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Other Comments:
The fact that the concept of free will is somehow represented in our mind – and two different persons – at least if they originate from different cultures – may have quite different representations. Add to this that, according to author, our mind is not driven by classic logic dealing with ‘true’ and ‘false’ statement but rather driven by another process that makes ‘vague’ instances of represented concepts ‘crisp’. The first statement leads to paradoxes but the second one allows avoid them by avoiding logical reasoning. This allows overrule monistic conclusion of free will nonexistence due to general causality principle. Validation of results requires a reader to undertake researches in philosophy, psychology, biology – not speaking of complexity in the computer science sense of the word. The approach is definitely fresh and very attractive.
A few comments on particular details:
- Godel incompleteness theorem describes ‘deficiencies of logic’ that are far beyond boundaries of physics and other ‘natural sciences’. On the other hand, the theorem or its derivatives are valuable for psychology and social sciences because of its reflexive nature.
- Scientists themselves are not very consistent crowd – that allows, I believe, to many of them believe in free will.
- I’m not aware of the connection between computational complexity and Godel’s incompleteness. An assumption of unlimited computational power does not eliminate incompleteness of, say, arithmetic – and nonexistence or falseness of incompleteness theorem will not change complexity of computations.
- Our eye contains about 7 mils cones (color receptors) and 100 mils rods (gray level receptors). Thus, crispiness of our vision is limited to 10000X10000 gray scale images or 3000X3000 pixels color image. I’m not sure that this can be considered as a limit of our perception crispiness.
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Invited by the author to review this article? :
No -
Have you previously published on this or a similar topic?:
No
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References:
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Experience and credentials in the specific area of science:
Math Logic, Computer Science - including complexity, AI.
- How to cite: Petrov S .Free will inside and outside of our brain[Review of the article 'Consciousness And Free Will, A Scientific Possibility Due To Advances In Cognitive Science ' by Perlovsky L].WebmedCentral 2012;3(3):WMCRW001586
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Other Comments:
A fundamental intuition of consciousness is free will. Yet, existence of free will contradicts scientific causality. A fundamental requirement of science is that future follows from the past. This following could be deterministic, or quantum-probabilistic. A relationship between the past and future could be non-computable due to chaotic properties of some nature processes. Still all of the above contradicts the idea of free will in principle. Within the scientific world view the idea of free will cannot exist, so it seems to generations of philosophers and scientists since Descartes to our days.
In this paper Dr. Perlovsky suggests what has seemed impossible: a scientific explanation of free will. His main argument is that free will is impossible within logic, but logic is not a fundamental mechanism of the mind. So free will cannot exist in logic, but it can exist in the mind. Then he suggests that free will is a mental representation near the top of the mind hierarchy, and analyzes the content of this representation. According to his model of the mind, mental hierarchy has two separate but connected mechanisms, cognition and language. This corresponds to a well accepted hypothesis of language evolution from mirror neuron system. Dr. Perlovsky adds a novel hypothesis that language representations become near crisp, logical, and conscious at about the age of 5, but they are not directly connected to the outside world, they represent contents of the surrounding language. Cognitive mental representations are connected to the world, but this connection is direct only at the level of directly observable objects. Higher up in the hierarchy cognitive representations are not directly connected to the world. They are learned from experience and language. At high levels in the hierarchy they remain non-logical, vague, and barely conscious. Our conscious and logical difficulties with free will exist in logic and in language, but not in cognition, and not in the world.
The cognitive model developed by Dr. Perlovsky is based on cognitive mathematics of dynamic logic. These models were experimentally confirmed at the level of perception. But they were not experimentally demonstrated at the top levels of the representations of free will. It is good to know that free will is scientifically possible. But until it is experimentally demonstrated, it remains a hypothesis, as every scientific theory remains until multiple experimental confirmations.
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Competing interests:
No, I don't
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Invited by the author to review this article? :
Yes -
Have you previously published on this or a similar topic?:
No
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References:
None -
Experience and credentials in the specific area of science:
I taught a course on a similar subject
- How to cite: Temkin A .Professor[Review of the article 'Consciousness And Free Will, A Scientific Possibility Due To Advances In Cognitive Science ' by Perlovsky L].WebmedCentral 2012;2(2):WMCRW00512
This article of Perlovsky offering mathematical approach to the perennial problem of the will is especially interesting to me because I’ve created and published on the mathematical theory of will. My theory follows a comparatively less broad and more practical hedonistic approach to the will and the nature and mechanism of the will effort as a part of process of choice. This approach has deep historical roots and support of such a thinkers as Locke, Kant, and William James. For example, Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding) asserted that, “… yet the will in truth signifies nothing but a power, or ability, to prefer or choose…”. In my theory of choice it is a function of comparative strength of the desirabilities of the choice elements. This is supported by Kant saying in the “Introduction to THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS”, that “The faculty of desire whose internal ground of determination and, consequently, even whose liking [das Belieben] is found in reason of the subject is called the will” (p. 11). For details see:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel4%2F5771%2F15415%2F00713713.pdf%3Farnumber%3D713713&authDecision=-203
no, only the complementary ones
No
Yes
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel4%2F5771%2F15415%2F00713713.pdf%3Farnumber%3D713713&authDecision=-203
I've published my hedonistic mathematical theory of will