Erik Hoel on Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science 7/24/23 

I have been fascinated with Science for as long as I can remember, but have also believed in its incompleteness and fallibility, for almost the same amount of time. Human beings are all fallible to one degree or another and Science is a man made concept. In addition, I thoroughly agree with Friedrich Hayek, that the functioning of our conscious minds will never be made clear to us (and quite possibly, that may be the better situation). Thank you gentlemen. Loved the podcast. I am now compelled to read, “The Sensory Order.”

Awesome conversation

The phrase “extrinsic drift,” stays on my mind.

The best part of this conversation was the opening reference to Julian Jaynes and his magnum opus, which is either a) utterly brilliant or b) floridly psychotic :) The rest of it was rough and sophomoric in my view: Russ getting overly excited about how he can keep free will and “God in the Gaps” of current scientific knowledge and for some reason annoyed that economics is economics rather than psychology, alongside a young neuroscientist who seemingly just started dabbling in bona fide philosophy of mind, which is very much its own field: having a doctorate in the former in no way guarantees that one is an expect in the latter (the “hard problem of consciousness” was articulated long ago, and scholars have been writing and reflecting upon it for many decades, whereas Erik seems to think he’s among the first to stumble upon it). A lot of old and basic ideas seemed to be reflected on as though they were novel ideas, without proper attribution (e.g., Nagel’s “View from Nowhere”), and a lot of cool philosophy of mind material and thought experiments were nowhere to be found. If you liked it though then read more bona fide philosophy of mind sources-you’ll really be blown away!

“My nose is about to grow” - Pinocchio

Denial of free will IS self contradiction. That's all you can know about the subject.

I love Erik's map analogy but imagine a map shown to somebody who has never seen a map, knows what a map is etc. Truth is that the map is just a visual reference tool that requires intrinsic meaning. Intrinsic meaning of what those symbols mean. Truth is, those visual maps, functional flow diagrams, schematic diagrams, compositional statements etc of neuroscience are just extensions of our existent mental map. Nature gave mammals a mental map system that allows them to actually know places. Apes actually understand which valley they are in, which valley they came from and which valley they can go to. Other species move by instinct. Birds migrate by sensing magnetic north, ocean fish move and feed with the tides etc. We can say that for mammals higher knowledge begins with the where. For humans the where questions are the most open qiestions which lead us to the gods.

Russ has been wishing that economics would become something that was never intended or should be. It's not psychology, philosophy or theology. It's power lies in its more limited ambitions.