iNow

Yes, that or leprechauns, of course. If you’re suggesting that physical and biochemical events are NOT the sole cause of thought and mentation, then I’d be extremely curious to hear what OTHER thing you assert is involved. Maybe you believe we must include unicorn farts, or perhaps tooth fairy dust?

Right. Ok. Never mind

Fine. Pick one statement you’d like me to address head on.

Look up companies like Tableau, MS Power BI, Fusion Charts, Domo, Google Cloud Analytics, SAP Analytics Cloud, and the 15 new ones that pop up every 3 days.

I’m not necessarily opposed to that. This seems like a data availability problem that could be solved by having access to more of it (more data >> better forecasts) than an actual hard limit imposed by the cosmos (aka: not impossible). Why is that a problem? Ah. So it’s an opinion wearing a tux and a polka dotted bow tie then? Which conditions are those?

What is the gap in the current market that you believe this helps fill?

You’re not disagreeing with me, though. You’re disagreeing with and rejecting all of the evidence collected across decades using precise measurements of neural activity. This remains an incoherent and internally inconsistent position. Which times in your estimation does our “volition” magically ignore physics and chemistry? Yes

Said another way: Simple isn’t all that’s necessary. It must also be correct and account for observations.

Hint: It's not the experiments that are wrong

In a move that makes matters badly worse, apparently Russia’s Wagner Group intends to send air defense systems to Lebanon’s Hezbollah. I'm tired of all these wars because one group thinks their imaginary friend is better than the imaginary friend of other groups.

That to me seems to be a separate question, and it's strange to fault me for not bothering to address it. This seems unrelated to my stance, so again I'll politely ignore it. Nothing in our normal day-to-day experience changes just bc I'm highlighting that the decision events appear to occur prior to us realizing any conscious awareness of them. That's fine. There have been a multitude of others in the decades since, and all point in the same direction. As I'm sure you can see, this is a bit of a strawman. Nobody is claiming they pop out of nothing, only that the chemistry occurs prior to conscious awareness.

Our behaviors of course are themselves a variable that in influences other things in a causal manner, but these too are selected prior to our conscious awareness of them. Better? I understand, but the addition of the word “conscious” in no way changes where and when in the mind the behavior was initiated… that was before / prior to conscious awareness of it.

Why do you continually refuse to answer direct questions? I have not attacked you, yet you act as if you’ve been wronged or offended.

So, IINM, you’re entire argument here boils down to, “Just trust me, bruh!” Please elaborate then. What are you suggesting?

This is what I’ve been referring to as a post-dictive narrative, a story you make up after the decision event already occurred. See link in previous post Has anyone demonstrated these actual exist? The literature I’ve been reading the last few decades implies occurrence before consciousness Are you suggesting they’re somehow different, somehow disconnected from the way the rest of our nervous system functions? Because it’s not even just your opinion. It’s not even wrong, and it’s definitely not evidence.

I’m reminded of when a toddler comes at me swinging and I just put my palm on their forehand to hold them back until they wear themselves out

Sometimes species go extinct because other predators become dominant and change the ecosystem. One has to try extremely hard to remain obtuse to these obvious facts

Couldn’t agree more

Homosexuality in the animal kingdom has already been observed in over 1,500 species and we’re still counting. Homophobia is just stupid nonsense we should all move beyond, but instead it becomes a lever to drive out the worst most abhorrent behaviors from the most manipulatable people among us.

What part of my understanding of neural chemistry and the locations of decision events being before conscious centers of the brain do you think is mistaken? The evidence is on my side here, so curious what evidence you have which leads you to conclude I am "lost" and have "a very unreal wrong belief." I'm quite open to correction, but you have yet to demonstrate I'm wrong. There are minor criticisms of some individual studies, but the preponderance of evidence in aggregate very heavily leans toward my side of this issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will

Trying not to get lost in finding perfect words, but we DO have "conscious behavior," that DOES lead to outcomes in a causal way, and IS selected for in the course of evolution, but the "conscious behavior" itself is also beyond any "conscious" influence. It all occurs BEFORE we're "conscious" of it, before we're aware of it, and the narrative our minds generate comes AFTER any behaviors or "choices" are already decided. Our centuries of false understandings on this topic makes using words to explain it properly quite difficult, not unlike trying to use English to explain quantum and relativistic behaviors, but as there is no clean math nor equations (yet) for the mind, I'm doing my best and hoping we don't simply get lost in imperfect words with lots of historical baggage and subjective interpretation. From a chronological and location based frame of reference, consciousness and awareness come AFTER the "choice" or "decision" is made. We then explain it with a post-dictive narrative. Seconded. That "sometimes yes, sometimes no" part baffles me, and remains vague to the point of being useless IMO. Sometimes, like when / what? We agree that I can't "free will" myself into gestating a baby in my belly as a male human, or that I can't "free will" myself into growing wings out of my earlobes, but you seem to be asserting that there ARE instances where we can "free will" our decisions and choices consciously and in a manner unrelated to the chemistry driving our nervous systems. So, what do you think ARE those times? What examples can you give? My position is there is no such possibility, but you keep asserting otherwise so I assume that you MUST have something tangible to offer in support of that assertion, something more than "I simply cannot allow myself to believe I don't have a freedom beyond my neural chemistry to choose my path," right??

Perhaps I should not have introduced the outdated idea of unconscious versus consciousness. In terms of my position, this arbitrary distinction isn't very relevant. It's all the same biological hardware and all the same chemically induced electrical signals, and all of them occur before reaching the parts of our brain considered "self" and before we are even aware of it. Once these signals reach our awareness, we then apply a story to explain them, but that occurs after, not during nor before.

What I suspect you’re still missing is that you’re calling something a “decision” when it’s just chemistry and a narrative the story-telling parts of your brain applied after mostly unconscious neural machinery has already led to it

There will be some failures. There will be many more successes. There will be an Eden of new ideas to be acted upon by those using AI as a tool.

Yeah, sadly I don’t actually understand your position at all. When would it exist, and when would it not? Will you please elaborate? What else would they be when viewed at the level of chemistry in our nervous systems? The very label of them as “rational” or “passive” is itself an arbitrary narrative being applied AFTER the creation and awareness of the thought.