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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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Why it is important to define the term "free will" before arguing whether we 
> have it:

> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6S9OidmNZM

> For the zinger, start five minutes in. :-) But it's worth watching the whole 
> thing. Creepy.

  It would have been nice if they had actually *demonstrated* that they
could predict the choices, rather than just *claim* they can. It would have
been much more impressive.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   It would have been nice if they had actually *demonstrated* that they
> could predict the choices, rather than just *claim* they can. It would have
> been much more impressive.

True. It looked more like an entertainment/news show than anything 
scientific. I bet if you watched the show, they'd tell you the web site, 
where you could find enough stuff to look up the citation of the paper they 
probably published. Just not on youtube. :-)

-- 
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:
> Warp wrote:
> >   It would have been nice if they had actually *demonstrated* that they
> > could predict the choices, rather than just *claim* they can. It would have
> > been much more impressive.

> True. It looked more like an entertainment/news show than anything 
> scientific.

  Well, it would have been a lot more impressive as entertainment if the
guy monitoring in the other room would have predicted the choices of the
test subject 5 seconds prior to him making him.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   Well, it would have been a lot more impressive as entertainment 

Agreed. I wonder if there was a technical or legal reason they couldn't take 
the cameras there.

And again, it might have just been how whoever posted it on youtube editted it.

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

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