Human Endogenous Retrovirus-K HML-2 integration within RASGRF2 is associated with intravenous drug abuse and modulates transcription in a cell-line model
Not all humans have the same HK2 viruses in their genomes. Here we show that one specific uncommon HK2, which lies close to a gene involved in dopaminergic activity in the brain, is more frequently found in drug addicts and thus is significantly associated with addiction. We experimentally show that HK2 can manipulate nearby genes. Our study provides strong evidence that uncommon HK2 can be responsible for unappreciated pathogenic burden, and thus underlines the health importance of exploring the phenotypic roles of young, insertionally polymorphic HK2 integrations in human populations.
...
Based on our cell-line experiments, we suggest that RASGRF2-int leads to enhancement of dopaminergic activity through higher expression of the first exons of RASGRF2, which then results in increased potential for addiction.
Very sensible that the mutation relates to the dopaminergic activity, just based on our knowledge of the reward pathway and the effect of addictive drugs on dopamine. There may even been a positive feedback loop here, as any viral gene inserted that increases risky, impulsive behavior may also encourage procreation.
There is some interesting research distinguishing "wanting" from "liking" behavior that is worth checking out. They are distinct neurochemical processes - addicts may "want" to engage in a behaviour due to dopamine reward circuitry but this is distinct from whether they actually "like" doing this. Animal models have been effective at teasing out the different neurochemical correlates of behavior.
While that might be true today, I don't agree that increasing risk-taking behaviors was evolutionarily advantageous past some equilibrium (otherwise, we'd have a new equilibrium).
Depends whether you consider this to be evolutionary advantageous to us or the virus/bacteria...similar example from toxoplasmosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis
Geoffrey West touches upon some of this stuff in scale - its worth a read
Oversimplification is that some of the viruses / genetic defects that kill us later let us live long enough to reproduce first and pass those traits/infections along.
The ancient Egyptians liked cats, and considering the effect T. Gondi has on males[1] (higher Testosotorone & dominance) and females[2] (submissiveness), this could have been a reason why they worshipped cats. It could also be considered an early example of a biological weapon used on sections of population.
With regard to addictive behaviour, some research has suggested addictions are neuro amine addictions, ie andrenaline, dopamine & serotonin. Cocaine for example last in the body for upto 2hrs and amplifies dopamine and serotonin, so being addicted to feeling good is understandable, however serotonin also plays a part in the innate immune system and the association between depression and illness has also long been known. The medical profession SSRI's inhibit the uptake of serotonin in the brain, which reduces the brains ability to convert it into melatonin (4x more potent than Vit C), plus not much can cross the blood brain barrier so the adapative immune can not work in the brain, eyes, gonads, ovaries. So whilst SSRI's can make you feel good, like everything in life it can also have its side effects because we are a bundle of realtime complex pathways oscillating in time and space.
One other point of risk taking behaviour, some of you may have noticed when you feel like you are going down with something like a cold or flu, you may also feel the need to procreate before the illness takes hold. This would suggest an evolutionary response to pass on genes, but excessive amounts of chemicals which can harm the body can also cause this behaviour as well, illegal drugs & alcohol being examples. ie did you know that smokers have elevated levels of copper in their blood stream? This is probably due to the need to deal with the risk of foreign bodies coming into the blood stream through the lungs, but copper and iron is also required to prevent anemia, which in turn is required to make red blood cells, plus its also known that elite atheletes, people living at high altitude and smokers have enlarged red blood cells. Plus smoking can also be a form of self medication if an asthma inhaler is not available, asthma being a type of allergic reaction to debris or pathogens inhaled, most commonly being from pets or pollution.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17435678
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17435678
About 20% of the human genome is endogenous retroviruses. We've all got them, and there is significant evidence that they become more active in old age, and may be a factor in dementia and other illnesses.
Yes. Make a primer that matches the inside of the retrovirus, and another that matches the genome outside it in this particular location. Use them to do PCR on a sample of DNA. If you get a band, you have the retrovirus in that location.
Certain aspects? Sure. All aspects? No. I don’t mind the buying the use and the minor incidentsl things. But if the addiction causes harm, be it physical, material or other major impacts on others, then it becomes both a health issue and a criminsl issue (stealing, hit and runs, deception, and obviously more). But yes, let’s try and treat it first rather than seek punishment first.
Punishment runs counter to all forms of sustainable learning, according to the science of learning how to learn.
Let's lovingly apply science to criminalization of people being human, rather than criminalizing human behavior. Let's not seek to punish. Let's start exploring other solutions spaces.
As I understand common animal training wisdom and the literature, punishment (+P/-R, in conditioning circles) does work. It just needs to be applied only when necessary, and in the right way. Punishment to avert a behavior is supposed to be short-duration and immediately after the behavior is observed. Judicial punishment fails on both counts. It also is supposed to be done only when the (natural) consequences of the misbehavior are potentially dire, or when the animal already knows what they're supposed to do, and is misbehaving due to some other drive.
But the judicial system of punishment is great for creating predators (prisons are great for reinforcing predatory behavior, on both sides of the bars), and it's also great for mis-training people to try to avoid getting caught, or to fight to the death in court, instead of training them to avoid criminal behavior in the first place.
Let’s say you havd someone in the Army of some country, any country, and that soldier does heinous things contrary than that allowed by internstional convention on clearly a civilian population, let’s say, do we still say, “oh, hey, they were high, it’s an illness, let’s treat them and after done, let’s get them back in the army”.
It is.
But there are psychopaths out there who simply don't do violence out of fear from counterviolence.
Remove the threat with social works and they laugh about it.
So in general I agree, that there are better methods than punishment, but for some it works.
I believe it will be hard to get those numbers. I take history as evidence that there are plenty of people or groups out there, who do violence to gain benefit. It was rather the norm. The strong eat the weak.
Humanism is a relativly new concept. One worth pursuing, but maybe not blinded by idealism.
> It was rather the norm. The strong eat the weak.
There are a variety of reasons for this. Different reasons have different most effective solutions. If we choose as our general solution something that has narrow scope of significant positive effect and wide scope of moderate negative effect, I'd say we've chosen poorly as that will harm society as a whole rather than help it. Which is why the hard task of getting those numbers is worth it.
We know so little about psychopaths and/or the brain. I've heard they can't change. I hypothesize believing psychopaths can't/won't choose to heal or contribute to life hinders the ability to conceive of ways they might.
I prefer to mix sciences of dynamics with love and mindful design. I've had a nuff* of the narratives of static sciences. What happens when we allow for resident psychopaths to shamelessly and fearlessly be themselves? Is that something we even have examples of happening, particularly where the dominant culture was a peaceful one of equanimity, autonomy, and interdependence? If we (humanity) haven't conducted that natural experiment, I'd love to give it a shot & work with them to answer the question of how can a community change to include them.
* I propose the unit of "nuff" as a subjective metric of satisfaction. What I say is a nuff is a nuff for me and what you say is a nuff is a nuff for you.
Every time I find interesting (and frighting) that we are nothing but a collection of ourselves and virus and bacterias, written down to our DNA and RNA or living together with close dependence deep in our guts (literally).
Going further, a lot of what we do unconciously is just what a virus or something else "did" to survive or spread in the past, and our free will isn't that free...
Edit: "did" wasn't meaning that a specific goal was set, for example, but just that the survival rate was better for certain configuration of atoms
It's also revealing how the unique ability of humans to overcome their fundamental biological nature can be quite impressive and inspiring. Humans have many natural tendencies that are not socially accepted, and better behavior can be learned and tendencies suppressed. Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain addicts for life.
>Addicts and alcoholics can turn their lives around, even though they remain addicts for life.
The "addicts for life" is an American puritan view (by AA and other such groups) -- not some scientific fact. Certainly not the view everywhere in the world. You can have an alcoholic of 5-10 years that recovered and can still enjoy the occasional drink just fine without getting back to regular drinking.
Neal Stephenson does a good job of presenting that sort of attitude in Cryptonomicon:
"I don't like the word 'addict' because it has terrible connotations," Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as 'Morphiumsüchtig.' The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as 'morphine seeky' or even more loosely as 'morphine seeking.' I prefer 'seeky' because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.
"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It's leaky all the time--even if it's not raining at the moment. But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to 'addict,' because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe."
Stephenson is great, but just for the record, the claim that Germans understand "süchtig" as "seeking" goes too far.
Süchtig is the adjective to Sucht (addiction), not to Suche (search), and although the etymological link is clear, there's nothing romantic or compassionate about the word.
Thanks: I'm sure I would have gone a long ways before discovering anything more about the context of that statement. However, I note that Stephenson does seem to have described this as a loose translation. Is the German word used as an adjective, or is that also an issue of translation?
Süchtig is an adjective, yes, and 'seeky' is actually a sensible literal translation. But just like the word addicted, it carries the connotation of a destructive obsession, not just a tendency-to-seek-out, and it is just as obliterating a word as its English equivalent.
The more specific statements about addicts become, the more cautious I tend to be.
That said, I do at least agree that your quote is rather particular to AA, and not shared by other programs, like SMART.
The reason I hesitate to dismiss the AA view is that it strikes me as quite possible that, for a subset of addicts, any kind of hope of moderation can be disastrous.
The way I see it, a less dichotomous perspective such as that of SMART is a better starting point than the 'once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic' approach of AA. And if SMART doesn't work, AA might very well be the only solution left.
> The reason I hesitate to dismiss the AA view is that it strikes me as quite possible that, for a subset of addicts, any kind of hope of moderation can be disastrous.
This, absolutely this. And since it is impossible to know in advance if moderation is possible for a given person, AA optimizes for the worst case scenario and assumes that no one can handle moderation, which has the greatest likelihood of success for all who use this strategy.
Although different substance, I'm a heavy smoker and moderation has always proved impossible.
I've kicked the habit once by NRT and once cold turkey. I'd gone well long enough for any physical withdrawal symptoms (many months).
Both times, I thought just one wouldn't hurt, socially. Both times I started right back up again.
There was a time I could smoke socially. I know people who did that and then went on to live a smoke free life. On the flip side, I've known smokers go years without and just one "oh go on then" hooked them right back on it.
So if nicotine addiction is anything to go by, it would be possible in other addictions too. Unfortunately, the only alcoholics I knew lost their battle and never achieved any semblance of sobriety. They were both at a point where the withdrawal would kill them without clinical supervision.
Not necessarily. The AA model is then unforgiving. This can create tremendous pressure, with the consequences of non-compliance being infinitely greater.
When it works, it works the best. When it doesn’t work, it’s a cliff. E.g. “20 years out the window”.
AA isn't so much a recovery program as a submarine Christian conversion program; it's seldom better than nothing, and often worse. Very consistently and well-marketed, though.
(Fun fact: when it started, it wasn't anonymous -- except one of the founders kept showing up drunk in public, and they realized this itself was pretty quickly debunking their success claims!)
I think this is a rather unfair distortion of AA. I know many who have been tremendously helped by the program. It does work for many. It's explicitly unreligious -- they have a notion of a higher power, but make the conscious effort to allow each member to have their own definition of this higher power. It's not a religious process in the sense most would think of it. I also don't think it's fair to mention any one particular person's success or lack thereof with AA when making sweeping generalizations about the program (including the founder, which I don't know if what you say is actually correct or not -- it just doesn't matter).
The other important thing that AA does, which is quite critical, is get individuals with problems frequent, implicit counseling from others who have been through the same thing. This is very hard to get in modern life in most other ways. It's possible, but AA makes it the default process. You can throw away all the other stuff about AA and dismiss it, and you are still left with the fact social therapy in any form is very effective, and AA promotes that.
When it's been studied for effectiveness, it turns out AA works for between 5% and 10% of the people in it; as it also turns out, that's about the same percentage of people for whom any group support program would work.
This isn't a distortion, this is the empirical view of AA.
As for explicitly unreligious, I would like to include the twelve steps here:
1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10) Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
I am struggling to find an unreligious interpretation for steps 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, and 12, even if the "higher power" isn't an Abrahamic religion "God".
I think the key here is that people function better, and break addictions better, when they realize and submit to the concept that they do not (and can't) have complete power and control over their own lives. The notion of a "higher power" or "God" can help people get into that posture of "letting go", which helps them find real support outside of themselves (and their addictions).
Being a Christian myself, I know I function much better when I'm consciously in an attitude of trusting God -- it lets me relax and simply be who I am and do what I need to do, without worrying about "fixing things" outside of my control. (And yes, I do take an intellectually rigorous approach to my faith, but that's a different topic.)
I'm not a religious man myself, but I think your perspective is wiser than most of those who call themselves Christians, and frankly, I think what you have expressed here runs deeper than the particulars of any specific religion.
>It's explicitly unreligious -- they have a notion of a higher power, but make the conscious effort to allow each member to have their own definition of this higher power.
Very magnanimous of them. But why would a rehabilitation program have a notion "of a higher power", and especially it's own notion of it?
> If it is useful in helping people to not harm themselves and others
this is a big if. the way AA is structured (they don't themselves collect any statistics about efficacy whatsoever) makes it extremely difficult to draw any conclusions about how helpful it is.
as other people have said, AA essentially provides free group therapy, which is likely to be at least slightly helpful. i'm not sure there's any evidence to suggest that the 12 steps or higher power aspect yield any benefits over generic group drug counseling.
There is some evidence that the higher power business works[1]. Anyway, it will always be difficult to directly judge a particular organization rather than its methods.
[1] The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg : while not scientifically spotless, the book directly addresses the methods of AA. To successfully establish a change in habit, one needs a belief that I can change : there is some sound evidence presented in the book.
Smart Change, by Art Marckman : he is literally a scientist and I can't find anything scientifically incorrect in this book. He also mentions and gives evidence for the advantage of belief in one's ability to change : here the context is not directly AA.
> It's explicitly unreligious -- they have a notion of a higher power, but make the conscious effort to allow each member to have their own definition of this higher power.
I knew about this 'misunderstanding' that most people have about AA and its 'higher power' thing.
I actually attended meetings though, and their 'unreligious process' is actually anything but.
Then again, it's basically all we have? I think my problem is when the AA beliefs are yelled at other members like they were laws.
As a former alcoholic, I was able to taper off alcohol myself. The doctor said I was being stupid. I wasen't going to spend my last 20 grand on a Rehab. I was a mess back then, but tapering off is what worked for myself.
(I personally feel many alcoholics have an underlying psychological problem that should be addressed.)
As someone who attended AA meetings for a few months when my depression/anxiety/substance abuse was getting out of control I have to agree with this.
A couple of the chapters were fine, and listening to people tell stories of their experiences was great, but there is a heavy cult-like vibe pushed on you relentlessly at most.
They parrot on about the fact that you are helpless to effect change in your own life and without the group, you will inevitably drink again.
That turned me off completely and I never went back. Still haven't had a drink in a year since either.
IDK. There’s no shortage of alcoholics, so they could deal with people exiting after 2y or so, without dissolving. Instead, they are like boy/girlscouts for grownups without the age limit.
> It's also revealing how the unique ability of humans to overcome their fundamental biological nature can be quite impressive and inspiring.
That ability is itself part of the fundamental biological nature of humans, or whatever. The way you phrased it suggests a Cartesian dualistic interpretation.
I have heard it frequently mentioned by interesting scientists (most recently, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson) that this ability to live against natural biological tendencies is unique for humans among the rest of the animal kingdom. So while it may be fundamental to humans, it is not apparently fundamental to the general biology of the world, and humans appear to be an interesting exception.
Color me skeptical of the idea that humans can really go against the grain of their evolved instincts. What seems much more likely is:
1) A large subset of people possess instincts that were successful for reproduction in the ancestral environment, but are no longer so. See also plummeting birth rates despite being at the historical peak in terms of access to resources for the average person (in the developed world, at least).
2) Some people's evolved instincts are to play a long game based on building reputation and then leveraging that reputation over the long term, rather than pursuing immediate wants and desires. Such an instinct will produce a lot of behavior that seems out of line with a naive interpretation of how we "should" be evolved to behave.
Dogs do it, albeit with human help. Considering that humans that grew up alone, ie. feral, seem to have no self control either I would think that dogs get to count too
Not sure why you are being downvoted. This link is one of the recent examples I was thinking of. The dog has been taught to not eat the food even when a human isn't around protecting the food. That requires ignoring one part of its biology for other benefits.
> Every time I find interesting (and frighting) that we are nothing but a collection of ourselves and virus and bacterias, written down to our DNA and RNA or living together with close dependence deep in our guts (literally).
The obvious opposing view to what you've just expressed would be that you are your body, and that what you just described as your true self is merely one part of you introspecting about another part of you.
And of course, as far as I'm aware science can say nothing convincing about all of this at present so it's purely an exercise in philosophy and logic.
Not really, I am a non-dualist actually but introducing non-duality in the current context would be a way too off-topic and unnecessary. I prefer not to go into the spiritual stuff beyond what can be easily experienced by everyone unless asked by a person specifically interested in this kind of information.
> it's purely an exercise in philosophy and logic
It's not. It's of little use as long as it is. One has to experience that. That's why I've mentioned the rubber hand illusion. Imagine your hands have been covered from you since you very birth and you have been believing the rubber hands are your real hands for your whole life, then the cover is removed and you experience your actual hands for the first time - it feels like this (approximately). This is how I've got into Buddhism - all the major religions tell you unverifiable things and demand you to believe and here the whole clue is a thing we can experience directly. I've used a quote from the Babylon-5 show because it's a lot about this and you suddenly find yourself understanding the Vorlons' "Who are you?" and "We are all Kosh" after you experience that.
I also suspect this kind of realization may happen to render people nearly-immune to addictions, I would even do some sort of clinical testing if only I had enough money (by the way, some time ago we have already seen news about mindful people being scientifically proven feeling less pain here on HN).
>> it's purely an exercise in philosophy and logic
> It's of little use as long as it is.
I didn't mean to imply uselessness; my previous comment was worded poorly. Aside from the spiritual aspects, logic and philosophy alone often manage to achieve (or form the basis of) incredibly useful things.
> the whole clue is a thing we can experience directly
The trouble I have with this is that trying to differentiate between "true self is separate from body" and "body is all there is" based on an experience seems to beg the question. If the former is true, then the experience is what it seems. But if the latter is true, then the experience itself is yet another bodily event - one that results in you (the body in this case) coming away with a false understanding.
A parallel might be someone who feels quite certain about a fact (ie experiences a sense of knowledge), but that "knowledge" later turns out to be false. In light of this, how can we use a direct experience to differentiate the above?
Of course this line of reasoning can be (repeatedly) applied to anything, so at some point I suppose we just have to accept that there are enough separate lines of evidence and that something is presumably true. But I don't think a single direct experience which itself involves the system in question (ie the body) is enough.
As an aside, my rambling on about unknowable-ness isn't intended as an attack against your interpretation of things but rather just general pondering of the (current?) limits of human knowledge and experience.
Don't worry, I appreciate your care but don't mind "an attack against my interpretation" :-)
It seems that I will have to introduce the actual Buddhist (Nyingma/Bön Dzogchen) non-duality interpretation of this in a more or less simplified way to make it (including the "We are all Kosh" part) more clear but be warned, it may sound a way too bizarre. I don't insist it's true and my initial intention was to leave it for the people interested in going this way to discover on themselves as it makes little if any sense before the experience. Ready? The "true self" you can directly perceive this way is just one for every sentient being (my true self = your true self, "by reference" not just "by value", it's the same object, not just same class) and it is kind of the absolute, the only thing that actually exists, everything else (including our feelings and beliefs (our ego), bodies, cars, events and everything) is an emanation of it, like a wave on the surface of a lake. The idea of everything being just an emanation of yourself seems less weird or even rationally obvious if you apply this to "everything in your dreams" but the real life is considered to be a phenomenon of little fundamental difference from a dream. I am not a real guru and may probably explain the things wrong so whoever interested should better watch a lecture of the actual Buddhist (Bön) teacher[1] (it's rather fun, easy to listen and made as free of any religious mumbo-jumbo as possible, the chant in the beginning is very short but the guided meditation that follows the introductory speech is important).
Obviously, the interpretation of a skeptic materialist capable to experience this "true self" and observe their ego is going to be it hardly has anything to do with any kind of absolute and probably is not a real object (needless to say shared between everybody) but just a sort of feeling produced by our bodies.
I believe neither of these interpretations can be rationally proven correct or wrong (it's a transcendental matter) but regardless to which one do you stick to it seems fairly easy to recognize that your feelings, your beliefs, your addictions, your DNA and dopamine receptors are you in the same degree as your left hand thumb is.
Keeping consciously aware of this as constantly as possible may gift a person with an amazing level of emotional balance and having the direct experience of "the true self" can strengthen it to an incredible level (and as a bonus probably let you actually feel less pain when it hurts physically[2]). Deep recognition of the Buddhist interpretation ("rigpa") also gives an awesome sense of union with everybody and everything, blissful presence in every single moment and sets your free of sorrow and worrying.
Are we not a little bit our car and our github account though? Growing up I wondered whether you could peel the banana all the way to its core of nothingness.
As for me it took me about 30 years of wondering before I've suddenly found it (by stumbling upon this fairly fun Buddhist monk lecture[1] while being extremely depressed and afraid and searching through YouTube looking for some psychological technique to relieve that). Whatever what I've found is from the philosophic or spiritual point of view, from the pragmatic point of view it seems an extremely powerful key to emotional well-being.
AFAIK there is a fair amount of scientific research effort taking place around mindfulness and other Buddhist stuff, perhaps sooner or later this is going to draw some scientific attention too. By the way, it seems at least some scientifically-minded people happen to come to similar ideas occasionally, e.g. I've recently stumbled upon similar concepts in a book by Itzhak Bentov and was delighted by his scientific manner of exploration of the question of "life, universe, and everything".
Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes, by Charles Seife
One item discussed in the book that we as humans may just be a transport method for the data within DNA to survive time. Because without some replication it would get trapped and cease to exist.
We aren't just a product of that, we are also a product of human sexual selection and epigenetic inheritance of individually acquired traits. Many of your important traits (such as general intelligence) were acquired in part by conscious processes by your ancestors.
That's a bit circular...I may choose to breed with someone, but i do that because I find them attractive (because DNA tells me what is attractive), because my (known in humans to be inaccurate) risk assessment says it is worth it, etc.
Plus, of the countless decisions I make every day, almost none of them are conscious. I can retroactively justify them as if they had been, but studies show we are far less conscious thinkers than we think we are.
Ultimately, until we resolve the mind-body problem, we cant say that our decisions are based on more than a chaotic soup of interacting proteins and electrical sparks that are only marginally distinct from our environment.
I think selection for intelligence was a feedback loop. I think you're interpreting my idea as circular, and I disagree.
Here's what I think was part of what lead to the development of large brains (and general intelligence). Keep in mind that biology and psychology are not my fields.
Intelligence was inherently advantageous for humans because they allowed us to operate better in different environments. That's where natural selection took effect.
Human tribes were and are (like most populations of social species) characterized by hierarchies, particularly among males in the species. Females tended to choose (and still tend to choose, as far as we can tell) males higher up in social hierarchies when all else is equal (just like most social species, even favoring position in a hierarchy more highly than most other traits). If a tribe has many different possible kinds of hierarchies for males (e.g. they inhabit many different kinds of environments), then one trait that enables a male to do well across many hierarchies is general intelligence. When females select males as high up the hierarchy as possible (in general), they are in effect sexually selecting for intelligence.
I think something similar likely happened with males selecting females with higher intelligence, but it was likely more subtle of a process than I can grasp, since males tend to mate far less selectively than females among humans (and most other animal species), which complicates it quite a bit for me.
Also, just because a choice is unconscious does not mean it is illogical. Many unconscious human choices are quite logical and make a lot of sense, but are not well suited to our current environment.
The photo-electric radiation emitting from my computer monitor is considerably more than marginally distinct from the chaotic soup of interacting proteins and electrical sparks in my brain. Just a few seconds ago, I, of which my brain is certainly a part of, made a decision based off of the computer monitor that is in my environment.
Grappling with chaos and complex interacting and intertwining systems is very difficult. It helps to not be led too astray by the easier to access tools we have (such as verbal language), which help, but many of which are woefully inadequate towards a coherent understanding of these issues.
You cannot choose to breed with someone who is already dead. Even if you succeed in breeding with someone (alive), if their genes are not very good your children won't live to breed.
Thus if intelligence is a factor at all in survival (and it seems like it should be) your ancestors may not have had a choice but to select for intelligent.
> Thus if intelligence is a factor at all in survival (and it seems like it should be) your ancestors may not have had a choice but to select for intelligent.
And this explains the large collection of (in our understanding) not-terribly-intelligent creatures on the planet how?
Not trying to be snarky, just pointing out that intelligence is just one of many paths, and it's very hard to have strong conclusion about how something so rare fares in evolution, and if the tend will maximize or if it pays off to be "just a little" intelligent, just like it pays to be "just a little" able to swim.
There's also the possibility that our concept of intelligence is totally wrapped up in our very anthropomorphic worldview. And we're simply incapable of understanding forms of intelligence that aren't distinctly our own.
Thus my "in our understanding" - I personally believe our view of intelligence, sapience, and self-awareness is pretty limited even from what we CAN relate to. It is easier to go through life we if assume the status quo of understanding.
I didn't mean to imply intelligence was a large factor, it need not be. There are thousands of factors, some more important than others. Some are even in direct conflict (intelligence is in fact in direct conflict with not needing too much energy to survive hard times - even while potentially providing more energy for those hard times). What humans have found successful doesn't say anything about about what any other animal will/should find successful.
So, while yes, we have lots of fmri data that suggests our mind makes decisions for us, then convinces us that we made the decision conciously. I suspect it's a mistake to take this to the logical conclusion that we can make no conscious decisions.
Even if consciousness is a complete illusion that our mind fabricated for us, we still seem to have some control over our reactions. I say this as someone who is teaching my children better reactions to what life throws at them, and similarly having to mediate my own responses to mistakes they make.
Even if all this is happening at the margin, that seems to be enough for us to have some profound differences in how successful we are at navigating life.
> I suspect it's a mistake to take this to the logical conclusion that we can make no conscious decisions.
And I don't! I consider it unproven, but a duality option definitely remains an option. Plus, there's always the default excuse that if I assume consciousness is reality when I can't in fact decide, well, then I can't be blamed for coming to that conclusion :)
That said, I think we really need to pay attention to how many "conscious" decisions we don't bother to be conscious for. I have a personal theory that consciousness is a state that is generally invoked only when the mind doesn't have a preset behavior - consciousness is invoked to ponder "what if" and decide what to do. Once we have prescribed behavior, consciousness shuts down. Thus, we might be "conscious" for only a few hours or even less in an average day. If so, we CAN be self-aware more often, but it takes effort.
Side Note: This theory is based in part on the idea that there's an advantage in minimizing conscious time - be that caloric requirements or an innate danger of being too aware. I've recently read some claims that hurt the caloric argument (brains are high caloric things, but that doesn't mean consciousness requires more calories) but the innate dangers of overthinking remain strong but vague and anecdotal.
Finding ways to make and support this theory without lapsing into it being an automatic (and thus not trigging awareness) response gets more tricky each time :)
Genetic inheritance via epigenetic pathways is extremely rare and basically irrelevant. It explains essentially 0% of the evolved traits that you see in humans and other complex organisms.
And none of our important traits were acquired by conscious processes on the parts of our ancestors, unless you mean by that statement that our ancestors consciously endeavored to further their own interests and as a side effect of this, we evolved the way we did. But if that's what you meant, it's a really disingenuous way to describe basic natural selection.
>Genetic inheritance via epigenetic pathways is extremely rare and basically irrelevant. It explains essentially 0% of the evolved traits that you see in humans and other complex organisms.
I would like a source to read more about this. I don't distrust you. I'm genuinely interested in reading more about this.
>And none of our important traits were acquired by conscious processes on the parts of our ancestors
I think humans sexually select for intelligence, because it's a trait that affects how high up a human can climb across different social hierarchies.
> I would like a source to read more about this. I don't distrust you. I'm genuinely interested in reading more about this.
Sorry, I don't have a source. Epigenetic changes in somatic cells (all the cells in your body except for your sperm or egg cells) are common and necessary for the differentiation that takes place as cells divide and multiply to create a growing organism. But epigenetic inheritance is rare, because epigenetic changes can only be inherited if they somehow change the DNA in germ line cells (sperm or eggs). There just aren't many plausible ways for stuff that happens in the environment to modify the DNA in sperm or eggs. The most plausible way would be for some sort of systemic stress. And, IIRC, one of the only known instances of epigenetic inheritance was a result of starvation.
But, more generally, epigenetic inheritance has to be rare. Evolution is a balancing act. On the one hand you need some mutation, because otherwise there is no variation against which natural selection can act. But on the other hand, you need to limit the amount of mutation so that beneficial genes can persist through time (otherwise they cease to be beneficial), and so that the crazy house of cards that is a developing organism doesn't collapse.
If you know anything about how complex organisms work, it's absolutely insane. There is almost none of the abstraction and encapsulation that we use in engineering to manage complexity. Instead, everything effects everything else. Evolution is like building a computer program by mutating individual bits in a binary program. If you play that out in a massively parallel fashion over billions of iterations, you can get some programs that do really cool stuff.
But they would be incredibly brittle. It would be incredibly easy to crash the whole thing by mutating the wrong bit. And these types of catastrophic mutations seem pretty common in complex organisms. Among humans, the miscarriage rate is 30%-50% (according to Wikipedia; look up the Miscarriage article). A significant number of those are believed to be caused by the female rejecting the fetus because of defects of some kind.
All of this is a long way of saying that it's simply not believable that there is some process which is introducing significant mutation into the reproductive process.
Perhaps the gene that makes people more prone to addiction also makes them take more risk or work harder? You can't just delete shit from an extremely complex system and expect it will just work.
There are so many more things than substances to be addicted to. Psychological dependence on certain behaviors can be just as strong as physical dependence on a substance.
It looks like this study is focused on drug addiction which on its own is really intriguing, but I wonder if there would be any evidence in the human genome to predict behavioral addiction.
Genetic test that could tell you: "You most likely won't develop physical addiction to cocaine." would be a game changer in some demanding professions.
Most people could use cocaine as safely as caffeine but since you have no idea if you get addicted or not mostly dumb people try and some suffer greatly.
I'm still not totally sure how the "causation" part is proven. Just because the genes must have already existed in human beings long before there were drugs? Not sure if this is totally convincing though sure, that is indeed stronger than many other cases as proving causation is really difficult.
Is it a particular SNP marker/mutation of the RASGRF2 gene? In my genetic report there are 99 such markers, I'm wondering if a specific one is mentioned in the paper.
I have some bad news for you: your perception of free will is a by-product of your ignorance of how your brain works. Every decision you think you make is actually just a bunch of neurons firing, and those neurons were built by your DNA.
Detaching a comment means removing it from its original parent (the comment it replied to) and making it a top-level comment of the thread instead. Usually, but not always, we do that in order to mark it off topic so it can rank lower on the page.
More like: "We detached this subthread which spawned the most interesting discussion in this comment tree because we are addicted to controlling the conversation and we want things to conform to our social justice agenda - nothing controversial is allowed here."
I'm glad you found it interesting. As you can see, it's still here to be enjoyed.
The problem is that generic topics like "do we have free will" frequently balloon into large discussions that crowd out the more specific topic at hand. If we didn't moderate HN this way, HN threads would consist mostly of the same generic discussions repeated over and over. I'm pretty sure the community wouldn't agree that it "produces negative value" to prevent that from happening, even though we don't always make the right calls.
No one actually believes this, including you. You may say you do, and even think you do, but you don’t. Everyone acts as if they and others around them possess free will. We act that way because that’s what we believe.
Honestly, I don’t think we understand enough about consciousness and how it arises from physical brains/bodies to make such an extraordinary claim like “there is no free will,” when the entire history of human thought and philosophy presupposes that there is.
Don't assume we have a free will when debating if we do :)
If we don't have a free will, then the fact that we believe in free will is irrelevant, and you cannot deduce that we believe in it from the fact that we act as if we believed in it.
Free will is most probably a quirk of language, an answer to a misleading question based on wrong assumptions. There are no difference in the state of universe no matter if there is free will or not.
This philosophical line of thinking is without much basis. In certain Buddhist teachings is the idea that we really only have about 60% free will. That is, 40% of our actions are not something we ever could have done differently, but there's still room for plenty of actual choice. Personally this seems pretty high, but even 10% truly self-directed free will would still be astounding.
There's no scientific understanding of where exactly consciousness is rooted, so if you take that to assume it means there's no such thing as conscious choice, I conclude you are a fatalistic downer who I don't want to hang with.
>BTW - why is lack of free will a downer? I perceive is as neutral.
Not the GP, but lack of free will implies that people have no agency over their actions, and hence can't really take pride in anything they've accomplished. They're just squishy robots following their programming and lying to themselves about why they do the things they do.
Or at least that's one depressing way to interpret it.
I'm pretty sure that I'm in a better position to know what I actually believe than you are, and I'm telling you, I really do believe this. There are only three possibilities: either free will is an illusion, or dualism is true, or consciousness is the result of unknown new physics. The first is by far the most likely from a scientific point of view, and the evidence for it is actually pretty overwhelming.
But just because it's an illusion doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't live your life as if it were real. It's a very compelling illusion as long as you don't know how the trick is done, and so far, we don't.
I don't think the evidence is overwhelming at all.
Free will isn't an illusion so much as a misleading oversimplification of a complex concept.
The traditional philosophical notion of free will assumes a kind of perfectly rational Platonic ideal of a thinking human who carefully weighs all future options before acting.
This is clearly nonsense, and should have been called out as nonsense much earlier in history.
In reality free will is a mash-up of all kinds of influences - rationality, misguided belief, instinct, genetics influencing brain structure and hormonal balance, culture, previous experience - in varying proportions.
They add up to a kind of meta-freedom - not necessarily rational, but not particularly easy to predict or control with any precision.
Your sense of self isn't aware of these influences, but that won't stop you acting with some form of independent agency - and that's still true even if there's a gap between your conscious model of your motivations, and the soup of real motivations that drives you.
+1. The moral basis for much of our societal rules and behaviors is unsound if free will is incompatible with biology. We in the US do so many things based on Puritan moral views that are so very harmful and counterproductive to our goals, based on an incorrect understanding of how the world works.
The existence of punishment changes the inputs to the system and, thus, changes the outputs of the system. The system in this case being the mind and it's output being behavior.
But the very existence of ethics is in danger in absence of free will. Existence : as in, whom do you blame for hanging the terrorist ? The lawyers, judges, jury, witnesses did not have free well : so it was inevitable that the terrorist be hanged.
> What decisions do you make differently with your knowledge that free will is an illusion? What choices do you make differently?
Interestingly, my belief in the illusory nature of free will has had a huge impact on my life. I'm a much more laid-back person than I used to be. I don't stress out so much over making mistakes. It has also helped me in a lot of practical aspects of my life. For example, it has helped me lose weight. I think about my desire to eat as my brain playing a sort of a trick on me, and that makes it easier for me to "decide" not to give in to the craving. I treat the part of me that wants to eat the cookie as a separate entity from "me" that just happens to reside in the same brain, and I interact with it through internal dialogs like I would a small child. It sounds weird, but it works, at least for me. I'm almost down to the same weight I was in college (and I'm 54).
Erm ... it seems to me that if there was no free will then your beliefs couldn't have any actual consequences at all, they and your cookie cravings are just different aspects of the unfolding of the universe
His beliefs are also a part of the unfolding of the universe, and as such his beliefs also have consequences even if he has no control over what he actually believes.
It's a throwaway comment, but perhaps (as with most problems of philosophy) the problem is really semantic? What does "will" really mean, in free will? It imagines a little person sitting in my head piloting my body. It seems equally plausible that there is no central "me", I'm just a competing mess of programs running in my brain (at varying levels of abstraction), with the gut biome being the BIOS. There may be a hypervisor in there somewhere, but that's the most you can hope for in terms of rational direction. Everything runs in parallel, and the part I think of as "me" rationalizes decisions after the fact.
Horizontal gene transfer? A literal virus that changes who you are. It's interesting to think that by going paleo or vegan you can perhaps become another "person"...
> The first is by far the most likely from a scientific point of view, and the evidence for it is actually pretty overwhelming.
Not really, few physicists have tried to explain consciousness - Roger Penrose being a notable exception - and no physicist has ever sufficiently explained how artifacts like the complete works of Shakespeare come about. They seem to have been invented by Shakespeare but if Shakespeare had no free will to invent them, then were did they come from? While we're at it, where does the continuum and the mathematical structures between real numbers come from? Are real numbers even physically possible? I've read a paper once that argued that they cannot be physically realized, because that would violate the laws of thermodynamics (and a few others, too). What about the rest of mathematics like perfect squares or functions that cannot be computed? Are these illusions?
In a nutshell, there is a whole lot that physics cannot explain, including all of human culture. That's the gist of Popper's three worlds argument. Physicists surely claim that the physical world is closed, but they haven't provided any arguments that go much beyond "human culture is super complex but we believe we could in principle explain it somehow with our theories".
Now Popper argued for some not too plausible dualism, but the central negative part of his argument still stands.
As for explanations, I agree that not many good ones are on the table and maybe the Philosophy of Mind confuses more than it clarifies. My personal favorite speculative theory is a rare form of computationalism, namely the position that some computations might have consciousness as an emergent property when they run on a suitable physical device, and that in theory we could even be able to determine which class of computations these are by mere analytical insight, provided we have the proper conceptual tools. Computationalism is not very popular in philosophy, though.
I don't understand why we would look to physics when consciousness is a product of neurobiology. Yes the principles of chemistry are physical principles and biology is based around chemistry, but that doesn't mean looking at the behavior of particles can explain the entire system besides some minor insight on how parts of it physically interact.
I'd argue that there are more than three possibilities. One addition, for example, is that the concept of free will is under-defined and an intelligible conversation can't be had about it. I encourage you to define free will without resorting to synonyms like volition, free choice, and the likes.
In order to define "free will" as in "I have free will" or "We have free will" first we have to define who "I" or "We" is and I'm not sure we have accurately done that yet.
Who (or more precisely what component of "us") is it exactly is it that has free will? The ethereal eternal soul (which is that anything but an imagined property of conscious beings)? The meat abacus in our heads? the nerves in our arms?
I believe it. Free will is an illusion, humans are just biological automatons, along with every other animal. Thinking you have free will doesn't change whether or not you actually have free will. Just as someone believing they are intelligent doesn't make them intelligent.
Experiment: you decide to do something and keep doing necessary things, putting all distractions aside, until you get there. Was that decision and perseverance towards the goal given to you by some viral DNA mutation, or is there a chance there might be some free will in you?
There's literally no way to know whether this is true or not, so it's not worth discussing as if any one of us knows what the truth is. If you feel like you have free will, that's important. If you feel like you don't, oh well, but don't let your beliefs interfere with other people's choices (or their deterministic actions, in this case).
I believe that the vast majority of people are effectively mechanical. Very few people notice and remember themselves. Maybe one in 10^6 or fewer.
There's a old Buddhist story, you're in a small boat on a lake in a thick fog, you can barely see beyond your boat. Out of the fog comes another boat that crashes into yours, and you start to yell at the other boater to be careful, but a break in the fog reveals that no one is in the boat. You've been yelling at nothing.
For me, either the other person is present, and therefore harmless, or they are absent, and therefore blameless. In any event, it's wrong to get upset or angry. However, one should take steps to prevent damage to boats.
Two things: it's been shown that, by the time you consciously decide to act, your neurons have already been increasing in activity for ~100ms. In other words, it's been scientifically shown that our conscious experience of "free will" is preceded by unconscious nervous activity. Make of that what you will. ;-) Pun intended.
Second, when you observe a person while remembering yourself it affects them. I've seen burly lads transform into scared little boys under a mindful gaze. When you're present people don't punch you.
That depends. Do you suffer from schizophrenia? Did I provoke you? Was it an accident? There are a lot of circumstances under which I would not blame you.
If you punched me without provocation, with no evidence of mental illness, and did it "deliberately" [1] then I will "blame" you because that's the only way I know of to defend myself against future attacks.
[1] Note that "deliberately" in a world without free will just means "as a result of unknown causes inside your brain". The more we learn about how the brain works, the fewer pathological behaviors can be labeled "deliberate". "Free will" is a sort of "god-of-the-gaps" if neuroscience.
So if you believed I punched you deliberately, but also believed no action of yours would keep me from punching you again, does that mean you would do nothing?
Then do it you wont unless your DNA thinks the reward you get for validating your assumptions is greater then the consequences of your actions. Likewise for the person your debating. That's why internet debates are so much worse than in person way less consequence for your actions.
Indeed i will, but now you move the goalpost to the definition of "blame". Even if both of us are deterministic zombies who just care for our self-preservation, i would create a mental note ("blame") for me to find ways to discourage your behavior. Somewhere along those lines the concept of blame is born, but one could claim that it is a deterministic mental variable. Indeed i would blame anything that hits me as if it had agency, if i can't see it. Like xerxes lashing the waves, i could be angry at a rock for falling on my face (and indeed anger follows pain), it's just that i know that fighting back at the rock is no benefit to me.
Why? If I have a free will then I blame you because I choose to.
If I don't have a free will then I blame you because that's how my brain is programmed (which is BTW most probably caused by optimization of social behavior by evolution - it's better for our genes if we punish violent behavior, so that's how our brains are constructed). There's no need to assume free will.
There's no difference in behavior that depends on existence of free will.
> There's no difference in behavior that depends on existence of free will.
Ah, but you are forgetting a major part of how brain works. Brain models both our own and others behavior. If your brain knows you don't have free will and I don't have free will, it will not fault me for not having a thing I am supposed to not be having.
If it doesn't have free will, brain can assign a response, but not blame. You can't have the notion of blame if you don't have a concept of free will. Same way you can't express certain colors, if you lack the words for it.
> If your brain knows you don't have free will and I don't have free will, it will not fault me for not having a thing I am supposed to not be having.
Punishment decreases the odds of repeated offence. It doesn't matter if it's because you have free will, or simply because you learnt not to do that because your internal neural network were taught not to do that or it hurts.
I'm pretty sure I can make a simulation with agents punishing each other. Doesn't mean they have a free will.
> You can't have the notion of blame if you don't have a concept of free will
I have a notion of free will. I just don't believe it's true. I can model beliefs of Muslims without believing in Allah.
> Same way you can't express certain colors, if you lack the words for it.
Bad example. I can express any color I can see with 3 real numbers. There's infinitely many of them and my vocabulary is finite.
> Fun fact, when people read about not having free will, they are more likely to lie/cheat on a test.
And when they drink they are more likely to do stuff they later regret. Environment influences the brain in many ways. Doesn't mean there is a free will.
> Punishment decreases the odds of repeated offence.
So does running away. However, the issue here is existence of blame.
> I can model beliefs of Muslims without believing in Allah.
Yeah, but you can't model belief without knowing what believing in something entails. Same thing with my example. You model behavior of others based on your experience. You think others have free will because you believe you do. Or not.
My own position is that while free will might or might not be illusion, it's a useful one. Like justice, mercy or love - that sort of thing.
I don't believe in free will because of a simple thought experiment. Maybe someone with a background in ML can chime in.
Imagine we could perfectly map all your brain's neural connections at an instant in time to software. This is not out of the realm of possibility in the future, right? Now imagine we "asked" that model to make a decision. Any decision. Wouldn't that frozen-in-time model give the same answer every time?
I use the same line of thought, but without any modeling. Suppose you could go back in time to a major decision in your life and make it over. But you arrive at that same point in time, with all of the same information you had, no new information about the future, with all of the same hormonal and biochemistry etc. Is there any way you could have chosen differently than what you did? I don't see how. Unless you want to introduce randomness, but that's also not choice.
This is not possible because of quantum mechanics. You cannot know the exact location and speed of particles in your brain and therefore cannot build a deterministic model to predict its behavior.
Chaos theory is enough if you accept imperfect measurements, which would result in small changes in initial conditions. But you need quantum mechanics to prove that you cannot have perfect measurements of all the quantities involved in the evolution of a system.
It might give the same answer, but I'm not concluding much from the thought-experiment. The model takes as input its environment, which includes its past decisions. If you pose the same question to it twice, it might choose to do something different the second time just because it weighs "whimsy" as a positive. How random is its RNG? Can it tell? What would it do differently if it knew the answer to these questions?
For me, the most important aspect of free will is to be able to predict the outcomes and consequences of my choices, use that as feedback to select which decision to make.
For me, acting as if people possess free will is a conscious decision. When I'm tired, I sometimes slip into my natural mode of thinking of everyone as automatons. I have to choose to believe that people are conscious. I have to remind myself that people are not merely robots, or even if they are, it's self-destructive if I think of them as robots.
If there is no free will, then the word "choose" is not a special word that implies consciousness. The word "choose" simply means particles flow one direction instead of another due to some combination of other particle flows. Therefore, whether I have free will or not, yes I did choose to believe.
Yes, there is a part of me that seems solipsistic. There is also another part that sees myself as an automaton along with everyone else. And there is yet another who reasons that at some level of sophistication, it's impossible to distinguish between automatons and beings with free will; I no longer care whether I have free will and rejoice in living along with everyone else.
The concept of free-will is so preposterous, baseless like souls or ghosts; because lack of understanding how the brain works doesn't make what happens inside it more metaphysical.
Free will is a subjective experience we all have, no matter what we believe. Talking about it in terms of Physics is kinda barking up the wrong tree afaics
Not really the entire history of human thought; the actual philosophers who thought differently were harshly persecuted, their books burned, or if they saw it coming did not even dare to publish their true thoughts...
Whenever free will comes up I like to bring up Conway's Free Will Theorem[1].
If you define free will as future choices cannot be predicted based on history, then it turns out that if humans have free will, so do elementary particles. To me, this doesn't mean we don't have free will, but instead the linear, deterministic model that's often used to discount free will is just not how the universe works.
Note that this result does not depend on statistical randomness like some of quantum mechanics, but just three simple axioms. I highly recommend reading the full paper, especially the end, "Free Will Versus Determinism".
Actually free will is one of those delicious unanswerable questions that everyone has a different answer for. Think about this for a moment -- what would be different about the world or human behavior if we had free will versus if we didn't?
Talking about free will is just another way to have a conversation about God.
Can't believe I'm being drawn into this, but in my view knowing an outcome doesn't mean controlling it. It simply means knowing it. In the case of your proposed definition of God's omniscience, it helps to picture God existing outside of our timeline. If God can see the entirety of history and the future as if it were a long thread, then it's more like he's watching a video of something that already happened. To Him, in many ways, it already has. So just because you're watching a replay of a football game doesn't mean the outcome was already decided from the beginning. It just means you know the story already because you're operating from a more privileged position in the timeline from which knowing the outcome becomes natural to you.
The fallacy here is in assuming the time perspective of God to be equivalent to our own.
Not when time is considered, in my view. Reference back to the football example. You can watch a replay of a football game where the outcome is already decided because you're literally in the future. But it wasn't decided before the game was played. So from God's perspective, yes the game has already been played and the ending is known.
I hope I'm not insulting you, none is intended, but it seems to me that most theories that attempt to remove God and/or free will from reality are a thin veneer over a desire to be without responsibility. The only thing I have to add that I think we both agree on is that truth is indeed concrete, and what we choose (or sadly, think we are coerced) to believe has no bearing on it.
Another similar thought experiment. Assume people have free will. What if you could go in the future, read a book and learn everything that someone did in their life. Would that contradict free will?
You can actually do that experiment. What you can't do is, after having gone into the future and read the book, is go back in time with that knowledge intact. And there's a very good reason why you can't:
Don't take away the illusion of free will when you can't give it back. Some people might actually like to think that they have free will. Or at least you could ask them which pill they want beforehand ;-)
One of many holes in this theory is that the mind that believes it has free will is also the one that created the conceptual model of neurons, so we could also be wrong about that too.
This is, in my opinion, the main flaw with Naturalism. If Naturalism is true, then no truth can be discerned (not even the concept of Naturalism itself). It's an argument for futility. It's actually a pretty dated argument, though. C.S. Lewis even spoke on the subject:
> If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us-like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform.
>Every decision you think you make is actually just a bunch of neurons firing
That's like saying "matter is just a bunch of atoms". The reality is not so certain. Our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality (physics) and consciousness (neuroscience/psychology) is still highly theoretical.
> Our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality (physics) and consciousness (neuroscience/psychology) is still highly theoretical.
It's much more than that. No experiment has ever been done that contradicts either GR or the Standard Model. So unless the operation of the brain depends on new, undiscovered physics, we do in fact have all the information we need in order to completely understand the operation of the brain, at least in principle.
Nah, it's much deeper than that as you well know. The word "just" implies there's nothing more to be explained.
>No experiment has ever been done that contradicts either GR or the Standard Model.
The Standard Model is an incomplete theory that fails to explain many physical phenomenon. Let's not pretend otherwise.
>So unless the operation of the brain depends on new, undiscovered physics, we do in fact have all the information we need in order to completely understand the operation of the brain, at least in principle.
So you admit we don't actually know that consciousness is "just neurons firing", you're just extrapolating?
Sure, but atoms are an extremely good approximation to the truth in the regime in which human brains operate.
> The Standard Model ... fails to explain many physical phenomenon.
Yeah? Like what?
> you're just extrapolating?
Of course. Until we have a full understanding of the human brain, there will be things about its behavior about which we must extrapolate (that's what "not having a full understanding" means). But I'm extrapolating from some pretty damned good data and some pretty damned solid math. So I am highly confident in this extrapolation.
Even still, we shouldn't state theoretical extrapolations as if they are facts. It's the difference between saying "x is caused by y" and "I think x is probably caused by y".
Just because I love arguing about free will, and because I feel like a lot of the time people are not all talking about the same thing when they say "free will", would some of you be willing to tell me what you think "free will" means?
Please say what you sincerely think free will means, and try not to give me strawman or devil's advocate positions on what you think your opponents think it means, if you would be so kind.
This is only bad news to people like you. In theory, finding out whether free will truly exists or not should make absolutely no difference to our lives because the universe would continue on the same way regardless. Only pessimists let such knowledge prevent them from doing things.
You have a choice, but that choice is nothing more than the combination of your DNA and your combined experiences. I mean were all in our own space time and we have no "free will" over the past, but the past affects our "free will" so it acts using something slower than light. Our brain is worse than computers unless we have no free will?
I see nothing here that suggests the link is causative. It could very well be that the toll of being an addict compromises the immune system leading to conditions that most people never get.
It's not hard to test this hypothesis. All they have to do is look if the elderly show the same pattern as addicts. If they do, it suggest that a weakened immune system leaves the body vulnerable.
So what does this say about all the studies on rats, dogs, and all the other animals we have been using to study addiction? The rats that choose cocaine over food, are they running a different retrovirus?
The researchers found that the presence of RASGRF2 in their sample populations went from 6% to 14% and 9.5% to 34% when comparing controls to chronic drug abusers.
So this means that addiction is a complex, multi-factor condition, and these researchers may have identified another factor. People with this gene may be predisposed to addictive behaviors but not behave that way for any number of environmental or other reasons; likewise, people without the gene may still develop addictive behaviors.
The researchers didn't study rats or dogs, so there isn't much in the way of evidence for this gene's presence in those species.
There's a guy who did a drug abuse study on rats but not locked in cages. his theory was that being locked in a cage was different than being in a social environment. So he built a habitat where rats could socialize with each other, use hamster wheels, and run around obstacles.
In this population he found that almost NONE of the rats did harmful amounts of the narcotics-laced water. (He was using opiates as his "drug of choice.")
So his theory is that a) many animal models of addiction are wrong because they use animals in very confined spaces b) maybe people who feel "trapped" in their life are more prone to developing addiction, and we should be treating addiction as a social disease.
This brings home the point Sam Harris makes often in his writing and blog (and books [1]): Our subjective experience of free will and being in control is largely an illusion.
I used to find that very depressing, but now made peace with compatibilism (the notion that determinism and free will are compatible) [2][3].
Sam Harris objects to compatibilism: both argue that determinism is true, but Harris thinks that thus we have no free will, while compatibilists argue that we still have the "free will worth having" (see the book by Dennett [4]).
Harris and Dennett had an insightful podcast/debate on that [5].
I don't know why this is downvoted. I read Sam Harris' book on free will and it was really good. FabHK's comment is a valuable addition to the discussion.
Human Endogenous Retrovirus-K HML-2 integration within RASGRF2 is associated with intravenous drug abuse and modulates transcription in a cell-line model
Not all humans have the same HK2 viruses in their genomes. Here we show that one specific uncommon HK2, which lies close to a gene involved in dopaminergic activity in the brain, is more frequently found in drug addicts and thus is significantly associated with addiction. We experimentally show that HK2 can manipulate nearby genes. Our study provides strong evidence that uncommon HK2 can be responsible for unappreciated pathogenic burden, and thus underlines the health importance of exploring the phenotypic roles of young, insertionally polymorphic HK2 integrations in human populations.
...
Based on our cell-line experiments, we suggest that RASGRF2-int leads to enhancement of dopaminergic activity through higher expression of the first exons of RASGRF2, which then results in increased potential for addiction.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27977239
Geoffrey West touches upon some of this stuff in scale - its worth a read
https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainabi...
Oversimplification is that some of the viruses / genetic defects that kill us later let us live long enough to reproduce first and pass those traits/infections along.
With regard to addictive behaviour, some research has suggested addictions are neuro amine addictions, ie andrenaline, dopamine & serotonin. Cocaine for example last in the body for upto 2hrs and amplifies dopamine and serotonin, so being addicted to feeling good is understandable, however serotonin also plays a part in the innate immune system and the association between depression and illness has also long been known. The medical profession SSRI's inhibit the uptake of serotonin in the brain, which reduces the brains ability to convert it into melatonin (4x more potent than Vit C), plus not much can cross the blood brain barrier so the adapative immune can not work in the brain, eyes, gonads, ovaries. So whilst SSRI's can make you feel good, like everything in life it can also have its side effects because we are a bundle of realtime complex pathways oscillating in time and space.
One other point of risk taking behaviour, some of you may have noticed when you feel like you are going down with something like a cold or flu, you may also feel the need to procreate before the illness takes hold. This would suggest an evolutionary response to pass on genes, but excessive amounts of chemicals which can harm the body can also cause this behaviour as well, illegal drugs & alcohol being examples. ie did you know that smokers have elevated levels of copper in their blood stream? This is probably due to the need to deal with the risk of foreign bodies coming into the blood stream through the lungs, but copper and iron is also required to prevent anemia, which in turn is required to make red blood cells, plus its also known that elite atheletes, people living at high altitude and smokers have enlarged red blood cells. Plus smoking can also be a form of self medication if an asthma inhaler is not available, asthma being a type of allergic reaction to debris or pathogens inhaled, most commonly being from pets or pollution. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17435678 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17435678
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERV-W
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERV-FRD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus
I could see difficulties if there were multiple copies in different places or some such that would make a naive test non-diagnostic.
For anyone interested in further reading on the topic I highly recommend information available from the Institute For Addiction Study (https://www.theinstituteforaddictionstudy.org/).
Let's lovingly apply science to criminalization of people being human, rather than criminalizing human behavior. Let's not seek to punish. Let's start exploring other solutions spaces.
As I understand common animal training wisdom and the literature, punishment (+P/-R, in conditioning circles) does work. It just needs to be applied only when necessary, and in the right way. Punishment to avert a behavior is supposed to be short-duration and immediately after the behavior is observed. Judicial punishment fails on both counts. It also is supposed to be done only when the (natural) consequences of the misbehavior are potentially dire, or when the animal already knows what they're supposed to do, and is misbehaving due to some other drive.
But the judicial system of punishment is great for creating predators (prisons are great for reinforcing predatory behavior, on both sides of the bars), and it's also great for mis-training people to try to avoid getting caught, or to fight to the death in court, instead of training them to avoid criminal behavior in the first place.
So in general I agree, that there are better methods than punishment, but for some it works.
Humanism is a relativly new concept. One worth pursuing, but maybe not blinded by idealism.
I believe it is worth the effort
> It was rather the norm. The strong eat the weak.
There are a variety of reasons for this. Different reasons have different most effective solutions. If we choose as our general solution something that has narrow scope of significant positive effect and wide scope of moderate negative effect, I'd say we've chosen poorly as that will harm society as a whole rather than help it. Which is why the hard task of getting those numbers is worth it.
I prefer to mix sciences of dynamics with love and mindful design. I've had a nuff* of the narratives of static sciences. What happens when we allow for resident psychopaths to shamelessly and fearlessly be themselves? Is that something we even have examples of happening, particularly where the dominant culture was a peaceful one of equanimity, autonomy, and interdependence? If we (humanity) haven't conducted that natural experiment, I'd love to give it a shot & work with them to answer the question of how can a community change to include them.
* I propose the unit of "nuff" as a subjective metric of satisfaction. What I say is a nuff is a nuff for me and what you say is a nuff is a nuff for you.
Going further, a lot of what we do unconciously is just what a virus or something else "did" to survive or spread in the past, and our free will isn't that free...
Edit: "did" wasn't meaning that a specific goal was set, for example, but just that the survival rate was better for certain configuration of atoms
The "addicts for life" is an American puritan view (by AA and other such groups) -- not some scientific fact. Certainly not the view everywhere in the world. You can have an alcoholic of 5-10 years that recovered and can still enjoy the occasional drink just fine without getting back to regular drinking.
"I don't like the word 'addict' because it has terrible connotations," Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as 'Morphiumsüchtig.' The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as 'morphine seeky' or even more loosely as 'morphine seeking.' I prefer 'seeky' because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.
"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It's leaky all the time--even if it's not raining at the moment. But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to 'addict,' because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe."
Süchtig is the adjective to Sucht (addiction), not to Suche (search), and although the etymological link is clear, there's nothing romantic or compassionate about the word.
That said, I do at least agree that your quote is rather particular to AA, and not shared by other programs, like SMART.
The reason I hesitate to dismiss the AA view is that it strikes me as quite possible that, for a subset of addicts, any kind of hope of moderation can be disastrous.
The way I see it, a less dichotomous perspective such as that of SMART is a better starting point than the 'once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic' approach of AA. And if SMART doesn't work, AA might very well be the only solution left.
This, absolutely this. And since it is impossible to know in advance if moderation is possible for a given person, AA optimizes for the worst case scenario and assumes that no one can handle moderation, which has the greatest likelihood of success for all who use this strategy.
I've kicked the habit once by NRT and once cold turkey. I'd gone well long enough for any physical withdrawal symptoms (many months).
Both times, I thought just one wouldn't hurt, socially. Both times I started right back up again.
There was a time I could smoke socially. I know people who did that and then went on to live a smoke free life. On the flip side, I've known smokers go years without and just one "oh go on then" hooked them right back on it.
So if nicotine addiction is anything to go by, it would be possible in other addictions too. Unfortunately, the only alcoholics I knew lost their battle and never achieved any semblance of sobriety. They were both at a point where the withdrawal would kill them without clinical supervision.
When it works, it works the best. When it doesn’t work, it’s a cliff. E.g. “20 years out the window”.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irr...
(Fun fact: when it started, it wasn't anonymous -- except one of the founders kept showing up drunk in public, and they realized this itself was pretty quickly debunking their success claims!)
The other important thing that AA does, which is quite critical, is get individuals with problems frequent, implicit counseling from others who have been through the same thing. This is very hard to get in modern life in most other ways. It's possible, but AA makes it the default process. You can throw away all the other stuff about AA and dismiss it, and you are still left with the fact social therapy in any form is very effective, and AA promotes that.
This isn't a distortion, this is the empirical view of AA.
As for explicitly unreligious, I would like to include the twelve steps here:
1) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10) Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
I am struggling to find an unreligious interpretation for steps 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, and 12, even if the "higher power" isn't an Abrahamic religion "God".
What's a spiritual awakening to an atheist?
Being a Christian myself, I know I function much better when I'm consciously in an attitude of trusting God -- it lets me relax and simply be who I am and do what I need to do, without worrying about "fixing things" outside of my control. (And yes, I do take an intellectually rigorous approach to my faith, but that's a different topic.)
Very magnanimous of them. But why would a rehabilitation program have a notion "of a higher power", and especially it's own notion of it?
this is a big if. the way AA is structured (they don't themselves collect any statistics about efficacy whatsoever) makes it extremely difficult to draw any conclusions about how helpful it is.
as other people have said, AA essentially provides free group therapy, which is likely to be at least slightly helpful. i'm not sure there's any evidence to suggest that the 12 steps or higher power aspect yield any benefits over generic group drug counseling.
[1] The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg : while not scientifically spotless, the book directly addresses the methods of AA. To successfully establish a change in habit, one needs a belief that I can change : there is some sound evidence presented in the book.
Smart Change, by Art Marckman : he is literally a scientist and I can't find anything scientifically incorrect in this book. He also mentions and gives evidence for the advantage of belief in one's ability to change : here the context is not directly AA.
I knew about this 'misunderstanding' that most people have about AA and its 'higher power' thing.
I actually attended meetings though, and their 'unreligious process' is actually anything but.
AA didn't work in their study.
Then again, it's basically all we have? I think my problem is when the AA beliefs are yelled at other members like they were laws.
As a former alcoholic, I was able to taper off alcohol myself. The doctor said I was being stupid. I wasen't going to spend my last 20 grand on a Rehab. I was a mess back then, but tapering off is what worked for myself.
(I personally feel many alcoholics have an underlying psychological problem that should be addressed.)
A couple of the chapters were fine, and listening to people tell stories of their experiences was great, but there is a heavy cult-like vibe pushed on you relentlessly at most.
They parrot on about the fact that you are helpless to effect change in your own life and without the group, you will inevitably drink again.
That turned me off completely and I never went back. Still haven't had a drink in a year since either.
I know a great many recovered individuals that tried everything to get clean and only found success (and more importantly satisfaction) in 12 step.
That ability is itself part of the fundamental biological nature of humans, or whatever. The way you phrased it suggests a Cartesian dualistic interpretation.
1) A large subset of people possess instincts that were successful for reproduction in the ancestral environment, but are no longer so. See also plummeting birth rates despite being at the historical peak in terms of access to resources for the average person (in the developed world, at least).
2) Some people's evolved instincts are to play a long game based on building reputation and then leveraging that reputation over the long term, rather than pursuing immediate wants and desires. Such an instinct will produce a lot of behavior that seems out of line with a naive interpretation of how we "should" be evolved to behave.
That's our bodies, not us. "Every time I find interesting (and fighting)" that people believe they are nothing but a collection of cells, chemicals and feelings. Most people (outside the audience of the HN perhaps) don't even recognize that the feelings are actually the chemicals and have little to do even with the objective reality, needless to say with their true self. Believing you are your body is almost the same as believing that you are your car or your GitHub account. That's not we, that's our bodies, our "cars" with baggage (memories etc) in them, in our true self "we are all Kosh" © Overwhelming majority of people just live in permanent "rubber hand illusion". Getting rid of the illusion and recalling who you actually are is, however, easy as 1-2-3: 1. get cousciously aware of your emotions and thoughts, distance from them and obseve them 2. turn your inner gaze from them to the direction of where do you feel you observe them from 3. recognize that what you see there (it looks like just nothing, just conscious "empty space") is the actual you and you will never be able to "unsee' that. One doesn't need any kind of religion or spirituality to realize this (although it actually is taught in the Tibetan religious tradition of Dzogchen), it is as simple as realizing the rubber hand is not a part of your body.
The obvious opposing view to what you've just expressed would be that you are your body, and that what you just described as your true self is merely one part of you introspecting about another part of you.
And of course, as far as I'm aware science can say nothing convincing about all of this at present so it's purely an exercise in philosophy and logic.
Not really, I am a non-dualist actually but introducing non-duality in the current context would be a way too off-topic and unnecessary. I prefer not to go into the spiritual stuff beyond what can be easily experienced by everyone unless asked by a person specifically interested in this kind of information.
> it's purely an exercise in philosophy and logic
It's not. It's of little use as long as it is. One has to experience that. That's why I've mentioned the rubber hand illusion. Imagine your hands have been covered from you since you very birth and you have been believing the rubber hands are your real hands for your whole life, then the cover is removed and you experience your actual hands for the first time - it feels like this (approximately). This is how I've got into Buddhism - all the major religions tell you unverifiable things and demand you to believe and here the whole clue is a thing we can experience directly. I've used a quote from the Babylon-5 show because it's a lot about this and you suddenly find yourself understanding the Vorlons' "Who are you?" and "We are all Kosh" after you experience that.
I also suspect this kind of realization may happen to render people nearly-immune to addictions, I would even do some sort of clinical testing if only I had enough money (by the way, some time ago we have already seen news about mindful people being scientifically proven feeling less pain here on HN).
> It's of little use as long as it is.
I didn't mean to imply uselessness; my previous comment was worded poorly. Aside from the spiritual aspects, logic and philosophy alone often manage to achieve (or form the basis of) incredibly useful things.
> the whole clue is a thing we can experience directly
The trouble I have with this is that trying to differentiate between "true self is separate from body" and "body is all there is" based on an experience seems to beg the question. If the former is true, then the experience is what it seems. But if the latter is true, then the experience itself is yet another bodily event - one that results in you (the body in this case) coming away with a false understanding.
A parallel might be someone who feels quite certain about a fact (ie experiences a sense of knowledge), but that "knowledge" later turns out to be false. In light of this, how can we use a direct experience to differentiate the above?
Of course this line of reasoning can be (repeatedly) applied to anything, so at some point I suppose we just have to accept that there are enough separate lines of evidence and that something is presumably true. But I don't think a single direct experience which itself involves the system in question (ie the body) is enough.
As an aside, my rambling on about unknowable-ness isn't intended as an attack against your interpretation of things but rather just general pondering of the (current?) limits of human knowledge and experience.
It seems that I will have to introduce the actual Buddhist (Nyingma/Bön Dzogchen) non-duality interpretation of this in a more or less simplified way to make it (including the "We are all Kosh" part) more clear but be warned, it may sound a way too bizarre. I don't insist it's true and my initial intention was to leave it for the people interested in going this way to discover on themselves as it makes little if any sense before the experience. Ready? The "true self" you can directly perceive this way is just one for every sentient being (my true self = your true self, "by reference" not just "by value", it's the same object, not just same class) and it is kind of the absolute, the only thing that actually exists, everything else (including our feelings and beliefs (our ego), bodies, cars, events and everything) is an emanation of it, like a wave on the surface of a lake. The idea of everything being just an emanation of yourself seems less weird or even rationally obvious if you apply this to "everything in your dreams" but the real life is considered to be a phenomenon of little fundamental difference from a dream. I am not a real guru and may probably explain the things wrong so whoever interested should better watch a lecture of the actual Buddhist (Bön) teacher[1] (it's rather fun, easy to listen and made as free of any religious mumbo-jumbo as possible, the chant in the beginning is very short but the guided meditation that follows the introductory speech is important).
Obviously, the interpretation of a skeptic materialist capable to experience this "true self" and observe their ego is going to be it hardly has anything to do with any kind of absolute and probably is not a real object (needless to say shared between everybody) but just a sort of feeling produced by our bodies.
I believe neither of these interpretations can be rationally proven correct or wrong (it's a transcendental matter) but regardless to which one do you stick to it seems fairly easy to recognize that your feelings, your beliefs, your addictions, your DNA and dopamine receptors are you in the same degree as your left hand thumb is.
Keeping consciously aware of this as constantly as possible may gift a person with an amazing level of emotional balance and having the direct experience of "the true self" can strengthen it to an incredible level (and as a bonus probably let you actually feel less pain when it hurts physically[2]). Deep recognition of the Buddhist interpretation ("rigpa") also gives an awesome sense of union with everybody and everything, blissful presence in every single moment and sets your free of sorrow and worrying.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frQVcizEkmI
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17935554
As for me it took me about 30 years of wondering before I've suddenly found it (by stumbling upon this fairly fun Buddhist monk lecture[1] while being extremely depressed and afraid and searching through YouTube looking for some psychological technique to relieve that). Whatever what I've found is from the philosophic or spiritual point of view, from the pragmatic point of view it seems an extremely powerful key to emotional well-being.
AFAIK there is a fair amount of scientific research effort taking place around mindfulness and other Buddhist stuff, perhaps sooner or later this is going to draw some scientific attention too. By the way, it seems at least some scientifically-minded people happen to come to similar ideas occasionally, e.g. I've recently stumbled upon similar concepts in a book by Itzhak Bentov and was delighted by his scientific manner of exploration of the question of "life, universe, and everything".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frQVcizEkmI
I agree that atoms are necessary, but how do we know they are sufficient for consciousness?
Can you prove the “nothing but” part?
Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes, by Charles Seife
One item discussed in the book that we as humans may just be a transport method for the data within DNA to survive time. Because without some replication it would get trapped and cease to exist.
Plus, of the countless decisions I make every day, almost none of them are conscious. I can retroactively justify them as if they had been, but studies show we are far less conscious thinkers than we think we are.
Ultimately, until we resolve the mind-body problem, we cant say that our decisions are based on more than a chaotic soup of interacting proteins and electrical sparks that are only marginally distinct from our environment.
Here's what I think was part of what lead to the development of large brains (and general intelligence). Keep in mind that biology and psychology are not my fields.
Intelligence was inherently advantageous for humans because they allowed us to operate better in different environments. That's where natural selection took effect.
Human tribes were and are (like most populations of social species) characterized by hierarchies, particularly among males in the species. Females tended to choose (and still tend to choose, as far as we can tell) males higher up in social hierarchies when all else is equal (just like most social species, even favoring position in a hierarchy more highly than most other traits). If a tribe has many different possible kinds of hierarchies for males (e.g. they inhabit many different kinds of environments), then one trait that enables a male to do well across many hierarchies is general intelligence. When females select males as high up the hierarchy as possible (in general), they are in effect sexually selecting for intelligence.
I think something similar likely happened with males selecting females with higher intelligence, but it was likely more subtle of a process than I can grasp, since males tend to mate far less selectively than females among humans (and most other animal species), which complicates it quite a bit for me.
Also, just because a choice is unconscious does not mean it is illogical. Many unconscious human choices are quite logical and make a lot of sense, but are not well suited to our current environment.
Grappling with chaos and complex interacting and intertwining systems is very difficult. It helps to not be led too astray by the easier to access tools we have (such as verbal language), which help, but many of which are woefully inadequate towards a coherent understanding of these issues.
Thus if intelligence is a factor at all in survival (and it seems like it should be) your ancestors may not have had a choice but to select for intelligent.
And this explains the large collection of (in our understanding) not-terribly-intelligent creatures on the planet how?
Not trying to be snarky, just pointing out that intelligence is just one of many paths, and it's very hard to have strong conclusion about how something so rare fares in evolution, and if the tend will maximize or if it pays off to be "just a little" intelligent, just like it pays to be "just a little" able to swim.
Even if consciousness is a complete illusion that our mind fabricated for us, we still seem to have some control over our reactions. I say this as someone who is teaching my children better reactions to what life throws at them, and similarly having to mediate my own responses to mistakes they make.
Even if all this is happening at the margin, that seems to be enough for us to have some profound differences in how successful we are at navigating life.
And I don't! I consider it unproven, but a duality option definitely remains an option. Plus, there's always the default excuse that if I assume consciousness is reality when I can't in fact decide, well, then I can't be blamed for coming to that conclusion :)
That said, I think we really need to pay attention to how many "conscious" decisions we don't bother to be conscious for. I have a personal theory that consciousness is a state that is generally invoked only when the mind doesn't have a preset behavior - consciousness is invoked to ponder "what if" and decide what to do. Once we have prescribed behavior, consciousness shuts down. Thus, we might be "conscious" for only a few hours or even less in an average day. If so, we CAN be self-aware more often, but it takes effort.
Side Note: This theory is based in part on the idea that there's an advantage in minimizing conscious time - be that caloric requirements or an innate danger of being too aware. I've recently read some claims that hurt the caloric argument (brains are high caloric things, but that doesn't mean consciousness requires more calories) but the innate dangers of overthinking remain strong but vague and anecdotal.
Finding ways to make and support this theory without lapsing into it being an automatic (and thus not trigging awareness) response gets more tricky each time :)
And none of our important traits were acquired by conscious processes on the parts of our ancestors, unless you mean by that statement that our ancestors consciously endeavored to further their own interests and as a side effect of this, we evolved the way we did. But if that's what you meant, it's a really disingenuous way to describe basic natural selection.
I would like a source to read more about this. I don't distrust you. I'm genuinely interested in reading more about this.
>And none of our important traits were acquired by conscious processes on the parts of our ancestors
I think humans sexually select for intelligence, because it's a trait that affects how high up a human can climb across different social hierarchies.
Sorry, I don't have a source. Epigenetic changes in somatic cells (all the cells in your body except for your sperm or egg cells) are common and necessary for the differentiation that takes place as cells divide and multiply to create a growing organism. But epigenetic inheritance is rare, because epigenetic changes can only be inherited if they somehow change the DNA in germ line cells (sperm or eggs). There just aren't many plausible ways for stuff that happens in the environment to modify the DNA in sperm or eggs. The most plausible way would be for some sort of systemic stress. And, IIRC, one of the only known instances of epigenetic inheritance was a result of starvation.
But, more generally, epigenetic inheritance has to be rare. Evolution is a balancing act. On the one hand you need some mutation, because otherwise there is no variation against which natural selection can act. But on the other hand, you need to limit the amount of mutation so that beneficial genes can persist through time (otherwise they cease to be beneficial), and so that the crazy house of cards that is a developing organism doesn't collapse.
If you know anything about how complex organisms work, it's absolutely insane. There is almost none of the abstraction and encapsulation that we use in engineering to manage complexity. Instead, everything effects everything else. Evolution is like building a computer program by mutating individual bits in a binary program. If you play that out in a massively parallel fashion over billions of iterations, you can get some programs that do really cool stuff.
But they would be incredibly brittle. It would be incredibly easy to crash the whole thing by mutating the wrong bit. And these types of catastrophic mutations seem pretty common in complex organisms. Among humans, the miscarriage rate is 30%-50% (according to Wikipedia; look up the Miscarriage article). A significant number of those are believed to be caused by the female rejecting the fetus because of defects of some kind.
All of this is a long way of saying that it's simply not believable that there is some process which is introducing significant mutation into the reproductive process.
Did they take the list of all HK2 viruses, and test them all to see which one had a prevalence in identified addicts?
If they did that, would they admit it in the paper?
Maybe I've become too cynical, but my default is to assume statistical misuse these days.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_Radio
It looks like this study is focused on drug addiction which on its own is really intriguing, but I wonder if there would be any evidence in the human genome to predict behavioral addiction.
Alcohol ruins your day.
I can be productive on weed and/or caffeine. Both of them get work done.
I believe I'm addicted to the productivity, when I take them outside of a work environment, I want to work.
At what point is this positive reinforced habits?
Addiction really has a lot to do with making bad decisions in your life to keep doing the addictive behaviour.
If its not negatively impacting your life, and it's not interfering with relationships and obligations, you're not addicted.
People can be addicted to lots of good things.
Most people could use cocaine as safely as caffeine but since you have no idea if you get addicted or not mostly dumb people try and some suffer greatly.
Your moderating produces negative value.
The problem is that generic topics like "do we have free will" frequently balloon into large discussions that crowd out the more specific topic at hand. If we didn't moderate HN this way, HN threads would consist mostly of the same generic discussions repeated over and over. I'm pretty sure the community wouldn't agree that it "produces negative value" to prevent that from happening, even though we don't always make the right calls.
Honestly, I don’t think we understand enough about consciousness and how it arises from physical brains/bodies to make such an extraordinary claim like “there is no free will,” when the entire history of human thought and philosophy presupposes that there is.
Don't assume we have a free will when debating if we do :)
If we don't have a free will, then the fact that we believe in free will is irrelevant, and you cannot deduce that we believe in it from the fact that we act as if we believed in it.
Free will is most probably a quirk of language, an answer to a misleading question based on wrong assumptions. There are no difference in the state of universe no matter if there is free will or not.
There's no scientific understanding of where exactly consciousness is rooted, so if you take that to assume it means there's no such thing as conscious choice, I conclude you are a fatalistic downer who I don't want to hang with.
It has exactly as much basis as the alternatives, explains the world just as well, gives the exact same predictions, but needs less assumptions.
BTW - why is lack of free will a downer? I perceive is as neutral.
Not the GP, but lack of free will implies that people have no agency over their actions, and hence can't really take pride in anything they've accomplished. They're just squishy robots following their programming and lying to themselves about why they do the things they do.
Or at least that's one depressing way to interpret it.
I'm pretty sure that I'm in a better position to know what I actually believe than you are, and I'm telling you, I really do believe this. There are only three possibilities: either free will is an illusion, or dualism is true, or consciousness is the result of unknown new physics. The first is by far the most likely from a scientific point of view, and the evidence for it is actually pretty overwhelming.
But just because it's an illusion doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't live your life as if it were real. It's a very compelling illusion as long as you don't know how the trick is done, and so far, we don't.
Free will isn't an illusion so much as a misleading oversimplification of a complex concept.
The traditional philosophical notion of free will assumes a kind of perfectly rational Platonic ideal of a thinking human who carefully weighs all future options before acting.
This is clearly nonsense, and should have been called out as nonsense much earlier in history.
In reality free will is a mash-up of all kinds of influences - rationality, misguided belief, instinct, genetics influencing brain structure and hormonal balance, culture, previous experience - in varying proportions.
They add up to a kind of meta-freedom - not necessarily rational, but not particularly easy to predict or control with any precision.
Your sense of self isn't aware of these influences, but that won't stop you acting with some form of independent agency - and that's still true even if there's a gap between your conscious model of your motivations, and the soup of real motivations that drives you.
> that's still true even if there's a gap between your conscious model of your motivations, and the soup of real motivations that drives you.
I would say it's true because there is a gap, not "even if".
What decisions do you make differently with your knowledge that free will is an illusion? What choices do you make differently?
(fwiw, I agree with you; I just think it doesn't particularly matter now.)
Interestingly, my belief in the illusory nature of free will has had a huge impact on my life. I'm a much more laid-back person than I used to be. I don't stress out so much over making mistakes. It has also helped me in a lot of practical aspects of my life. For example, it has helped me lose weight. I think about my desire to eat as my brain playing a sort of a trick on me, and that makes it easier for me to "decide" not to give in to the craving. I treat the part of me that wants to eat the cookie as a separate entity from "me" that just happens to reside in the same brain, and I interact with it through internal dialogs like I would a small child. It sounds weird, but it works, at least for me. I'm almost down to the same weight I was in college (and I'm 54).
Horizontal gene transfer? A literal virus that changes who you are. It's interesting to think that by going paleo or vegan you can perhaps become another "person"...
Not really, few physicists have tried to explain consciousness - Roger Penrose being a notable exception - and no physicist has ever sufficiently explained how artifacts like the complete works of Shakespeare come about. They seem to have been invented by Shakespeare but if Shakespeare had no free will to invent them, then were did they come from? While we're at it, where does the continuum and the mathematical structures between real numbers come from? Are real numbers even physically possible? I've read a paper once that argued that they cannot be physically realized, because that would violate the laws of thermodynamics (and a few others, too). What about the rest of mathematics like perfect squares or functions that cannot be computed? Are these illusions?
In a nutshell, there is a whole lot that physics cannot explain, including all of human culture. That's the gist of Popper's three worlds argument. Physicists surely claim that the physical world is closed, but they haven't provided any arguments that go much beyond "human culture is super complex but we believe we could in principle explain it somehow with our theories".
Now Popper argued for some not too plausible dualism, but the central negative part of his argument still stands.
As for explanations, I agree that not many good ones are on the table and maybe the Philosophy of Mind confuses more than it clarifies. My personal favorite speculative theory is a rare form of computationalism, namely the position that some computations might have consciousness as an emergent property when they run on a suitable physical device, and that in theory we could even be able to determine which class of computations these are by mere analytical insight, provided we have the proper conceptual tools. Computationalism is not very popular in philosophy, though.
Who (or more precisely what component of "us") is it exactly is it that has free will? The ethereal eternal soul (which is that anything but an imagined property of conscious beings)? The meat abacus in our heads? the nerves in our arms?
How would we "act as if they don't" ?
There's a old Buddhist story, you're in a small boat on a lake in a thick fog, you can barely see beyond your boat. Out of the fog comes another boat that crashes into yours, and you start to yell at the other boater to be careful, but a break in the fog reveals that no one is in the boat. You've been yelling at nothing.
For me, either the other person is present, and therefore harmless, or they are absent, and therefore blameless. In any event, it's wrong to get upset or angry. However, one should take steps to prevent damage to boats.
Two things: it's been shown that, by the time you consciously decide to act, your neurons have already been increasing in activity for ~100ms. In other words, it's been scientifically shown that our conscious experience of "free will" is preceded by unconscious nervous activity. Make of that what you will. ;-) Pun intended.
Second, when you observe a person while remembering yourself it affects them. I've seen burly lads transform into scared little boys under a mindful gaze. When you're present people don't punch you.
If you punched me without provocation, with no evidence of mental illness, and did it "deliberately" [1] then I will "blame" you because that's the only way I know of to defend myself against future attacks.
[1] Note that "deliberately" in a world without free will just means "as a result of unknown causes inside your brain". The more we learn about how the brain works, the fewer pathological behaviors can be labeled "deliberate". "Free will" is a sort of "god-of-the-gaps" if neuroscience.
Even if I called you a coward?
If I don't have a free will then I blame you because that's how my brain is programmed (which is BTW most probably caused by optimization of social behavior by evolution - it's better for our genes if we punish violent behavior, so that's how our brains are constructed). There's no need to assume free will.
There's no difference in behavior that depends on existence of free will.
Ah, but you are forgetting a major part of how brain works. Brain models both our own and others behavior. If your brain knows you don't have free will and I don't have free will, it will not fault me for not having a thing I am supposed to not be having.
If it doesn't have free will, brain can assign a response, but not blame. You can't have the notion of blame if you don't have a concept of free will. Same way you can't express certain colors, if you lack the words for it.
Fun fact, when people read about not having free will, they are more likely to lie/cheat on a test. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-...
Punishment decreases the odds of repeated offence. It doesn't matter if it's because you have free will, or simply because you learnt not to do that because your internal neural network were taught not to do that or it hurts.
I'm pretty sure I can make a simulation with agents punishing each other. Doesn't mean they have a free will.
> You can't have the notion of blame if you don't have a concept of free will
I have a notion of free will. I just don't believe it's true. I can model beliefs of Muslims without believing in Allah.
> Same way you can't express certain colors, if you lack the words for it.
Bad example. I can express any color I can see with 3 real numbers. There's infinitely many of them and my vocabulary is finite.
> Fun fact, when people read about not having free will, they are more likely to lie/cheat on a test.
And when they drink they are more likely to do stuff they later regret. Environment influences the brain in many ways. Doesn't mean there is a free will.
So does running away. However, the issue here is existence of blame.
> I can model beliefs of Muslims without believing in Allah.
Yeah, but you can't model belief without knowing what believing in something entails. Same thing with my example. You model behavior of others based on your experience. You think others have free will because you believe you do. Or not.
My own position is that while free will might or might not be illusion, it's a useful one. Like justice, mercy or love - that sort of thing.
Imagine we could perfectly map all your brain's neural connections at an instant in time to software. This is not out of the realm of possibility in the future, right? Now imagine we "asked" that model to make a decision. Any decision. Wouldn't that frozen-in-time model give the same answer every time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
For me, the most important aspect of free will is to be able to predict the outcomes and consequences of my choices, use that as feedback to select which decision to make.
I believe it.
My brain is a collection of experiences and my body is a chemical reaction.
In other words, I am not a product of neurons firing, I am neurons firing.
I feel like we should reread Descartes' Meditations. But roughly speaking, "I think therefore I am" can be interpreted as "I am thought."
What is essential to me is the information processing that happens as a result of the neurons firing.
If you define free will as future choices cannot be predicted based on history, then it turns out that if humans have free will, so do elementary particles. To me, this doesn't mean we don't have free will, but instead the linear, deterministic model that's often used to discount free will is just not how the universe works.
Note that this result does not depend on statistical randomness like some of quantum mechanics, but just three simple axioms. I highly recommend reading the full paper, especially the end, "Free Will Versus Determinism".
[1]: http://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf
Talking about free will is just another way to have a conversation about God.
http://blog.rongarret.info/2018/09/the-last-word-i-hope-on-f...
You might find this interesting as well:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2018/01/a-multilogue-on-free-wil...
The fallacy here is in assuming the time perspective of God to be equivalent to our own.
I know, right?
> but in my view knowing an outcome doesn't mean controlling it. It simply means knowing it.
Turns out knowing is enough to negate free will. Take a look at the proof.
I hope I'm not insulting you, none is intended, but it seems to me that most theories that attempt to remove God and/or free will from reality are a thin veneer over a desire to be without responsibility. The only thing I have to add that I think we both agree on is that truth is indeed concrete, and what we choose (or sadly, think we are coerced) to believe has no bearing on it.
http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/10/parallel-universes-and-ar...
> If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us-like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform.
That's like saying "matter is just a bunch of atoms". The reality is not so certain. Our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality (physics) and consciousness (neuroscience/psychology) is still highly theoretical.
Well, it is.
> Our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality (physics) and consciousness (neuroscience/psychology) is still highly theoretical.
It's much more than that. No experiment has ever been done that contradicts either GR or the Standard Model. So unless the operation of the brain depends on new, undiscovered physics, we do in fact have all the information we need in order to completely understand the operation of the brain, at least in principle.
>Well, it is.
Nah, it's much deeper than that as you well know. The word "just" implies there's nothing more to be explained.
>No experiment has ever been done that contradicts either GR or the Standard Model.
The Standard Model is an incomplete theory that fails to explain many physical phenomenon. Let's not pretend otherwise.
>So unless the operation of the brain depends on new, undiscovered physics, we do in fact have all the information we need in order to completely understand the operation of the brain, at least in principle.
So you admit we don't actually know that consciousness is "just neurons firing", you're just extrapolating?
Sure, but atoms are an extremely good approximation to the truth in the regime in which human brains operate.
> The Standard Model ... fails to explain many physical phenomenon.
Yeah? Like what?
> you're just extrapolating?
Of course. Until we have a full understanding of the human brain, there will be things about its behavior about which we must extrapolate (that's what "not having a full understanding" means). But I'm extrapolating from some pretty damned good data and some pretty damned solid math. So I am highly confident in this extrapolation.
>Yeah? Like what?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model
>I am highly confident in this extrapolation.
Even still, we shouldn't state theoretical extrapolations as if they are facts. It's the difference between saying "x is caused by y" and "I think x is probably caused by y".
Please say what you sincerely think free will means, and try not to give me strawman or devil's advocate positions on what you think your opponents think it means, if you would be so kind.
So this means that addiction is a complex, multi-factor condition, and these researchers may have identified another factor. People with this gene may be predisposed to addictive behaviors but not behave that way for any number of environmental or other reasons; likewise, people without the gene may still develop addictive behaviors.
The researchers didn't study rats or dogs, so there isn't much in the way of evidence for this gene's presence in those species.
In this population he found that almost NONE of the rats did harmful amounts of the narcotics-laced water. (He was using opiates as his "drug of choice.")
So his theory is that a) many animal models of addiction are wrong because they use animals in very confined spaces b) maybe people who feel "trapped" in their life are more prone to developing addiction, and we should be treating addiction as a social disease.
I used to find that very depressing, but now made peace with compatibilism (the notion that determinism and free will are compatible) [2][3].
Sam Harris objects to compatibilism: both argue that determinism is true, but Harris thinks that thus we have no free will, while compatibilists argue that we still have the "free will worth having" (see the book by Dennett [4]).
Harris and Dennett had an insightful podcast/debate on that [5].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/free-will-by...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
[3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbow_Room_(book)
[5] https://samharris.org/podcasts/free-will-revisited/