They believe it, they don't know it. Still an "if" until proven to be one way or the other

I had this conversation with my lady one night. My question was a bit different, it was "when does consciousness start, and do we have 'soul' before that?" Was trying to recall my first memory and it really terrified me that I was alive, breathing, eating, walking etc. all before I had any recollection. Made me wonder if consciousness requires a certain amount of information be taken in by the brain first.

You say you don’t, but your previous comments constantly differentiate between “a person” and concepts like “their programming” and so I ask you: where’s that line? If you’re not drawing it on a mental physical divide then why are you constantly referring to situations as if an immaterial mind is being made unfree by its connection to a physical body? You have refused to address this any time I’ve pointed it out and just double down on this “we are trapped” narrative as if I’m supposed to have some existential epiphany and realize I’ve actually been deluding myself this whole time.

An unintelligent robot like you’re describing doesn’t have consciousness or a sense of self, or even the capability to recursively alter its own criteria on a meta-level via self-reflection and imagined circumstance, so now we are not “basically robots”The robot’s programming isn’t part of its identity because it doesn’t have one. It doesn’t even have will, so forget about free will.

I’m out.

I mean to say, these "no free will" comments tend to revolve around you being solely the product of your genetics, experiences, etc. But if the brain and the self are the same thing, then that's still "you." If you are your brain, then you are your genetics. It's pointless to separate them.

At each point in time, all your atoms, electrons bonds etc are in a given state of motion, energy, location, etc. So the next moment must either be determined already and/or varied by what we consider random quantum effects. And so on back to the big bang and forwards into the future.

Unless there is "a soul" or similar which would contain our will and can somehow interact with our body(including the brain) and change its state but also has never been detected by science... it is pretty hard to explain that their is free will.

However, it is clear that drugs/chemicals, brain damage, education, illness, weather, sleep deprivation, time of day, etc can affect what people think, how they think and how they act. Which means that a souls impact is minimal or the soul is impacted by the material world and is therefore starting to look deterministic...

Either quantum actions in the brain are soul/magic/unknown something or we are deterministic (Newtonian) and/or random (quantum) bio-automatons.

Or, of course, we are in a simulation, then a scientific understanding of the "world" doesn't help much as there could be a random "if statement".

>if

Yeah dawg, western philosophers been agreeing this is all an illusion for almost two centuries now

I don't subscribe to dualism, but you can call it anything. Meat of my argument is whether or not the kind of state of existence/experience I'm describing, where a person has the awareness of the absurdity of their own nature of existence & the lack of ability of their rational/conscious preferences to defy their own primary programmings, is something one should be happy that they have, or want to have. Sure, the experience may still be less awful than enslavement by other humans or some kinda aliens, but does this state sound anything close to the characteristics/images we associate with the idea of 'freedom.'

Is your idea of freedom being a robot and not having your execution of tasks obstructed by the environment? I mean, we are basically robots, but you seem to be saying that being a robot is free as long as no one's stopping you from carrying the box from point A to B, and your own computer is doing the calculation to decide the optimal route to get there.

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recommended although I don’t know the first

determined in some grander sense

Define "you."

Only if you can pinpoint a certain spot at which you consider “life starting”

I’ve asked this question to many and most just become uncomfortable about it, but I still hold it,

“when do you consider your life starting, at which point did you say “I’m alive” and consider the other parts not alive”

I’m not sure this highlights the topic but it’s still in line with the underpinnings. Why do we look to science to deliver us when most can’t even simply awnser that for ourselves?

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Language vs experiences

I am curious what others thoughts are on this… does language limit our understanding of experiences and our understanding of meaning? So many times I hear ppl use a word that in my opinion is more symbolic of a greater meaning but many times people limit the word to how they were taught about it or how they understand that specific word. For example.. the word ‘god’, to me the word god is just symbolic for a higher power/energy/consciousness, it’s not limited to a person or a single experience… it’s all encompassing and the foundation of it is love in its purest form… many times I have conversations and use the word god and it seems I often lose ppl in translation because of the limited understanding of limited meaning they assigned to the word ‘god’. I wonder how often we do this in life… when we experience something greater but based on our understanding of the language we’ve learned; how often our perspective of that experience can be so limiting only for the mere fact of being limited by the language we know. If we experience something and can’t provide the right language to give it meaning, does that diminish our experience?

There are those who think that life has nothing left to chance…

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> You may have debated it consciously, but if you really think about it, that decision was made as soon as you are aware of the choice. You are really spending the time trying to understand that choice.

I don't see why. That sounds like saying an artificial reinforcement learning agent is only evaluating a pre-made decision when it is computing the weight for each action in the action space and selecting (deciding) the maximum weighed action. That would be a very weird and confusing thing to say, even if the agent is completely determined by its inital seed, program, environment, history and etc. You can always create off-brand language games, and say such things as "because the decision is logically entailed by so and so, it's all pre-made" but I am not sure everyone would subscribe to that language game. Being logically entailed is different from actually causally executing a decision.

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Futorama https://youtu.be/8Ge59iM2dS0

This is pretty interesting and I appreciated the end of it (quick read). But I think the author skipped an important concept. If all our decisions can be traced back to genetics, situational and nurture; aren’t those variables beyond our own control anyway? We may feel that our choices are our own but think about a recent decision. You may have debated it consciously, but if you really think about it, that decision was made as soon as you are aware of the choice. You are really spending the time trying to understand that choice.

I think that was main theme The Matrix part II.

You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!

You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill.

I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose Freewill!

Trust me, that book is actually about everything EXCEPT motorcycles, you don’t need to know anything about them

It really just sounds like you’re subscribing to dualism, so we’re not having the argument we think we are.

The article states "Our instinctive aversion to incest is informed by intuitive eugenics" and links to a scientific study which supposedly asserts the same claim, which it doesn't. The study uses "intuits" which isn't the same as holding eugenics as a belief system. The entire article reads as a classic case of propaganda intended to reinforce confirmation bias in favor of normalizing eugenics.

Label away enough and it's perfectly normal to be a eugenicist. Why not natural?

Edit: and in the linked study, I'm not seeing any evidence that this can be reproduced among polyamorous tribes where close familial ties are comparatively vague or not recognized. If it isn't reproduceable, it would suggest any aversion people intuit toward close kin is due to some kind of social contstruct, being not innate.

Why do you think it's not a coercion, if the cause of potential suffering is inside the organism which creates the conscious thoughts and experience of "it"? Sure, the distinction may be useful when discussing ethics in a court and we wanna decide the appropriate response to someone's action. But Dennett's not just talking about that. If it's inside you, does it not matter how ridiculous the needs/drives/etc. it causes are when contrasted to your conscious/rational personality/preferences? Even if you, the conscious, experience great disconnect between your preferences and the condition imposed by the rest of "you"? If someone was born in such a way that their conscious part has normal sensibilities, but the particulars of their brain makes it so they feel immense suffering if they don't eat human feces, would you still not call it a coercion, from the perspective of the conscious part/conscious experience (of thoughts and feelings) of the person?

If you, one day, suddenly develop a condition so that you experience unbearable suffering unless you do something you absolutely hate to do, (I don't know what your preferences are, but suppose it's the urge to hurt people and you don't like hurting people) would it not feel like you are 'being forced' to do something you (the-conscious, thinking and feeling part of you) have no good reason to be doing? Forget about how you'd see someone like that, as a thirdperson. How would it feel to be in that state?