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Free Will and the Choice to Focus

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 A newborn, though, is not merely flailing. I said be careful, because "flailing" makes it sound like newborns begin as machines.

I don't think we disagree, but...

 

....motricity is present from the time that the fertilized egg divides into two cells - and long before there is anything resembling a nervous system or mind to exert coordinated, well timed behavior across multiple systems.

 

Conscious learning involves learned inhibition as much as learned habituation.  That is, we learn to control uninhibited behavior such as flailing, crying, pooping/peeing, etc.  We also learn to habituated our behavior, such as purposefully controlling the muscles that allow us to talk, write or shoot fade-away jump shots. In fact, the seat of procedural memory, the basal ganglia is inhibited from acting, as can be seen by damage resulting in Tourette's syndrome, or automatically pulling our hand away from a hot stove top.  Someone suffering from Parkinson's may not do the latter.

 

Without this "uninhibited" behavior, our hearts would not beat, food would not metabolize, waste would not be eliminated, we would not sleep, etc.   This ties into the point I was making above regarding internal, self-directed behavior as it relates to various cells, organs, sub-cortical and cortical structures.  A great deal of what we do is sub-attentive, and not open to conscious, attentive control.  And this is as it should be.  If we had to focus on triggering each and every heart beat, we would never get anything done.  The attentive cortical structure- awake for 16 hours a day - is one of many systems operating according to it's nature.

Edited by New Buddha
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To build on the post above:  From Nervous System

 

"Historically, for many years the predominant view of the function of the nervous system was as a stimulus-response associator.[46] In this conception, neural processing begins with stimuli that activate sensory neurons, producing signals that propagate through chains of connections in the spinal cord and brain, giving rise eventually to activation of motor neurons and thereby to muscle contraction, i.e., to overt responses. Descartes believed that all of the behaviors of animals, and most of the behaviors of humans, could be explained in terms of stimulus-response circuits, although he also believed that higher cognitive functions such as language were not capable of being explained mechanistically.[47] Charles Sherrington, in his influential 1906 book The Integrative Action of the Nervous System,[46] developed the concept of stimulus-response mechanisms in much more detail, andBehaviorism, the school of thought that dominated Psychology through the middle of the 20th century, attempted to explain every aspect of human behavior in stimulus-response terms.[48]

 

 

However, experimental studies of electrophysiology, beginning in the early 20th century and reaching high productivity by the 1940s, showed that the nervous system contains many mechanisms for generating patterns of activity intrinsically, without requiring an external stimulus.[49] Neurons were found to be capable of producing regular sequences of action potentials, or sequences of bursts, even in complete isolation.[50] When intrinsically active neurons are connected to each other in complex circuits, the possibilities for generating intricate temporal patterns become far more extensive.[44] A modern conception views the function of the nervous system partly in terms of stimulus-response chains, and partly in terms of intrinsically generated activity patterns—both types of activity interact with each other to generate the full repertoire of behavior.[51]  

 

Although stimulus-response mechanisms are the easiest to understand, the nervous system is also capable of controlling the body in ways that do not require an external stimulus, by means of internally generated rhythms of activity. Because of the variety of voltage-sensitive ion channels that can be embedded in the membrane of a neuron, many types of neurons are capable, even in isolation, of generating rhythmic sequences of action potentials, or rhythmic alternations between high-rate bursting and quiescence. When neurons that are intrinsically rhythmic are connected to each other by excitatory or inhibitory synapses, the resulting networks are capable of a wide variety of dynamical behaviors, including attractor dynamics, periodicity, and even chaos. A network of neurons that uses its internal structure to generate temporally structured output, without requiring a corresponding temporally structured stimulus, is called a central pattern generator.

 

The 2nd and 3rd paragraphs are illustrate the position that I'm trying to explain.

Nerve cells are cells, just as are kidney, liver, skin cells, etc.  One cell does not cause the other to behave in the way that it does.  The kidneys, liver and skin are organs, but so too it the nervous system.  Each has identity.

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Of course, but it also takes making a clear post so we can discuss if the errors really are errors. The main issue I see in the thread is that none of us seem to agree on what focus is on a philosophical level even. So, any errors I see aren't due to the sorts of reasons you cite.

If philosophy, the variant that is often taken under consideration on this forum, were to be consulted, The Objectivist Ethics, pg. 22 offers a starting point for chewing on:

 

When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man—in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being—an unfocused mind is not conscious.

 

Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.

 

On page 56 of OPAR,

 

Volition subsumes different kinds of choices. The primary choice, according to Objectivism, the one that makes conceptual activity possible, is the choice to focus one's consciousness.

 

Jumping to page 72, consider the following:

 

By identifying the locus of man's will as his conceptual faculty, Ayn Rand aborts such mysticism at the root. Will, in her view, is not something opposed or even added to reason. The faculty of reason is the faculty of volition. This theory makes it possible for the first time to validate the principle of volition objectively. It removes the principle once and for all from the clutches of religion.

 

While this was not referenced directly in OPAR, a similar vein can be found in The Objectivist, May 1969, What Is Romanticism? with regard to the primacy of values in human life:

 

The still deeper issue, the fact that the faculty of reason is the faculty of volition, was not known at the time, and the various theories of free will were for the most part of an anti-rational character, thus reinforcing the association of volition with mysticism.

 

Ponder a cat focused on a bird, it's undivided attention hell-bent on stalking it. This has a considerably different tenor than that of a man focused on the cat's ability to focus, while identifying the similarities and differences between his own focused conceptual grasp of "focus" and that of the cat's. I would submit there is a teleological difference. While both may carry existential and metaphysical benefits, only one has demonstrated the ability to conceptualize any epistemological ramifications.

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This was addressed touched on too in Post 83:

 

This link is from a book I'm currently reading.  At the bottom of page 59 and onto page 60 is a brief overview of how individual cells (in embryonic development) are eventually "controlled" by the nervous system.  The cells are acting long before the spinal cord is even present and long before there is a brain.

Book is purchased. Thanks! Though feeding my book habit may not be so nice. 

 

I am catching up here. The best I can do is knock off a few easy posts and try to read the rest of this and offer some summaries.

 

On influences I started with Dennett and Damasio, Baars, Minsky, Koch, Ramachandran, The Churchlands, LeDoux, etc.

Then I hit the science for a few years in multiple passes. Anatomy and mol.biol. 

 

Then I discovered Thompson and Varela, Maturana, Johnson-Laird, Miller, Tucker, Lakoff, and Mark Johnson. I'm sort of stuck there and have thousands of pages to read still. I was also influenced heavily by a group of NS papers (have to look for them) by two researchers on the thalamus and hippocampus and data compression in the brain. I have about one hundred papers to read there yet when I get back that way. 

 

Philosophically I am influenced early on by Alan Watts, at fifteen. The same year I discover Atlas Shrugged. I somehow fit perfectly into some odd combination of hippie capitalist pig ( a joke among my friends who also call my a perfect contradiction of myself). I read a lot of philosophy and am disappointed by almost all of it eventually. I mentioned in my intro that I had ignored Rand and Now I am kicking myself. The clarity I am finding so far in recently purchased books recommended here is refreshing. Still waiting for the other shoe to drop though I must admit. 

 

Now that may seem off topic but is not. What I write about here on 'will', will be from influences in that second group of books on autopoiesis and dynamical systems. I am loathe to start with mind in any analysis and rather start with brain and the idea 'what can some DNA and the brain it constructs actually do'. If I can't work out a developmental path from single cell to mind then I am not done working on it yet. 

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Grimm said:

Lacan was insane. (Like most of the french continental junk)

I asked only because he made the assertion that children start fragmented and their bodily motions reflect this. He posited a "mirror stage" that your cog sci assertions are very similar to.

I am not saying your crazy because of this similarity. Was just wondering if Lacan was motivating your interest in the particular cog science stuff you are asserting.

Are you trying to derive an answer to questions about volition and focus from these models you posit too?

 

Thanks. i am glad you think he's nuts too. I was worried.

 

Yes. I am trying to derive a model for will based on this developmental aspect. The question in this thread is posed as a chicken and egg dilemma. Systems dynamics in development is the only way I can see toward digging us out of that one. 

 

I always try to keep in mind that we do not just appear fully formed with our philosophical influences and adult categories. When I hear Descartes' cogito I scream inside. I do not think any of this is incompatible with Randian ideas of will and agency. It's a thing in itself once it spins up out of the void. Well, maybe not void.

 

Consider that there is a world with a complex storm of molecular happenings. A seed of a crystal enters into a relationship with that world and then there is a system of a developing crystal, forming itself, yet being shaped by that world at once. 

 

Now consider biology and DNA. An information packed seed for a very different kind of crystal. A living thing. The entire history of it's species and life itself is packed in that information. It forms itself as it relates to the world and then it does something else that defines the very life of it. It forms and maintains those processes that continue to form itself. It is autopoietic. 

 

Note. None of that would work if the world suddenly and radically changed and that history no longer applied. It's always an interaction. 

 

Now as fully formed living human beings that will is obvious an functioning. We can argue all day about it's features. Yet, it will do no good to argue, by crossing categorical boundaries between physical or scientific matters and matters of the will of men. This science can inform us as to structures and chicken vs. egg just the same. We have to keep it all in it's proper pen though. 

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DW:

As much as Rand is pointing out the way man needs to focus, and what she means when she talks about the way man needs to focus, it's not entirely clear what she means by focus unqualified. In that context, she says an unfocused mind is not conscious, which is fine if she means conceptual consciousness. I'm inclined to say she just altered her position later on, though, if she is claiming only humans are conscious here (see this post).

Of course, the next passage you write is the general idea I've had about focus: any thought or conscious act entails and requires focus. (see this post)

The OPAR quote is saying how conceptual activity requires choosing to focus, and probably a certain degree of focus. So it doesn't help much in thinking about if focus unqualified always requires conceptual capacities.

The next OPAR quote, and Rand quote, equate the faculty of reason and the faculty of volition. I don't see how they are identical, unless the context of the quote is like the first one, where we're talking about the way man focuses, the teleological purpose of man's ability to focus. As a whole, these quotes show the kinds of questions and ideas we should consider.

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While discussing the Oist position on focus and volition with DW, I remembered that Greg Salmieri makes a distinction in Objectivist Epistemology in Outline about Ms. Rand's view on consciousness. He points out therein that Ms. Rand talks of two different senses of consciousness.

1). Consciousness as a state of awareness. Here he makes the distinction between conceptual awareness and perceptual.

and

2). Consciousness as a faculty, which he defines as "an enduring attribute of an entity, especially an organism, in virtue of which it is able to engage in some activity or set of activities". Ex. nutritive, reproductive, locomotive.

As a faculty one posseses consciousness even when asleep but qua process it is "an active process".....

OPAR said:

Let us begin with an overview of the Objectivist position. Consciousness is an active process, not a motionless medium, such as a mirror, which passively reflects reality.9 To achieve and maintain awareness, a man's consciousness must perform a complex series of actions. The object of awareness, reality, simply exists; it impinges on a man’s senses, but it does not do a man’s cognitive work for him nor force itself on his mind. The man who waits for reality to write the truth inside his soul waits in vain. The actions of consciousness required on the sensory-perceptual level are automatic. On the conceptual level, however, they are not automatic. This is the key to the locus of volition. Man‘s basic freedom of choice, according to Objectivism, is: to exercise his distinctively human cognitive machinery or not; i.e., to set his conceptual faculty in motion or not. In Ayn Rand‘s summarizing formula, the choice is: “to think or not to think." to think is an act of choice.... Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question “to be or not to be” is the question “to think or not to think.” As long as a man is awake (and his brain intact), he is conscious of reality in the sensory-perceptual form; this much is given to him by nature. But consciousness in the form required by his survival is not given to man; it must be achieved by a process of choice. Man's power of volition is the power to seek such awareness of reality or to dispense with it. His choice is to be conscious (in the human sense) or not. Volition subsumes different kinds of choices. The primary choice, according to Objectivism, the one that makes conceptual activity possible, is the choice to focus one’s consciousness. Let me introduce the concept of “focus” with a visual analogy. A man cannot do much with his faculty of vision until his eyes are in focus. Otherwise, his eyesight gives him only a blur or haze, a kind of visual fog, in which he can discriminate relatively little. Although the power of visual focus is not possessed by newborn infants, they acquire it very early and soon automatize its use. As adults, therefore, our eyes are automatically focussed; it takes a special effort for us to unfocus them and dissolve the world into a blur. A similar concept applies to the mind. In regard to thought, as to vision, the same alternative exists: clear awareness or a state of blur, haze, fog, in which relatively little can be discriminated. On the conceptual level, however, one must choose between these alternatives. Intellectual clarity is not given to man automatically. “Focus" (in the conceptual realm) names a quality of purposeful alertness in a man's mental state. “Focus" is the state of a goal—directed mind committed to attaining full awareness of reality. As there are degrees of visual acuity, so there are degrees of awareness on the conceptual level. At one extreme, there is the active mind intent on understanding whatever it deals with, the man prepared to summon every conscious resource that will enable him to grasp the object of his concern. Such an individual struggles to grasp all the facts he believes to be relevant—as against being content with a splintered grasp, a grasp of some facts while other data dimly sensed to be relevant are left shrouded in mental fog, unscrutinized and unidentified. In addition, he struggles to grasp the facts clearly, with the greatest precision possible to him—as against being content with a vague impression, which loosely suggests but never congeals into a definite datum. To achieve this kind of understanding, an individual cannot stare passively at whatever concretes, images, or words happen to strike his attention. He cannot abdicate his power to control his consciousness and ignore his own mental processes, on the premise that his brain or reality will do in his place whatever is necessary. On the contrary, he must commit himself to a course of self- conscious mental action—to the policy of mobilizing his faculty of thought. He must be prepared, when necessary, to conceptualize new data.

Now, DW, having earlier mentioned to NB about the relation of parts to wholes qua organic entity, understood my point to NB about entity causation and was perceptive and active minded enough to point out that I said "the fallacy of composition" when in fact what I was trying to point out was the fallacy of division.

Well done Greg! Thank you for your virtuous exchange.

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Now, DW, having earlier mentioned to NB about the relation of parts to wholes qua organic entity, understood my point to NB about entity causation and was perceptive and active minded enough to point out that I said "the fallacy of composition" when in fact what I was trying to point out was the fallacy of division.

Well good, but I don't know what you mean by fallacy of division. Can you be more specific where that happened? No need to suggest people who don't understand you are not active minded or perceptive enough, though. Sometimes you're simply hard to comprehend because of your writing style.

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Louie said:

Well good, that makes you [...]

I don't understand what you are saying. Could you adjust your wording? Makes me what?

Edit: you changed your sentence while I was typing a response, to:

Well good, but I don't know what you mean by fallacy of division. Can you be more specific where that happened? No need to suggest people who don't understand you are not active minded or perceptive enough, though. Sometimes you're simply hard to comprehend because of your writing style.

but I don't know what you mean by fallacy of division. Can you be more specific where that happened?

I mean what standard logic texts mean. Anyone who is unclear on that could take the actual words I said along with a simple google search and find:

After reading : "Description: Inferring that something is true of one or more of the parts from the fact that it is true of the whole. This is the opposite of the fallacy of composition."

One could then integrate that with the rest of my statements about entity causation as well as the statements I quoted NB saying.

Your treatment of cells as "an end in itself" is a failure to grasp the very point on entity based causation you are citing in that article. You are actually making the fallacy of composition while also pontificating about special science and then trying to derive philosophical significance from that. Discussion of free will from that method is indeed difficult. Its completely upside down. Human beings are the entity and choices are actions they make. This is a self evident fact, no cognitive psychology necessary. There are no isolated sections inside human biology. The integration of an organism ("thoroughly coupled") is what undoes the notion that the cells are "ends in themselves". None of this makes any coherent sense.[...] The ends of any part of an organism is the life of the whole organism. That is, it is an integrated whole.

NB said:

In the case of living things, whose actions are self-generated (i.e., the action's direction and energy come from sources internal to the acting entity), entity causation becomes agent causation; the contraction of a muscle is caused by the nature of the animal's muscular and nervous systems. This understanding of causality makes it possible to see how human agents, whose nature includes the ability to weigh alternative courses of action and deliberate about them, and consequently the capacity for genuine choice, act in accordance with causality, not in any way in contradiction to it.[....]This, in part, is what I was touching on in my post regarding Dennett's misunderstanding of Cause and Effect by trying to fix the "time" when a decision is made per Libet's Experiment. Behavior is always internally, self-initiated at the cellular level. It would be wrong to stay that the neocortex or the somatosenory cortex "causes" the behavior of the muscles. The distinction/boundaries between the behavior of these systems is epistemic. The systems, in a healthy organism are thoroughly coupled and yet largely self-directed. This is what makes discussion of Free Will so difficult.

And while you yourself have not made the distinction, discussion of "bottom-up, top-down" is more metaphorical than physical. It ties into the misunderstanding of Causality as outlined in the Atlas Society article I linked to in Post 182.

Here NB did not explicitly categorize his claims with too much verbal precision. One must integrate the conceptual themes in his posts to see what he is claiming. If one actively works to recall his previous claims elsewhere it is rather obvious what he is pointing at. Particularly if you know that the neo cortex is thought by many to be where the actions we call choices are said to be initiated from.

NB cited Libet's experiment which he claims is the basis for Dennett's determinism. That experiment is taken to refute free will because electrical impulses thought to be associated with "unconscious" neuronal processes, are firing prior to the agents conscious sense of willing the act as well as the cortex and muscles used as EEG units of measure. (Roughly)

In philosophy of mind there is what is known as downward causation within the "mind-body" problem. There are those who think that there is a consciousness-mind but that it is "causally closed" usually a species of epiphenomenalism. Dennett, I believe is even less inclined and is an eliminative materialist.

Buddha wants to derive claims about free will from the notion that cells are organisms in themselves with their own ends and that working from the higher structures thought to be responsible for the physiological instantiation of volitional actions is an error because cells are able to fire long before they are a part of an organ.

Add that to his misunderstanding about entites being epistemic-contextual, as in "boundaries are epistemic".

Searle makes the problem here very clear. You cannot reduce the first person ontology of consciousness to a third person ontology. The qualitative nature of consciousness is first person. In the philosophy of mind the use of first person approaches to consciousness and volition is called "folk psychology". When Grimm says he doesn't prefer the psychological approach I think he means more than the nutty Lacanian kind. Objectivism validates consciousness and volition from the qualitative experience of it.

Louie said:

No need to suggest people who don't understand you are not active minded or perceptive enough, though. Sometimes you're simply hard to comprehend because of your writing style.

Wether or not anyone else misunderstood me because they focused only on my writing style, or not, Greg didn't. He looked at the context of my statement and was able to see what I was saying. That is the point. Edited by Plasmatic
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There's a lot of science being introduced, that while interesting is above my pay grade to comment on :confused:

 

...

Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.

...

 

It seems to me that morally, the choice to focus or not is the choice to assume personal responsibility or not.  That helps me to clarify the terms free will and focus in a manner that is philosophically relavent to the OP, including having self awareness and a will to express.  Focusing on choices without some sense of personal responsibility removes a moral context, doesn't it?  Isn't that why (referred to earlier on) we hold man morally accountable for wreaking havoc, but not the same for (most, if not all) animals??

 

When Robert Heinlein states, "I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do," that speaks more to me about what is looked for in positing free will and a choice to focus.  However, the science is interesting, so carry on I guess...

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I wasn't talking about what the fallacy of division is, Plasmatic, I meant more what you're referring to, where the fallacy happened. I would think it's fairly clear that the main idea that brought up cells was in response to my claim that babies would act not mechanically at any point. To point out that behavior is initiated at a cellular level isn't to say a cell -chooses- anything. The idea, rather, seems to be that the behavior of an organism itself in a biological development context gets started on a cellular level by cells themselves prior to any conscious control.

But that still leaves epiphenomenalism - that consciousness serves no causal role in behavior - wide open. We didn't really get there yet. Insofar as it looks like we all agree that a "point" in which decisions are made is senseless, and any "points" are entirely contextual in their epistemic context, epiphenomenalism is no threat. Any epistemic boundaries are about delimiting context, as opposed to some empiricist error of "there's no real way to delimit a context". So I'm not sure where there is an attempt to say physiological instantiation must precede and occur separately from volition. That definite seperation is what the Libet experiment uses as a bad premise. An epistemic boundary explodes that premise, since discussion of cellular activity is not at all on the same level of abstraction as volition. (In the same way Peikoff here provides arguments against reductionists. The same video in another thread.)
 

Searle makes the problem here very clear. You cannot reduce the first person ontology of consciousness to a third person ontology.

Can you grab a quote, or at least point to a passage where Searle says that?

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If a Doctor taps your knee with a hammer, and your knee jerks in response, the Materialist/Determinist/Behaviorist would say that the stimulus caused the response (see post #227).  The Objectivist would say that the Doctor, the hammer and the knee all behaved according to their nature.  If you have damage to your nervous system, we would not say that the Doctor and the Hammer did NOT cause you knee to not jump.  If the Doctor does not strike your knee with sufficient force, we don't say that your knee chose not to respond.  Determinism's under understanding of causality is very little different from the Scholastic's, from which it was derived, and leads either to an Infinite Regression or a Prime Mover fallacy.  Or Socialism.....

 

A healthy, conscious person cannot Will his knee to not jerk, nor can he not be consciously aware that his knee did jerk.  But the stimulus did not cause the response -- except in a derivative sense.  If a person shoots another person, we won't quibble that the bullet caused the person to die - we assign cause/blame to the shooter.

 

If you were listening to music, with you eyes closed, and your knee were tapped, you would momentarily stop attending to the music and focus on the new signal.  Once you understand what it is, you could then chose to go back listening to the music or take some other action.

 

The above does not just apply to what can be termed reflexive behavior.

 

If you are playing a round of golf on a very hot day, and are "dying" of thirst, you cannot not be aware of, nor not attend to, your thirst.  Thirst is a signal sent from the kidneys/autonomic nervous system that monitors salinity levels.  The generation of the signal is not open to your attentive mind.  However, you can chose how to behave to the thirst.  You might look around for the drink cart, or remember that there is a drinking fountain a few holes back or realize that you're on the 16th hole, and just decide to stick it out and get a drink at the club house.

 

Grimm mentions the cortical, thalamus and basal ganglia model of consciousness.  This is one which I believe is on the right track.  The following is a quote from the Lee Pierson paper I mention above:

 

The fringe/focus distinction makes volitional selection (switching among objects of attention) possible. An organism cannot directly choose the contents of its consciousness from outside its consciousness. You cannot consciously, directly select from outside your consciousness the next mental content to focus on within consciousness. You cannot say to yourself “I will now think about this” unless you are already at least peripherally conscious of the “this.” You can select content from within consciousness by moving content from the fringe to the focus of awareness, and you can bring in more information about a given subject by choosing to sustain a thought process about it.   

 
The brain structure that admits thirst into the realm of attentive awareness is (roughly speaking) the thalamus.  The thalamus is intimately connected to memory, emotion, fixed action patterns, the sensorimotor cortex and the cortex, etc.  But the thalamus is not computational, nor is it open to control by the attentive "self".  The strongest signal - of the moment - wins.  It is an organ that behaves according to it's nature via internally generated behavior, and it's behavior is not caused by other organs.  And this is as it should be.  If you hear a growl in the woods, you prepare for flight or fight! It's only once you're prepped that your conscious, attentive mind takes over and either adjusts your response, or chooses an alternate one.  This is Free Will.
 
As I state above in another post, this constant switching of attention is not a bug, it's a feature.  Without it, we would either become fixated or swamped by signals.  So too is the fact that we have a "crow's epistemology" and are subject to the one, two, three, many limitation.  These are not bugs, they are necessary features.  Concepts allow us to move beyond the concrete-bound percepts and both abstract from concretes and abstract from abstractions.  But even our most abstract ideas are perceivable as either written or spoken words.
 
From this model, I have several ideas about how attentive, consciousness comes about.  The idea came to me originally when I couldn't fathom why we saccade when it consumes energy.  I believe that any model of consciousness will probably include some type of memory that preforms the same type of activity as Tranassaccadic Memory.
Edited by New Buddha
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Is anyone else surprised that a thread about a subject that is so close to the fundamentals in metaphysics and epistemology could last for 237 posts in explanation and debate?  You have free will, within the limits of metaphysical identity, and as humans, you have choice/volition as relates to the amount of focus you will apply to any issue.  Pretty simple.

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The OPAR quote is saying how conceptual activity requires choosing to focus, and probably a certain degree of focus. So it doesn't help much in thinking about if focus unqualified always requires conceptual capacities.

The next OPAR quote, and Rand quote, equate the faculty of reason and the faculty of volition. I don't see how they are identical, unless the context of the quote is like the first one, where we're talking about the way man focuses, the teleological purpose of man's ability to focus. As a whole, these quotes show the kinds of questions and ideas we should consider.

I'm not sure where to start here.

You asked, in essence here:

[W]hat's an example of a non-volitional creature?

You indicate to DA here:

(and we can leave aside for a moment that you are still equivocating conceptual awareness and volition)

and further here:

Maybe it doesn't "matter" if an animal acts expectedly, or is easy to predict, but lots of people also act as expected. Doesn't mean they aren't using volition - it still takes an act of focus to work at all.

Questioning the distinction between conceptual consciousness and non-conceptual consciousness, consider Peikoff taking into consideration that "The faculty of reason is the faculty of volition." here?

I don't see where or how Peikoff can argue that non-conceptual consciousness lacks volition.

Animals are quite capable of focus. Consider, again, a cat focused on a bird.

Yes, and to some degree, anything conscious would be aware of a mental state, otherwise it'd be "empty in the head". To be aware of a mental state would take a degree of focus. Focus is the minimal volitional choice. That's why I don't see how any consciousness could lack volition.

The cat is simply focused on the bird. Volition is imported here, esp. considering the faculty of reason as the faculty of volition.

Focus and volition are two different concepts that refer to two different mental states.

Focus is neither perceptual nor conceptual, it's an action.

I would have to contend that premise 2 is erroneous, and while the following is not a syllogism, renders the conclusion (6.) dubious at best.

1. All acts of focus require attending to mental content.

2. Attending to mental content requires volition.

3a. Mental content with focus has causal efficacy.

3b. Mental content without focus has no causal efficacy.

4. All mental content has causal efficacy.

5. All conscious entities attend to mental content.

6. Therefore, all conscious entities have volition.

Focus deals with more than strictly the conceptual content.

Evasion is a matter of denying evidence or explicit knowledge, which is conceptual in nature. To do that requires minimizing focus or not focusing at all. That doesn't mean only humans are able to choose to focus, it only means evasion is about denying conceptual content.

Yet the conceptual content requires the ability to focus. Essentially, as I understand it, this is, in part, why the faculty of reason is the faculty of volition.

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Thanks DW, that helps me clarify some of my position. I'm still working on my ideas, so any changes or alterations I make are thanks to talking it all out.

 

"Focus and volition are two different concepts that refer to two different mental states."

 

Yes, focus and volition aren't identical, but going by my premise to conclusion (I know it's not really a syllogism), my position is that focus is accomplished by volition. If focus, as a mental state, can be accomplished by something other than volition, then I don't know what to call it. Volition - as a concept denoting a mental selection that's representational - works as far as I see.

 

If 2 is erroneous, my position falls apart. 6 is dubious, as in I still need to formulate it better, but 2 is a deeper question.

 

Here's one new idea: perhaps we can treat volition as a concept applicable to Peikoff's two definitions idea. In one sense, volition is any kind of representational selections. Even ants are volitional. Compare that to one sense of morality, where altruism is a moral belief in descriptive terms. In another sense, altruism is not "really" a moral belief in normative terms. Another sense of volition is that ants aren't "really" volitional, not in the rich and normative sense required of epistemology. Both definitions are needed - the simpler one is required before developing the stronger, fuller one. In the richer sense, reason IS the faculty of volition.

 

The richer sense is exactly the context Peikoff or Rand wants. It's the sense of volition with moral implications.

Edited by Eiuol
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Thanks DW, that helps me clarify some of my position. I'm still working on my ideas, so any changes or alterations I make are thanks to talking it all out.

 

"Focus and volition are two different concepts that refer to two different mental states."

 

Yes, focus and volition aren't identical, but going by my premise to conclusion (I know it's not really a syllogism), my position is that focus is accomplished by volition. If focus, as a mental state, can be accomplished by something other than volition, then I don't know what to call it. Volition - as a concept denoting a mental selection that's representational - works as far as I see.

 

If 2 is erroneous, my position falls apart. 6 is dubious, as in I still need to formulate it better, but 2 is a deeper question.

 

Here's one new idea: perhaps we can treat volition as a concept applicable to Peikoff's two definitions idea. In one sense, volition is any kind of representational selections. Even ants are volitional. Compare that to one sense of morality, where altruism is a moral belief in descriptive terms. In another sense, altruism is not "really" a moral belief in normative terms. Another sense of volition is that ants aren't "really" volitional, not in the rich and normative sense required of epistemology. Both definitions are needed - the simpler one is required before developing the stronger, fuller one. In the richer sense, reason IS the faculty of volition.

 

The richer sense is exactly the context Peikoff or Rand wants. It's the sense of volition with moral implications.

 

With regard to the new idea, "volitional"—as a teleological concept—harkens to Binswanger's book The Biological Basis For Teleological Concepts. Viewing the world from the perspective of our own awareness, of our own causal efficacy, many have projected observations outward onto both inanimate and non-human life-forms, When a storm blows in and lightning accompanied by thunder does damage—this can be viewed, metaphorically, as an angry person coming in and noisily causing damage. To view ants as volitional is understandable colloquially. Yet, if precision and clarity of thought is voluntarily adhered to by focusing conceptual consciousness on an objective identification of the various aspects of existence, how does the consideration of ants as colloquially volitional move toward a more substantive discussion where principles are engaged in?

 

If a richer sense of understanding is desired, the efficiency and effectiveness of mining for it must be continually evaluated for opportunities to improve its overall efficaciousness. .

Edited by dream_weaver
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Is anyone else surprised that a thread about a subject that is so close to the fundamentals in metaphysics and epistemology could last for 237 posts in explanation and debate?

No. The most specific stuff isn't the hardest to grasp; the most general stuff is. Since this is a discussion of something that none of us has ever experienced a conscious moment without, I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't live to see these questions answered to any of our satisfactions.

And, to be fair, you can't count all 237 posts as part of the discussion; many of them were my prior restatements of exactly what I've now restated.

Well good, but I don't know what you mean by fallacy of division. Can you be more specific where that happened?

It's interesting to contemplate that, of the 200 hundred different types of cells in the human body, each and every one the billions of cells is a causal agent, and an end in itself...

I ultimately decided not to comment on it but I winced a little bit, when I first read it. To discuss the ends and means of single-celled organisms (as if they hold their own microscopic codes of morality) really is taking the biological metaphor too far.

Again, I didn't think it was worth refuting, but if I had to guess at what stuck out as a 'fallacy of division'...

Now consider biology and DNA. An information packed seed for a very different kind of crystal. A living thing. The entire history of it's species and life itself is packed in that information.

Be careful about 'physical information'; just as "knowledge" requires a knower, "information" requires someone who's informed. Trust me, you're better off biting the bullet and finding another way to conceptualize the research we've done on "information".

I'm looking forward to hearing about whatever you discover, by the way. Analyzing the brain in terms of dynamic systems seems, by far, like the most promising way to attack it.

Just be careful with your conceptual foundations.

Searle makes the problem here very clear. You cannot reduce the first person ontology of consciousness to a third person ontology. The qualitative nature of consciousness is first person.

Could you elaborate (or reference)?

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...

 

The richer sense is exactly the context Peikoff or Rand wants. It's the sense of volition with moral implications.

 

 

It's what I want too, and it requires a sense of self without which there's no moral context.

 

Something's being brought to your attention is non-volitional.  Sustaining attention over time, however, is volitional.

 

Agreed to the first part, not so much to the second.  I don't think you can claim sustained attention posits volition without filling the vacuum for want of a better term.  It has the effect of making all creatures volitional by default.  For example, animals are aware of, and remain attentive to, an approaching fire. That per se, isn't volitional behavior.  Man on the other hand, is not only aware of and attentive, but considers actions additional to not getting burned (instinctive), like making the fire go away.

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I ultimately decided not to comment on it but I winced a little bit, when I first read it. To discuss the ends and means of single-celled organisms (as if they hold their own microscopic codes of morality) really is taking the biological metaphor too far.

The direction I was heading towards (and hopefully communicated in Post #237) is that the behavior of the thalamus (and basal ganglia, and certain other structures in the nervous system) are not open to volitional control.  The second part of jcassidy2's post, underlined below, seems to be in agreement with this:   

 

Is anyone else surprised that a thread about a subject that is so close to the fundamentals in metaphysics and epistemology could last for 237 posts in explanation and debate?  You have free will, within the limits of metaphysical identity, and as humans, you have choice/volition as relates to the amount of focus you will apply to any issue.  Pretty simple.

 

 

Agreed to the first part, not so much to the second.  I don't think you can claim sustained attention posits volition without filling the vacuum for want of a better term.  It has the effect of making all creatures volitional by default.  For example, animals are aware of, and remain attentive to, an approaching fire. That per se, isn't volitional behavior.  Man on the other hand, is not only aware of and attentive, but considers actions additional to not getting burned (instinctive), like making the fire go away.

In my Post #237 I give the example of "thirst" impinging on your awareness during a round of golf .  Not only do you consider options to quenching your thirst, but some of them might require that you delay resolving it.  In this manner, it requires volition to switch from "thirst" and attend to finishing your round of golf.  And as thirst continues to periodically force it's way back into the center of your awareness, you must consciously push it back to the fringe of awareness, and concentrate on finishing the task at hand.  This is what I mean by sustained attention requires volition.

 

As to all animals having volition, I think a case can be made for it.  Think of a wolf chasing a rabbit.  The wolf is thirsty, and crosses a puddle of water while in pursuit of the rabbit, but continues the chase.  He does not just "stimulus-response" switch tasks at the sight of water.  And if he loses the rabbit, he will come back to the water for the drink.

Edited by New Buddha
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...

As to all animals having volition, I think a case can be made for it...

 

But not without being self aware, else who is making the choice?  I don't think anyone is arguing that animals don't make choices relative to competing instincts, e.g., thirst vs hunger, or fight vs flight.

 

Think of your wolf scenario this way, is the wolf fully in control of whether to initiate the chase, or to flee from an approaching fire?  Could your wolf choose to raise rabbits instead of chasing them??  To speak of free will in terms of focus, there has to be some ability other than to fulfill a 'natural desire or tendency that makes you want to act in a particular way'.  All I see in your example is a hungry wolf willing to wait for a drink.

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I definitely make a distinction between awareness and self-awareness - the latter being unique to humans.  Posts 101, 195, 197 & 199 describe what I believe to be the substrate to self-awareness.

 

As to "can a wolf choose to raise rabbits instead of chasing them" , a great deal of time on this post was spent discussing the difference between learned behaviors and innate Fixed Action Patterns and learned, automated FAP's.  I'm confident that we could find examples where human-raised wolves live next to rabbits, or other animals, that they don't instinctively kill.  Just like lions, etc.

 

Edit.  I don't think we can say that a one year old child "chooses" to walk, a two year old "chooses" to talk or a 6 year old "chooses" to read.  They are instructed.  There does come a point, however, when a human does choose to proceed on his own.  Very young children are (loosely speaking) not much different cognitively than other intelligent animals.  And young children, like many animals, learn through play, encourage by elders.

 

I don't believe the issue is that a wolf is not "fully in control", but rather humans exhibit not only the same range of behaviors, but have evolved additional cognitive faculties.  Human's did not "give up" behaviors via evolution, they evolved a new domain of behaviors while retaining the old. 

Edited by New Buddha
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...

I don't believe the issue is that a wolf is not "fully in control", but rather humans exhibit not only the same range of behaviors, but have evolved additional cognitive faculties.  Human's did not "give up" behaviors via evolution, they evolved a new domain of behaviors while retaining the old. 

 

But the difference between being fully in control and being controled by influence is precisely what is being discussed here; that is what free will is all about.  Human-raised wolves live next to rabbits, or other animals, that they don't instinctively kill because they have been domesticated by a human animal that chose to tame them for it's own benefit.  Do domesticated animals choose to live that way?

 

The ones that don't would have a better claim to volitional, free will than you, et al are gifting them.

Edited by Devil's Advocate
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Choices to an entity with no sense of identity are events that happen in the course of doing what comes naturally; that is in the province of instinctive behavior.  To suggest that a chicken crossing the road is a volitional choice is a gross exaggeration of the term volition that dismisses the term I.  Self awareness is the precursor to having volition, and while the mirror test suggests humans aren't uniquely self aware, chickens simply aren't.

 
Remove the term I from volition and you are left with substituting some other actor/thing that choice belongs to in order to avoid having an uncaused effect.  But accepting something other than yourself as the actor dismisses the term volition entirely, to say nothing about nullifying the meaning of free will.  And a potential for volition based on biological similarities, still falls short of the possession of a volitional ability.

 
The emergence of self awareness (understanding ones identity) responds to the OP without torturing the definitions of instinct, volition or free will.
--
I also came across the following Objectivist position on free will as it relates to choice:

 
"In the most general sense, Free Will is the theory that you have control over your choices. If you decide between doing task A and task B, it's really you that's making the choice, just as it seems to be. Determinism, on the other hand, says that you don't really have a choice at all. It maintains that choice is an illusion, and that your actions are really out of your control."
http://objectivism101.com/Lectures/Lecture24.shtml

 
I think some of the reluctance to include instinct in this discussion relates to the appearance of a similarity with determinism vs choice.  I think we can (or should be able to) agree that instinctive choices are still choices, just not volitional expressions of free will.

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Harrison and Louie asked for a citation on Searle's view of first person vs third person ontology.

Here is one of the many places you can find it:

1. Conscious states, so defined are qualitative, in the sense that there is a qualitative feel to being in any particular conscious state.

​ This is the “what-it-feels-like” feature of consciousness. For example, tasting beer is qualitatively different from listening to Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Some philosophers use the word “qualia” to mark these qualitative states, but since consciousness and qualia are coextensive, it is unnecessary to introduce another expression. All qualia are conscious states, all conscious states are qualia. It is important to hammer this point home. There are not two kinds of conscious state, one qualitative, one nonqualitative. All conscious states are qualitative.

​2. Such states are also ontologically subjective in the sense that they only exist as experienced by a human or animal subject.

​In this sense the tree outside my window has an objective ontology, but my conscious visual experience of the tree has a subjective ontology. The objective-subjective distinction is ambiguous and we need to disambiguate it before we go any further. First, there is an epistemic sense of the objective-subjective distinction. The claim that Rembrandt was born in 1606 is a matter of objective fact. The claim that Rembrandt was a better painter than Rubens is a matter of subjective opinion. Objectivity and subjectivity in this epistemic sense are features of claims. But in addition to the epistemic sense there is an ontological sense of the distinction. Most things, such as mountains, molecules and tectonic plates exist apart from any experiencing subject. They have an objective or third person ontology. Some things, such as pains and tickles and itches, only exist when experienced by a human or animal subject, and they have a subjective or first person ontology. Consciousness is ontologically subjective in the sense that it only exists when experienced by a human or animal subject. It is important to emphasize that you can have epistemically objective knowledge of a domain that is ontologically subjective. It is for this reason that an epistemically objective science of ontologically subjective consciousness is possible.

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/BiologicalNaturalismOct04.doc

He also deals with this in Mind, Language and Society, Seeing Things as They Are, his audio Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind and several other places.

Edit: Incidentally, Searle does make the error of dabbling in special science but he does so in a way that is consistent with his philosophy at least.

Part three is relevant here too:

​3. The neuronal realization of consciousness. All conscious states are realized in the brain as higher level or system features.

​Everything that has a real existence has it in a single space/time continuum and the real existence of consciousness is in human and animal brains. But conscious experiences do not exist at the level of individual neurons and synapses. Thoughts about your grandmother, for example, are caused by neuron firings and they exist in the brain as a feature of the system at a higher level than that of individual neurons.

Edited by Plasmatic
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