Liberty loving people vs. the statist bunch, which side are you on?

Liberty loving people: Oh, so the feds are doin' it. Can it be solved by state govt? Oh it can? Can it be solved on county level? Yes? Great! Can it be settled in a town hall meeting, then? Can too? What about community? Family? Individuals?

The statist bunch:


Shutup and shut off your brain and let the federales take care of everything!

 

Please give some examples of people who hate liberty.

 

Liberals, all of them. Conservatives, most of them.

 

Ah so you hate Liberty, and hate Americans as well. Good to know.

 

I believe in abominable dictatorship but I am not totally opposed to liberty. I just consider it of secondary importance to economics.

 

Intimately tied with the notion of liberty is that of free will and the process of decision making based on choice selection. Reductionists (such as I used to be) place behavioral causation firmly in the realm of the physics of the molecular machinery underlying the brain's mechanistic functionality. But if you want to hear a most wonderful lecture by a leading neuroscientist, and get his fascinating take on liberty, freedom, causation, reductionism, determinism, etc, check out the first 50 minutes of the linked video, below. It's a lecture and q&a session by Bill Newsome of the Kavi Institute for Mind and Brain. This guy and Carl F. Craver's book, Explaining the Brain convinced me that my reductionist view of the free will was hopelessly inadequate and downright wrong.

Since the very mechanics of decision is based in the electrochemistry of the brain, this talk provides a very relevant view of the subject - and one you won't usually get from most neuroscientists - or many other scientists, for that matter.

[video=youtube;Jzn2msnmPso]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpag e&v=Jzn2msnmPso&t=0[/video]

 

I still find it adorable how Americans use the words liberal and conservative in such a peculiar way.

 

I'm for people and against the rich vermin who live off their misery. Freedom my American elbow!

 

Good day and good bye, Canadian.

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Who let the Canadian gate loose?

 

I am on neither side, because I'm not foolish enough to think that any type of singular philosophy or principle is going to work. Yes, that means paying lip service to "liberty liberty liberty" is just as foolish as thinking the government can solve all your problems.

 

I'm pretty sure you had mistaken "Reductionists " with "minarchists"

 

Not at all. I was pointing out that liberty and choice and free will are intimately related to whether we view ourselves as automata, driven by deep physical forces where even our so-called choices are not really choices at all but the result of forces beyond our control such as molecular brain function. Much of science, especially neuroscience is currently struggling with that very notion and how it applies to the legal profession and politics in general.

Reductionism in Neuroscience seeks to "reduce" causality to increasingly bottom-driven mechanisms - for example, explaining behavior in terms of its underlying molecular/biochemical pathways. Taken to extremes, even this level of mechanical causality could be further "reduced" to that of quantum chemistry and then onward and downward to that of quantum mechanics itself. At that point causality has become merely a series of statistical probabilities involving constituent elementary particles. And it doesn't stop there, at least in theory

The point of the linked Stanford lecture and book is that causality doesn't just run from bottom to top in terms of organizational complexity. It also runs from top to bottom, where the higher complexity feeds into and affects the lower levels of system functionality. It's a two way highway.

As an extreme example of the practical ramifications of this, we usually don't need to analyze the quantum state vectors involved in all of the underlying solid state physics that give rise to ("cause") our cell phone's functionality in order to understand what it means when we hear a ringtone or feel its vibration. We utilize our awareness of its higher level of functional causality, knowing that by pressing the "Talk" button (or whatever) we will more than likely connect to whoever is calling. However, we most assuredly CAN "reduce" the various phone's features to their lower level of physical causality but the question then becomes, under what circumstances does it really make practical sense to do so?