sorts. It's taken on faith by the induction that if you are similar enough to me in terms of your outward displays that you must similarly have a mind. There is nothing that we are more certain of.
But, presumably a criterion for knowledge is having a mind in the sense of some form of awareness. If the behavioral zombie somehow manages to have a subjectivity or awareness then it is definitionally not a behavioral zombie. I don;t know what it means to inject a subjective impulse into his brain. If it has subjectivity it is not a behavioral zombie.
This is not my assertion.
Let's be clear. We could discover many mental laws or facts concerning the subjective nature of the mind, even if we don't know how the subjective nature of the mind arises. We could find many brain damages, and neuroatypical state and how they correlate in a very precise manner to a change in subjectivity without knowing how as a whole an being has a subjectivity whatsoever.
But presumably a successful account of mind should be able to give us this account, which it has not. It is an unsolved problem.
Anyhow, you raise good points, and I appreciate them.
I guess someone needs reading lessons.
I have specified that the cancers I talk about are repeat offenders of child molestation, rape and murder. People that will never be a functioning part of society ever again. People that will never be able to be rehabed and placed back into society.
I have stated numerous times, prisons should only house those that is felt have a chance to be rehabilitated and re-entered into society. If someone doesnt fit that, put them to death. Limit the appeals process so it doesnt cost what it does now.
If 1 person slips thru that type of screening, so be it we have done away with 9 cancers. I dont have a problem with that. Its called collateral damage and as a society we use it every day.
The needs of the many out weight the needs of the few. No one person is more important then the group.
"In a world where money talks, silence is horrifying."
Ashcoat Bear of Limited
If you can honestly tell yourself society is better today then it was 30 or 40 years ago, then more power to you. I personally dont like the direction the country is going. This is my last post aimed at your attacks on me and my beliefs. Enjoy the world you coddling has created. I hope you enjoy paying for it all.
It's hard to classify better, but the world is actually getting less violent as time goes on. Statistically, less people are actually committing murders or robbing others. Even though there are wars right now, there was plenty of wars before as well. Tensions between most of the world are definitely less hostile now than 30-40 years ago, there's no longer a Cold War.
Even if we ignore all of the other social gains in that time period, you realize there's less crime now, right?
Hmm.. crime is low but prison populations are at an all time high... Those 2 stats seem to go against each other.
Prison stats are high, but so is drug use. Weed definitely doesn't make people violent, or at least smoking it doesn't.
The major talk is recitivism, the Quakers had closer to ideally what probably the anarchists talk about. Where someone does wrong by a community and is forced to give back to that community, but is also trained and socialized at the time as penance is given. This also occurred through much of the old colonial justice system when it was mostly effective, where the person would be fined and then forced to undergo job training.
And this is in part where some people like Shining Blue Eyes seemed to miss out on the opportunities about prisons being evil, is that the current system marks a person for eternity as a felon. This creates a negative feedback loop, especially for someone who has already repaid her debt to society, to then face stiffer penalties for years to come. Especially with the fining system we use today to cover court costs, but lack the colonial institutional and economic infrastructure to absorb that person into the system to pay it off. This creates a negative feedback loop for "easy money," makes for a great Oceans 11 sequel but bad for a lot of low time thugs going back to the old ways to get some money. So the real George Clooney goes to Darfur or the red carpet, the other guy is a guest of the government tossing salads.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
I also think that the issue is more complex than it's being made-out to be. There is a movie called "The Bad Seed", it's in black and white, and in that movie there's a psychopathic child that was born. Throughout the movie, the adults were all saying that people were only ever evil as a product of their environment, but the child lived in a sublime environment but still killed people. It isn't really about a hug, it's about how criminals actually view things. With psychopathic disorders, the parts of the brain that normally say " don't hurt other people" or "society helps you" don't exist or are mutated, and because of that, how they actually view people or whether they even view them as living things and not objects is different. On top of all the genetic stuff which has a wide variety of levels and the environmental stuff, there's habitual patterns as well, such as that if you are in a pattern of being around violence, you will get desensitized to it and thus not recognize it exactly the same way as other non-desensitized people, and will be more use to violence thus making it easier for you to be violent, at least if your not careful about it. If you can consciousness make yourself not do anything violent I guess it would be fine, the but severity of which would depend on how much time one has been in the habit. It's actually a pretty complex issue, and it's why there are people specifically in criminal psychology divisions.
While I am sure there are some fine people who work in Department of Corrections, I'd say that in 25+ years of interacting with a random sampling of guards working in the system, out of maybe 50 I've met in 4 states in 25 years, there are maybe 10 I'd have trusted not to bash my head in for $50.
Consider:
You know how people talk about people going into police force for the wrong reasons? Power tripping etc.? What would motivate most people to go into dept of corrections?
Taking the police comparison further: do you see how police interact with citizens vs how they act with KNOWN perps? What if EVERYONE were a perp?
I once sat down with two DOC guys escorting an ICU patient who was there to get some bowel surgery. They just sat there talking with me about how cool it was when they bashed the face of some "con" who was clearly up to something. The way they said it lead me twice as scared of them as I was of the guy handcuffed to the gurney.
Consider Abu Graib: remember how being made into a prison guard can transform otherwise mostly good people who signed up to be soldiers and defend their country, into monsters who are mistreating their prisoners? Well the prison system is the same thing... Minus the "mostly good people" going into it.
Unlike the police force, where accountability is paramount, there is very little accountability in prison: videotape or files just "disappear". The guards form small gangs or alliances under corrupt leadership covering up each others corruption. The Internal Affairs or other accounting agencies are a joke compared to the INternal affairs for cops. The IA for cops is an independent agency that is widely hated and feared by cops. The IA for prison guards in many areas is part of the same system. I dont want to repeat the specifics of stories I've heard for fear of repercussions to people I've known.
Consider the drug trade in prison: that cannot exist unless a huge percentage of the DoC officers are just corrupt as HELL, and assist in the importation of all of it.
Talking with so many bad officers (and a few good ones) the picture is clear. The prison system sucks, and it's a giant money making exercise without accountability, and nobody in govt gives a ****, because it's just cons.
Cons get SET UP to be raped or even killed. Guards let people gang rape rhe newbie under a blanket in the middle o the room and joke about it. Guards even get set up to be raped or killed themselves. You've read it in the news before. remember Platoon with Tom berenger and Willem Dafoe? Where one accuses the other of some corruption that could result in charges or loss of job? And one let's the other get killed or sets him up to get killed? It's EXACTLY like that. Exactly.
I wonder if when we privatize prisons, if it will (a) be less lacking in accountability - it couldnt be more (b) prison guards will be more or less corrupt (c) whether it will cost more.