[xmca] Response to David Kellogg about Volition

From: steve houston <stevehouston3000 who-is-at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu Sep 06 2007 - 21:41:25 PDT

First time poster here and this may be from out of
left field, I'm not sure. I am not active in the
field so forgive me if but:

Roger Penrose, a prominent asttrophysicist, (among
others) has advanced the case that human
thinking/consciousness/cognition is not
"computational". Here he follows Kurt Goedel in the
use of the term computational. He wrote a book that
started with this premise and then further wrote a
response to a chorus of influential academics, all of
whom issued polemics against his book and especially
the "non-computational" thesis.

The contents of his reply somewhat step into the
middle of the debate but should be perfectly
understandable even to someone who hasn't read the
book or the scathing reviews. The Contents are
numbered and I recommend especiallyr reading #s 3 and
4 and then some of the later items at your own
discretion, evocatively titled "Free Will", "What Is
Consciousness?" and so on.

Penrose is not really trying to answer those
questions, by the way, only remove them from a
reductive, emergent from matter, reducible to physical
properties and laws, perspective.

Might at least help center your search for how and
where volition fits into the puzzle.

This is a wonderful list by the way, thanks guys

> It's a good read too, but it wasn't what I was
looking for. I need
 some
> > way of integrating complexity theory and VOLITION
(or
 CONSCIOUSNESS). In
> > language teaching (which is what I do)
volition-free approaches are
 very
> > popular (nativism, subconscious acquisition, and
now
 chaos-complexity

       
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Received on Thu Sep 6 21:45 PDT 2007

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