Comments by "Kristopher Driver" (@paxdriver) on "Mind Over Masters: The Question of Free Will" video.

  1. Adam Sujkowski we could create it, yes, but computers could never instantiate themselves naturally because of irreducible complexity of logic gate structures, power modulation/generation/distribution and function. there's no impetus for an organic chip to grow and evolve because it is in and of itself self-sustaining and therefore not needing growth or development. a hallmark to life is that it adapts and is constantly improving on itself. computers would never have that proclivity so they could never organically gain consciousness on their own. very different forms of life even if we give computers life, it would be off a branch of the homosapien tree, not a tree of their own.
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  2. Fantastic moderator
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  3. Louise Vanderbilt not sure but I hope to see more of her on WSF. Credit where it's due :)
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  4. If you believe you're conscious, free will necessarily exists or is unknown; it can't not be if you're conscious. Conscious is the free will of the mind, the purest free will that we're able to be conscious of. Any freer and will would be unchanged, so our mind epitomize freedom, and thus free will exists by virtue of it being contemplated.
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  5. All you guys are arguing is whether or not you believe you're truly conscious. If you're conscious and contemplate free will, even if it's a natural chemical mechanism, it exists in your mind's creation of it. Presumably a rock doesn't create it's sense of self and ergo does not have free will. The limits to our freedom are natural physical laws of nature, but free will is required to consider it is even possibly true. Animals, even conscious ones, are functioning on instinct. Humans will contemplate their own existence as an optional choice made available to them through biology.  In other words, free will is limited by our brains but it exists inherently by our creation of it via contemplation. If we weren't free to at least minute degree, we would be incapable and unable to fathom the concept to begin with.
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  6. ***** lol i hear you. i mean, there's always an existential defense for consciousness since life begets life, but it's by no means the most logical approach to the subject, it's just stretching open a pinhole. Occam's Razor suggests our line of reasoning to be the lasting and most reasonable one.
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  7. Adam Sujkowski first off, acting conscious and being conscious are different things. that's what the word simulation means. secondly, conscious life can create conscious life, so babies would be a better example of creating consciousness. although free will is limited because of epigenetics, the intrinsic quality of freedom itself is only perceptible by a free-thinking source, to whatever degree that source is free it needs to be for the concept to arise. that's why animals and rocks aren't free, they can't fathom the concept. 
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  8. Adam Sujkowski logic and reasoning are the basis of science. the scientific argument is that by being able to discuss the matter a degree of freedom is necessarily present.
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  9. Adam Sujkowski such is the nature of all matter and all sciences. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in particle physics suggests the same for anything with energy/mass. That's why I mentioned Occam's Razor, the logical conclusion with the least assumptions is the most likely to be accurate.
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  10. Adam Sujkowski that's just asking how consciousness works. if you believe you're conscious you have to believe you have a measure of free because one precludes the other. logic and reason are considered scientific evidence, the only thing lacking is experiment but a test can't really be done on existential matters any more than it can be done on quantum mechanical scales. your question is akin to asking for evidence of the mechanism of energy. it's unknown but by rational deduction and logic we can say with utmost certainty that energy is real for all intents and purposes. same goes for free will, some has to exist for us to have the concept of it just like energy has to exist for matter to exist, and consciousness must exist for consciousness to be questioned.
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  11. Adam Sujkowski the thing that makes us better IS the special and magical thing we're talking about. our difference in opinion is just the significance and abstraction
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  12. Adam Sujkowski we still can't create life by rubbing amino acids together though, that's the special part. the fact that our brains process AND are alive is what's fascinating to me :)
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  13. Adam Sujkowski computers can't spontaneously come into existence, they require intervention. some people think life needed intervention to, but either way there is a distinct difference between life and computation. secondly, computation is based on algorithms moreso than natural law
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