Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

[Laird]

Process, voltage and temperature variation is just a fact of life for TRNG’s.

And I explained at length and in detail why there's no problem here. You effectively just said you stand by your claims anyway. There's nothing more I can do...

Let's go for a whirl then, @Merle - via this very belated combined response to your long-ago responses to me.

I have moved on. Thanks for the opportunity to be here. I have learned a lot. Hopefully people have also learned from me.

I summarize my experience at Adventures in Psienceland.

Re that to which I've added emphasis: yep, exactly, the evidence we discuss suggests at least a functional dualism.

The challenge is always this question of substances & interaction...I've come to see the Interaction Problem as having less of a bite because it seems to me we define "substance" in terms of "interaction"...and no one seems to have a proper account of [how] entities/things of a singular substance interact causally.

However for me it seems we are in the same "place" as all the other "places" out there, though perhaps a bit fenced in by fortune or design. So I would reject Dualism in the sense that there are two realms, though I do accept that there seems to be a Visible/Invisible division of sorts.

I have moved on. Thanks for the opportunity to be here. I have learned a lot. Hopefully people have also learned from me.

I summarize my experience at Adventures in Psienceland.

Why is your blog called Mind Set Free if you don't think you have any freedom in your decision-making?

Why is your blog called Mind Set Free if you don't think you have any freedom in your decision-making?

Good question.

The name for my website comes from my deconversion story that I had written 20 years earlier:

I had drifted away from participation in church. I now made one last effort to find my place again. There had been a radical change in my thought process. I was no longer the most conservative thinker on the block. Now I was perhaps the most liberal thinker at church. I persuaded myself that I could still fit in–after all it was the progressive element at church that started me on my journey–but I found it increasingly hard to identify with the church program. And I asked questions that surprised everyone.

There is no stopping the mind set free. It is like that first leak of water through the dam. It reaches a critical size, and then bursts free. My thoughts refused to stop. The dam had been broken. I read books that were critical of the Bible. I read the Bible from a whole new viewpoint. I found skeptical sites on the Internet. I asked many questions–many of which are on my website. I found it harder and harder to identify myself as a Christian. [emphasis added]
[Source]

Notice the inner conflict here. Something was trying to stop these new thoughts. Who or what was doing that? I was! Per the first paragraph, I had identified myself as a religious conservative, one who followed the script. But I had been learning new things, and these new things kept coming to my attention. Wanting to fit in, I made an effort to dam back the new thoughts. But the effort was futile. The new thoughts were like water leaking through a dam, reaching a critical size, and bursting through. And by the end of the story, I was identifying myself with those new thoughts.

That story is the inner, first-person version of the story. The "I" in this story--13 times in those 2 paragraphs--represents my inner conscious self, which is the constructed model my brain builds of myself as a cohesive whole. This is the perspective we are used to hearing when people interact--the first person "I" telling the story to the third person "you".

But I could also tell the story from the perspective of my neurons. My neurons had built a self-concept of an "I" that followed the conservative religious line. But other neurons were responding to inputs from my eyes and ears and building other models of reality based on these new inputs. These new models worked to integrate with all the other models in my brain, causing a lot of conflict, and leading the overall thinking pattern away from the unified self-concept my neurons had developed. The neurons that formed the overall self-concept attempted to shut down the efforts to integrate these new neural patterns into my brain. In the ensuing battle, the new neural makeup won. The self-concept neural patterns could not stop the progressive neural patterns. So, gradually, the new neural patterns took over, and rewrote the self-concept neural patterns into a new self-image.

The first-person telling of the story--"There is no stopping the mind set free"--is easier to understand than the mechanical, physical version--"The self-concept neural patterns could not stop the progressive neural patterns."

Is my mind free? In a sense, yes, I have free will in that I am free to act according to my motivation. But my motivation is a name for the sum total of the neural forces inside my brain. So I have freedom to do what I am motivated to do, but my motivations are the result of the sum total of my neurons (plus anything else that may be involved). But I don't have metaphysical libertarian freedom. 

If we had libertarian freedom, then we would be consciously selecting our thoughts. But you and I do not even know what our next thought will be. It will just come. Where is the freedom in that?

I thought I had extracted myself from this thread, and now, here I am talking about free will, compatibilism and metaphysical libertarianism? Oh my!

Good question.

The name for my website comes from my deconversion story that I had written 20 years earlier:


Notice the inner conflict here. Something was trying to stop these new thoughts. Who or what was doing that? I was! Per the first paragraph, I had identified myself as a religious conservative, one who followed the script. But I had been learning new things, and these new things kept coming to my attention. Wanting to fit in, I made an effort to dam back the new thoughts. But the effort was futile. The new thoughts were like water leaking through a dam, reaching a critical size, and bursting through. And by the end of the story, I was identifying myself with those new thoughts.

That story is the inner, first-person version of the story. The "I" in this story--13 times in those 2 paragraphs--represents my inner conscious self, which is the constructed model my brain builds of myself as a cohesive whole. This is the perspective we are used to hearing when people interact--the first person "I" telling the story to the third person "you".

But I could also tell the story from the perspective of my neurons. My neurons had built a self-concept of an "I" that followed the conservative religious line. But other neurons were responding to inputs from my eyes and ears and building other models of reality based on these new inputs. These new models worked to integrate with all the other models in my brain, causing a lot of conflict, and leading the overall thinking pattern away from the unified self-concept my neurons had developed. The neurons that formed the overall self-concept attempted to shut down the efforts to integrate these new neural patterns into my brain. In the ensuing battle, the new neural makeup won. The self-concept neural patterns could not stop the progressive neural patterns. So, gradually, the new neural patterns took over, and rewrote the self-concept neural patterns into a new self-image.

The first-person telling of the story--"There is no stopping the mind set free"--is easier to understand than the mechanical, physical version--"The self-concept neural patterns could not stop the progressive neural patterns."

Is my mind free? In a sense, yes, I have free will in that I am free to act according to my motivation. But my motivation is a name for the sum total of the neural forces inside my brain. So I have freedom to do what I am motivated to do, but my motivations are the result of the sum total of my neurons (plus anything else that may be involved). But I don't have metaphysical libertarian freedom. 

If we had libertarian freedom, then we would be consciously selecting our thoughts. But you and I do not even know what our next thought will be. It will just come. Where is the freedom in that?

I thought I had extracted myself from this thread, and now, here I am talking about free will, compatibilism and metaphysical libertarianism? Oh my!

So the mind was not really set free, what really happened was atoms colliding in such a way as to make you shift from one set of mental states to another?

"Mind set free" seems erroneous as a title then, because it suggests someone accomplished something...

So the mind was not really set free, what really happened was atoms colliding in such a way as to make you shift from one set of mental states to another?

"Mind set free" seems erroneous as a title then, because it suggests someone accomplished something...

Do you think I should rebrand my website as "The neural patterns that I refer to as 'my mind' set free"?

Do you think I should rebrand my website as "The neural patterns that I refer to as 'my mind' set free"?

Not sure how "set free" cashes out in terms of physics, so maybe Neural Patter[n]s Shifted State?

Not sure how "set free" cashes out in terms of physics, so maybe Neural Patter[n]s Shifted State?

See my new signature below.

[Ninshub]

@Merle 

If you're interested only! I haven't followed closely everything in this thread but I just posted an interesting video by a physicist arguing against ephiphenomalism. The video goes step by step through his arguments and sub-arguments. I imagine it's possible it brings up some points not necessarily brought up in this thread.

https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-m...nomenalism