Having been in Allison’s psychological situation a little…I can say the issue is “beating yourself up”…

Namely, there is a LARGE difference between recognizing what you did is wrong, and trying to change yourself…and circling around in a spiral of guilt and self-loathing.

Essentially, Allison was in the latter space…which also means that she was incapable of making positive change. Or, in fact, ANY action, to an extent. She was so busy beating herself up for daring to make a mistake. (Though her mistake was far greater then mine), that she was incapable of taking action.

Only once she has accepted her mistake,acknowledged it as a part of herself, can she make a change. Either make recompense, or “Go and sin no more.”

Of course, my mistakes were “I forgot to study for a test”, and “I missed an appointment”, not “I bitch-slapped a guy and broke his neck.”

I wonder how many of this commentators have had someone use force on them and ignore everything else. There was a guy who was doing martial arts demonstrations and I volunteered to throw a punch and have him block it. So I throw the punch, he puts my arm in a lock and starts explaining how it works to the crowd. Thing is my arm is being bent pretty far, so I’m getting very uncomfortable and I ask him to let go. He ignores me and keeps on speaking, while I point out that this hurts and there’s no need to keep me in the lock. My friend starts screaming at him to let me go and then he lets me go and says I shouldn’t be such a pansy. Crowd did not like the guy after that.

Trust me, being ignored by someone who’s using force on you is more scary than them sounding reasonable because it makes them seem alien and sociopathic.

Oh and about manipulation: I disagree with coat!Alison that any and all attempt at reasoned discourse is brainwashing. Politically, we have to believe humans have free will.

Anthropologically, physically, realistically, we have not. Obviously.

That’s why I separate the realms of politics and that of physics. As a mathematician, I rather like one where, let’s say… we shall call free will the ability by which consciousness is somehow able to triumph over the determinism of the macro scale. That one we absolutely don’t have.

And I say politically we got to believe we have it because, well, even that one’s not so certain, what with how many unconscious biases, psychological and social phenomena control our behavior and whatnot.

Well, it gets fuzzy at the quantum level, with probability distributions and uncertainty principles. But to ours, expecting free will is like expecting a domino in a chain will not fall because it wants to.

I dunno if quantum mechanics would really leave room for free will either. If my decision is either the cause of the interaction of natural laws on my neuro chemistry, or random chance interacting on my brain, I still don’t see much room for free will.

I just meant that I don’t even have an idea of what having free will would be like. Either we are bound by the laws of nature or those of random chance or something else? What would that “something else” that we call “free will” even be?

How would you even test if a choice was done by free internal will? We can obviously test if someone was pressured by external pressures by other people their “wills”, but how would we even do that for our own free will?

Freedom is incredibly important to me as a “useful illusion” to make a society I want to be a part of, but to be honest, I can’t even imagine what free will actually is.

“And then there’s grant writing, which is a little of both.”

I admit, I laughed.

I try not to make time bounded predictions, but if you mean “thinks like a human” yeah, not soon. The other definition of AI has generally been a moving target – a succession of “this problem requires AI…” followed by “Oh, that problem is now old hat.” Which is actually incredibly cool, and we’re doing some pretty cool things with modeling inverts. (OTOH, our neuron models are imperfect. So when people start talking about modeling brains as such, I start snickering.)

Quick note before I run off to the farmers market.

I come from a computational neuroscience tradition that puts a lot of emphasis on detailed single neuron models. And sure, you can abstract that a bit if you’re going to set up a giant network… except that a lot of people tend to gloss over the fact that brains are only sort of a digital system, they’re really super analog, and all the stuff you throw away when you make simplified models is important.

The link above doesn’t work on my box, but I found the SMRITI page though if there was a particular paper you wanted me to look at I’m missing that piece. I’m going to need to read though to see more about their neuron models, but modeling the hippocampus seems like a reasonable goal – it’s a reasonable size, we know a fair bit about its connections and activity and a lot about the behavior of the individual neurons.

What steams me is when you have groups that want to build vast simulations of, oh, say, entire human brains, and their plan reads something like “we will simulate neurons, and connect them all up like in a real brain, and then the magic will happen”… and holy fuck, that’s just not how neurons work, neurons are highly non-equivalent, synapses are are also non-equivalent, and it’s like these people have never head of actual neuroscience…

…which would be fine, right until they hype the hell out of it, and get a huge amount of funding for something that is stupid rather than ambitious. Yeesh. Take that funding, parcel it out to small labs who actually have a clue, and forget the dog and pony show. Nnnnnggggh.

Well, I did look through the paper I was looking at more, and it was super into explanation the connection model and not so much into explaining the neuron model, though maybe there’s a link to where that’s explained somewhere that I missed (I was still going through quickly). I type fast as long as I know what I want to say – sometimes it’s clear, sometimes it’s not, sometimes I’m bouncing between another screen where I’m chatting with one of my students.

Mirror neurons are a perfect example of why a work in motor control, and in sea slug, where we have some idea what our data means. It’s seductive as all hell, but…

Oh, I like that. See, this is the problem with working with humans – all the stuff the IRB won’t let you do!

though with language, the problem is less IRB and more “do these words really mean what I’m assuming they mean” + “are these stimuli really equivalent” and “how do I even make 60 items for a stimulus set”

also, at the time I did the study, “how do I draw clear recognizable & unambiguous actions… IN XFIG?”

The link didn’t work, I don’t know why. I didn’t try to mess with it and figure it out, I just went to Google. But if it was the overview, I think I know which one.

I’m not a had core programming (in the sense that I hate sitting at a computer coding all day – ugh!) but my dad was a CS prof, and… well, I’ve been on the internet since 1978, and starting coding only slightly after that. It’s a little pathetic, really. (There were a lot of gaps, I had a lot of better things to do, too. And sometimes I couldn’t afford computers.) I have a love / hate relationship with models, which is one of the reasons I left the U of WA and my old lab there to seek biology that really went squish. I love the design, and it can be a great way to test your own understanding and … well, hell, tasty, tasty math. But you can’t go mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon, can you?

A model is only as good as your understanding of the limitations of the model.

“The best and the worst think about studying neuroscience is that we don’t know jack. I mean, I used to joke about how in biochemistry, you only have to scratch at anything a bit before you hit “we don’t know” but neuroscience” is worst – or better, if you want to think of it that way.

We have a lot of data. There are a lot of low level pieces we can tell you about. (I work a lot in this area, because things are more or less sane here.) But how it fits together big picture? Ahahaha… no.”

…and this is why my SO left academic neuroscience for the game industry… “fun” is so much easier to define than anything important.

I don’t remember where I saw it (I want to say PBS SpaceTime on YouTube?), but I saw a video a while back that put it like this: even if our decisions are “determined” by whichever of the infinite us-es we happen to be, the fact still remains that our specific instance of ourselves is *defined* by the events we partake in, which includes the decisions we make, thus at least partially suggesting that we have “free will” in that we define our existence by the choices we make.

No idea if that holds up under actual science from cutting-edge experts, but a very smart person on YouTube said it and mostly makes sense when I subject it to my own scrutiny, so that’s how I currently see it (at least until someone proves me wrong, of course).

You have reduced the problem to the fact that we have to make a “free” decision to be considered having free will, but you haven’t proven that this decision isn’t just from random chance or internal and external determinism or just a combination of the two. There still is no “free” part in that will.
It either is randomness that determines which possible one individual out of an infinite we are, or it is the consequence of decisions that are made by chemical processes in our brain that are completely dependend on natural laws. Or a combination of the two.
Nothing shows free will.

But aren’t our wants also merely the product of, if you’ll excuse the poor metaphor, our “programming”?
Sure, there are plenty of examples of people overcoming their “wants” by force of will alone.
But isn’t this always to fullfil a more abstract want, that is also a part of our “programming”?
If we can’t have a choice over our wants, it does not matter how strong our will is and how easily we can override some instinct for another. I never chose to be alive and a human. I never chose the different, sometimes competing, wants that I have.

I already said that the illusion of free will is an extremely vital part of the human experience, neccesary for any kind of bearable society, and that I personally value it very highly.
My point was, and still is, that I don’t know what free will is and that I don’t actually see room for it in our universe.

Maybe they will find something that is “free” eventually in the brain, but it would have to be pretty spectacular.
As far as we know, everything is either determined by natural law, or by random chance or a combination of those two. It would be quite surprising if we found something outside of that. I, personally, can’t even imagine something outside of those two options.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible, I am a very limited being after all, but it does make me doubt the existance of free will very much.

Well, I never heard anyone offer up what could possibly be there except for random chance or determinism.

If you know of anything else that could explain what drives our decision, no sarcasm, I’d like to hear it. Because I honestly have no idea.

I think the bottom lone though, is the argument about free will is something of a diversion. A universe without free will acts the same as a universe with free will, so why worry about it? Unless of one uses the idea that there is no free will in order to justify whatever decisions one makes, in which case, that’s no different than saying the Devil or spirits are responsible.

speaking as a cognitive scientist who did some neuro work – I strongly suspect effect size of any/all quantum effects = negligible.

But also YEAH I wish ppl understood better that p much all conscious reasoning is justification after the fact (though it can in fact affect future unconscious reasoning if you work at it, both in my experience and non-rigorous “metaanalysis” of studies, meaning just that I’ve gone huh, this is consistent w that other thing in another subfield entirely and these things link ’em up.

yeah at that level & stage absolutely, and that *must* affect the details of how our brains get structured, but at the level of neuronal activation I’m dubious. There’s just so much redundancy in the system, and from what I understand the relevant stuff happening at even the single cell level involves so many molecules that effects on any given one aren’t going to affect the whole, and anything random is cancelling out.

And then there’s the redundancy built into the system.

Like, it could happen, sure. But chances seem small. and, specially since among cognitive scientists I have met many people who want to talk about quantum effects and only a couple who understood them, with zero overlap between the two groups, so by default I don’t trust that anyone talking Quantum + Brains actually understands both those thingies.

(Though if Shastri’s model with the timing effects is relevant maybe I’m
wrong? I could see tiny changes affecting something like
timing much more strongly than whether a pattern activates at all.)

:nodding along: All of that I find plausible enough, and given that it makes sense if the effects are detectable at a single neuron level. But when people decide that language, or consciousness, or free will, or heck, poetry, is an emergent property due to quantum… that just kinda proves to me that they don’t know what quantum effects *or* emergent properties are. It’s like “These two things are hard to conceptualize therefore they’re the same thing!!!”

And mostly it’s because they don’t want to give sensory & motor systems enough credit & don’t want to accept that what they think of as rational thought piggybacks on those, either because ~rationality is what makes us not animals~ (to which I’m like… we… are… animals) or because sensorimotor stuff is haaaard (which is at least more honest if just as annoying)

I think there are different kinds of computer models, and they can tell use different sorts of things. I don’t know which ones you’ve been most exposed to – I know some of the CogSci folks use super abstract ones that are really useful to computer science, and have nothing to do with neuroscience as such. Whereas you then get into ones that are highly detailed in the different channels, and the geometry and synapses and some pretty amazing neuronal behavior falls out of that. …those low level models are my favorite. But I’m not against using simplifications, as long as people are clear on what they’re using, why their using it, and what effect that will have. (For instance, the majority of models do not take spatiality into account in any major way. Which is kind of a major oversight – necessary for some things, but don’t be blind to it.)

I also think generally it’s a bad idea to spend so much time working on computer models that you lose touch with actual data. But… well, I have made personal career decisions around that. …and I’m considering going off and building robots for a while. So.

And that’s what I meant… damn, did I write that part? (I definitely have a cold today, darn it) about how there is a tradition of trying to deal with neural models as purely digital, whereas brains are clearly and obviously analog and ignore that at your peril. Super useful stuff came out of some of those digital models… but we can’t be divided into hardware and software. Just like we can’t be divided into mind and body.

(Honestly, there’s way too much smugness around some parts of neuroscience and some buddhists these days. I mean, yes, it all works out rather nicely, but as someone who doesn’t want to get my chocolate in my peanut butter, as it were, I am current avoiding those parts of neuroscience. Even if the sleep and meditation lab at Madison is doing some really cool work.)

Hey, I was a liberal arts major, so no clue.

If I remember Quine’s definition- will have to see if I can find it again- it seemed a good one; the ability to form goals and carry them through without what we’d recognize as external coercion (external could include such forms of apparently internal (inside-body) coercion as such Suicide Squadish techniques as bombs wired inside us by other people to blow up if we don’t do what someone says, but there one does skirt paranoia unless one really can -prove- that they exist, surgically e.g.)

I would add that we have to believe humans in general have free will in order to *behave* as though we have free will ourselves.

Remember, Feral was only able to save a fraction of those people before. That’s why she wanted to be on the table 24/7–she was never “done,” because the absolute maximum number of organs she could donate still only met a fraction of the global need. So Alison’s action did in fact save thousands (probably tens or hundreds of thousands) of innocent people who would otherwise have died in spite of Feral’s constant donations.

Three options:

1) many more people dying for lack of organ donations
2) Feral voluntarily, continually, experiencing excruciating pain indefinitely
3) Max …

Very true. I think their implication with the baby-skull thing is that making Max do this could conceivably somehow lead to him being exploited for his power in the future, but I think a lot of commenters seriously overestimate that risk. One person even compared it to being exposed to a potentially lethal dose of radiation. In reality, as Alison said, the information is already out there, and she went to great lengths to conceal Max’s involvement. If anything, her conversation with Gurwara presents a greater risk to Max’s secret than making him boost Feral did.

Also, why do any of us take it for granted that Max has a right to keep his power secret? IIRC, that was the direct result of his mom pulling strings, right? Everyone else had to disclose theirs.