The Great Illusion: The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self - Paul Singh Audiobook
Category: Misc. Non-fiction, Science
Language: EnglishKeywords:
Language: EnglishKeywords:
Consciousness Brain Neuroscience Free-will Science
Shared by:daenigma100
This book presents research that supports the naturalistic stance that the mind is identical to the brain. The author argues that if one were to look at the idea that the mind is the brain, then it follows logically that free will must be an illusion, that there can be no consciousness separate from the brain, and that there can be no substantial self that exists independently from the brain. He further argues that there can be no such thing as absolute moral responsibility and provides listeners with the overall sense that the survival of the human species will depend on a scientific understanding of the human brain.
| Announce URL: | |
| This Torrent also has several backup trackers | |
| Tracker: | udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337/announce |
| Tracker: | udp://tracker.leechers-paradise.org:6969 |
| Tracker: | udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969 |
| Tracker: | udp://tracker.open-internet.nl:6969/announce |
| Tracker: | udp://tracker.torrent.eu.org:451/announce |
| Tracker: | udp://tracker.tiny-vps.com:6969/announce |
| Tracker: | udp://tracker.vanitycore.co:6969/announce |
| Tracker: | http://retracker.telecom.by:80/announce |
| Tracker: | http://tracker.vanitycore.co:6969/announce |
| Creation Date: | Thu, 31 Jan 2019 13:41:01 -0500 |
| This is a Multifile Torrent | |
| Paul Singh - The Great Illusion.mp3 181.66 MBs | |
| File Size: | 181.66 MBs |
| Piece Size: | 256 KBs |
| Comment: | Updated by Science Audiobook |
| Encoding: | UTF-8 |
| Info Hash: | 9923979f4a3b9ce0f41d70cc1d0f598508b9e0df |
| Torrent Download: | Torrent Free Downloads |
| Tips: | Sometimes the torrent health info isn’t accurate, so you can download the file and check it out or try the following downloads. |
| Direct Download: | Start Direct Download |
| Tips: | You could try out alternative bittorrent clients. |
| Secured Download: | Download Files Now |
| AD: |
|
This post has 17 comments with rating of 5/5
January 31st, 2019
“no such thing as absolute moral responsibility”? Well, that’s the entire legal system and criminal responsibility, not to mention intentionality, completely down the drain. I’m not culpable, your honour, my naturalistic brain did it.
The fully deterministic model is not viable.
January 31st, 2019
Spot on @caesar! Putting the mind back to nature away from the “substance dualism” of Descartes was the real concern of scientists with the rise of physiology and psychology in the latter part of the nineteenth century. But that did not mean adopting the elaborate sanitary regimes of behaviorism. Intentionality is unavoidable trait of humans with minds, and even of some animals that act as if they do have minds. Beings with minds can refer to other things; things without minds do not refer to beings or other things. This man is distorting the whole findings of neuroscience, which he purports to advance.
January 31st, 2019
The fully deterministic model is, of course, completely viable. It may not please people like caesar963 or marcodiluce because if it is true - it should mean dramatic changes in the way that we work as a society.
The evidence is very strong to demonstrate that most of the time people act before they think and then come up with a story about why after the fact.
This is in the same way that nihilism is almost certainly correct even if people spend their lives whining about how “if everything is pointless there’s no point, so why bother?” as though meaning were a pre-requisite of life.
Truth doesn’t respect your wishes or societal institutions. It’s just true.
January 31st, 2019
Free agency is factual whether we will it or not (irony intended!). Freedom of action is always available, think of it as course-correction. Conceptualising a paradigm whereby human free will is wholly supplanted by the model of a fully determined automaton is counter-intuitive, irrational, counter-factual and patently absurd. Choice is inherent in action, you know this to be the case subjectively, as do we all. Compatibilism is an option I would CHOOSE over absolute determinism, but I wouldn’t even go that far, in truth.
To imagine this contested question settled in favour of determinism is preposterous. There is scope for both environment and genetics, but this is a continuum and in no wise unipolar. It’s the unmitigated absolute that is a problem in the system which you propose.
How would your impoverished account of action address a fully intended, pre-planned, cold-blooded, premeditated, calculated, carefully considered crime (such as murder)? Or long-term financial fraud? Or planned conspiracy? You could not possibly hold the offender/criminal responsible; even though they manifestly have the requisite mens rea, which is proven to the criminal standard: beyond a reasonable doubt.
Although the model of a fully determined meatball hurtling pointlessly through space is appealing, I’ll pass.
As for nihilism - that’s a curveball coming suddenly from left-field! If you deny objective moral values derived through reason from the Natural Law (which is actually the world we live in) - how do you confront/condemn enormities like the Holocaust? Do you just shrug your shoulders? The Nuremberg Trial did not - they derived Crimes Against Humanity from Natural Law, as no such entity existed in international law. Even the virulently anti-theistic Soviet judges agreed with the legal regime. Nihilism does not function as an account of moral action. It’s a decadent luxury no one can afford. When faced with true exigencies, no one is an indifferent observer in their own life.
February 1st, 2019
caesar963 you deal in fantasy because you want it to be true. You need “meaning” to justify actions against individuals (which to be fair, using the model in question, are pre-determined anyway).
I don’t need to justify the holocaust for it to have no meaning in the big picture. Nothing has any meaning in the big picture. You can imagine that it does but it doesn’t.
Using latin legal terms doesn’t change that one iota. The Nuremberg courts don’t either. Nor any other flawed instrument of mankind.
And it is entirely possible to fantasize your life has meaning when objectively it has none.
Your 3rd rate logic may impress undergraduate art students - it has a long way to go to convince anyone else.
February 1st, 2019
Or, to sum up some of the rather high level stuff in the comments section: “Please engage brain before opening mouth.”
February 1st, 2019
Thank you
February 1st, 2019
3rd rate logic! Fantasy! You do realise that you’re ascribing evaluative terms invested with meaning don’t you?
Do you comprehend the irony? Determinism is an abstract concept which you, of your own wholly unimpeded free volition, choose to invest belief in. And you can then choose to change your mind about the entire thing. I fully respect and recognise your free choice. (Nihilism is also such an abstract idea which you care enough to choose to lend credence to).
If you’re unsure about your scepticism, perhaps you should consider the possibility of doubting it also? If you take it as far as David Hume, you end up ensnared in a tangle of nonsense.
How does a nihilist inculcate genuine (radical) normative values in their child, for instance? The most crucial task a human being will perform (one of those things in life which really does have meaning, incidentally) - teaching ethics, morals, values, right from wrong. Or, contrariwise, you could deliver a lecture to your 4 year-old child on nihilistic relativism, and it’s related role in rendering him/her an unfree automaton.
You reach a certain point in life and suddenly adolescent posturing will no longer serve (”lifes not fair!”). Clear choices emerge which you then deliberate upon as an adult.
You’re not a neutral, passive bystander anymore. Anomie shears away.
Like Socrates observed, there are certainly absolute, universal values and principles - our task as thinking human beings is to use our reason in order to discern what they are. Your job and mine.
That’s fundamentally how we live our lives - our real lived experience. If your own existence or that of a loved one is threatened, straightaway meaning, value and purpose become perfectly clear - the futile, inane pose of relativism is abandoned. Suddenly, you’re a rational, purposive, thinking human being, with a distinct teleology. You’ve rejoined the human race.
Do you believe that human life has value? Do you believe in equality or slavery? Are you committed to such ideals or are you wholly apathetic? Do you believe that reason is better than unreason - do you care enough to freely choose? Do you believe in human rights and that they are critically important (you would if you were about to lose ‘em!)? They are derived from Natural Law by the exercise of human reason.
You cared enough to comment and furthermore you chose to do so.
If you’re committed to truth and representing your deeply held views sincerely (as you’re doing here) - then you value objective truth. Telling the truth is then a moral imperative which we engage in. You probably break left or right on political issues - this then is another substantial moral value which can be struck off the diminishing nihilism list.
How can we reform, change, improve conditions for ourselves and others if we don’t think anything matters; and even if we did think there was meaning and significance, we are not free to choose the course we think best? What would Martin Luther King have achieved if this was his pathological, distorted mindset?
For him, there really were values worth pursuing and that’s what he chose to do.
We condemn the Holocaust and the gulags because we have a system of objective morality which we use to evaluate such horrific crimes. They are not neutral (if you are indifferent to them, that is truly bizarre!). We live our lives according to such ethics and principles. This is how we appraise moral action and how we react automatically, in a principled manner towards injustice. The concept of justice is entirely bound up with meaning and significance. In an elemental sense, it is who we are - the superficial nihilistic account of morality is incoherent in the face of such lived reality. You are your brother’s keeper and you are responsible for your choices.
This pathology of nihilism can be characterised as a systematic distortion of communication.
In a true process of enlightenment, there can only be participants (Habermas). But you’re withdrawing from it!
Your own self-schema and project has meaning and significance; even when you choose to imagine yourself as fully determined.
If you embrace nihilism, or more aptly, if you’re consumed by it, you give up on the human project of reason and sink into a morass of absurdity and despond.
February 1st, 2019
I like the way Gordon goes from “viable” by way of “strong evidence”, and “almost certainly” to knowing the objective truth on the matter. Poor old classically trained Caesar, in consciously erring on the side of meaning (emergent of what have you), merely formed an/his opinion based on limited argument. He had no chance whatsoever against Gordon’s next gen logic and the certainty it somehow arrives at. Amazing. Epic victory royal.
February 1st, 2019
*or what have
February 1st, 2019
the remarks have convinced me to pass on this selection…
February 1st, 2019
@Roscoteapot - It’s like the assassination of Caesar all over again. PTSD for the SPQR.
February 1st, 2019
Hail, Caesar! Millennials forsooth. I blame their wives’ boyfriends. Prayers and supplications they get their Pompeias in their rear view before all “people like” get the pointy end.
February 3rd, 2019
This is the best description of this book: if you’re borderline suicidal, it will definitely help you make your mind.
February 8th, 2019
The Great Illusion is that there is some kind of intellectual rigour in the speculations of deterministic materialism.
Determinism and radical materialism have no basis in physics, and physics is merely the description of how the world is, fundamentally. Quantum physics, the most complete and verifiable model of the reality we inhabit, shows beyond any reasonable doubt (if you doubt it you have to explain why a modern solid-state electronic device like a TV even works, amongst numerous other things like the double-slit experiment) that the universe is in fact the exact opposite of deterministic. It is probabilistic and consciousness has a profound and primary position in the nature of things.
Those that argue determinism and ignore quantum physics are really quite silly. Boring even. This is basic logic. You need to address quantum physics even if you can’t accept, say, the insight knowledge of the great mystics. Either they still can’t get the implications, nay, the vehement assertions, of quantum physics or their own dogmatism of irrational “rationalism” defeats their logical mind.
And of course they have absolutely zero explanations for how consciousness arises out of “dead” matter. I could understand someone holding this position in the 1800s, but to continue to do so today is a demonstration of either an inferior intelligence that cannot grasp the implications of Schrodinger’s wave equation or a character flaw, a psychological blind spot, that cannot accept a view contrary to that which is dogmatically pre-supposed no matter what the evidence.
It is really dumb. Dawkins, for instance is just stupid and it usually leads to displays of pretty gross intellectual dishonesty and fallacious argument to torture the marshaled “facts’ to fit the theory.
Look at this quote from the description:
“the author argues that if one were to look at the idea that the mind is the brain, then it follows logically that free will must be an illusion”
So an assumption is made that “if” the mind is the brain” then the other must follow. I can “prove” a lot of bizarre things too if I assume that which I want to prove. Doh. No doubt the book presents some of the findings of neuroscience to “prove” that the mind is the brain, but in fact merely assert such but prove no such thing. In any case you would first have to show that the “mind” is the same as “consciousness”. It isn’t. Schoolboy stuff gets very tiresome, yet these people never give up or grow up.
February 8th, 2019
I mean you have to laugh at the illogic. The argument is that “free will”, i.e. a conscious awareness independent/transcendent of the brain is an “illusion”. But “illusion” is precisely a state of consciousness. What is the subject? What is experiencing “illusion” if not consciousness? To be deluded or in a state of illusion are states of consciousness. It doesn’t mater how many times you regress perception to deeper levels of neurological or biochemical functions, unless you are suggesting that the regression is infinite (!) you end up at an independent conscious awareness.
It is similar to the argument that the Big Bang is the beginning of “everything”. The question “so what was before the Big Bang?” is answered with “well, you can’t ask that question, it just isn’t allowed” or ” well, the laws of physics didn’t apply so we can’t know”. Yeah those are quite tidy assertions but ummm . . . they are neither logical argument, nor proof nor anything other than claims. If you can’t explain the fact of conscious awareness, of subjective reality, then you have no justifiable claim to a comprehensive theory or model of the world. It matters not how loud you yell that you do.
February 8th, 2019
@lifeasart - Great insights (wish I’d thought of ‘em!). Materialistic ideologues, who are true believers in scientism, actually get furious if you ask what may have preceded the Big Bang, as if one should not speculate about such things. Such questions are problematic and therefore strictly verboten. Similar rage is precipitated when you ask the old question: why is there something rather than nothing?
That Tolstoy bloke had something interesting to say about these types of books - “The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive.”
Speculations with the narrowest (and carefully selected) parameters.
Add a comment