You Don’t Believe this crap, Do You?

Bucky said:
Interesting... the podcast episode is filed under the "Logic and Persuasion" category.

Hmmm... I wonder, why do professional skeptics spend so much energy trying to persuade others when one of the fundamental tenets of their metaphysics is that we play no role in our decisions (and thus our beliefs)... that I find illogical. :)
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You were always going to say that. ;)

Anyone want to dig into his actual argument?
 
malf said:
If your aim is to prove we're more than stimulus/response organisms you're doing a pretty lousy job. :)
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If you're trying to persuade anybody with your arguments you're fighting a lost cause. :)
Persuasion is as illusory as your convictions, as long as we're trapped in the orthodox definition of consciousness.
 
Max_B said:
What, his headline claim that "...avoiding a personal experience is actually a better way to learn about something...".

I wouldn't have thought that would need any digging to dismiss immediately as a turd.
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I understand it's counterintuitive and many people share that instinct - all the more reason to read, and discuss this article. I hadn't seen it before but I know I've made very similar points.
 
malf said:
... and cogent argument, apparently.
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Or maybe he meant it to apply to Dunning himself- while I forget the particulars about the stuff he did that landed him in jail IIRC it was pretty scummy. That said, that has nothing to do with the validity of the points in his article, which rise or fall on their own merit.
 
Arouet said:
Or maybe he meant it to apply to Dunning himself- while I forget the particulars about the stuff he did that landed him in jail IIRC it was pretty scummy. That said, that has nothing to do with the validity of the points in his article, which rise or fall on their own merit.
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Yep. I'm no cheerleader for Dunning and was hoping for a decent counterpoint. Although I guess he's only presenting a basic tenet of the scientific method.
 
malf said:
Yep. I'm no cheerleader for Dunning and was hoping for a decent counterpoint. Although I guess he's only presenting a basic tenet of the scientific method.
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Yes, but the point is more about why there is a need for that method in the first place. It's uncomfortable for people to acknowledge it, which is one reason we see the resort to quips and put downs in place of reasoned discussion. As long as it is framed as a ridiculous, pointless discussion, there is no need to spend too much time contemplating it.

Thing is, this is exactly the kind of behaviour that certain skeptics - rightly - get criticised for.
 
Arouet said:
Yes, but the point is more about why there is a need for that method in the first place. It's uncomfortable for people to acknowledge it, which is one reason we see the resort to quips and put downs in place of reasoned discussion.
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What is the point of a "reasoned discussion" in a scenario where the participants have no agency? What is "reason", other than predictable neuron firing...
 
Bucky said:
What is the point of a "reasoned discussion" in a scenario where the participants have no agency? What is "reason", other than predictable neuron firing...
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That's your view, don't put it on me. From my perspective reason is a type of information processing.
 
Arouet said:
That's your view, don't put it on me. From my perspective reason is a type of information processing.
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Didn't say it was mine, but it's likely that of the article's author given the brand of "skepticism" he sells on his website.
Which suggests this people is really confused...

From my perspective reason is a type of information processing.
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Okay.. and who is doing the processing? :) If it all boils down to neurons running their deterministic software why should we care about rationality?
We have no say in it, we're just passive spectators of some mysterious software running inside our skull.
 
Bucky said:
Didn't say it was mine, but it's likely that of the article's author given the brand of "skepticism" he sells on his website.
Which suggests this people is really confused...
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I can't speak for Dunning, but remember it is you making this claim here, not Dunning. I don't mind going into it because its a good topic, but your use of it here comes off as a way to avoid addressing the point being made in the article.

Okay.. and who is doing the processing? :) If it all boils down to neurons running their deterministic software why should we care about rationality?
We have no say in it, we're just passive spectators of some mysterious software running inside our skull.
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So I've said all of this before, but I'll try and summarize the way I see it. I'm not claiming to represent Dunning or anyone else's view other than my own.

First of all, note that I'm not positing some sort of hard determinism. From the best that we've been able to figure out so far, nature has elements of probability/randomness involved so let's just put hard determinism aside.

Now, who is doing the reasoning? My answer is, we are. But what are we? In my current view, I see us as a particular form of information processing system. I'm partial to the IIT view that consciousness is a fundamental property and manifests when information is processed in certain ways. IIT refers to the integration of information being key. IIT is a developing hypothesis which has shown promise so far but it has some ways to go before it should be accepted. But I find it presents a useful framework for where I'm at right now.

I think information is also a property of the same stuff. It's not separate from the stuff we call matter, it's a description of some of the properties of this stuff.

So in this context what we are, the ones doing the reasoning, are information processing systems, with some of the information pathways leading to integration (and therefore conscious awareness) and other information pathways still processing but not in an integrated manner and so falls bellow our consciousness.

Now, it's been so long since I studied philosophy, and I'll admit I'm not that comfortable with the full implications of most philosophical terms. To me, this system is the agent that you are refering to. We are therefore agents. (I'm open to the possibility that I may not be using agency quite in the same way you are, so don't read too much into my use of the term).

So we've got neurons firing, and doing many things including the information processing that we call reasoning (I'm not aiming at technical accuracy here, I'm sure there are better ways of putting it). Now, I don't want to read to much into this term, but I think a lot of information processing is calculation like. That's what analysis is. That's what choice is. And while we might not be able to formally predict the route in advance, what we can do is look back and see the web that preceded it. I'm not sure the exact balance between determinism and randomness/probability here, but what we do see to a large extent is a cause and effect web. We take in information through our sensory organs (soundways, waveforms, etc) which get processed through our brain and body. We perform all sorts of analysis completely unconsciously (just think about catching a ball - we're not consciousnessly doing all the analysis needed to be in the right position to catch it, most of it is going on under the surface). In terms of thoughts, we're conscious of some of it (ie: the actual thoughts) but for example, in writing this sentence, I'm not conscious of the actual steps involved in retrieving the word "retrieving" - it comes to me. When I make a choice, I'm not conscious of all the steps that go on in the deliberation, but I am of some of them. When someone asks me a question and the answer pops into my head, I wasn't aware of the steps that went into the processing to get that answer, but I am aware of the product of it. Despite my not being aware of it, it's still me who figured it out.

So while there are likely neurons firing during all of this, its not the property of "firing" per say that we're interested in when it comes to consciousness, I think that's the marker of the energy being used. But there's other stuff going on, namely information processing.

I hope what I'm expressing is coming through because this why I've also said that I don't think it makes a real difference if we label what we do - free or not, because I think at the end of the day it doesn't make as much a difference as people think it would. In effect, we're all describing the same processes, we're just trying to figure out how to categorize them.

Sorry, I've been meandering a bit. In terms of the web, whatever the precise role of cause/effect/randomness/probability what we still see is information coming in, being processed with partial awareness. We are information processing systems but we're not technically separate from everything outside of the system, and it seems that the parts are interchangeable. We are part of the overall system. We're affected by stuff outside our system in various ways. Some of it impacts the parts of us we label body, other integrates into our information processing, etc.

Regardless of how determinism/randomness/probability work in practice, we see a lot of cause and effect reactions. We're processing the information that we bring into us and to a large extent do so in predictable ways. When we reason, we deal with the information we have - which is going to be slightly different for everyone leading to individuality, but also in similar ways leading to similarity and predictability - though not perfect. Think of what happens when someone tells you something you hadn't thought of but your brain suddenly goes off thinking about it and the concept integrates into the rest of your ideas and thoughts and you reach a new conclusion. Or the opposite, a cognitive dissonance instinct kicks in that serve to push the information away.

At the end of the day, describing it as all boiling down to "neurons running their deterministic software" oversimplifies and by doing so mischaracterizes what is going on, I believe. Who cares about rationality? We do - because reasoning is part of what we do, regardless of whether we label it as part of a cause and effect chain with degrees of randomness/proability or package it as "free". Thought and analysis and choice are all part of it, with some being conscious, some not.

I hope that holds together. I'm not stating any of it as absolute, this is just where I roughly am right now, and no doubt there are some nuances I left out. There are still elements of it I'm working on, so it's open to change.

Would love to discuss further.
 
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