Daniel Dennett: Stop Telling People They Don't Have Free Will

You appear to be on the no-such-things-as-facts bandwagon, too.

~~ Paul
Nope. Typoz summed it up very well.

Although I'm supportive of science, it's true that what it gives us is a model. The model is a tool we use as a way of understanding the world. Obviously in some respects it has been extremely successful. But we should not mistake the model for the thing it attempts to represent. When the model is incapable of explaining real-world observations, it is time to look for a better, more suitable model - but there are not necessarily any rules or methods to do that, it can be a matter of inspiration, luck, creativity, or something else.
 
Nope. Typoz summed it up very well.
What Typoz said is fine. However, that does not mean there are no facts. Since our entire perceptual world is a model of the "real world," one could argue that there are no facts. This makes sense if you restrict "fact" to pertain to facts about the real world. But why would you do that, when you will never have access to the real world and so never use the word "fact" at all?

If you don't want to use "fact" in the context of our perceptual model, then you need to come up with another word to distinguish between facts and other kinds of information, such as hypotheses.

~~ Paul
 
What Typoz said is fine. However, that does not mean there are no facts. Since our entire perceptual world is a model of the "real world," one could argue that there are no facts. This makes sense if you restrict "fact" to pertain to facts about the real world. But why would you do that, when you will never have access to the real world and so never use the word "fact" at all?

If you don't want to use "fact" in the context of our perceptual model, then you need to come up with another word to distinguish between facts and other kinds of information, such as hypotheses.

~~ Paul
It is cool if you want to use the word fact. But I'm guessing that all facts are relative knowledge. Our knowledge is a model of reality based on observed behaviors. There are tons of good things that you can do with the knowledge from that model. But it doesn't seem to answer questions like "what is matter?"
 
It is cool if you want to use the word fact. But I'm guessing that all facts are relative knowledge. Our knowledge is a model of reality based on observed behaviors. There are tons of good things that you can do with the knowledge from that model. But it doesn't seem to answer questions like "what is matter?"
I doubt we can ever answer that question.

~~ Paul
 
Nor is it unusual that you make no effort to expand upon your explanation when I say I don't understand. For example, are you suggesting that a memory is a quantum entanglement?

Not really, no. Most things are entangled before we make an observation, but the reason for this appears to be that they have a past history, which seems like one of the the more interesting parts of entanglement, at least to me.
 
Not really, no. Most things are entangled before we make an observation, but the reason for this appears to be that they have a past history, which seems like one of the the more interesting parts of entanglement, at least to me.
I still have no idea what this has to do with human memory. We agree that humans memories exist because humans have past history, but where and how are they encoded?

~~ Paul
 
I still have no idea what this has to do with human memory. We agree that humans memories exist because humans have past history, but where and how are they encoded?

~~ Paul

It seems to me that they are probably stored in something underlying space-time, which when processed, results in our classical observations of time, space, matter and energy, through which they are reencoded.
 
It seems to me that they are probably stored in something underlying space-time, which when processed, results in our classical observations of time, space, matter and energy, through which they are reencoded.
Interesting. I think they are stored in my brain.

~~ Paul
 
It seems to me that they are probably stored in something underlying space-time, which when processed, results in our classical observations of time, space, matter and energy, through which they are reencoded.
Why are you creating an explanation that's complicated and explains nothing? Why not memories stored in the brain?
 
Interesting. I think they are stored in my brain.

~~ Paul

Imagine that memories are not stored in the brain, but it is more like a sense, an interaction with other parts of reality. We use our eyes to see things, separated from us by some distance in space. We use memory to "see" things that are separated from us in both time and space.

Nothing is stored. We connect to it. In real time.
 
Imagine that memories are not stored in the brain, but it is more like a sense, an interaction with other parts of reality. We use our eyes to see things, separated from us by some distance in space. We use memory to "see" things that are separated from us in both time and space.

Nothing is stored. We connect to it. In real time.
It's not stored in the usual sense of a memory, but all spacetime is available, so the universe is one giant store.

This is an interesting idea, but I don't see what the stunning complexity buys us. In particular, there is no evidence of any mechanism in the brain for interfacing to spacetime. Nor have we discovered any way to interface to it mechanically.

Why can't we remember the future as well as we remember the past? What causes all the failures in remembering the past?

~~ Paul
 
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