catalog

Well-known member
Yeah but it's also very specific and low probability, is what I mean. You might as well worry about getting knocked over when you cross the street.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Or one of those little fish swimming up the hole in your dick

Guess that's localized to a certain part of the world

Still, with climate change.. never know
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I tend to think our conscious, decision-making process, is an embodiment of stochastic evolution, ever higher-order executions of endocrinological cascades and motor movements that somewhat blindly end up proving to entail longevity, as far as the perseverance of nucleic acids is concerned.

That is, I think our will is a stochastically evolved function of negentropy, but whether or both not it should be described as free, probabilistic, or deterministic is largely a matter of semantics, and beyond that a matter of knowing some greater portion of the veritably infinite unknown. Even so, probabilisticism and determinism may not even be incompossible, to my knowledge.
 
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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I suspect any mechanistic understanding of consciousness will frame the phenomenon as a palimpsest of sensory phenomena and “lessons” abstracted therefrom, IE connectomic circuits, informed by sensory input, that entail the execution of certain biochemical functions, which then exert influence, statistically, on the likelihood of reproduction.

Beyond reproduction, I think other human motivations are, as far as negentropy is concerned, spandrels. That said, as far as we are concerned, our interests needn’t be reduced down to ensuring reproduction, as there are ostensibly much more oblique and nebulous motivations at play - motivations which perhaps quintessentially defy analytic reduction.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
But to answer the question in it’s common sense: no, I don’t believe the decisions we make are causally independent from the prior physical states of universe.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Here and then a blistering moment of cognizance may be apprehended, as if strapped into an ancient, predetermined orchestration of fiery phenomena, iterating across a vast breadth of spatial and temporal scales.
 

version

Well-known member
One thing which worries me from time to time is the prospect of sustaining a head injury or developing a tumor which drastically changes your behaviour or personality.

That Sapolsky bloke Stan likes mentions a case like that in one of his lectures, some guy murdering someone or having an affair or something and turning out to have had a tumor putting pressure on his brain and causing behavioural changes.

Death+to+videodrome+long+live+the+new+flesh.jpg
 
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