Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same? I tend to think of dualism as being a sort of fundamental duality for example "nothing - something" or they way I prefer to word them, "something - not something". However, determinism tends force a cause-effect, or hierarchical, or directional meaning. For example, determinism in relation to my above nothing/something duality would be "from nothing came something" or something of that flavor. However, would could also say that there was no deterministic relationship and that both nothing and something mutually depend on each other to exist. i.e. there is not directional arrow of relationship.
(I'm not a professional philosopher)
Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same?
Not at all, they are more like opposites of each other. Dualism in this context refers to the idea that there is something non-physical in addition to the physical body and brain that makes you conscious, a soul or something along that line. If you think that dualism is wrong and you are just a bunch of atoms governed by the laws of physics, then you probably think determinism is true, i.e. the choices people make are not really free choices but just the results of the initial conditions and the laws of physics (which may actually be non-deterministic, for example if the randomness of quantum physics is real, which makes the naming potentially a bit confusing).
Yep, even if the process is stochastic, and the result is determined by some mixture of present state and randomness. It's still determined. If we replayed everything with the same random variables, we'd get the same result.
It's hard to walk away from this determinism since we apply it to the rest of the world so often. It seems really suspicious to not also apply it to ourselves.
Got it. I didn’t think they were, or that you necessarily implied. I think I got mixed up with the last bit of wording in the commenters sentence and his intent.
I’m also realizing based on a couple of responses that my thoughts on dualism probably fall out of what the majority of people consider dualism to mean. I.e. not just limited to the mind body problem.
Thanks for the clarification :)
> you think that dualism is wrong and you are just a bunch of atoms
That's what I am - a self replicating, self adapting bunch of atoms that manages to keep being alive for a few decades. Not just any bunch of atoms. Any self replicating system has interesting properties not found in non-replicators.
Are determinism and dualism considered to be one-in-the-same?
Dualism AFAIK is believing that body and soul are two different entities. Atheism negates the soul so only the body exists, with the mind as a structure of brain activity.
Since the body is matter and subject to physics laws, some conclude that there can't be free will. But this is actually assuming a dualist vision, as if we existed outside the physical world.
Try this one. Consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. All the rules and laws by which the brain operates are completely constrained by physical laws, but they create an emergent 'field' in which it is not mathematically possible to predict the behavior of the field.
The brain has its own set of rules that it uses that is only partially attributable to the rest of the world around it. It can create it's own rules and operate 'under it's own steam', in the same way that North Korea manages to operate largely autonomously of the world around it. It's certainly constrained by geopolitics, but its internal behavior manages to remain free regardless.
I used to want to reach for quantum mechanics to explain the brain, now I'm happy with "plain old" electromagnetism.
Agreed. I actually wrote a short paper walking through determinism and non-determinism to ultimately demonstrate that we can’t describe a system in which we have control as any system with rules governing it directly violate the possibility of control. My conclusion was not that free will is impossible, but that it at very least can not be defined. I may upload it if I get some more peer review first.
I mentioned loosely above, but I agree that your definition of duality appears to be the common interpretation. I think I also have to be more careful how I use the word in the future. :) I just realized I use it more generally, I think more inline with how eastern philosophy uses it. However, there does seems to be a connotation around mind-body problem with the term duality.
Right, that's more in line with the way I view duality.
Lately I've actually came up with what I feel is an even more general pattern. And because it's 1am, I'll ramble a bit. :)
Typically we like to say things like:
Something <-> Nothing
True <-> False
etc
I'm thinking a better pattern may be:
Something <-> Not Something
True <-> Not True
Which yields the pattern "A <-> Not A"
The next step is that Everything follows such a relationship, such that you could conclude the Absolute duality of "Absolute/All <-> Not Absolute/All"
An interpretation of this may be that: The universe must exist absolutely out of logical necessity as absolutely not existing requires the definition of absolute existence.
This means past, present, future, all states, all things, all possibilities, exist. There was no beginning and end everything just "is".
This leaves many problems and many things to resolve such as, "if the universe just "is", how is it that I feel the sense of happeningness?". But hey, "Happen <-> Not Happen". They both most be reconciled. A metaphor to reconcile this is to take the static state of all knowledge in your brain as the totality of your brain states. Dreaming, or viewing these different brain states in different orders yields visions where things are happening, even though at rest each piece of knowledge/memory are just static pieces of information.
There are many other problems to reconcile, but this is my current line of thought. After spending my whole life fighting battles that emerge with hierarchical, cause-effect logic, I had to go off-roading a bit.
Of course, now matter how far we take it. You can with a bit of over simplification, sum your brain up to neurons being "connected or not connected" as the base of everything you know. Which means the limit of the description of the logic of the universe is comically limited based on the structure of your brain. I.e. It seems that we can never self-confirm beyond this play on words. I call this the cosmic joke.
Good night. Please forgive my poorly formed, probably not scientific, and brief midnight thoughts :)
Take a drug that makes you feel like you might never be the same... a fear inducing one like LSD, mushrooms, or heavy cannabis. And imagine that your very reason for being is to uncover such. And if you get terminated somehow, you fail on two fronts. Maybe every moment in time, every brain state, is simple digits in a long string of a real number. Your whole life..was just computing a unique number. Maybe every person or entity who ever is conscious, computes a number too. What about the set of all those numbers?? Is that the universal set..of all knowledge..of all entropy..of all phenomena?? Is that set of the physicality of experience directly isomorphic to some slices of its members..or a subset..an abstract sense of itself?? Cohomology / homotopy links consciousness to a recursive transformation of itself?
Maybe the link between physicality and information is consciousness. Only consciousness provides a single player universe -- and thus provides the mechanism for axiom of choice..grabbing the totality of experience as a piece of data. Without internal experience, we must resort to AC and somehow look at a living creatures' external experience in order to derive the real number their life computes...nonsense..it is not sound. So consciousness really does serve as some sort of bridge. The totality of all consciousness provides the same complexity as the totality of the 3rd person objective universe from start to finish. We have two data sets that encode the same thing. Linked by consciousness. What is the rub?
It was actually a couple psychedelic experiences that allowed me to "get over the hump" and "see" the universe the a larger, deeper, internal lens. It also allowed me to reflect and understand myself in a way that I found to be extremely valuable. While the experience itself was simply beyond description, ineffable, the single most enlightening moment of my life, it was the following years of reflection on it and everything around it that start putting things into place.
I remember one particular thought of how "real" the mind space actually is. We tend to think of the perceived reality as very physical, when in fact the mind space is able to simulate the same feeling of physicality. It really makes one question if the difference between mind and physicality is even worth distinguishing.
Right but that link between physicality and mind _is_ consciousness..the perception of qualia. So though they may be caused by the same thing, the process itself is one to be looked at carefully.
So, consciousness is a hologram of the universe? I can imagine it like that.
I often describe consciousness/me/you/entities/etc as dynamic lenses of the universe. Something (like information) goes in from all directions and the lens transform that into reaction. I think you could actually extend that view to entities like atoms. Hm, every point is a lens in itself?
