Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>> However, if you follow the instructions of "push the button as soon as
>> you decide which to push", chances are good you aren't aware of your
>> choice six seconds before you push the button.
> 
> In that case, the observer does not know which button you will push
> either, they are only predicting it. 

But if they predict with 100% accuracy, I'd say they know it.

>>> Actually, that would be a fairly easy prediction if you know the person.
>>>  Introverts are more likely to pick 1, extroverts would be more likely
>>> to pick 2. You could easily get above 50%, maybe as high as 75% with
>>> people you know well. With a few leading questions to set it up, you
>>> could get even higher.
>> I don't believe you. Certainly not if you repeat the experiment a few
>> dozen times.
>>
> 
> Behavioral psychology. 

I still don't believe you. Shelton is funny for always picking Spock exactly 
because he's so predictable. If you could actually pick my number 75% of the 
time, I'd be shocked.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> In that case, the observer does not know which button you will push
> either, they are only predicting it. 

Or, to put it another way, they are aware of what choice you're going to 
make before you are aware of what choice you're going to make.

Do you agree that you can know whether you're hungry or not?
Do you agree that if I ask you to write down 100 random numbers from one to 
one hundred, you don't right now know what the 80'th number is going to be? 
And you will know after you write it down?

I don't understand how you can say "know" is meaningless.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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Darren New wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>>> However, if you follow the instructions of "push the button as soon as
>>> you decide which to push", chances are good you aren't aware of your
>>> choice six seconds before you push the button.
>>
>> In that case, the observer does not know which button you will push
>> either, they are only predicting it. 
> 
> But if they predict with 100% accuracy, I'd say they know it.
> 

Have been trying to find a published report on this. I doubt it was 100%
but will keep looking till I find something. I only doubt it because
100% would have been a major jump that I think would have made a bigger
impact, or at least stuck in my brain for longer.

>>>> Actually, that would be a fairly easy prediction if you know the
>>>> person.
>>>>  Introverts are more likely to pick 1, extroverts would be more likely
>>>> to pick 2. You could easily get above 50%, maybe as high as 75% with
>>>> people you know well. With a few leading questions to set it up, you
>>>> could get even higher.
>>> I don't believe you. Certainly not if you repeat the experiment a few
>>> dozen times.
>>>
>>
>> Behavioral psychology. 
> 
> I still don't believe you. Shelton is funny for always picking Spock
> exactly because he's so predictable. If you could actually pick my
> number 75% of the time, I'd be shocked.
> 

Crossed meanings here, I think. I was talking about predicting the
choices, once per person, for a group. For an individual, picking
repeatedly, I dunno what the odds would be. People have a tendency to
favor one number over the other in choices like that, but if they know
what the experiment is they have the choice to try to throw it.

It works easier in large groups, picking from 1 to 10. Just predict that
everyone will pick the lucky number for that culture, and you will be
right more than 10% of the time, simply because more than 10% of people
will pick that number.

Shelton and Spock. . . I think I am missing something here.

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Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> Crossed meanings here, I think. 

I got your meaning. It just wasn't relevant to the experiment in the video. 
They didn't do that whole thing for one button push.

> Shelton and Spock. . . I think I am missing something here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iapcKVn7DdY

Sheldon is in the blue t-shirt.

Also, whenever they play charades, the first question is "Are you Spock?" 
and he always goes "How do you guess?"

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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Darren New wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>> In that case, the observer does not know which button you will push
>> either, they are only predicting it. 
> 
> Or, to put it another way, they are aware of what choice you're going to
> make before you are aware of what choice you're going to make.
> 
> Do you agree that you can know whether you're hungry or not?
> Do you agree that if I ask you to write down 100 random numbers from one
> to one hundred, you don't right now know what the 80'th number is going
> to be? And you will know after you write it down?
> 
> I don't understand how you can say "know" is meaningless.
> 

As an individual, yes, knowing I am hungry or cold or in pain is simple.
As a scientist, understanding that separation of the first nerve impulse
and when it transforms into knowing, is interesting. We know the
measurable delay that it takes for pain or heat neurons to signal the
brain, and the delay the brain takes to trigger muscles to respond. We
know, scientifically, that that all happens before the individual knows
that they are in pain or on fire. So, at some point the body knows that
the stimulus exists, but the person does not yet know that they are in pain.

That is why I use know in quotes. There is a point where the stimulus
crosses from sub-conscious to conscious, if that is where you want to
define "knowing"[1]. However, there is also the sub-conscious feelings,
gut instincts, that we know we have but do not know the source of. Since
 this experiment shows that other thought processes start at this level,
should we discount them all as unknown until the entire thought gets to
the conscious level?

[1] quotes here to separate the words as the phrase being discussed.

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Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> As an individual, yes, knowing I am hungry or cold or in pain is simple.
> As a scientist, understanding that separation of the first nerve impulse
> and when it transforms into knowing, is interesting. 

All agreed, yes. That's why I said one has to be careful how to define free 
will before arguing about whether it exists or not.

> That is why I use know in quotes. There is a point where the stimulus
> crosses from sub-conscious to conscious, if that is where you want to
> define "knowing"[1]. 

Well, specifically, knowing you've made a particular choice. Clearly it's 
possible to react to things before you consciously know it. I just thought 
this was an interesting experiment in that I can know what your choice is 
far enough before you do that I can thwart your choice (say, by grabbing 
from your hand the button you were about to push).

I think an experiment where the person monitoring tells the person deciding 
what his decision is before he's aware of it could be very interesting. Will 
the person pick a different button? Will the person claim they weren't 
planning to pick either button yet? How late can you tell the person before 
they can no longer help but push the button they were thinking of?

> should we discount them all as unknown until the entire thought gets to
> the conscious level?

I think that knowing something at the gut level is generally colloquially 
considered not knowing it. You can hear people say "I knew something was 
wrong but I didn't know what" if they see an odd situation and (say) cross 
the street to avoid getting attacked. In this case, they really don't know 
*why* they crossed the street - they just know their brain noticed something 
that didn't perk all the way up to the self awareness, but rather manifested 
in the self-awareness as something unusual and fearful, say.

So yeah, I'd say the gut feeling is known, but not the details of why you 
are having that gut feeling. Clearly there is processing that happens in the 
nervous system that isn't reflected directly in the part of the brain 
modeling itself.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
news:4b606472@news.povray.org...
> somebody wrote:

> >> Yeah, but not when it's "pick a random number from 1 to 2."  This isn't
> >> really what most people would call a "decision."

> > Why? That's the least of human faculties.

> Because there's no external information on which you could base your
> analysis.

Yes, if there's no outside information, there's no analysis to speak of
(although I am skeptical about truly achieving the premise, even in a
sensory deprivation tank or somesuch setup). Given no (outside) information,
we are simply talking about a RNG, or rather a PRNG as a state machine whose
final outcome third parties can predict before it is reached. IOW, this
experiment shows that humans have a lousy PRNG, which we already kind of
knew. I fail to see how it relates to free will one way or the other.

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somebody wrote:
> I fail to see how it relates to free will one way or the other.

Well, for one, it certainly puts a crimp in the "free will is our god-given 
ability for moral choices that only humans can do because we have souls" 
sort of definition.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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On 1/27/2010 11:51 PM, Darren New wrote:
> So yeah, I'd say the gut feeling is known, but not the details of why
> you are having that gut feeling. Clearly there is processing that
> happens in the nervous system that isn't reflected directly in the part
> of the brain modeling itself.
>
Some studies seem to imply that even the stuff we "think" we know the 
cause of are post hoc, of course. That, in effect, we don't know the 
details of *any* choice, just our justifications for making them, after 
the fact. Those justification may be completely rational, in that they 
reflect what can be testably shown to reflect actual events in the 
world, or they can be completely irrational, in cases like mental 
illness. For the person experiencing them, hitting someone with a bat, 
because they *see* them attacking them for real is **identical** to the 
mentally unstable person hitting a vending machine with one, because 
they **imagine** that its about to attack them. The mechanism generating 
the excuse is operating fine, more or less, its the underlying processes 
that are **supposed** to identify threats, correctly determine what is 
going on, and filter out pure nonsense, which fail.

Or, to put it another way, we might, in a bit of day dreaming, think, 
"What if vending machines could attack people?" We know this is absurd, 
we know it doesn't happen, and we know its not happening to us 
specifically, but, if all the layers that *know* those things don't 
manage to place proper markers on the thought process, or filter it into 
the, "I am just thinking about this, not experiencing it", category... 
But, we are only aware of *how* a thought arises *because* these filters 
work in the first place, since our awareness is built from the data 
provided by them. If the data is wrong, the experience is wrong.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
news:4b61d7ce$1@news.povray.org...
> somebody wrote:
> > I fail to see how it relates to free will one way or the other.

> Well, for one, it certainly puts a crimp in the "free will is our
god-given
> ability for moral choices that only humans can do because we have souls"
> sort of definition.

I would not consider inconsequential random picks as moral decisions.

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