Never in my wildest imagination would I have thought me saying you and I can snap our fingers is overloaded
When you say it, it is. You add the qualification of non-determinism to the snap. If it turned out that the decision to snap your fingers was entirely deterministic then you would claim you didnât snap your fingers.
Sure, in black and white cases where a scientist is sticking a needle in my brain, I am not snapping my fingers.
Of course weâre not responsible for our actions⌠until someone maliciously keys my car with a long scratch â then they sure are.
If it looked like âmyâ car (if it still works when I move out, it is intended to be), then keying wouldnât be very obvious (âoh, another hole in the paint, we should get around to dealing with it some time this year, along with all the othersâ).
1 Like
I have a thirty-year-old truck like that too â you canât tell where the paint ends and the rust begins.
By the way, I add the qualification of self-determined to the snap when I cause it.
Now it may be when a scientist probes the brain of a person who is unaware of the scientist, a person may be fooled into thinking they snapped their fingers when they didnât.
Yet it is also true that we may be aware of actions our body performs that we did not consciously intend. As can be observed with certain patterns of speech and thought or bodily gestures.
As with an emergent phenomenon, that is in a state of becoming, there can be some real practical concerns with determining whether the phenomenon is or is not.
What we are asking is if the decision to snap your fingers is deterministic or not. We arenât asking if fingers were actually snapped.
You are making the assumption that if someone snapped their fingers it automatically means it was a non-deterministic decision.
We are asking if a person snapped their fingers, whether it was consciously determined.
Or another way to state the question: Is it possible to consciously act?
Then the answer to that is no. It is determined subconsciously as demonstrated by multiple scientific studies.
14 participants, and at best the decision was recorded 1 second prior to the participant registered that they made the decision.
Do you have the full data set?
These experiments have been disputed:
Some people may be more intentional to act when compared to other people. It also requires real determination to come up with a random series numbers of any considerable length. And in the process of choosing the numbers, there is a noticable sense when your attention begins to lapse.
What a poorly written article. The AI behind that piece needs to get an update:
âwere able to predict basic choices participants made 11 seconds before they consciously declared their decisionsâ
Consciously declared??
It also shows that âwater boardingâ was an elaborate cover story
They could make decisions? If they decided, then the actions, mental or otherwise, were not predetermined.
11 seconds is a total false flag. Iâm surprised the scientists are said to predict the decision 11 seconds before the subject made the decision.
The subject was to select an image, register that they made a decision by pressing a button, and then visualize the image for 10 seconds.
Iâd bet $10 there were outlier subjects on this study. 14 participants? Itâs not an expensive or time consuming study.
âScientists animated by the purpose of proving themselves purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.â
âŚChristian beliefs were no longer feasible as a way of explaining the world. The authority of the Bible as an explanatory text was fatally damaged.
Thatâs seriously overstated! Its authority as a scientific explanatory text was fatally damaged.
1 Like
(Iâm not picking up on your reference.)
They were measuring brain activity before the subjects were even asked to make a decision. What the scientists are arguing is that the activity of the brain before being asked to make a decision affects the decision that is made. It is deterministic in that sense.
Do you have any reason to accuse the scientists of cherry picking their data?
Even the article casts doubt on what it means to make a conscious decision.