Londoner wrote:You understand 'Zeno's Paradox' is an actual thing in philosophy concerning time...
Not so. “Zeno’s Paradox” is a sleight-of-hand “parlor trick”. It is not real or “actual”.
Londoner wrote:Again, 'logic' means something specific. It is not slang for 'I'm right'.
Logic is our ‘innate’ means of “making sense”. Without it, 'nothing' makes sense.
Steve3007 wrote:I'm really late in joining this conversation and I must have missed something vital, because I cannot see for the life of me what the big deal is. So there is a delay between an event happening out there in the world and my conscious awareness of that event. Yes. Of course there is. That doesn't come as any surprise at all.
Hi Steve, I’m glad you’ve joined in, and agree that CTD exists.
Steve3007 wrote:But then, at the end of the OP, there's the sudden leap to the unfounded conclusion that we don't consciously do anything!
There are no "unfounded" conclusions here. If CTD exists, then “conscious causation” simply and logically cannot. Maybe one of these explanations may help:
1- If CTD exists, then consciousness FOLLOWS X (an event in reality). If Conscious Causation exists, then consciousness must PRECEDE X. One is not possible if the other is true. These are mutually exclusive.
2- If CTD exists, then ‘everything’ one is conscious of, has ALREADY HAPPENED. If it has already happened, then it has already been caused. If it has already been caused, then it is too late to ‘cause’ it.
3- If CTD exists, then EVERYTHING one is conscious of, has already happened. If 'everything’ means ‘everything’, then there is ‘nothing’ left to cause.
RJG wrote:We are, in effect, being ‘fed’ our conscious experiences. That which happens, ‘necessarily’ happens. This conclusion is a bit ‘chilling’, as it destroys any viability of conscious control (aka “free-will”, mental causation, conscious causation) or any form or notion of “consciously doing” anything.
RJG wrote:So, contrary to popular belief, we don’t actually “consciously do” anything, ...we are only “conscious” of what we’ve “done”.
Steve3007 wrote:Of course we do. No amount of delay is going to change that. When mission control were talking to the astronauts on the moon and there was a 2.5 second round-trip delay, that didn't stop the mission controllers from asking the astronauts to do something and then, about 2.5 seconds later, seeing them do it. It just meant that it took a little while for the order to be carried out, and for the confirmation to arrive back on Earth that it had been carried out.
Your analogy of mission control’s view of the astronauts on the moon is a good one, but you are leaving out the time delay when it comes to the events happening at mission control itself, as if somehow these are ‘exempt’ from this time delay. In other words, if you wish to use this analogy to represent CTD (conscious time delay), then you must include ‘everything’ that one is conscious of, otherwise the analogy is non-representative.
Here is another (I think better) analogy:
RJG wrote:To help better understand -- imagine watching a “live-broadcasted” sporting event on TV. We believe that what we see (on the TV) is actually happening in ‘real-time’, but due to “network transmission delays” of up to 7 seconds, our ‘present’ view actually consists of ‘past’ events. While we may see the batter on TV going through his warm-up swings, but back at Fenway Park, in so-called ‘real-time’, he has already hit a home run, ...we just don’t know it yet!
We view live sporting events through the ‘time-delayed’ view of our TV. And likewise, we view reality through the ‘time-delayed’ window of consciousness. ...this being our only access (view) to reality.
Steve3007 wrote:Am I missing something RJG? Because this seems obvious to me.
Yes, you are making the false presumption that we consciously experience events happening in the 'present'.
We don't. We are only conscious of ‘past’ events. That’s it. Anything and everything that we consciously experience ‘now’ is
old-news; it has
already happened.
Although we may
physically exist in the ‘present’, we
consciously exist in the ‘past’.
Steve3007 wrote:He/she seems to think that just because we cannot perceive the results of our conscious decisions until after they have already happened, that somehow means that we didn't [consciously] cause them to happen.
Correct. …I’ve included the missing word in
[] that makes this correct. If we are not conscious of what we do until ‘after’ we do it, then how can we then claim to be the conscious causer of it???
Btw, I'm a "he".
Steve3007 wrote:I used the example of NASA mission control and astronauts on the Moon to increase the time delay to a relatively large value and thereby demonstrate that the time delay is irrelevant to the question of whether a conscious act of control is taking place. If the astronauts were on Mars the delay would be even longer. Maybe a 40 minute round trip. That still wouldn't stop Mission control from consciously ordering the astronauts to do something. It simply increases the period of time that they have to wait in order to see if their order was successful. It increases the "lag". It slows down any actions which require feedback mechanisms to confirm that they've happened.
Again, you (mis-representatively) assert that the conscious activity happening at mission control is somehow 'exempt' from this time delay. There is no conscious part of us that is exempt from CTD. EVERYTHING that we are conscious of, has already happened. Our future actions have already played-out in reality. There is nothing we can do in our conscious state now to change that which has already happened, or the future that has already play-out, ...that we have yet to consciously realize.
********
Burning ghost wrote:We are 'wired' to be optimistic. We could not accept no free-will even if it was the case, because the "we" just seems to have volition because the brain is wired like that. This would be what RJG has called the difficult truth, or something like that, because we do like to think that we're in control to some degree. Merely "liking" is not a big deal though.
I think the phrase we’ve discussed in the past was “psychologically unable to accept an ugly truth”. And our “liking” has no relevance in the free-will / volition debates.