[SeaGypsy]

I think about that & for me it boils down to firstly knowing who it is asking the question (self awareness) then what it is the self strives for (will) & the real possibility that the self can change, control the will (freedom). Such researchers have a running start in the first instance, self awareness at any meaningful level being abysmally rare. If their argument was worth 2 cents they would need to be able to predict the thoughts & actions of people with acute self awareness. They don't because they can't. Their theory is an extension of entropy, whereby life shouldn't even exist, 2 universal absolutes contradicting each other absolutely. In layman's terms the exchange involves a silly question & perhaps a punch in the mouth.

[Newfie]

Damn Sea gypsy, I don't have a clue what you meant!

Could you try that again, simplified for my idiot brain.

Or simply, do you think we have free will?

[Newfie]

Here is a Wiki on the topic, haven't read it myself yet.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurosci ... _free_will


And a snip it..

It is quite likely that a large range of cognitive operations are necessary to freely press a button. Research at least suggests that our conscious self does not initiate all behavior. Instead, the conscious self is somehow alerted to a given behavior that the rest of the brain and body are already planning and performing. These findings do not forbid conscious experience from playing some moderating role, although it is also possible that some form of unconscious process is what is causing modification in our behavioral response. Unconscious processes may play a larger role in behavior than previously thought.

It may be possible, then, that our intuitions about the role of our conscious "intentions" have led us astray; it may be the case that we have confused correlation with causation by believing that conscious awareness necessarily causes the body's movement. This possibility is bolstered by findings in neurostimulation, brain damage, but also research into introspection illusions. Such illusions show that humans do not have full access to various internal processes. The discovery that humans possess a determined will would have implications for moral responsibility. Neuroscientist and author Sam Harris believes that we are mistaken in believing the intuitive idea that intention initiates actions. In fact, Harris is even critical of the idea that free will is "intuitive": he says careful introspection can cast doubt on free will. Harris argues "Thoughts simply arise in the brain. What else could they do? The truth about us is even stranger than we may suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion".[15] Philosopher Walter Jackson Freeman III nevertheless talks about the power of even unconscious systems and actions to change the world according to our intentions. He writes "our intentional actions continually flow into the world, changing the world and the relations of our bodies to it. This dynamic system is the self in each of us, it is the agency in charge, not our awareness, which is constantly trying to keep up with what we do."[16] To Freeman, the power of intention and action can be independent of awareness.

[SeaGypsy]

One can just as easily say the illusion of free will being an illusion is an illusion. Just semantics, healthy because they encourage insight, unhealthy for depressives, never to be proven.

Onlooker, sorry but this topic is one requiring substantial reading. I source Wittgenstein & Freud, Jung, & the Hindu Shastras & Vedas when I'm dwelling on these questions, which there is nothing new about, but always inspire new thinking.

[SeaGypsy]

Chaos theory applies very interestingly to the subject also. The natural quest for novelty aspect particularly.

[Ibon]

The deeper philosophical question of free will is the domain that philosophers can mentally masturbate over while caffeinated.

There are many facets to this question. On a species level humans have to balance dominion over nature (free will of sorts to exploit) with being subservient to the laws of ecology as in staying within carrying capacity.

As most of us would agree, consequences of human overshoot will undermine human free will and the havoc will be great enough to even sweep away those Viennese philosophers sipping their coffees while contemplating free will.

[KaiserJeep]

ennui2, No knowledge was lost during the Dark Ages, or the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, or the Industrial Revolution. In fact, basic science made advances in all those periods in History, although the spread of the knowledge was severely constrained until the Gutenberg press was invented in 1440. That the research was done by mainly Jesuit priests and recorded in handwritten texts does not matter. (Part of the confusion seems to be the terminology, I use the modern terms: Age of Rome lasted through the 4th Century, Dark Ages was 4th-10th centuries, 10th-14th centuries was the Middle Ages, 14th-17th the Renaissance, 17th - 20th was the Industrial Revolution, and 20th onwards is The Digital Age.)

pstarr, it is truly amusing to have somebody who studied Permaculture lecturing to an Electrical Engineer about digital memories, but you are just as deluded as well. Not only has no knowledge ever been lost, but written records - everything from Babylonian texts on clay tiles to the Dead Sea scrolls to birth records from the 15th century to back issues of every newspaper ever published, are finding their way into digital storage. Nor do you need concern yourself about imagined problems with computer media, because all this knowledge is online all the time, and will remain so, resident in ever faster generations of hardware. Every word you ever typed online, all your financial transactions, all your grade-school transcripts, all your parking fines, criminal history, your mortgage history, your medical records, every photo you ever put online, everything. You will be allowed the courtesy - completely false and never true - that some of this data is "private" and "inaccessible". Even that pretense, of course, will disappear with your death. Online privacy is an illusion, and it always was. In spite of Legislation to the contrary, if it is online, it can be accessed - and is in use, even if you think it is encrypted. Nobody should be surprised, privacy was the true price we paid for the network.

Nor do I care what Henry Ford or the ancestral Bushes or the Roosevelts did in the 1930s. Henry Ford produced tanks, Jeeps, and airplanes among many other weapons, for the Allies. GHW Bush flew 58 combat missions against the Japanese in WW2. It's all as meaningless as an OPEC member saying they will not sell oil to Israel - because there are middlemen involved - and Israel in fact runs on Arab oil. It doesn't mean they are good buddies or admire each others culture, it means they both deal with third parties. Historically, a significant portion of Americans - lower, middle, and upper class - were terrified of the implications of the Russian Revolution. This hysteria persisted through McCarthyism to the end of the Cold War, when Communism was revealed as the fraud it was.

As for just about everyone's musings on the nature of Fascism, it's all just words. I'll remind everyone that the Democrats control the White House and have pretty well stuffed the Supreme Court with Liberals. They are newly the Minority in the Senate, for the last four months, after controlling it for 8 years. They are the current American Fascists. But the political pendulum swings back and forth, it will not last.

Nor have I noticed any rightward slant to US politics. Just the opposite, in fact.

I don't think religion is dead either. Last I checked, the single man whose policies affect the most people was not the POTUS or the UN Sec Gen, but the Catholic Pope. Even here in Silly Valley CA, we have five churches for every school.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I have plenty of free will, and I'm not afraid to use it. The next door neighbor's cat also has plenty of free will, of that there is no doubt.

[Newfie]

Ibon,
The concept of free will, in the context humanities ability to plan, to effect population control, is a very important question.

I agree with you when we are speaking of individual and personal understanding.

But taken on a societal level, applying a pragmatic approach, do you see any evidence of societal self awareness or the ability to delay gratification for future benefits?

I think we may have been capable of that in the past, but recently?

[Lore]

Certainly knowledge is lost. Just like anything that's no longer needed is forgotten. I found the following article interesting. Especially item #4.

Top 10 Lost Technologies We Really Could Use Today

4. Apollo/Gemini Space Program Technology

Not all lost technology dates back to antiquity—sometimes it’s just become so obsolete that it’s no longer compatible. The Apollo and Gemini space programs of the 50s, 60s, and 70s were responsible for NASA’s biggest successes, including some of the first manned space flights and the first trip to the moon. Gemini, which ran from 1965-66, was responsible for the much of the early research and development into the mechanics of human space flight. Apollo, which followed shortly thereafter, was launched with the goal of landing a crew on the surface of the moon, which it succeeded in doing in July of 1969.

How was it Lost?

The Apollo and Gemini programs aren’t truly lost. There are still one or two Saturn V rockets lying around, and there are plenty of parts from the spacecraft capsules still available. But just because modern scientists have the parts doesn’t mean they have the knowledge to understand how or why they worked the way they did. In fact, very few schematics or records from the original programs are still around. This lack of record keeping is a byproduct of the frenetic pace at which the American space program progressed. Because NASA was in a space race with the USSR, the planning, design, and building process of the Apollo and Gemini programs was always rushed. Not only that, but in most cases private contractors were brought in to work on every individual part of the spacecraft. Once the programs ended, these engineers—along with all their records—moved on. None of this would be a problem, but now that NASA is planning a return trip to the moon, a lot of the information about how the engineers of the 1960s made the voyages work is invaluable. Amazingly, the records remain so disorganized and incomplete that NASA has resorted to reverse engineering existing spacecraft parts that they have lying around in junkyards as a way of understanding just how the Gemini and Apollo programs managed to work so well.

http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-lost-technologies.php

We are probably in more jeopardy today then ever before of a possible loss of tons of knowledge just because we do rely on digital record keeping. Which at best is a very fragile long term storage solution. As one example, Imagine a world subjected to a large solar EMP and you may get a better understanding of why.

[ennui2]

giving rise to an opposition movement with a sense of the sacred or a religiosity in terms of how we treat our biosphere.

Yes. That's what deep ecology is all about. I don't see this becoming the dominant ideology/belief-system, though, no matter how bad things get. You'll also have one step further, the anti-civs who are more overtly destructive. There will be a whole range of post-collapse -isms. Even if some are more clearly sustainable than others, it won't prevent some people from clinging to whatever -ism they most prefer. And so when you have all these divergent ways of life, you'll have conflict. This tends to result in the more pacifist ones (like the deep ecology permies) getting themselves clobbered once they're confronted by the warlords.

I just think the prediction that if you just stress humanity in a certain way that everyone will just funnel towards a singular benign ideology is wishful thinking.

[ennui2]

Lore, I have recent evidence of technology being lost. I don't need to go into a lot of detail other than to say that the codebase behind the animation system I use is essentially "lost" technology despite the presence of source-code. The documentation is insufficient and the greater context of how the pieces fit together has been lost through layoffs and the original people not wanting to look back anymore due to bitterness. And this happened almost overnight.

It doesn't always work out that way. Think of how long the code-tree of Linux is when you trace it all the way back to Unix in the early 70s. Or look at how far back Windows goes with all its backwards-compatibility. But it requires a concerted effort to keep that kind of stuff viable. Usually there is a gap in understanding when any code project moves from the original coders over to new coders and a new compiler/server back-end. Coders tend not to be good at or enjoy documentation and so that sort of information just gets lost when people leave or the company folds.

[Lore]

If you recall this happened as well during the Millennium bug. When everyone in the corporate world was looking to find retired programmers that were knowledgeable enough to fix old legacy systems that were still using COBOL A lot of the root documentation was lost.

The more complex a system becomes the easier it is to lose something.

[ennui2]

ennui2, No knowledge was lost during the Dark Ages, or the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, or the Industrial Revolution.

This is such a stupid thing to say, man. Come on. Look at the antikythera mechanism. Outside of advancements in the field of armor and weaponry maybe, knowledge took a big hit in western/northern europe and the only forward movement during that whole period was in the middle-east (or in asia I guess, which was on its own trajectory).

Nor do I care what Henry Ford or the ancestral Bushes or the Roosevelts did in the 1930s. Henry Ford produced tanks, Jeeps, and airplanes among many other weapons, for the Allies. GHW Bush flew 58 combat missions against the Japanese in WW2.

If you want to show that not all the GOP are treasonous elites, then drop the hyperbole that democrats are cardboard cutout villains and we can get back to reality.

I'll remind everyone that the Democrats control the White House and have pretty well stuffed the Supreme Court with Liberals.

You mean the supreme court that ruled on Citizens United and Hobby Lobby?

Nor have I noticed any rightward slant to US politics. Just the opposite, in fact.

You must have missed the "Tea Party Wave" of the 2010 mid-terms which ushered in the "party of NO" and constant grid-lock and government shut-downs.

The main problem with the right is they can't win national presidential elections because the right-wing is mostly aging white males and the biggest growing demographic are minorities who are turned off by the GOP's xenophobia, bigotry, and anti-entitlement policies.

Also, the right has been a victim of the transition of news from news to entertainment. Fox and AM talk turned News into "outrage spectacle". Why? Because constant outrage = ratings. You see this now with click-bait headlines "SHOCKING news about ____". The only way to really get people's attention is to hit them in the fight-or-flight brain-stem. As a result, people turn their brains off, grab hold onto a slogan like "Obama is destroying america!" and really there's no way to have any sort of reasonable policy debate. It is basically fundamentalist thinking.

[PrestonSturges]

As for just about everyone's musings on the nature of Fascism, it's all just words. I'll remind everyone that the Democrats control the White House and have pretty well stuffed the Supreme Court with Liberals.

You need to stay away from any objects sharper than a basketball.

[hvacman]

I think the Jesuit monks forgot to document something...concrete.

Concrete is a composite material composed mainly of water, aggregate, and cement. Often, additives and reinforcements (such as rebar) are included in the mixture to achieve the desired physical properties of the finished material. When these ingredients are mixed together, they form a fluid mass that is easily molded into shape. Over time, the cement forms a hard matrix which binds the rest of the ingredients together into a durable stone-like material with many uses.[2]

Famous concrete structures include the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal and the Roman Pantheon. The earliest large-scale users of concrete technology were the ancient Romans, and concrete was widely used in the Roman Empire. The Colosseum in Rome was built largely of concrete, and the concrete dome of the Pantheon is the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome.[3]

After the Roman Empire collapsed, use of concrete became rare until the technology was re-pioneered in the mid-18th century. Today, concrete is the most widely used man-made material (measured by tonnage).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete

[SeaGypsy]

The deeper philosophical question of free will is the domain that philosophers can mentally masturbate over while caffeinated.

There are many facets to this question. On a species level humans have to balance dominion over nature (free will of sorts to exploit) with being subservient to the laws of ecology as in staying within carrying capacity.

As most of us would agree, consequences of human overshoot will undermine human free will and the havoc will be great enough to even sweep away those Viennese philosophers sipping their coffees while contemplating free will.

The Viennese masters were swept away by time already, their words remain, whether in any way practically useful.

The one theme all Hindus subscribe to is that humanity only finds enlightenment through service of the divine in some form & that all divine forms are extensions of the one divinity. The controversy is only about hierarchy, in the divine & human worlds, & all of our troubles come from two bodily organs, the one between our jaws & the one between our legs. There is no greater illusion than the belief that self service is service of the divine, not that the self is not divine, but that it only becomes self aware through relationship with others aligned in the same service. In true self awareness there is no conflict, even in the decision to war (aka Bhagavad Gita).

Krishna's mother, Queen Kunti's most famous lament "Let the calamities return, that they may remember your divinity!"

KJ is obviously not a linguist. Counting spoken & written languages as knowledge, there has been mass extinction event in progress since the age of empire began.

[KaiserJeep]

This is such a stupid thing to say, man. Come on. Look at the antikythera mechanism. Outside of advancements in the field of armor and weaponry maybe, knowledge took a big hit in western/northern europe and the only forward movement during that whole period was in the middle-east (or in asia I guess, which was on its own trajectory).

I fail to see your point. That ancient planetary clock is a form of ancient analog computer. The knowledge to understand it's working was never lost, it was the basis for Copernicus's work on orbital mechanics - and both Copernicus and Galileo Galilei built upon even older work. The Sumerians made the first recorded astronomical observations in 3300 BC, inscribing the "Planisphere of Nineveh" on a clay tablets:



The Greeks possibly built the computer, more likely it is of Asian origin, as only the Chinese then possessed machine tools capable of fabricating such fine toothed gears. The Greeks certainly had the mathematics of orbital mechanics, as did ancient Persians, Muslims, and even the Aztecs:



The biggest mystery: why did all those ancient peoples have a year that was officially 360 days long, when it is obvious from their recorded observations that they all knew better? The answer is that the calendars were decreed by priests and kings, who liked things tidy. Galileo thought they were ready for the truth when he elaborated upon and published the work of Copernicus in the 16th century. If you will recall, his findings contradicted the calendar established by the Catholic Pope, and he was imprisoned and forced to recant his work.

If you want to show that not all the GOP are treasonous elites, then drop the hyperbole that democrats are cardboard cutout villains and we can get back to reality.

Where did you learn history? Every single thing I said about the Democratic Party is established historical fact, and the party was officially anti-Civil Rights right up until the sweeping reforms of the Kennedys in the 1960's, the time they called "Camelot". Even then, the extreme right wing of American politics remained the Dixiecrats - and many Democrats in both the Senate and the House were open members of the KKK, including Senator Robert Byrd, twice the Majority Leader of the Senate, and a KKK leader:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/18/AR2005061801105.html

....and if there was ever a Republican KKK member, I was unable to find such. By the way, I included the Roosevelts in my earlier post as famous Democrats who supported Germany as a foil for Communism, decades after their only Republican politician (Teddy). Like I said, most Americans of all classes and political preferences feared the spread of Bolshevism more than the Fascists.

You must have missed the "Tea Party Wave" of the 2010 mid-terms which ushered in the "party of NO" and constant grid-lock and government shut-downs.

The main problem with the right is they can't win national presidential elections because the right-wing is mostly aging white males and the biggest growing demographic are minorities who are turned off by the GOP's xenophobia, bigotry, and anti-entitlement policies.

Also, the right has been a victim of the transition of news from news to entertainment. Fox and AM talk turned News into "outrage spectacle". Why? Because constant outrage = ratings. You see this now with click-bait headlines "SHOCKING news about ____". The only way to really get people's attention is to hit them in the fight-or-flight brain-stem. As a result, people turn their brains off, grab hold onto a slogan like "Obama is destroying america!" and really there's no way to have any sort of reasonable policy debate. It is basically fundamentalist thinking.

I didn't miss a damned thing, and I was never a member of the Tea Party, either. By the way, you are displaying the exact attitude that was determined to be the epitome of Fascism in this thread earlier. By which I mean, you obviously think that government gridlock is a bad thing.

We are worlds apart on this issue. I believe that government gridlock was designed into our system deliberately by the Founding Fathers. The fact that it is so hard to enact legislation, and so extremely hard to amend our Constitution, is in my mind the only thing that has preserved the Union for 240 years. I have the belief that that government which governs least governs best, laws are the enemy of personal freedom.

For example, the Equal Rights Amendment. Introduced into Congress in 1923, it did not pass until 1972, and it twice failed ratification by the necessary 38 states and is now dead, and women do not have the same rights as men in the USA, and the States and the Federal congress have no power to enact laws giving them equal rights until the ERA is again passed and then ratified by 38+ states.

I view this as a great injustice, and note that for the most part, the opposition to the ERA is Democratic and the support for it is Republican, it came very close to becoming a plank in the 1992 Republican presidential platform.

I doubt Hillary will mention it, as it is a vote loser.

Whatever. You will NOT go around here rewriting history without me challenging you on it. If you are ashamed of the historical positions taken by the Democrats, or their utter failure to bring minorities into the mainstream of American life, then you should first admit the truth of it, and then work to change it. Denial of truth solves nothing.

Edit: By the way, a huge solar EMP can take down the power grid, which will cause a temporary Internet outage - but the backbone servers are deep underground in chilled rooms with UPS's - only the local servers would be effected. If the EMP were intense enough to erase magnetic media - which would require a solar storm two orders of magnitude greater than any recorded, which probably would also fry our planet, the net would again go down temporarily. Even if it did, the backup media is deep underground and the outage would be the length of time needed to replace or repair the damaged above-ground local servers and the electric grid they depend upon.

Unfortunately, the current crop of Science Fiction novels about EMP damage are all rendered obsolete by fiber optic communications, all but immune to EMP. Were we still running the DARPANET of the 1970's over hardwired telephone lines and modems, the EMP would be a legitimate concern. Today it is just another example of lots of smart people who studied Physics, but don't use it for anything.

Edit 2: I did in fact read The World Made by Hand. But knowing it was based upon nonsense science spoiled it for me, I don't plan reading any of the sequels.

[Lore]

The Internet is a mishmash of cables, nothing more. Snip them in the right place, cut the power to them, by whatever, and the system caves. A weakness is thinking somehow such technology, any for that matter, is invulnerable.

Not to mention we all operate now on the scale of global dependence.

Want to test my theory? Cut the power to your home, go nowhere and see nobody. Now, build a computer. Even if you could build one, why would you?

[Newfie]

The manufacturing industry of the future will not need oil because data will become the world's largest source of energy, says Alibaba founder and executive chair Jack Ma.

http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subc ... 1&cid=1204

Got popcorn?

[KaiserJeep]

That fellow really sounds like a "Big Picture" guy without a clue. Maybe he thinks he'll connect to the Web and heat his home with it.

Ennui2, you are still way off. Remember that act of environmental terrorism where 1100 fiber connections were slashed near the Metcalf Energy Center, that CALPINE peaking plant a couple of miles from my home in April 2013?

That was about a quarter of the Silly Valley's bandwidth when it happened, and I myself suffered the horror of having my streaming video auto-step-down from 1080p to 720p for a couple of weeks. Some of the SmartGrid devices became unmanageable by PG&E.

IOW, no big deal - and additional redundancy and additional physical protections for the fiber optic trunks have been implemented here in the last two years.

Bottom line would be, the biggest risk that you will lose the Web connectivity that most of us crave like a drug is the same as it has always been: If you don't pay the monthly charge, they will cut you off cold.