god isnt dead, u cant kill something that has no-life / never been born / ever existed o.O

the metaphor is dead to you

x_x

.

you forgot rtfm

If philosophy is anything like religion it's at least like history of religion; rationalizing away learning by equating it with religion just shows your pessimism regarding knowledge in general and your celebration of ignorance.

.

You can kill it with the sword of a thousand truths.

ah, man.. that cracked me up

still does xD

I'm curious. Do you actually mean to say hz, cause thats always signifies a frequency. And that would be kind of weird imo.
Cause with robots if you have one operating with 100 hz you can get lucky and your signal is processed almost immediately or you're unlucky and it takes almost 10ms.

Now if humans had some kind of frequency that should be the same.

Of do you actually mean a delay of 100 ms?


About the robots, yeah they're still stupid as fuck, even with neural networks it took my roomate half a year to teach a robot to draw a circle very fast and perfectly round.

Not to speak of those super robots that manage to navigate a desert with 20mph.

i don't know.. it said hz.. cycles per second..

so it has nothing to do with the delay from the brain to the muscle, but the frequency of the pulses that send information or whatever to the muscles.

..during a voluntary action

interesting, but if that were true results of restion tests should be in a in a range of 100ms no matter what you do. And they generally aren't.

it can be 10hz, without meaning that there's a 100ms delay.

From what I can understand there's simply 100ms inbetween the "messages", so the first one can be there with a sub 1ms delay probably, while the next signal will be sent 100ms later.

so it's basically a maximal frequency?

Well, that would make some more sense.
It would be more like a "recharge" delay of 100ms.

Yeah I think so. Atleast that's what I could understand from it.

yeah

"perfectly round"

do you know what that means?

its so funny to see people talk like that..

like "objective" haha


btw, CPLains you look like a boy

if you had actually ever programmed a real roboter to draw you would understand the difficulties. What results you usually get and how hard it is to achieve something which most people except hypocrites like yourself would call perfectly round.

Nice try at sounding smart thuogh.
Really, I mean it.

so u use the word "perfect" to describe something that actually isn´t?

thats bullshit and all you smartypants ..ah nvm

call it a euphemism if you want.

You know as long as 100% f the people who read it get what I mean I will use it. And the 2% wiseasses won't stop me either.

just wanted to help u understand that,
good student

thank you for your help. Before your insightful I was completely oblivious of the severe complications my insanely unconsidered statement might have had.

drawing circles isn't what neural networks are for :>

oh really?

Tell me more about it, I think my institute would be really curious why they can't use neural networks to control robot actuators.

because it takes a month to draw a circle? :)

nah, whenever you got the system set up it takes a little less to draw a circle (or anything else).

It's just the calibrating and programming part that took 6 months :)

You're basically teaching it to draw a circle and calibrating it by putting strenght on nodes depending on the output instead of just inputing a standard draw circle function. You get a learning system... but not the best thing if you just want to do a predefined sequence. Imagine a car production robot running on neural networks. :)

the robot I'm talking about is not the standard serial car production robot. It's a prototype of a parallel robot that is working at way higher speeds.
There are no predefined motions for it. and if you simply try using the the solutions of the Inverse Kinemtic Problem you simply wom't get anywhere close to a "perfect" circle, because of inertia, bearing clearance and other reasons.

So the point of the paper was to try if a neural network could predict these reactions of the system and learn to even them thus achieving better results.

cool. got the url of the paper? it sounds interesting.

no, sorry. I don't think it exists on the interweb either.

Robots are evil. No need for them. See terminator

not in asia!

They are just waiting for an opportunity, You will see

oh and Replicants > Evil Robots

integration!

He was more of a cyborg than a robot ..

they are all evil

even kitten cyborgs?

Especially those

ALL HAIL THE COMMUNIST ROBOT!

have you wondered if you're wasting time yet?

[ look at me! i'm in a box! ]

sometimes, when i'm doing philosophy of language. it's all part of the package, which i tend to like so far :)

like Nicolae Iorga said:
"in life we waste years, but close to death we beg for seconds"
(edited to fix the language but no result lol)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmHTXiNNO48

wish i had sound now :p

hahaha ;)

Speaking of Personal frequency

This is a program for testing your reaction in an FPS like environment aiming at a randomly moving target.

http://www.draebenstedt.de/reaction/reaction.html

You can (crudely) set the mouse resolution aswell as the resolution and refresh rate to your quake 3 standards.

A test lasts around 15 seconds and at the end it will tell you your delay and RMS distance from the target.

A really cool game that I used to think meant something in relation to skill in FPS games. Well maybe instagib ones.


Some things I've learned from using that for experiments:

Higher monitor hz = faster reaction
Higher mouse hz = faster reaction (but there was no difference between 500 and 1000)

It correlates pretty well with the aiming skill of a complete beginner at FPS. But experienced players find movement patterns and aim better than reactions alone would allow.

You can adjust the cutoff frequency for how quick the target can change directions and as cplains said it becomes exceedling difficult to track on the target at 8-9hz and above. Even if you can score under 150ms for the default 5hz.

The limit is not a just function of reaction time but one of how fast you can simply tell a muscle to move. Also you're guessing or spamming if your personal frequency is higher than 1000/(reaction time in ms). It's not that those movements aren't conscious ones. They just aren't all in response to a new unique stimuli.

As for me my average distance from target tends to be 3.7 degrees and personal delay 160ms on this 17" 800x600@120hz CRT. It's better on my 21" Sony where I can score lower than this.
Also LCD users are hindered and this program is great for showing them that if they also happen to have a CRT around.

imo that test is more about precision than speed

The target is constantly in motion, I think you can only be as precise as your reactions allow you to be.

Occasionally you will get plain lucky and the target randomly moves but doesn't go very far so it's easy to stay dialed on the whole time.
So because of that the personal lag time is more meaningful.

To an extent you can trade accuracy for lower delay and vice versa. If the target is simply too slow play with it on 6hz or maybe 7hz and it should be more of a speed test.

Playing on a lower sensitivity will naturally make being precise easy and so it will take more speed. I think the default speed is way too high (even for 400dpi mice), but the program author is a physics major not a hardcore gamer. So I don't expect him to know about drawbacks of too high a sensitivity.

somewhere around 172
my screen: 19'' 1024x768@ 70 hz CRT

With 150hz you could expect to be in the 165 region everything else being equal.

twas cool - i get around 160 +-3 on 100hz ~100fps 500hz g5mouse.. it's a year since ingame so, might get better if i try some over next few days, i'll report back if i improve ;)

Bit sleep deprived currently:

did 10 tests then put my IME3.0 USB rate up to 1khz
125hz
first ten 168.2 +/- stdev. 4.0 ms
1000hz
first ten 161.0 +/- stdev. 7.3 ms

Lowest delay on 1khz was 150ms.

One thing of interest is 1khz is 7ms less lag than 125hz polling. And my average times were actually about that much lower on 1khz.

It takes alot more trials than 10 to say anything for certain but USB rate is a real benefit.

Other notes: CRT monitor @ 800x600 @ 170hz

hah, nice.. :))

what's the diff between monitor hz? from say, 100 to 170?

I can barely notice the inpersistence of 100hz if I look from the corner of my eye or have my 17" Dell sitting by my 21" Sony.

So in a post a while back I decided that humans percieve rates by the time between events and not the frequency of them. And that they interestingly (although sorta obviously) percieve decreases or increases in that time linearly.

So for a frames per second example.

30 (33.33ms) to 40 (25.00ms)
reduces frametime by 8.33ms
40 to 60 (16.67ms)
reduces frametime by 8.33ms
60 to 120 (8.33ms)
reduces frametime by 8.33ms
120 to 9999 (0.100ms)
reduces frametime by 8.23ms

So each one of these increases would provide an equally noticable change over the previous framerate. I think everyone has experienced this. Input lag is very bad on low fps and just 10fps helps noticably. Then as fps is higher it takes more and more fps just to get the same amount of improvement.

The last example is roughly false (not because the eye can't see 10k fps) because the best consumer CRT monitors only could do 200hz. When your fps exceeds your refresh rate, you can still get some reaction and feel improvements, but it's less significant since the screen doesn't show all of the extra information it draws as much of a frame as it can then switches to the most recent one even if it's half way through the previous.
Benefit of high fps on low hz is merely atleast as the screen is drawn seeing the most recent information possible, even if you can only see a full 60fps you can see smaller parts of (until it's line by line at over 1000fps) frames beyond that.

So the improvement from 100hz (10ms between retraces) monitor to 170hz (5.88ms) monitor is 4.22ms. For reference 100hz is a 4.29ms improvement 70hz. So play at that for a while then switch back to 100hz and that's about the improvement from 100->170. In my experience it's a noticable improvement, expecially in determining where something fast moving is and the general quality of motion.

But it's not as amazing improvement as you might expect if you were to look at rates relatively (100->170 = 70% improvement??) or absolutely (100-170 must = the same improvement from 30-100).

If what you were wondering was how much my RT improves depending on monitor refresh rate at 100hz and 170hz. Mathematics expects about a -4ms+/-2 change.

Can't test right now as I'm on an LCD but for hecks sake I will just to expose their shit: 220ms 4.9, 213ms 4.1, 221ms 4.7
And that was on plenty of sleep and a good WMO1.1a mouse (although at 125hz no doubt).

The screen was a Dell 21" 1920x1200 Flat Panel.

Thanks, great reply. It's interesting to see how the things some people have labeled insignificant (60+fps, 125+hz usb, 85+hz crt) can actually be seen this directly to influence response-time even when taken individually. :)

One more thing, what was the delay/responsetime/hz/ms (,or whatever lcd screens choke on,) of that lcd screen?

6ms (G-G)
It looked just like this one:
http://reviews.cnet.com/lcd-monitors/dell-ult...14853.html
And I guessed the size wrong: 24" my university's tech dept gets a big ass budget apparently.

Just tested on my home PC now: 156ms, 157ms, 160ms, 162, 149ms (try aimming directly for the red dot it will make you less lazy and ironically reduce your reaction time and increase your distance from target versus smoother more averaged out movements of the mouse give you better accuracy scores but higher reaction since every little small movement could be the beginning of a big one)

All trials below 4.0 degrees except the last one was 4.1 best accuracy was 3.5.

My machine stats:
169fps (it uses V-sync?? yeah I recently upgraded drivers and hadn't set it to force off in Nvidia CP)
170 Refresh rate
Mouse 1khz
Screen 0.0ms response time

Total delay= 5.9 (framerate) + 1 (mouse) + 5.9 (v-sync buffers one frame) = 12.8

LCD equipped PC at the lab was:
60fps
60hz refresh
+++15+ms Unknown large quantity of panel input lag
Mouse 125hz
Screen 6.0+ ms response time

Total delay= 16.7 (framerate) + 8 (mouse) + 6 (monitor response) + 16.7 (v-sync buffers one frame) + X (unknown input lag) = 47.3 + X

If you read his description of the program (it's actually sorta interesting) he explains the reason he uses V-sync is so that calculations of your reaction time can be made knowing exactly the moment you saw the position of the target in. Without V-sync there would be a random error of as much as 1/(refresh rate) as you might not see the target until 16ms after it was finished by the video card if it came just too late in on a 60hz screen. So he willingly adds everyone the delay V-sync gives in exchange for eliminating one source of random error. The remaining one is the mouse. :)

He also realized between his laptop and home PC a big discrepancy found LCD screens have input lag and then added a feature for testing the total loop delay of a system (it doesn't work very well though anyways putting an optical mouse to your screen...)

Anyways the gap between the average of my 5 on this PC and the 3 on the Lab PC is 61.2ms.

The gap of the system lags was 34.5 + X.

I know from experiences in the past I score about 10ms higher with the WMO mouse compared to Deathadder and IME3.0 has to do with ergonomics I score even worse with a Mxx/G5 shaped mouse.

Then add a few more ms for not being used to either (how 800x600 gets stretched across a 1920x1200 panel or what the desktop resolution looked like either)

Also a big ms delay can affect you by more than it is. The reason being is imagine playing at 3fps and trying to aim, because of the huge lag if you're not used it, you move farther than needed and next frame find you've aimed past your target then the frame after that over correct and aim past again. That is a psychological issue only though.

The rest of the delay other than that is about 15ms of input lag I predicted from the panel earlier.

ah, forgot to reply.

awesome. ;D

free will is a contradiction in terms :>

yeah, it's easy to see yet escaped and still escapes billions of people right

apparently it still escape you, even though you are on the right track.

(you cannot lack something which you cannot even coherently define)

edit: here is a smiley :) so i dont sound like a prick :>

I'm just saying you're making it too easy; there have been hundres of people smarter than you who didn't think it was a contradiction in terms for various reasons - just because you happen to live in an age where free will is a contradiction in terms (mainly because of our scientific conception, with its conservation of energy etc., depending on how you define free will), that does not make it a priori obvious like you seem to think.

People in the past did struggle with free will and some had the view e.g. Daniel Dennet has that it's roughly the ability to see into the future and thus being able to aviod something that makes us able to "chose", others had the conception of some other (godlike?) substance (descartes), yet others (some pre-socratics i think?) postulated determinism to make sense of free will in the first place.

As far as free will goes today, it seems in larg part (perhaps not always) to be an illusion whereby a part of the brain takes hold of the action of another part and proclaims after the decision; "I chose to do this (now)!" .. But this is still complicated and we are still just talking about a word, (with no platonic reality of its own, unless, perhaps, you speak of nietzschean quantum of "will" or something - which is just a perspective on what energy is,) and it still may become several words or dissapair or become radically different etc.etc. in the future. Free will seems more to be a simpliciation, abstraction and illusion (conceptual confusion) than anything else.

I've read enough Ramachandran ("Phantoms in the Brain" recomended!) to know this is no easy matter. (btw; got another book by him today; "A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness" (i'll even recomend it before i read it!).. Also, recomended is the book "On intelligence" - by Jeff Hawkins which offers a huge insight into the way the brain makes sense of information (if it's correct), and currently reading "I of the Vortex" by Rodolfo Llinás which is very interesting so far and also recomended! I've been awestruck by almost every chapter in these books :))

Wow, this would be very interesting if it wasn't just over complicating of such a simple matter by trying to fit an 'unnatural' concept into an animals brain.

Huh? It's a simple matter if you look at it as a simple matter. As soon as you need to speak in relation to someone other than yourself with another concept of free will -and perhaps another worldview - who would urge you to qualify what you are saying to the depths, you'll soon find it being a bit more complicated than mere semantics and "contradiction in terms". It would actually lead deep down to a vast collection of unanswered questions, both on the part of the so-called modern scientist as well as any random dude wondering about "free will".

There is nothing complex to the idea of physical determinism. Yeah, it's easy to talk about things that do not have any empirical consequences, it doesn't mean they're interesting.

Such as?

Such as, why does it feel like free will? How does the brain make up its mind (hehe)? What influences the choices? How much of the choices you make are you aware of (perhaps, in the process of making them)? To what extent is there a center in the brain making decisions and coordinating behavior? etc.etc.

All of this leads to questions we perhaps cannot even concieve of asking yet. A current "hard problem" is the question of qualia (vague word for sensing/feeling) and its relation to the physical world. In philosophy of mind nearly everyone is physical determinists in one sense or another, yet despite the "agreement" people on the outside would see, debates are raging if you look closely and are able to see the nuances between the so-called "materialist" views.

"Survival of the Fittest" - a good simplification with huge impact etc.? Yes. The full story and end of interesting information? No.

Ps.

Firstly, these might, for all we know, be empirical questions - we don't even know yet if there are plausible emperical answers to the questions i've asked. Sometimes it turns out questions you ask are in fact emperical even though you didn't think they would be, and at other times the reverse might be, and have been true.

Secondly, if people ask me what philsophy of mind is about, i readily say that i'm inquiring into problems such as whether there is a soul, whether there is an ego and if we have free will. I don't go up to them and say, "free will is an illusion, you're a collection of cells and the soul is a ridiculous concept" (much less that they are all contradictions in terms!), it's just moronic on several levels.

I miss my pc!! need to leave now x(

I'll give you the benefit of doubt, but you are putting words in my mouth (in comment #46).

I don't "define free will". I don't "struggle with free will". I don't think the "age" where I live has any bearing one way or another about the fact that "free will" is a contradiction in terms.

There is a lot of talk about free will, and always will be. There's also a lot of talk about Homeopathy, Astrology, and how Windows is a secure operating system. However, that's not the point I am trying to make.

Will is the intention to do something. Freedom is the negation of that intention. The two are irreconcilable, if defined as such. If defined otherwise, they don't make sense to me, although I invite you to make sense of different, more compatible definitions so that I may benefit from them.

(I am not even touching on the subject of proving free will, which would require nothing less than a time machine, and all the paradoxes that that entails, the existence of said paradoxes only giving more intuition to the fact that the original premise is incoherent.)

yeah, you're probably a random victim of my attack on "matter of fact"- people; typically arguing within a paradigm that everything is "matter of fact" and obvious and "easy".

but you are putting words in my mouth

He always does this

yeah, i even know it - i read to much into what people say, what people do not say.. i guess it comes from my wish in irl convo's to subtly guide it to presuppositions and themes i like x)

like people say, "i'm a vegan", "so you think it's morally wrong to kill animals?" or "i hate the city", "so you think it was better before?" or "i'm pro-life", "so, you believe in god?" ;)

"why does it feel like free will? .... etc.etc."

All of these questions are about the mechanics of the biological system which is brain and human organism and psychological system which it is running, specifics of which would bear little consequence considering what we already know. None of these questions seem deep to me. Perhaps "what is intelligence?" does.

"All of this leads to questions we perhaps cannot even conceive of asking yet."

Yeah, all of this leads to something .... we don't what it leads to, but it's just so exciting!!!

"A current "hard problem" is the question of qualia (vague word for sensing/feeling) and its relation to the physical world."

Huh? What "hard problem"? Are you, again, talking about the mechanics behind the way our brain abstracts information?

"In philosophy of mind nearly everyone is physical determinists in one sense or another, yet despite the "agreement" people on the outside would see, debates are raging if you look closely and are able to see the nuances between the so-called "materialist" views."

Hate to break it to you, but "Philosophy of perseption" is a pseudo-science loaded with meaningless turds like "qualia". People like that can stuff their "materialist views" and go do something productive, like writing poetry.

""Survival of the Fittest" - a good simplification with huge impact etc.?"

No.

"Yes."

No.

"The full story and end of interesting information? No."

Who's genius that cam up with that!?

"Firstly, these might, for all we know, be empirical questions"

Some of them are, some of them aren't. And we *do* know which are which. The ones you mentioned are way too general and lack definition. You could write a book answering them and still say nothing.

"we don't even know yet if there are plausible emperical answers to the questions i've asked"

You've asked different questions. Any question will have an answer in terms of the question, the terms on the same level of abstraction, and its operands. "Free will" is on absurd level of abstraction and will always yield different answer depending on how the terms are defined.

"Sometimes it turns out questions you ask are in fact emperical ... and at other times the reverse..."

Which in all times means you didn't know what the hell you were asking.

"Secondly, if people ask me what philsophy of mind is about, i readily say that i'm inquiring into problems such as whether there is a soul, whether there is an ego and if we have free will."

Oh my, deep questions. Sounds like you Scientology also might be for you.

"I don't go up to them and say, "free will is an illusion, you're a collection of cells and the soul is a ridiculous concept" (much less that they are all contradictions in terms!), it's just moronic on several levels."

The act of walking up and saying that when you're asked what philosophy of mind is about? Yeah I guess so. However, the statement itself is alot less moronic than the answer you gave beforehand. Haha.

While I might not agree with your tone, I agree that a lot of modern-day "cognitive science" is more aptly defined as "intellectual masturbation". "Qualia" is a good example, as is the general propensity of people to invent intimidating but meaningless words (at an really fast rate).

I'm not saying all of these people are on the intellectual level of Mr. Frank Chu, but they are getting there.

How to stop generating such make-believe knowledge? I think the answer lies in how seriously you treat knowledge, and that depends on what you mean by that word. The best definition for knowledge I have heard so far (if we suppose that it is innately tied with language) is: the more concisely you can define something, the more knowledge you have about it. Or, to follow that maxim, the definition of knowledge on subject X would be: the length of your definition of X. Or, to be extra geeky, strlen(definition(X))

edit: To clarify: this doesn't mean Encyclopedias are bad. On the contrary, knowledge, as defined above, would be impossible without them. It is only after studying a couple of books on the subject, that we can create even more concise definitions of a subject.

qualia etc. serve some purpose if you see it as awareness or some kind of endpoint in the brain where higher concepts (abstractions) gather together and can be amplified, thus neurologists people like Rodolfo Llinas (although married with a philosopher of mind!) talk about protoexperience and how to measure it ect. having impact on ect. utilitarianism of which our politicians are so fond.. blblabla i cant be assed to..

others see it as electrical activity, others as just in the neurons, others as "information" others yet as waves or whatever.. people don't really have a clue in general and whatever is right will hit people hard (i think)

Yes. It might even cause some apples to fall.

bear little consequence. think again - i've learned alot about both the brain and philosophy of mind the last two years; if this knowledge won't make as huge an impact on people in the next 15 years as the discovery of e.g. dna (or evolution) did, then i'll be deeply surprised and maybe suspicious that people don't follow out the
(esp. ethical and epistemological) consequences. lets see!

you've taken that phrase completely out of context, above quote being more of a random juxtaposition. The way a gate on a microchip works has little to do with understanding how to create an AI.

microchip? i'm not sure what you mean.. i was trying to insinuate that understanding the brain and how it understands the world will help us understand ourselves and how we make choices etc. and this will have huge impact on almost everything i can imagine (ai, epistemology, ethics, cybernetics, vr, politics etc.) .. we will soon have a "whole-theory" of the brain, at least to some better level of precision

"i was trying to insinuate that understanding the brain and how it understands the world will help us understand ourselves"
How the brain works is different subject than how it understands the world and than "understanding ourselves". The last two we ALREADY KNOW extremely well.
"how we make choices etc."
Depending on what you mean by that, the asnwer is either already known, or is something we will have a hard time making use of for another millenia.
"this will have huge impact on almost everything i can imagine (ai, epistemology, ethics, cybernetics, vr, politics etc.)"
AI - yes. Ethics - No. Cybernetics - Yes. Politics - No.

"we will soon have a "whole-theory" of the brain, at least to some better level of precision"
Either "whole-theory" or "better level of precision", which is it? I guess "soon" is besides the point. Is there a book on "Stuff, soon." by any great philosopher you can recommend? This reminds me. I like Sci-Fi.

"How the brain works is different subject than how it understands the world and than "understanding ourselves".

So understanding how the brain works does not contribute to the other two?

"The last two we ALREADY KNOW extremely well."

Very much disagree.

"AI - yes. Ethics - No. Cybernetics - Yes. Politics - No."

Disagree.

"Either "whole-theory" or "better level of precision", which is it?"

"Both." (figure)

"So understanding how the brain works does not contribute to the other two?"

All complex systems are comprised of components that work on various levels of abstractions.
* > Organs > * > Cells > * > DNA > * > quarks > *
Inner workings of lower level components do not directly influence or explain how higher level components work.

"Very much disagree."

Check out social studies, psychology, etc, etc.

""AI - yes. Ethics - No. Cybernetics - Yes. Politics - No."
Disagree."

Check out system design.

""Either "whole-theory" or "better level of precision", which is it?"

"Both." (figure)"

A "better level of precision" is infinitely worse than "whole-theory".

"Inner workings of lower level components do not directly influence or explain how higher level components work."

I can't help seeing such a breakthrough as something that will lead to changes in the way people think. If e.g. find Jeff Hawkins's theory to be true, that the most basic structure of the cortex is storing ever more abstract sequences of sequences, giving rise to intelligence, then this will have quite some significance.

The same Rodolfo Llinas's idea, where the thalamus in the brain dealing with abstract information gives rise to the feeling of "self" by a mechanism analogous to that of cells uniting and bonding in sync to contract a muscle..

Now the point is not whether these are right or wrong. It's that however we eventually find the brain or parts of the brain to work, that's going to influence how we think about ourselves and the universe as much as any paradigm-shift has done in the past.

If you're saying we've solved the puzzle, then you know , think you know or "know" something i don't. x)

Btw; How feelings and moods and sensations come to us, and why they are in the relative intensity and what relation they have to the internal and external world is surely going to be relevant to ethics etc. The highest concept in at least some types of ethics is the concept of pain or suffering; quantifying/measuring these or showing how the mood or feeling of pain can be separated from the sensation of pain or anything like that might undermine views or lead to new movements and ways of thinking..

Or even disregarding that, the brain can still be seen as a mystery for all religious people who like to hide, the current excorsism that
neuroscience is undergoing might set up quite the tension when touching further and further upon "the self" and "free will" and "sensation" and "emotion"; saying everything is made out of atoms may be a reasonable thing to do, but like the vanquish of "the life force" didn't come until we understood cells to high precision and got a good grasp of dna etc. so too i predict that people still haven't and won't yet realize the impact of taking this "self=x scientific theory" until we have come a good deal closer to understanding fully..

And of course, even then it will take quite some time before we see the real impact..

jhkjbgkhbhk;k
Yes.
Changing how people think by the way of origin of "self" since 1985(c).

Well, people who have personalities like mine will certainly draw inspiration from it in formulating new ideas.. People are different - I may just be extremely overenthusiastic about this.. we will see, in 30 years time or so, how much unraveling the "self" and all these most personal concepts affected the course of things :]

HOLD ON TO YOUR ENTHUSIASTISS

I didn't read what you said Christian but all I wanted to say is that I still love you...

<3

<3

exactly :)

An ad hominem in the first sentence is usually a bad sign :>

the length of the sentence weighs up for it i think ;)

robots you say?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSsXlRytRDs

Will Smith > robots

Free will goofyness. Study the animals... study the universals... then you might know true Free Will (or the lackthereof). The pains, pleasures and fears... they guide so much of your life... your behavior... your words... your thoughts. Do you have the Free Will to stop breathing permanently? How much of your behavior is the direct result of neuro-chemistry, environmental conditions, and billions of years of evolution?

You have 'Free Will'... but there is strong encouragement and discouragement guiding your Will. These 'couragements' are aside from the opposition you may face from other 'Free Will' beings.

Exactly, all we are is a complicated program with a complicated decision making process. There is almost nothing "free will" about it, Every decision, every thought is just part of this program. That we have conciseness is a very small part of this programs facilities where choices which are influenced by current actions and which will influence the future are evaluated. But we have almost no leeway in the decision making due to the universals you describe.

All we are is matter (and energy), atoms in void! it's simple, really; even democritus could grasp this easy fact, as a matter of fact! now the brain is just a complex assembly of these "particles" which we have come to know to some extent are also "waves" - but that does not "matter", as a matter of fact! they move around and out comes all we see! our highest internal abstractions become the simplest constituents of external reality, how easy and convenient everything turns out to be!

and now, in our computer age, the brain is suddenly "running" a complicated "program", "processing" "information", "generating" "consciousness", instead of having, like when newton ruled and the closedness of physics was not apparent, a "mental spirit", combined with or only being ruled by a "clockwork machine" with "nuts" and "bolts" "mechanically" "moving". or how about later, when the steam-machines came about, then it was all about internal "pressure" and "release" of "steam" which got built up. the internet is really just a series of tubes!

I'm glad you understand the obvious and how nothing ever changes. A system is a system, no matter what we call it. The fact that we know more details about the systems inner workings doesn't change what we knew about humans since stone-age.
Well, at least now you don't have to think about the "existence of soul" and "free will". I think you still got "Ego" though. khekhe

All we do is describe; postulating something beyond that is perfect foolishness.. This is a given.

Now on to the nuances and the complexity of what we see and how we describe it:

People saw things move, they described (and thus ascribed) that a thing willed its movement or got pushed by someone that willed their movement. (it was obvious!)

People felt they were capable of choices, and where free to chose between a and b - they described (and thus ascribed) a free will.

We, of course, reject souls and mental forces and divine forces, we describe movement with matter, inertia and various types of physical forces. We describe the feeling of free will by interaction of these forces. But this is in the end just a better description - not a "true" one, nor a "final" one (we still ascribe!).

Showing the old description of free will does not hold? Very well, that's old news. Are we done describing the feeling of interest? No, not at all.

Yes.Yes.Yes.
Oh, this reminds me of poetry again!

I say as Goethe; one day science and poetry will meet and unite!

It's beautiful!

:]]

I don't mean to be annoying, and I do respect and value your comments - the words still resound in me. But I nevertheless feel like you don't fully understand my point, this is why I keep it going. If you already got it - i'm sorry!

ha
And all this time I've been saying that your points are useless goings around with no end in sight and of no interest to a knowledge seeking mind.

My heroes include Goethe and (especially) Nietzsche - did they seek knowledge?

If you don't think so, don't worry too much, i've always been a fan of both Einstein and (especially) Feynman - Mr. Science himself. ;)

this thread = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj7zzviGpb8
PS
Those two, especially Nietszhe certainly were looking for it, but got further and further away as they lost touch with "reality". I don't have any heroes, but I respect many people, some of which, mainly ancient Greeks, literally wrote the book on knowledge. Almost everyone, with very notable exceptions, since than, has been interpreting, reiterating, misunderstanding. Most common cause being, they didn't experience, "understand" and as a result didn't command life. Regardless of how smart, imaginative, or full of other seemingly impressive intellectual qualities, many people are not actually particularly insightful, imho. A lot of them are downright crazy, eccentric, minds living in delusion, often too narrowly focused on one subject.

ahahaha, rofl.. that's a pretty good description xD

I don't know much about goethe really, but for nietzsche i think the losing touch with reality was a symptom of aiming too high.. more a becoming the shadow of his own ideal with an inability to unite what he saw into a coherent whole, than some error in interpretation.

"When one has dealings with scholars and artists it is easy to miscalculate in opposite directions: behind a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist often—a very remarkable man."- Nietzsche

It's an interesting phenomena, even people with high IQ's often don't seem that wise or insightful (although i'm very careful in judging people i think may be intelligent!). Personally I think intellectual honesty, childlike curiosity and self-insight is extremely important

but i'm off now, back home where there is no pc or internet! (i'm really an addict).. Good talking to you :)

Quite the German fetish you have there ;)

Anyway I think your disctinction is too easy. Einstein was also philosophing at times while on the other hand Goethe did some scientific research.

In fact the German term I would use to describe Goethe is "Universalgelehrter" which could maybe be translated with "universal scholar" or "multitalented". Let's just say that Da Vince is the very definition of a "Universalgelehrter".

/edit
some more googling gave me polymath as a translation.

Mainly just Nietzsche really, it's just that Goethe was the epitome of the "genius" for Nietzsche.. and psychological insight i'd argue is one of Nietzsche's specialties ;)

He admired Emerson, Voltaire and Leibniz as well, all very genius ;)

Yes, after all they do call Lebniz the last "real" polymath.
He actually lived near here for a while, Wolfenbüttel.

Of course the other two are very good examples for intelligence. But I would say calling those people genius doesn't need a lot of psychological insight ;)

Probably not, but he does seem to pick out the more monstrous intellects - Spinoza, Dostoevsky, Pascal, Socrates, Shakespeare - and draws inspiration from all of them. ;)

I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom requires moderation in knowledge as in other things.

yeah, he brags about reading only a little blabla, yet he was a philologist and crossreferences left and right, so he must've read quite alot, at least in his youth.. he did become quite able to think by himself, but i'd think his poor health and lack of readingability made him so explicitly turn not-reading into a virtue and positive value ;)

I wasn't quoting this in respect to his stance on erudition, which is made quite clear in the first Untimely Meditation, but on knowledge. I hope this passage helps reaffirm his position in this regard:

Subtle deficiency - Do not mock the mythology of the Greeks because it so little ressembles your profound metaphysics! You ought to admire a people who at precisely this point called its sharp understanding to a halt and for a long time had sufficient tact to avoid the perils of scholasticism and sophistical superstition! in Daybreak, §85.

yes! this partly what i've been trying to get at - this matter-of-factness with heaps upon heaps of (invisible!:p) metaphysical jargon is usually so unjustified.. perhaps i should not speak so loud until i know more about philosophy of science and the arguments etc. My intuition bad at articulating and yet even worse at teaching - yet it's usually what i'm running on x[

"To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common."

also: there is no spoon

truth, i keep getting a new "aha" feeling every now and then when i look at an old saying or quote or idea or whatever, even if i've had the "aha" feeling thinking i exhausted its meaning once or even several times before ;)

Just received "Being and Time" and "Being and Nothingness".
Took a few peaks at " Being and Time " and it really looks a bit harsh.
I guess my sympathy for this kind of stuff is really going to be tested.

:D

Yeah, it's pretty harsh. Weirdest thing i've come across yet. Think i'm gonna have to reread "being and time" properly some time, from cover to cover instead of this chapter thing we get in our curriculum; that goes for "being and nothingness" as well, although i'd think that's more of a cultural book (spawning the popular existentialism etc.) ;)

Got the same thing . It´s a never ending issue, to rediscover new meaning´s in some idea. It´s the epitome of " i want more than just this", childlike curiosity and a truly self-insight ( and whatever that means, tired of to thinking/imagine what really self-insight is ) . Most of the times it´s just a grasp of a new meaning, a feeling. It´s kinda like a curse.

"To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished."

also: been working on Nietzsche, and i have now a better understanding on some concepts.
Was being too naive regarding what some really meant, meaning for example the eternal return, and how it fits his philosophy. I negleted it´s true meaning to his philosophy and treated it like a gimmick.

sry for the long ass post, was bored

Yeah, i was especially thinking of Nietzsche; it's so easy to think one understands, yet as one reads another and another book it's all set in a new light, a new perspective giving new meaning :)

shitty new-age hippie thread tbh!

The info about the muscles is from a book by the neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas. He's one of the giants of the field.

If you're referring to anything else or question my ability to recite.. then feel free x)

Too much rhetorical blah blah blah for my taste :>

I can pluck names like Goethe and Nietzsche and whatever, but that only shows that I know some last names, not that I know anything in particular about the subject at hand.

No one has yet assailed the fact that free will is a contradiction in terms. Free will is not "defined incorrectly" or "not understood" but is simply incoherent and therefore outside the realm of understanding; just like "living dead", "taped live", "working vacation", "virtual reality" and "jumbo shrimp". All of these oxymorons can be reconciled once we define the terms separately and realize that only one of them applies to the thing we are talking about.

Don't be offended, it is entirely natural for human beings to contradict (one could make the case that there is natural selection for this ability) but in matters so basic as will and freedom I think we can realize they are mutually exclusive.

edit: If you claim we have free will, the only evidence you could have of free will would be if you went back in time and changed your will. That would be the only way to really demonstrate free will (but I am open to other suggestions...?) However, since I do not expect any such evidence to be forthcoming, I can safely say that we have will but not freedom.

i'm not claiming anything of the sort, check my posts - read them holistically x)

Er, that should have read "if you claim we can or can not have free will". The point is, you are making a statement about something that is incoherent. You are talking about "long shorts" (insert your favorite contradiction in terms here) as if that is actually a coherent thing. In contexts where the discussion is not serious, we usually forgive this (such as the case would be with long shorts.) But when you are making such a big deal about it (if your posts are to be taken as a whole as you suggest) then I can't help but point out the mistake.

it's starting question, like "why are we here" .. even though there is no reason we are still "answering" the question because people have asked it, now just at a more sophisticated level - don't you understand my point?

lmao @ "why are we here"

yeah, it made sense before right, "there must be some reason why we are here just like there is a reason why i made this house".. or just like it made sense to talk about the fact that a stone "wants" to unite with the earth.. or consider that after the mechanical view took over even newton and his contemporaries found gravity to be a spooky action at a distance that didn't really explain anything. after a while they let the problem alone because it seemed unexplainable - it's just a basic fact. same with chemistry, after a long time of asking how color and texture etc. came from particles, they gave up understanding it, in favor of a theory with some good predictions that didn't touch on it; only far later did they understand that it was, after all, something explainable. you can't know these things beforehand.

the only way to ask a "serious" "matter of fact" question that you know you can get an answer to, is by being well within whatever paradigm you're in. safe and boring.

wow, you really lost touch with logic there, all I can say is
"And that brings us to tonight's word: Truthiness.
Now I'm sure some of the word-police, the "wordanistas" over at Websters, are gonna say, "Hey, that's not a word!" Well, anybody who knows me knows that I am no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, what did or didn't happen..." - Stephen Colbert

what's the problem? i've baisically just said that

1. The meaning behind the questions we ask change. (like, what is an atom)

2. If you're researching on uncharted terrain you can't know if something is knowable. (for all they knew the heavens where governed by divine unknowable will)

so much that i see no point getting into it

too late for msn i guess

This whole thread is boring and pointless armchair philosophy :<

you're getting it all wrong, armchair philosophy is the fun part ;)

don't you dare insult robots ;D

as long as you don't insult the brain x)

&#8220;Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.&#8221; - Emil Cioran
if you read so many books at some point you will realise these thinkers are just running around the tail and at some point they all just can't break through an imaginary wall hiding the true

One of my fist principles is that everything is more difficult that it looks. I believe in nuances and complexity we can't fathom rather than some easy "all is one", "experience in this moment is truth forever" etc. ;)

I am not the "live your moments" guy, usually I just look at time like there would be nothing else, which mean absent to everything
my personal "principles" is go and read, write, paint or study, but try usually not to finish your work and whatever you do just don't become one of them, whatever the domain

i was just thinking about some sort of reality with a platonic ultimate truth hiding behind it - at this point i'm really in opposition to such a view.

Ultimate truth of our reality:

God=Pasta

^^

Juggling is easier than it looks.

yes, but you see, my principle applies to itself as well!

So your principle is unfalsifiable?

i think atleast it tries to :D
Its all matter of beliefs

But i think we can all agree on some extend, that his principle is the best one in order to not make "bad" judgments about something thus not false. Life´s better outside of the box
Something like this

it would apply to that question as well.. besides, "psychological" principles like that can often be contradictory and still yield meaning to us. another opposite but also valuable principle is that everything is easier than it looks as here mentioned. it's like the duality of "it's better to be safe than sorry." vs "nothing ventured, nothing gained" - although contradictory they still hold insight and meaning which can be seen in different contexts.

There's nothing easy about "All is one". Try reading reading Nietzsche, Barnes or Colli (the least biased of the three) on the Presocratics. Spinoza doesn't strike me as someone whose thought can be characterized as easy either.

I've read almost all of Nietzsche now. In my youth i was skimming through these spiritual easy theories for 6 months, and the people with the *main* message of a single primary truth or single feeling or single experience, speaking of essence and energy in an overly unitary universal way, giving less and less room for nuances, i considered the worst. This is primarily what i was referring to and what i associate with "all is one" - the spiritual feeling people get when all is meaningful and profound.

Spinoza and these presocratics may have had a type of "all is one" philosophy - but i've not read this and i don't think i'd disagree too much with them. I do like e.g the "will to power".. i just have bad associations i guess ;)

I guess you must have read this then, and you're probably familiar with this too.

Oh, i misread you; i never read Nietzsche specifically *on* the presocratics, didn't know about that work.. Looks interesting, does it presuppose an understanding of these philosophers? I've read tiny fragments of Heraclitus and Thales, but i never really got into any ancient philosophy.

I know about monism, but i had no connotations to older philosophy; it's so commonly used these days to oppose Cartesian dualism that i most frequently associate it with materialism and atomism and physicalism; my associations with "all is one", on the other hand, is new age philosophy, random gurus and spiritualism.

need to know moar etymology and ancient philosophy i guess ;)

I recommend you to read The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus for some different points of view
the book tries to explain for example how human mind at some point can't break through further and how there are so many paradoxes that it is practically impossible to make a final decision wheter the true is God or no God or science
"Camus's first significant contribution to philosophy was his idea of the absurd, the result of our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither"

Looks cool, i'll probably do that sometime.

try a little bit faster, I am almost sure two week later you will totally forget the name of this book :p

i did read the plague some time back, but didn't really think it was that good due to the drawn out nature of it (that was indubitably intentional but still).. but as this looks better i'll look into it when i have time, which may be a long time away still. but now i have the title in mind at least x)

The Myth of Sisyphus is just pure phylosophy so it's not a novel, which is pretty different I guess

yep, i'd probably have read that instead of the plague if i knew that then x)

Let me give you guys a crouchsliding tip. Crouchsliding has a few good uses. One is going up ramps, which most people know. Another is going around corners. Something about the turning corners motion works great.

Once you've mastered crouchsliding around corners, you can move on to 'snakesliding'. Which is basically manipulating the turning motion to keep yourself in a relatively straight line. In other words, it's like going around corners without actually going around corners. It is theoretical at this point, so don't kill yourself trying. But it's possible it will work, and I have had some success with it.

i've had some success with it too x)