The Science of Freedom – The Mirror Paradox

I claim that there is a rather gross error in the book, both in the presentation of the ”paradox” and in the proposal for its solution (because there is nothing to solve). It is right to omit it in future editions because it illustrates nothing and is embarrassing.
I am only asking if I understood the intention correctly in order to validate my claim.

From the pages to which I refer.

The error as formulated is that the source of the mirror appears as if there is a difference between up and down and right and left, which stems from our definition of the concepts without distinguishing the differences.

In my opinion, – things have no reason.
There is no difference between up and down and right and left.
Differences in the source of gravity are irrelevant. To see this, – just imagine the same experiment with a person lying in front of a mirror.

The error in the ”paradox” The following distinction lies in the mistake:
The mirror shows everything on its true side.

The inversion is created by the fact that we have rotated the figure 180 degrees towards the mirror – a rotation in which the points have been reversed according to the axis of rotation.
The clock is indeed on the left side of the observer even after the figure has turned towards the mirror. It simply has its back to the observer.

The axis of rotation determines what will be preserved and what will be reversed.
In the experiment described – a person rotates 180 degrees around the vertical axis and therefore the inversion is between right and left.
If we rotate the same person towards the mirror around the horizontal axis that passes between his hips – a kind of flip-flop upside down – then at the end he will be facing the mirror with his head down and legs up, while his right hand will still be on the right side of the person looking at the mirror.

It is true that when we look in the mirror we will notice that the watch is in the right hand of the figure (which is visible on our left); but this is certainly due to the horizontal symmetry of our body and nothing more.
This is easy to understand.
If we had vertical physical symmetry and horizontal asymmetry (one hand on the right only) in the example of the upside down inversion (which this time was a reversal around an axis of symmetry) we would see the single hand as an anchor and conclude, similarly, that the mirror is turning up and down (which would also be true here of course because this already happens in the process of turning to the mirror).

Did I miss something in understanding your intention in the book?

If not – Don't you think the proposed solution is wrong?

In particular, it tries to make a distinction between up and down when there is actually nothing in the mirror effect that really distinguishes them (just imagine a person lying in front of a mirror – and everything you described about right and left immediately applies to up and down).

The differences between up and down in terms of the center of the Earth are meaningless for our purposes. The ”paradox” can be illustrated with any rotation transformation of a Cartesian coordinate system…

Hello.
I referred there to Gadi Alexandrovich's words that describe what you wrote. This is the mathematical perspective. And it still does not contradict my words that explain the matter on an everyday level.
The experiment when I lie down is a bit confusing. It reverses right and left (because I am used to referring to my hands as right and left and not up and down as they are now). But it still does not reverse up and down. In other words, the hand with the clock will indeed be the right hand, but it is still the one that is closer to the earth. Therefore, in my opinion, my explanation stands.

ThanksClose the previous answer.

A more general question:
From the summary of the things up to Chapter 14 with the Libet experiment, the gist of the arguments in favor of libertarianism appears to be something like this:

1. Both the principle of causality and the sense of freedom of choice are based on intuition, and it is not clear that the former should be preferred over the latter.

This is very understandable, even if it is not decisive.

2. The attempt to project from the neural to the mental is a kind of conceptual error (and why is explained).
Question: This seems to be the desired assumption. I would be happy to hear your clarification on how the analysis presented in the book refutes the following (simpler?) hypothesis:
For example, I argue for the priority (out of excessive simplicity, but certainly one that does explain all the facts) that indeed the mind that experiences the qualia is not a separate substance, but rather a (weak) emergent of the brain as a whole.

The arguments of the mental – I read Taylor's arguments, and in general the demonstration from Mary's room and his counterparts – but they do not seem to be able to rule out anything: it is true that logical explanations and physical knowledge will never be able to teach a person things that he will first sense only when he tastes/sees the color/etc.;
However, it seems that this is just a carelessness in defining the whole of physical knowledge:
After all, the same statement can also be said about sensory nerves! No knowledge will replace a sense, but it does not seem that anyone would conclude anything from this except the fact that the trigger for those nerves (which are uniquely linked to the brain) – cannot be initiated through analytical thinking / memory, but are built to be triggered by the retina / skin / taste buds, etc.

I ask now – How is it that sensory nerves differ from the process of cognition?
For on the same weight, I say that mental sensations are a certain innervation of the areas responsible for pleasure and pain – which themselves are nothing more than a network designed to respond (up to the motor parts of the brain) in a manner consistent with encouraging/preventing motor actions that increase (ultimately) that same pleasure/pain!

So back to the question – What in all the evidence from Mary's room forces a separate substance?

The explicit summary of this in the book – seems to be based on the sentence that says that the fact that pain, pleasure, (from taste, color and any sensory input) renew something even for someone who knew everything about them in advance except to experience them.

It seems to me that the simple explanation is:
The information about how they feel simply cannot be stored in the part of the memory, but only in the part responsible for sensing (similar to the way the optic nerves transmit information to the part of the brain responsible for recognizing images and not to the analytical part, etc.).
This, ostensibly, would explain why physical information about the process (which would be stored in memory and be capable of analytical processing) – indeed would not exhaust what there is to know about color / taste, etc. ’, but without the need to assume additional substance, but from a much simpler explanation:
The knowledge would not be exhaustive because the sensation of color is the responsibility of another separate area of the brain, which has no way of triggering it from the analytical lobe, but only from the sensory / memory alone (but memory also requires a first sensory trigger).

And don't tell me that if we map all the information on such a network and store it on a magnetic disk / in the brain's memory – We have not yet expected to experience anything; for the feeling is not the storage area, but the pain and pleasure area that exists in the brain and is not triggered by what is found in analytical knowledge.

The mental according to this explanation, therefore, is only a weak emergent (as required) of a deterministic neuronal network whose sensations (?!) that we call pain and pleasure are only the very operation of a network structure that is already configured to respond motorically accordingly:

In simple words:
Not that there is someone else here and only he who experiences the pain that is the expression of the specific stimulation (= the assumption of the desired);

Rather, all feeling and choice are explained by a network, with an initial structure that provides a concrete translation (even if plastic and dynamic) of inputs – into concrete outputs (according to their weights on that part of the network of pleasure/pain).

Of course, the cogito with which the book opens comes to mind, but there is no contradiction to it either. This network, which ontologically concludes that it exists – does indeed exist. But why assume that it is something beyond this network itself?

I would appreciate your response, including in the body of the matter if it is more convenient (although in the end my question is one that offers an alternative and refers to possible counterarguments / those predicted in the book).

Thanks and appreciation,

I don't understand the questions.

1. I'll start by saying that I'm not here to prove my position, but rather to show its feasibility. Therefore, it's enough for me that the findings of science do not force me to give it up. After all, everything starts from libertarian intuition.
2. I didn't understand your suggestion to skip from the neural to the mental. There is no explanation, nor even language that pretends to hint at a direction that does this. Therefore, if anything, this seems like strong emergentism. Are you claiming that this is still weak emergentism, even though we haven't yet discovered how it happens and we have no idea how it's even possible? So the burden of proof is on you. When you see something that is fundamentally different from its components and you don't have the slightest idea how it arises from them, the simple assumption is that there is something else there (such as raspberry juice).
3. I didn't understand your distinction between sensory nerves and consciousness. I recognize them and say the same about both. Sensing is also done in the mind, not in the brain, and the question of emergentism does indeed arise there as well.

1. Of course. Although my second argument is that perhaps it is more likely that even if they do not actually force us to give up, they at least turn it into a question of “(temporary) freedom from the gaps”, until we find the mechanism.
Because in 2 I mean that the concepts are not necessarily separate and that emergentism has not been ruled out, as follows:

2. “There is no language that makes a transition from the neural to the mental”: First, it is generally required to prove that the two levels are different, and I have not seen one. The only evidence, brought on page 239 by Taylor, on the difference between what I believe and the very definition of the question of what my body believes – is not at all clear:
The term “I believe” expresses only the current path of logical gates in my mind that a certain input is going to pass through.
I believe that now it's nighttime means that the network of neurons (represented by the same network of logic gates) produces a positive response to an input of 11:00 PM on the clock.
Are you arguing that the possibility that a network refers to itself and its results in the terminology of belief and the like – indeed requires a separate entity?!
So I would love to understand why the explanation I proposed is not simpler (answers everything), and eliminates the need for an unnecessary entity?

3. Continuing with question 2 – I also see no need to prove a transition from here to here:
It is true that it is not mathematically analytic (at the moment) like statistical mechanics that puts thermodynamics on the dynamics of microscopic particles.
However, can we rule out a connection between different mental sensations and more complex and longer neural responses?
Let me clarify my meaning:
At one extreme there is a reflex / impulsive response which, in response to input x, immediately creates a response y;
At the other extreme, however, it is certainly reasonable to assume a more complex response, in which input x does not trigger an immediate action y. Instead, it only triggers a recollection of the situation. From there, as part of thinking (about the injustice done to me, for example) this event that is available in memory, through analysis (using System 2 in Kahneman and Tversky's terms) initiated by some trigger (not necessarily sensory. For example, attentional appeals and recollections) – this event joins the memory that includes all the injustices done to me by that person. Together, these motivate me to act retaliatoryly towards him.

Of course, in practice it would be difficult to trace such a neural chain that includes a pause, a stop, and a return to action, etc.

All of this may be an unproven hypothesis, but if it is not fundamentally unfounded, and simple, it is certainly more than reassuring – then this is enough to offer an alternative explanation.
For such a person to say “I have not yet proven” just because “I have not yet measured/calculated” – becomes a mere “freedom from the gaps”. No?

I don't understand these questions. Understanding is a mental act and that cannot be denied. At most, you can claim that the mental emerges from the material, and that's what I claimed in the book. But you can't deny that the mental is not a collection of logical gates. It's just conceptual confusion. Just as pain is not the wound, nor are the currents in the brain that generate it, and just as the color yellow is not the electromagnetic wave that generates it, nor the currents in the brain that generate the yellow sensation.

That's exactly what I don't understand – Why not??

The light is converted into an electrical signal (in a brush, as well as in an electro-optical transducer).

But the currents from the cutaneous axon that reach the brain and are converted into internal currents that we ultimately experience as pain – Why can't I “deny” that they are not the pain, unless I assume the desired thing that there is an entity that experiences them?

Why do you assume that there is a separate entity that experiences pain? From what I understand – From the immediate feeling of the experience of pain that cannot be denied. Right?
But maybe our interpretation of the experience is not an experience at all but a consequential neural response (of discomfort and creating an urge to act to get out of the painful situation)?

Of course I understand the question that echoes in the background of “Who feels it?” Or the experience…
But this is the heart of my question. How do we distinguish between the existence of an entity, and an alternative possibility according to which the machine responds and also knows (in addition to motor actions) to define and describe the map of its stimuli by saying "It hurts me" etc., when the feeling we describe as pain is only a stimulus to scream, get out of the situation, etc.?

Can we clarify (enough to elaborate on the titles. I carefully read back and forth the parts in question in the sequence of chapters) where the hypothesis fails according to which the experience we describe is a solely consequential neural response (not only motor but first cerebral neural)?

I really can't understand the problem and don't see what needs to be explained here.
I'll try one last time, step by step: Do you think the yellow light exists in the world itself or only in our consciousness? And if in our consciousness, shouldn't we assume a perceiving entity beyond the mere currents in the brain and their electrical processing?

The yellow light is, to begin with, an expression derived from our knowledge of the electrical signals from the retina when the specific wavelength strikes it.
But the discussion revolves around the question of what exactly “knowledge” means.
Under the a priori assumption of a perceiving entity – certainly in the physical world there is only the ~470nm wave and not the knowledge of the entity;

However, I do not see why and how we refuted the possibility that the perceiving entity is nothing more than a neural derivative, continuation currents in another area of the brain that feels pleasure. That is, in another part of the network (belonging to another part and process in the brain).
Also regarding sensation, my argument is that pleasure is only the term we (the network) give to the phenomenon of the continuation of the development of continuation currents in the pleasure area (which strictly electrically motivate the continuation of actions, both motor and analytical).

I understand that your claim is that the immediate feeling of an experience requires the ontological existence of an experience. But I didn't understand. Couldn't this be just an artificial separation between 2 different stages and areas of the brain, when what we call an experience is also an electrical brain process?

Sorry, but I gave up.