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| http://www.philosophers.co.uk/games/games.htm
"Battleground God" and "Morality Play" are the two "games" I played. kind of amusing (apparently, I am neither morally parsimonious nor very consistent about my beliefs...)
you may or may not have read about the guy who was able to record a population of neurons from a monkey's brain and use that information to control a robotic arm...he's a very cool guy, this is general article written by the man himself about the history of that result, pretty interesting (appeared in Scientific American)...sharing it for your interest
http://www.nicolelislab.net/NLNet/Load/Papers/SciAm_%200802.pdf | | |
| fuck, it took my 5 minutes to figure out how to freakin post on this thing...this is the day after i already figured out how to post. sad.
okay, my next question (for ginfiend+friends)...what's your feeling on the issue of free will? i'm of two minds on this. on the one hand, i believe that a hell of a lot goes on in our brain which we are not aware of...i mean, when you think about neuroscientists looking for the "neural correlates of consciousness", they are having a hell of a time since most of the neural activity they find does NOT correlate with conscious awareness. Thus, it seems extremely likely to me that whenever we consciously "make a decision", there were a hell of a lot of non-conscious neural activity that triggers whatever decision we make and also have us believe that we really made it. Thus, no free will (the Matrix is totally wrong...there is no choice)
On the other hand, I tend to be of the opinion that while "conscious awareness" is a phenomena that is somehow caused by neural activity, conscious awareness can actually control your neural processes as well (in other words, it is not unidirectional, but bidirectional. rather than saying that mental states are solely a representation of your underlying neural activity, i would think of mental states as some product of neural activity which can also modulate neural activity)...thus, if mental states have some degree of control over what i do and don't do, then there is some degree of free will (the main problem with this form of thinking, however, is that it seems to force you into a somewhat of a dualistic view of the mind/brain problem, that the mind and the brain are not identical, and a dualistic view in general is a rather laughable proposition)...hence the dilemma...
i will also include an interesting article i read just now on free will.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/09/03/norway.whale/ | | |
| I'm gonna start posting random thoughts here, in the rare case that someone actually stumbles upon it and has any insights.
My current question/comment:
assume a universe where no living thing has ever lived or will live...there are stars, galaxies,etc., all the laws of physics still hold, but the conditions are such that that spark of life will just never happen...further, this universe exists in such a realm that it does not interact/affect our universe in any way.
Does such a universe actually exist in any sense of the word?
My opinion is the following: Nothing can be defined in a world that no one will ever perceive or be affected by. So, if this universe is said to be somewhere, but doesn't interact with us in any way, never will, and no living presence is there to witness it being there, it doesn't exist.
Why do I bring this up? I think it at least begins to question what "objective reality", or a "reality out there, apart from our minds" means. i think i would even go so far as to say that "reality" is defined by/depends on some kind of conscious perception/sensation of it...so, while i don't go so far as to say that there is no absolute reality, i do believe that there is no such thing as a reality independent of ANY conscious experience/effect.
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