[FRIAM] Hard problem vs. free swill

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

I am about to logon to vFRIAM so I will just say that the answer would be
something lie:

"Everything that is ... is experience.  To the extent that experience is OF
anything, it is OF other experiences.  Experiences can be "of" other
experiences in two ways, in sequence, and "meta".  If I experience another
experience as a dream, that is a meta experience.  Evolutionarily speaking,
detecting agency is useful.  It's useful, for instance, to detect whether an
object is bright because it has a birght color or bright because it has a
bright light on it. A lot of the circuitry in the retina is devoted to
figuring that sort of thing out.  Similarly, when, say, I find some
experience annoying, it's useful to figure out whether that annoying feature
of the experience is arising from me -- fatigue, etc. -- r for particular
feature of the experience.  Experiences  that are tagge as arising from the
self are forms of meta-experiences.  Yeh.  Something like that.  Yikes!  I
am late!

N

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, July 3, 2020 9:42 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Hard problem vs. free swill

Jon,

Not sure how Nick would respond, but it seems that your question assumes
that evolution has some sort of "discrimination" that would allow it to
choose between two or more different adaptational-complexes that have the
same or closely comparable outcomes. We have consciousness and a sense of
agency because it just happened that way, not because something decided it
was necessary.

davew


On Fri, Jul 3, 2020, at 8:25 AM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> Nick,
> 
> Granted determinism, how might an evolutionary theorist or ethologist 
> approach the question of why we have the illusion of free will at all? 
> It seems to me that evolutionary theory can describe a deterministic 
> history just fine, but then I am unsure why we would ever need to 
> develop a sense of consciousness or a sense of agency. Couldn't nature 
> find a way to have us do the same without the added expense of reflected
experience?
> 
> 
> 
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