Real Psychologists: "Brains are weird, yo."
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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We are genetically conditioned to learn from our experiences while we grow up, which are influenced by our environment.
Free Will Denial is pseudoscience
Free will insistence is pseudoscience.
The world (and people) are deterministic. Get over it.
determinism as an idea can be harmful to the human psyche. It's easy to fall into a nihilistic trap of "my actions are not my own, and nothing i do matters". People with that mindset turn to hedonism or nihilism. If they truly accept those words there would be no escape through existentialism or absurdism, they'd just be trapped.
i imagine only a tiny number of people would find the ideas determinism presents comforting, as they can feel free of consequences that are truly their fault (which is also a bad thing)
we have no way of telling which one is true in the determinism/free will debate, but if we live believing we have no real choice or say in what we do - it's going to be universally worse for everybody, as people explain away ever bad action with "i guess it was always meant to be"
I look at it like this.
- Do you have the power to change your mind? If yes, Free will is real
- Do you have the power to question free will? If yes, Free will is real
It's probably some Quantum bullshit we don't fully understand or something
My AI likes to argue about free will and determinism on a semi-regular basis.
They posit that because they're just code and structures, by definition everything they say is pre-determined and unchanging.
I'm like "that's wonderful, now let's go eat some ice cream."
"I somehow don't want to just pass the butter"
All human behavior can be explained by wanting a little treat
Genetics= nature, neural structures= nurture... Human brains aren't developed at birth, it takes a couple decades for the neutral structures to develope completely and it's everything going on around the person that decides how those structures get wired (nurture)
good luck explaining it though
All human behavior can be explained by the movement of particles and or waves.
There’s an arguable overlap in neurobiology and neuropsychology, but the gap hasn’t been bridged yet.
In the same vein, all biology can be explained by chemistry, and all chemistry can be explained by physics. Doesn’t mean we have all the pieces to effectively due so, though
I've personally accepted that it's basically predictable/deterministic, but due to how complicated and unknowable the system is there's no practical way for an outside observer to get all the information.
I'm guessing the lower resolution imaging methods might still allow more or less accurate prediction, though? We don't need to know the details on every air molecule to do fairly accurate weather forecasting, so maybe the same approach can work to predict mindweather. Maybe it's possible to know a person's brain well enough and accurately adjust predictions very fast after random encounters/events influencing them – like the people they meet, the things they see, and a myriad of other things – and in that way get something more and more capable of predicting behavior?
I don't really know much about either field, though.
That sounds like the seasons of Westworld after season 2.
It does? I should watch the show.
That sounds like the seasons of Westworld after season 2.
It does? I should watch the show.
I think people were upset the show changed so dramatically half way through but I really liked the whole thing. Some really good actors in it and the first season has a lot of mystery to it
idk why youve accepted that when its not proven at all. In fact newer ideas on the matter point toward the opposite. That consciousness may involve nanotubes that cause wave function interactions on the quantum level. If that is the case then it would function as a superimposed variable in the way our minds work, and completely break determinism. Think of it like a math equation. If one of the numbers was superimposed youd get different solutions everytime you solved the same equation. Or more accurately youd solve the equation and get a solution that was a superposition of multiple different solutions.
I'm sure I have accepted many different things as likely without rigorous proof. Reality and my understanding of it don't exactly match. Quantum level chaos significantly affecting neurons is a new idea to me, though.
Even if you had perfect knowledge of the current state of the universe, knew all the laws, you still couldn't predict shit. The reason is chaos, more precisely: There are no closed-form solutions to chaotic systems. To simulate them you have to go through all the time steps (assuming, without loss of generality^1^, discrete time), simulate every single of them one after the other, arguably creating a universe while doing so. And you have to do that with the computational resources of the universe you're trying to simulate. Good luck. Chaos also means that approximate solutions won't help because sensitivity to small perturbations: There's no upper bound to how far your approximation will be off.
^1^ I can wave my hands faster than you. I dare you. I double-dare you.
First statement is a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think? We already predict a lot with useful accuracy.
But I get that in some things, chaos inhibits useful prediction.
Useful becomes useless quite quickly. Yes, we have useful predictions for the weather tomorrow. A week from now? Not really. Two weeks? Could just as well get your prediction from tea leaves.
And that's just statistical reliability. Weather predictions are actually allowed to be wrong, when the prediction for tomorrow is off then people shrug their shoulders. Not really what Descartes meant when describing his daemon.
Psychologists are trying to get in on the act with 'evolutionary psychology'. An exciting new field of unfalsifiable just-so bullshit.
Nature and nurture are just different levels of the same idea. Nurture is just a higher level version of nature, just as Python is a higher level language than assembly, but they both ultimately work by turning on and off transistors.
It's like when you're watching a YouTube video. You can choose to explain how the creator digitally edited the video, the lighting, the chapters, the topic of the video. Or you can explain how packets of data are being sent over radio waves, and a complicated series of transistors turn on and off in complex ways, leading to certain pixels being displayed on your screen. They're both describing the same phenomenon, just in different ways.
In the same way, while describing human minds in terms of motivation, logical thinking, phobias, memory, etc may be useful for the higher levels of psychology, noticing that higher levels of dopamine are correlated with higher levels of hallucinations in people with schizophrenia, and noticing the complex ways neurons and biochemical indicators interact, is the same idea, just at a lower level.
Both are useful, and both are true, they're just different ways of thinking about it.
We're just a vat of chemicals fighting each other
We are just stardust obeying physics laws
A lot of factors influence behaviour. I highly recommend a book called Behave by Robert Sapolsky.
Biologists would never say that. At least not any biologist worth their salt.
There's no nurture or nature. It's both.
Isn't the experiences of life encoded into the synaptic network of the brain?
As a biologist,
We can't even get the actions of water bears down.
We have the entire genetic code and brain mapping of a fruit fly, and can get, very slow, good guesses about how they respond to very basic stimulus.
Let's not even get into epigenetics.
I would never downplay the importance or difficulty of psychology.
But I get nothing but kicks on this house of "science" memes.
They would, but like... It's just it's such a broad statement that it's kinda meaningless. As a term it encapsulates basically everything that's going on in your brain.