Implications of no free will

[Og]

So people say that the topic of no free will has been beaten to death.  They say that "whether we have it or not, it doesn't matter, we still have to behave like we have free will."  Many philosophers say that this makes the notion of free will vs determinism an uninteresting argument.

I disagree.

The notion of "free will as myth" has to do with what we know about behavioral neurobiology.  Creatures are driven by their neural networks.  The neural networks process sensory inputs and create behaviors.  If you change part of the neural network with drugs or through genetics or other means in an experiment, the behavior of the organism changes.  This is how people study modern neural networks.  They generate behavioral assays for a certain response in an organism and then change something about the neural network and characterize the behavioral changes.  For the human model, this has classically been done by studying accidental brain lesions in their results.  In modern neurobiology, the most studied animals in this field are mice and the fruit fly (drosophila melanogaster).  "Libraries" of genetic mutants of these creatures are created and they are put through all sorts of behavioral tests to detect changes from control animals.

There is one particularly interesting new tool called "channel rhodopsin" that allows scientists to turn off individual neurons temporarily with a pulse of blue light.  This allows for detection of behavioral changes in the same animal with groups of neurons deactivated or activated.  There are many such tools available to neuroscience for understanding behavior in neural networks and how it correlates with brain states and behavior.

What behavioral neuroscience illustrates is that free will is a myth.  It illustrates that creatures are literally products of their environment.  The brain develops based on the genetics of the creature and the chemical nature of its environment as it's gestating.  After it's born into the world, the creature's brain begins to take in sensory inputs and adapt to its surroundings.  All behavioral responses are identical to control systems such as cruise control in a car.  They have "inputs" and "outputs" and the way that the inputs correlate with the outputs defines how the system works.  We, and all neural machines are effectively computers.


I think that the notion of "free will as an illusion" should be the crown jewel of the skeptical/scientific movement.  It has many implications:

1) We are literally eternal.  The flesh in our hands is made up of material that was once at the center of a star and elsewhere in the universe.  What we are as "individuals" are patterns of particles with complex interacting behavior.  We are an "effect" that propagates and is connected to all other processes in the universe.

2) We are are literally selfless.  We are a part of the entire process of the universe.  No matter how big we think our egos are, it's ok.  We are expressions of our environment.  The idea of identity and individuality is a myth.  The reason that soldiers lay down their lives on a grenade to save their friends is because they extend their sense of self to include what they're fighting for instead of just their own flesh.  The reason that a mother protects her child is that she extends her identity of self to include that child.  The firefighter identity extends to his community.  All acts are selfish but with a sense of self that may extend outside your skin.  This realization of modern neuroscience allows us a true understanding of self that includes all beings.

3) It offers definitive PROOF that the god of the western world (yaweh/allah/etc) is false.  We no longer have to be a teapot agnostic on this topic.  The great questions of being are still out there, but the notion of a personal god who JUDGES our behavior as free agents is patently false because we are NOT free agents.  This take's dawkin's chapter 3 "why there is most probably no god" and changes it to "the western god is false.  It is the product of our illusion."

4) This realization of science mimics the role that christ and buddha played in their respective religions.  It shows that things like good and evil and fear and desire have no ultimate meaning.  It shows that self is an illusion.  It returns us to the garden of eden.  The eden metaphor shows us being cast into the field of time by a realization of "good and evil."  This notion of modern neuroscience shows that "good and evil" are as arbitrary as the behavior of our immune systems and have no real ultimate meaning (thus returning us to the garden).  This is the exact role that jesus and buddha played in their respective mythologies.  As we all know, jesus was there to defeat original sin (i.e. the attainment of the knowledge of good and evil).  

5) This offers a true MORALITY of science where we can start with saying "Surviving is the first and only purpose of life."  Why is that?  Because without surviving, there can be no purpose.  After that, following your bliss and creating a stable society should be balanced with one another.  Judgments can be made on crimes in a population as if they were parameters in a feedback control system seeking stability.  Judges no longer need to show righteous indignation at an "evil" offender.  We can now, with the strength of systems engineering at our back, label offenders as destabilizing entities and extract them from the equation.  A gentle balance will obviously have to be met here in order to not create a stagnant society.  We no longer have worry about righteousness causing horrors like the holocaust or the inquisition because we no longer are driven by the notion of good and evil and some illusory being or ideology driving us.

6) Guilt is eradicated.  People say that "free will vs determinism" is a useless debate because we "have to act like we have free will anyway."  But when it comes down to it, people can be wracked by guilt and regret over things in their past.  This can be motivational for the future, but it can also be destructive to the psyche.  The idea of guilt is useless when you realize that it couldn't have happened any other way.  Motivation can now be out of rational thought instead of the forces of fear and desire (i.e. the buddhist solution).

I think that this list goes on and on.  I think that many of the atheist authors we have today equivocate on the notion of God and of science as being "amoral."  I think there are many things that science clearly illustrates about the nature of being that are crucial to the stability of our society (i.e. the only metric of morality).

Free Will as Myth (FWAM) should be on the flag of our fricking nation and the neural basis of behavior should be taught in our most basic science classes.  That human beings are complex adaptive feedback control systems is NOT in question.  That is what modern neuroscience, physics, chemistry, biology, etc all illustrate.

This really is the light that is going to eventually drive our society into the future.  It's what many of the newest major scientific research initiatives are based around.  Howard Hughes Medical Institude, for example, has just opened up a new massive facility with insane resources (Janelia Farm) outside of DC in order to get directly at the neural basis of behavior in a variety of model systems.  As you know, this conference from this forum addressed many of the issues of the neural basis of consciousness.  It's clearly a hot topic today.  The work of modern behavioral neurobiology illustrates that free will and self are illusions and we MUST deal with these realizations.

Instead of going nihilistic trying to mourn our old views of independent agents with identity and ego, I propose that we make this our fricking banner and post it up as the mesiah of our time, 2000 years after christ, and 2500 years after the buddha, but with the same message of exension of the self to all of existence and to living now and following your bliss under the realization that there is no distinction between you and me.  Just because my skin doesn't enfold your neurons doesn't mean we're not the same process.  The sanskrit for this idea is "tat tvam asi" and was highly repeated by Joseph Campbell.  It means "Thou art That."  It was also echo'd in Robert Heinlein's book "Stranger in a Strange Land" which was a fabulous kick in the pants to get secular humanism running ("Thou art God").

It also gives us a new perspective on what life is.  For example, galaxies are alive in the same way we are alive.  They are a complex behaving network of gravity connected entities that, for example, change conformation when a massive entity passes by.  This is analogous to photons hitting our eye and causing physiological changes in our brain.

The idea of an individual entity "God" is silly too since the idea of an individual entity is a notion in our minds and with no real application to anything in the universe.  If there is some directing process in the universe, its part of the UNIVERSE (the one verse, the one statement) as well.  It's part of the process that we're part of.  We are the same thing as it.

life is the processing of information.  It enters the system, is modified, modifies the system, and then behavior is caused.  This realization of free will as myth connects us to all matter in the universe.  It identifies us with everything that exists and paints good/evil, death/birth, fear/desire, left/right choice, and all sorts of other pairs of opposites as illusions.

This notion is very powerful.  To me, it's FAR from uninteresting as some philosophers and scientists would put it.

It yields eternal life, freedom from suffering, siezing of the day, loving thy neighbor/enemy as theyself, etc.  It gives us everything that modern religions seek in the western world but its antithetical to the central notion in the west that each of us is an eternal soul (ego) that is inserted into this world and extracted out at death.  So we've got a long way to go, but it's demonstrable and repeatable.

[Og]

This is real.
This is the antithesis to western religion.

Identification with the divine instead of separation from it.
A moral code based on a clear obvious imperative (survival) and adaptive parameters for stability which we can alter (laws).
Freedom from guilt.

At the same time it provides many of the things that people seek in religion.

Eternal life
Freedom from suffering (i'm with buddha where suffering = fear/desire).
connection to something larger

All of this wonderful stuff comes with the realizations of modern science and its generally put forward as some amoral enterprise.  We need to turn schools into cathedrals and scientific/engineering research institutions into the places that produce our finest statesment.  Our president should be a scientists from the former bell labs.  Our leaders should be intelligent individuals who have a demonstrated capacity for understanding sociology and engineering and mathematics... Not individuals who represent the fickle feelings of the populous.

We should spend equally on national defense and on education (wow, that'd be the day).  Without both of these, we can go nowhere.  Defense and education.  But our current policies as a nation don't reflect this.

But the realizations of cosmology and neuroscience (and all sciences) illustrate that the notion of egocentric control is a delusion.

[Jeff Corkern]

You're "eternal"?

Og, you're going to die someday.

When that happens, your personality, YOU, is going to disappear like a light bulb going out. You will stop thinking and feeling, stop all perception of the Universe. You'll be G-O-O-O-O-N-E, baby!

True, or False?

If your answer is "True", you ain't eternal in any sense whatsoever.

[snooziums]

We need to believe that we have free will, or else our legal system goes out the door.

Free will is why we can convict criminals of the crimes they committed, stating that they CHOOSE to commit them.

Otherwise, every criminal can claim that their neuro-network was "mis-programmed" by their environment or genetics.  Thus, we will have no bases to punish them.

[ruprecht]

I need to believe that I have free will, or else  my avoidance of  beets goes out the door.

[Og]

You're "eternal"?

Og, you're going to die someday.

When that happens, your personality, YOU, is going to disappear like a light bulb going out. You will stop thinking and feeling, stop all perception of the Universe. You'll be G-O-O-O-O-N-E, baby!

True, or False?

If your answer is "True", you ain't eternal in any sense whatsoever.

Yes, me is a complex confluence of events.  My sense of self extends to all things.  I look at the material in my hands and think that at one time it was inside the furnace of a star.

As i move through life, I disturb air molecules.  As I interact with people, I alter brain chemistries.  As I excrete waste, I modify bacterial cultures and such.  As I teach students, I change the shape of their brain.

Just because my skin doesn't enfold the neurons of other people doesn't mean that we're some separate process.  That's the point of free will as myth.  "You" is an illusion.  You are a confluence of events.  Alan Watts said: "As the ocean waves, the universe peoples."

When this body dies and dissociates, sensory processes will stop integrating information and comparing it to other information stored in memory pathways.  The system will no longer respond in complex manners to physiological stimuli.  Yes.

But "I" am an effect.  A confluence that effects a variety of similar confluences in a complex interconnected manner.  My effect will still propagate.  It will just be in a different form.

The analogy is deleting a file on a computer.  You don't actually destroy anything.  You just re-arrange the charges and fields on a hard disk.  The concept of deleting a file is based on illusory objects in your mind.

Point is that "You" and "Self" are inextricably linked to the notion of Free Will.  Without the latter, the former don't exist either.  That's what the garden of eden myth illustrates.  We attain the idea of pairs of opposites (good/evil, fear/desire, birth/death) and are cast into the field of time.  The rise of consciousness which is an awareness of the illusion of free will.

What the buddha showed with his enlightenment and what christ showed with his crussifiction is that it's all an illusion.  That's what "free will as myth" shows in a way that is clear for everyone to see, reproducible at any time, and requires only minor work to understand.

Yes, the illusory self that is me will die because self, will, death, fear are all part of the illusion.  But what I am truly a part of is eternal.  This is not some new age crap.  This is a direct consequence of our modern understanding of behavioral neurobiology in the life sciences and information processing systems in engineering.

[Major Malfunction]

If you don't have kids or do something memorable before you die, your effect will be even shorter lived than you.

And there's a lot of competition who can make the biggest wave, out there...

[Og]

False.  You are part of the one process that is the universe.  What you are, regardless of what happens, is a component of the same process that spins galaxies in the cosmos and explodes stars and produces hitler and ghandi.  Your effect is a part of the confluence of effects that is the UNIVERSE (one statement, uni-verse)

You can't escape that it is one process when there's the realization that free will is myth.

"competition" is a null word.  It describes a complex process.  But the notion of will makes the idea of free competing agents a fallacy as well.  The notion of decision making becomes illusion too.  Behaviors occur in response to stimuli.

This also gets rid of the notion of inadequacies along with guilt.  Every individual is an element of the process.

Free will as myth takes the motivating forces of fear, desire, feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and all sorts of stuff in the same boat and replaces them with wonder, reason, and curiosity.

[Jeff Corkern]

Og, sorry, I don't see it.

If you delete a file on a hard disk, sure, you're just re-arranging magnetic field.

But the INFORMATION is gone. Something truly HAS been deleted.

This is all a bit too mystical for me, alas. Read my sig. "the hardest of hard-case rationalists", right? If you're going to prove free will is a myth to me---you're gonna have to do it in a laboratory.

[snooziums]

However, your memories and experiences are unique to you and you alone.  That is what defines you, and what makes a person special.

If the memories are gone, then the individual is gone.  That is just the way it is (unless there is some kind of afterlife).

So yes, the person is truly gone when they die.

[ruprecht]

maybe  not, Snooziums.

One person with amnesia is reported to be just the same nice guy even though he lost his prior memories. His Mom says he is the same, and his fiancee married him afterward, and both say he is the same nice guy, he just can't remember back before the event.

We all have some loss of recall of some memories, and yet that does not make us lesser persons.

Q/ are people with eidetic memory  MORE person-ish than others ?? Don't think so    

[snooziums]

One person with amnesia is reported to be just the same nice guy even though he lost his prior memories.

Really.  Amnesia with little or no personality change?  Is this the case in most instances of amnesia?

If so, it would suggest that the personality might be partly something outside of the neruo-network of the brain.

Hmm...

[ruprecht]

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articl ... d=15604191

In the real world, most profound amnesic syndromes have a clear neurological or psychiatric basis. True dissociative amnesia or fugue states are rare, but people with such conditions are able to learn new information and perform everyday tasks in the context of a profound retrograde amnesia triggered by a traumatic event. The most commonly agreed features of organic amnesic syndromes include normal intelligence and attention span, with severe and permanent difficulties in taking in new information. Personality and identity are unaffected. These distinctions, which in a medical setting are critical in terms of prognosis and treatment, are often blurred at the movies.

[snooziums]

From your same source:

Amnesia not only frequently results in a loss of identity in the movies, it also commonly causes a complete personality change. This can just mean a character becomes more extroverted or introverted, but usually it involves a complete shift in values and behaviour.

So personality change is typical.  That would suggest that the neuro-networks that were affected by the memory loss are also responsible for the personality.

Suggests that the brain's neruo-connections are actually responsible for quite a bit of the individual's personality.  That is, if amnesia is a condition of the neuro-network.

[ruprecht]

only in the movies, snooz

Amnesia not only frequently results in a loss of identity in the movies, it also commonly causes a complete personality change.

[Og]

Og, sorry, I don't see it.

If you delete a file on a hard disk, sure, you're just re-arranging magnetic field.

But the INFORMATION is gone. Something truly HAS been deleted.

This is all a bit too mystical for me, alas. Read my sig. "the hardest of hard-case rationalists", right? If you're going to prove free will is a myth to me---you're gonna have to do it in a laboratory.

Information is something real?  Information only has meaning if a target and a source have colluded.  Information as you're describing it here is not a real entity with meaning outside humans interacting (i.e. no cosmic significance).  There is a generic definition of information that has to do with things like entropy and how random a signal is.  But that's not what you're talking about.  Changing the orientation of fields on a hard disk physically removes nothing.  Information is not gone, patterns are just changed.

As for illustrating it in a laboratory, I was trying to give some illustrations of how it is illustrated in laboratories.  How behavior is based on neural states.

[Og]

I should add that there's not going to be some one experiment that illustrates the fact that free will is a myth until we can either monitor every process in the brain simultaneously or create a copy of the brain with consciousness (simulation or whatever).

But our understanding of sensory and behavioral neurobiology, perception, the structure of the brain, and a variety of other things makes it clear that brain states produce behavior (of course) and that the notion of an independent will is false.

Life is not something separate from matter.  Life is a thing that filters signals from the world around it, processes it, and responds to it.  Signal Transduction is the term generally used in cell biology to talk about this process.  In engineering it's called systems analysis.  In both cases, outputs correlate with inputs and there's no will involved.

Free will is a myth.  This is not theory, this is fact.  Life forms such as us are driven by complex machinery that responds to its environment.  We are products of our environment, not the other way around.

[Jeff Corkern]

If so, it would suggest that the personality might be partly something outside of the neruo-network of the brain.
Hmm...

snooziums, I greet a fellow radical. (waving) I also believe souls exists. Based on a personal experience of mine, plus an examination of human behavior.

If souls exist----it should be possible to deduce it by applying the scientific method. By using the same coldly logical process that was used to deduce the laws of motion and all the other fundamental laws.

By observing human behavior. The laws of motion were deduced by observing particles in motion, coming up with a theory, then testing that theory in the lab.

I have done one part of that. In the essay section, under the heading "CALLING ALL GENIUS PHYSICISTS I", I have an essay titled "ON THE SENTIENT CONSTRAINTS OF A SENTIENT-CONTAINING UNIVERSE".

This essay addresses the most basic question about souls.

If souls exist---WHY? Why in the world would something like a soul exist? Only if it served some VERY fundamental purpose.

This essay lays that purpose out.

But you make up your own mind. It is an exercise in logic and reason, and as such, you get to use your own ability to use logic and reason to judge whether it is correct---or not.

I guarantee you an interesting read.

As an aside, there's the weirdest thing about souls.

NOBODY'S DONE ANY EXPERIMENTS! NOBODY! IT'S INSANE!

You'd think if either side wanted to really, finally, truly prove souls exist---they'd observe death in the laboratory. Pro or con, you'd think that's what they'd do.

But they haven't. Oh, there have been a few efforts here and there, but nothing that was really credible.

At least, not until lately. There are a few quiet credible efforts going on out there now, but they're pretty low-key.

[snooziums]

Information is something real?

Information is what builds civilizations.  Information is what education is for.  Information is what sets us apart from the rest of the primitive animal kingdom.  Experience is information.

Without information, we are nothing, except for useless animals.  Every aspect of civilization can exist thanks to information.

[snooziums]

Free will is a myth.  This is not theory, this is fact.  Life forms such as us are driven by complex machinery that responds to its environment.  We are products of our environment, not the other way around.

So, basically, if we do something wrong, it is the the fault of our environment/society.  If we have no free will, we CANNOT take responsibility for anything.  Personal responsibility is based on the concept of free will, and cannot exist without it.  Period.

So, instead of punishing the criminals or anyone else if they do something wrong, we should be redesigning the environment/society they are in.  Using the no-free-will-exists argument, we should not have prisons of any other method of punishment.

[snooziums]

...We are products of our environment, not the other way around.

Then that means that we should have every right to change our environment to fit us.

Nature [the "natural" world] is clearly our enemy under this argument, and should be dealt with harshly.

[snooziums]

Free will is a myth.  This is not theory, this is fact.

This is an interesting statement.  Scientists will state that most things are Theories, but not as "fact."  Linear time was once thought of as scientific "fact," yet we know it is not.  It was once "fact" that there were nine planets in our solar system, but not now.

What would happen of such theories as "string theory" and "the ghost in the machine" were regarded as fact and not theories?  Would they be questioned?  No.  Facts CANNOT be questioned.  If they could, they would be theories, not facts.

Personally, I do not think it is safe to call anything "fact."  We have theories, yes.  Saying something is "fact" is an act of faith.

So calling free will as being a myth as a fact, is an act of faith.

[Major Malfunction]

Allow the Circle into your heart and you will be saved. FACT!

In fact, Snoozy, there are facts. Undeniable, unchangeable, facts. As illustrated above, Pi is one of them, gravity is another, and so is Life.

We don't really understand facts, but we can describe them.

[A-number]

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[A-number]

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[Major Malfunction]

I made this post because I had no choice.

[Og]

...We are products of our environment, not the other way around.

Then that means that we should have every right to change our environment to fit us.

Nature [the "natural" world] is clearly our enemy under this argument, and should be dealt with harshly.

There is no we.  If we change our environment then that was an expression of the environment.

You're still stuck in the ego-centric perception of what it means to be a neural organism.

Free will is a myth. This is not theory, this is fact.

were regarded as fact and not theories? Would they be questioned? No. Facts CANNOT be questioned. If they could, they would be theories, not facts.

When I say that "free will as myth" is fact, I mean to correct an illusion.  I do not mean to make the assumption that we have free will and then any change to that is a theory.

In the same way that Carl Sagan says "Evolution is Fact," I say "Free will as Myth is Fact."  The term theory is widely misunderstood.  We are neural machines.  This is established.  All organisms with neural networks are complex machines that respond to their environment.

So, basically, if we do something wrong, it is the the fault of our environment/society. If we have no free will, we CANNOT take responsibility for anything. Personal responsibility is based on the concept of free will, and cannot exist without it. Period.

So, instead of punishing the criminals or anyone else if they do something wrong, we should be redesigning the environment/society they are in. Using the no-free-will-exists argument, we should not have prisons of any other method of punishment.

This is one option.  But as I said in my original post, we can extract individuals who act criminally based on a rational desire to create a stable population.  Changing the environment versus changing the individual is moot.  Both are expressions of the same thing.  Extracting the "individual" removes an agent of instability in the system.

Fault is a null word.  Think of it as clipping your nails when you incarcerate a criminal.  Or taking a multi-vitamin pill.

[Og]

I made this post because I had no choice.

Nah.. I has a choice.  But "I" and "Choice" are both illusions.  You ever sit and watch Conway's Game of Life carry out some complex pattern?  This post is analogous to a glider shooting out of a complex swirl and traveling across the screen.  Just rearranging patterns.

[Og]

decision and choice are null words.  They describe the appearance of a complex process from our unaided (by the tools of science) perspective.

[Jeff Corkern]

Don't count on theists to get this kind of testing and demonstrating done. Their typical retort for this inquiry would be "well, God says the soul exist." That's their demo.

Yeah, guy named Gerard Nahum tried to get funding from the Catholic Church for detecting souls and that was their basic response. Their loss, I think.

I think it will be up to the scientific community to prove that or disprove it and it is a tough job because one cannot really expect one who does not believe something exists to begin with to start an investigation to work to either prove or disprove it.

I agree 100%. In the end, the scientists have to be the ones that do it, detect souls----except that most scientists don't think the soul exists.

This is a problem.

In fact it is the purpose of The Nine Point Five Theses ( I have a collection of theses I have dubbed The Nine Point Five Theses, of which "ON THE SENTIENT CONSTRAINTS OF A SENTIENT-CONTAINING UNIVERSE" is one) to convince scientists that there is a real possibility the soul exists by showing a completely consistent theory of souls is possible.

My purpose is not really to convince anybody souls exist----it is to convince them that trying to detect souls in the lab is a reasonable experiment to do.

[Og]

Experience and consciousness is based on sensory systems filtering certain information out of the world and processing it (converting it) into actions.

The idea of a soul is false.  Behavior is described by behavioral neurobiology.  Your arm muscle is innervated by a motor neuron.  That neuron is innervated by an afferent interneuron.  That neuron is inervated by more interneurons.  No neuron along that path back into the brain has "choice" or a soul.  The idea of the distinction of objects such as you and me has to do with our brains.

The real truth of it is that what we are, as organisms, is an expression of our environment.  "We" are part of that environment.  Us neurobiologist can, and do, turn off individual neurons in complex organisms and characterize the behavioral change.

Neuron states = behavioral states = conscious states.  This is clearly illustrated by modern neurobiology and electrical engineering.  Neurobioloy allows us to characterize and see individual cells and electrical engineering gives us constructs of information processing systems and input/output system stability (that we apply to construct things like computers).  Neuro illustrates the components and EE gives us constructs to describe how they behave.

We are a highly complex adaptive feedback control system.  Soul is a null word.  Our outputs correlate with our inputs.

[Og]

Thanks for the questions.

since will and choice are illusions, and they describe how we behave, would it be safe, based on what you said, to conclude that behavior is also illusiory?

By illusion I mean "something other than it seems."  Free Will implies that there is an "I" that is an end in themselves.  A source of unique effects that are not caused.  This is not the case with behavior.. Behavior is a description of the system's outputs.  It is not a confusing term.

you constantly referring to what Sagan and Campbell said clearly demonstrates that these 2  men do have the ability to affect the environment since you are a part of it and their work has an impact on the way you see and interpret things.

Yes, But these people were products of their environment as well.  They are part of my environment.  They're not the only things that influence me.  On may 26th, I'll receive my PhD in Biophysics from Cornell with my minor in Neurobiology and Behavior.  I have had a detailed environment that has constructed my current commentary.  I have undergraduate degrees in physics and electrical engineering.  It's quite an environment that I'm an expression of and it's neat to be in this position, but it's nothing that anyone is responsible for... It just is.

There is neither free will or choice.  There is only the illusion of each.  They do not have ultimate meaning.  When I suggest making choices in actions I am referring to the illusion.  Because that's the only way we can communicate.

I dis-agree with that but assuming that free will and choice are illusions as we understand them, how would they be if they were actually to be real and authentic?

This is the thing.  You can't really answer this if you dig down deep.  The reality is that people anthropomorphize humans (ironically) the same way you would say a hurricane "choose" to turn west and hit a town or something.  When you look at how people actually are, you see reason and brain states.  It's just that we've been programmed in the western world with the relatively new idea of a soul that is not part of all this.  The soul is the anthropomorphization that is based on perceiving a complex system.

computers have the ability to interact with each other based soly on how they were programmed and for what purpose. Does this means we are also programmed/"manufactured by somebody for a specific function  or the similarity happens to be a rondom one?...I mean based on what you believe?

As I've been trying to say, there is no we or somebody.  We are part of the whole process of the universe.  A bunch of systems all interacting (this is the illusion).  What it is is one gigantic system.  The hindus have a term for this and it's what my avatar expresses.  It's called the jeweled net of indra..

When it boils down to it, your cells interact with one another by gap junctions and chemical signal transduction at the cell membrane.  Your neurons interact by propagating signals along their lengths.  Your organs interact via the common blood stream and proximity in the body. The human organisms interact by pressure waves (air) and other sensory inputs including touch, smell, vision, etc..

Communities and countries interact in the same way that cells interact and galaxies interact the same way that cells interact.  You can take this down to the protein and atom level too or to organelles in cells (nucleus and endoplasmic reticulum).  All physics and engineering and life science is the study of signal transduction between systems at varrying levels.  Why is one level of distinction more relevant than another?  The only reason I can think of is that its because we're having this discussion at a certain level (i.e. individual organism).  I can't think of any other reason to make a distinction between you and me though.

The distinction between two skin cells is arbitrary.  We've given it a definition, but they don't act separately.  One effects the other and vice versa.  The boundary is a layer called a membrane that is 2 lipids thick.  Do we have reason for making the distinction?  Sure.  Does it have any ultimate meaning? No.

Just because your skin doesn't enfold my neurons doesn't mean we're a separate process.

I partially agree  with that, knowing that each individual is a separate "unit" on one hand and the self is applicable at a least to the physical part of the human being if not all other aspects, but on the other, like you said each of us exists as a part of a whole considering the fact that each is a part of the many ensembles known as the human race, the earthly environemnt, the universe, and depending on what are our professional, social, intelectual, athletic etc. attributes we do also exist as A part of corresponding communities that those attributes link one to.

[snooziums]

There is no we.  If we change our environment then that was an expression of the environment. You're still stuck in the ego-centric perception of what it means to be a neural organism.

So why the heck do we still have environmentalism?  Why all of this concern about the environment?

I once said that when we build a dam across a river, it was "natural," the same as beavers do, just on a much larger scale.  And I was laughed at.  So how is what you are saying so and my statement about the dam building false?

When I say that "free will as myth" is fact, I mean to correct an illusion.  I do not mean to make the assumption that we have free will and then any change to that is a theory.

Ahh, then it should be that the definition of "free will" is not well defined, but not that it is absolutely false.  That is different.

In the same way that Carl Sagan says "Evolution is Fact," I say "Free will as Myth is Fact."

However, evolution might be true (I think it is), but it needs some refining.  There are many theories as to the exact workings of evolution.

This is one option.  But as I said in my original post, we can extract individuals who act criminally based on a rational desire to create a stable population.

But why extract them when it was "out of their hands" to begin with.  They were a victim of their biology and environment, so why punish them for that?

Fault is a null word.  Think of it as clipping your nails when you incarcerate a criminal.  Or taking a multi-vitamin pill.

However, my nails cannot exist on their own.  They are not a separate life entity.  They have no thoughts, no emotions, no memory.

[snooziums]

The idea of a soul is false.  Behavior is described by behavioral neurobiology.  Your arm muscle is innervated by a motor neuron.  That neuron is innervated by an afferent interneuron.  That neuron is inervated by more interneurons.  No neuron along that path back into the brain has "choice" or a soul.  The idea of the distinction of objects such as you and me has to do with our brains.

True, but that dies not take out totally the concept of the "soul," just defines what it is not.  We still do not totally know how behavior works, we have ideas, but to not know it totally.  And we do not know what every neuron in the brain does.

The current concept of what a "soul" is responsible for is invalid, but not perhaps it itself.

The real truth of it is that what we are, as organisms, is an expression of our environment.  "We" are part of that environment.

So please tell that to all of the environmental protesters that are trying to undo so many industrial accomplishments.

Us neurobiologist can, and do, turn off individual neurons in complex organisms and characterize the behavioral change.

Really?  So you can change criminal behavior like that?  Then why not just "reprogram" criminals instead of locking them up?

[snooziums]

I guess what when ever anyone says "it is a fact," that I automatically question it.  I guess that is part of being a skeptic.  I tend to question everything whenever I hear it.

Interesting how the idea of "free will as a myth" as stated and the concept of predestination is so closely related.  I have been reading works by Calvin and later Calvinist leaders, and they seem to suggest the same idea, that ultimately, we do not have a choice, and that we are creatures of our environment.  Just that they believed that the "environment" was God-created.

But, the ideas expressed seem the close together.

[Major Malfunction]

I made this post because I had no choice.

Nah.. I has a choice.  But "I" and "Choice" are both illusions.

I disagrees. I says you is an illusion.

[snooziums]

By illusion I mean "something other than it seems."  Free Will implies that there is an "I" that is an end in themselves.  A source of unique effects that are not caused.  This is not the case with behavior.. Behavior is a description of the system's outputs.  It is not a confusing term.

That is a common definition of "I," yes.  But it is not the exclusive definition.  Just by saying "I" could be implying that I physically exist, which is so (at least to current knowledge).  We know that buildings exist, so referring to it as an existence is not false.  The term "I" could be just referring to one's own existence, which is also valid.

I think that the definition of "I" needs to be clearer before proceeding with saying that it exists or not.  I see it as just existing as a unit, like a building does.

[Og]

I haven't said that "I" doesn't exist Snooziums.  I've said that it's an illusion.  It appears to be something it's not (i.e. an end in itself... An effect with no cause).  Or at least that's the way the western world views it (the soul).  They view it as something put into this world and taken out.

[Major Malfunction]

I was put into this world with no choice. I will be taken out of this world with no choice. But I chooses what I does in the meantime.

[A-number]

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