Game Addiction

[Nyarlathotep]

that's a joke, people. I actually don't like writing long posts, either, because it makes discussion impossible ... I just get suckered into it sometimes. So much for free will...

And you think I do? Half the time, I wind up writing long-ass posts because I know that people will either wildly misinterpret what I mean or won't understand what the hell I'm talking about unless I explain in excruciating detail. You can be precise; you can be concise, or you can be comprehensible. Pick any two.

[Maximius]

But if logic is already an obvious truth that's just waiting to be seen, then there's really no choice to be made.

I don't have any evidence of course, but I don't see how our conciousness can make decisions totally independent of the rest of the brain, and if that is so, then we do not have free will.

 

The fact that you can recognize a logical truth and then shape your actions accordingly is the freedom of our wills.

 

Consciousness cannot make independent decisions, or in the language of analytical philosophy indetermined decisions, but that ability is not a viable concept of freedom anyway. The reason is that the opposite is also true, if our consciousness were to make decisions independent from the rest of our brain (an impossibility) then why could we claim these independent decisions were free? We, as living organisms, want our actions to be shaped by our senses and our thoughts. People who cannot make decisions based on these sources of data are considered highly defective and certainly lack freedom in many ways.

 

Free wills are not free from deterministic causes. We must set that idea aside, I don't think it has a scrap of merit. Im not picking on your points, they are good points for a non-specialist but they are also an old part of the free will debate and have been dismantled as I see it. In fact, I am writing a thesis that attempts to do exactly that, undermine such notions of independent freedom while presenting a picture of dependent freedom of the will. (Kudos to you for intuitively arguing them however.) However, humans are free to produce new sets of deterministic causes, namely reasons, which our consciousness recognizes and acts on, making them our wills. There is no "I" to sit and look back on this process, hoping to jump in and do something freely. This process literally is you, your consciousness (taken as an experiential whole, not its components) is this reason producing mechanism. Determined causes come in and cause the machinery to do its thing, freedom comes when we reflect on those causes and in doing so open the path for creating new causes, new reasons, sets of determining influences that move us to actions that we want.

Edited April 4, 2007 by Maximius

[oDDity]

Well, I can't pretend to understand all this jargon and philosophy-speak, but it seems to me that the only difference between us an animals, is that we have that extra concious level to our brain.

It means that we can deliberately interact in a limited way with other levels of our brain in a way that animals cannot.

We can deliberately search and recall memories for example, then put them together in a variety of new ways, which leads to ideas, but an animal only recalls a memory due to some direct stimulus linked in some way to that memory, which in turn causes it to perform an action automatically.

Does anyone suggest that animals have any level of free will?

Is free will only present if the animal has a conscious level?

IF you are agreeing that out concious level cannot make independant decisions, then its a matter of working out just how much the other levels, right down to the most basic and primitive levels of hunger, sexual desire, sleep, up to the more advanced emotions, and also the brains own automated processes of keeping the body alive and in working order, are influencing any decision your conscious level makes.

If we're just slaves to that automated brain, and it's at the root of any possible want you might have, affecting every decision you think you are making, then I don't see how you can call it free will.

You're really just being given the choice between one option or another, which is what I said at the start, and even the choosing of that choice may be influenced by more primitive parts of your brain.

Our brains didn't always have this concious level, and back when we didn't have it, our brains were just as big and carried out the same functions as they do now. Brain's can quite happily function without this conscious level that we have developed.

In the end, you can never say that when you want something, it's really because you wanted it, and not because some primitive automated section of your brain required it for reasons that have nothing do to with you as a thinking human.

[AtariThief]

What if this Freedom of Descisions is just the result of a couple billion unconscious calculations our brain makes and due to the fact that no two humans are ever the same (not factoring cloning) every one calculates a little differently. And then based on the experiences of any one individual added to their own individuality factored in makes even more complex descison making. In the end

"Do we make the descision or does the descision make us?" .. Me

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

The only new thing I learned from all these discussions is that it's possible to model a mind using independent clusters which compete with each other.

 

I have for years wondered about the similarity between a collection of neurons and specialized clusters becoming concious and a collection of individuals and groups forming a society, which can perhaps be called concious (not yet certainly). But how will we know when a society is concious? Only by obvservation because we're capable of noticing because we're concious? Because neurons are not aware of the brain.

 

The next question that I always thought of is how do we organize people in such a way as to promote a concious society? Do we increase the amount of interconnections, and grouping of people, and pre-defined filtration and routing of information?

[sparhawk]

If society would become a "super-consciousness" I doubt that we would be aware of it. You probably would have to be outside such a system to notice it, just like cells, don't know that they are participating in us.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

But then there's a key difference, we can think about society, cells can't think about us. This complicates matters.

[AtariThief]

Maybe cells can think about us. Just we don't know they're doing it?

[Lord Vergider]

With 4 pages i dont have enough time to read it all but id like to say a little:

 

How could you possibly get so addicted to a game that you spend 10+ hours a day every day for months? years? if you buy a game that you pay money once and you keep it, it doesnt provide enough enjoyment to stay addicted for so long and with mmorpgs there is enough fun stuff to do, but your are shelling out money every month! i HATE spending money and i think that alone would be enough to save me from addiction.

[Nyarlathotep]

I think that's the question that none of us can answer. Go to Korea, enter your average internet cafe, and ask the same question--you might just get an answer. As for not reading the thread, you really haven't missed much. We've been too busy talking about free will again.

 

I once played a free beta for an MMO for about a month. After that I had to stop. I couldn't stand playing the damn game any longer. It was just too fucking boring. Never touched an MMO since.