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GrimmsFairyTail

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    Physicalist/realist neuroscientist and programmer. I'm looking for relief from the Ouroboros/humanist brand of skepticism that backs every good bit of reasoning into a muddle of nonsense. Not sure what I will find here.
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    Not enough. Branden, Rand fan of old.
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    Mike
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    Neuroscience of cognition

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. That post is encouraging. It does ever so slightly suggest a system simpler than it actually turns out to be but then any post on this mess of systems would sound that way. The s/n ratio and bottom-up attention grabbing is accurate. I like the quote at the bottom. Lets see if we can model this thing but first do you see me disagreeing with #107 in anything I wrote so far? (I am having some issues using this editor and quote system. Damn! This is my quote!)
  4. Have him on my bookshelf but haven't had time to read him. I will take a look and see why you suggest this. Edit; Just did a quick review and found out why it's just on my shelf and not in my hands. I find the psychology approach hard to grasp and a little strange. My ideas are mostly due to a constant attempt to model the interplay of thalamus/basal ganglia/cortex. I keep meaning to get serious about this project, putting aside distractions. Yet here I am
  5. I'm reluctant to draw a line on that. I was scanning a wiki page on lipid bilayers and one part had many blue links. They 'caught' my attention then I willfully chose to focus on each one but the choice I made was a little on the bottom-up side. I randomly picked which link I would focus on and read and consider for a click. There is an interplay of these two systems and it's hard to separate them. I see instinct as more like the bedrock structures that then interact to construct the organism. In the fetus certain neurons migrate in pathways that form like the lobes on a developing leaf. Due to the last structure that developed then this new one will be constrained in some way. I haven't much use for the idea of instinct as an active process in our brains. Of course that is not a traditional way of looking at it. Buddhists talk about karma and by that the real Buddhist does not mean some crazy afterlife payment plan. He means 'habit' or tired worn pathways. In my life certain habits automatically drove me and it was by awareness and reason that I broke the karmic yoke and changed my way of life. Those would be more like the instincts wee commonly think of. Then there are the basic driving emotions and hungers. These are more like motors to me. They mot-ivate me to act. The most basic of which is the drive to get up in the morning and create.
  6. I doubt I will be too popular around here. Learning to choose to focus and to act is precisely what happens when baby is doing all of that flailing about. At once with the flailing is learning to think, AS we learn to move. There are impulses given those flailing limbs almost random noise but more along the lines of a spring bouncing. A little cluster of neurons forms pathways, by trimming ,and what's left after the trim is the bare nugget of volition. Our very first learned skill sort of happens 'instinctually'. I would suggest that we lose the word instinct along with the nature/nurture dichotomy. The latter is fortunately more commonly out of favor. We could use the word instinct to represent a sort of form from which things develop though. Focus is a similar skill but a bit more complex in the anatomy involved. It comes at once with the ability to categorize. Choice to focus develops as a combination of volition and this learned ability to focus.
  7. Sounds refreshing. My head is still spinning a little though, from a few rounds on Philosophy Forums. Epistemic quicksand. Trying to get time for the Two Rand books I have. Hopefully this weekend. What I have scanned so far is fresh air for me. I am ashamed that I listened to the press enough to ignore the philosophy, though I have long defended Rand as one of the most interesting novelists.
  8. The book is ordered. I actually have been looking for a decent history of Western Philosophy. One untainted by the idealist. My direct realism is a result of studying neuroscience. Strong representationalism doesn't make sense in the brain.
  9. I used children to stretch the example somewhat. Could have used any object. I am talking about philosophy forums and the thing they do not think exists is the physical world outside of their minds. There is an assumption that the mind is the only thing that you can actually experience in high definition consciousness. Everything else is behind some kind of veil of uncertainty. I find that I am often the only one who has doubt about all this 'mind' stuff. I am a direct realist. If I (see) experience my coffee cup I believe it is because of my coffee cup. Not 'sense data'. I use the little single quotes a lot because I find fowl in most of these standards.
  10. I have a few questions about what I deem epistemic nonsense. I am a bit frustrated with entering a discussion about the nature of mind and awareness, then being swarmed by people who don't even believe that their children actually exist except as some kind of cluster mind-share. Makes it quite difficult to discuss the physical nature of cognition. How is that sort of epistemic vapor treated here?
  11. I'm wading through this topic: Relationship between Object and Percept in perceptions. Looks just up my alley. This is the kind of thing I use my models on.
  12. I need a little more time here to find out what is on topic and what is not. I have used it to lay out the frame context for brain in a vat arguments and 'the world is an uncertain illusion' arguments. I got tired of seeing the arguments jump frames in the same sentence. It makes sense to me but did not actually help the argument a bit. I ended up spending days explaining and defending the tool instead. Another usage is to create minimal structural basis for various cognitive functions. I use a little coding and a little imaginary robotics for that. Give me time to get acquainted here first, though I would be glad to take it up in private messages.
  13. I am a frustrated 45,000 plus post RichardDawkins/ RatSkep philosophy addict. Any argument I attempt on anything ends up in a convoluted self-destroying loop of solipsism and misreadings of Hume and Descartes skepticism. I prefer very simple models with clear and certain propositions first, prior to extension to homologs in the more complex domains. I am working on minimal metaphysical models of cognition and things such as identity. I have developed a couple of simplistic tools that I think have great use in rational discussions. I have no idea whether it be idiocy, madness, or something good. I am a software artist by trade but have spent 8 years in serious study of neuroscience from molecular biology to cognition by way of detailed brain anatomy. I own and peruse over 1300 books on logic, science, and philosophy. My philosophy education is 'coming along'. It will be easy for people who read this to recognize my SpeedOfSound handle on those 'other' forums so I may as well spit that out. My hope is to have discussions in philosophy here that actually progress. Mostly, at first, I will be a listener and a humble occasional commenter. A note on minimal metaphysical models. My take on metaphysics is that of a mathematician not an imaginer of worlds where gods and minds that create worlds. I am disturbed by what passes for metaphysics these days. My models are truly minimal and a third grader could do them with color crayons. Hope you guys can adopt me.
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