Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

  Post 122.  January 29, 2022 continued . . .

  Unscripted Free Will

  Afterthoughts and End Notes 5

 These are some marginal notes to Self while reading the book by Peter Carter. They are my own thoughts regarding topics he mentions in his text.

• Transcendence :
“Entangled particles transcend space and time . . . The whole idea is absurd, reality cannot work that way. Except it does.”

Einstein’s Block Time24 freezes space-time for mathematical purposes which are Ideal, not Real. Is that absurd?

• Holism :
“All beings are part of the Whole. Their actions do not come from their own free will, but as expressions of its laws.”
___Chuang Tzu, Taoist philosopher

The Whole governs the parts. But each person is a holon25 (part with holistic properties). So, the self-aware system (organism) makes laws to govern its own parts.

• Self-Determination :
“Do we have free will? . . . Must every event have a cause? . . . If the answer to the second question is yes, then the answer to the first one must be no.”

Is a self-conscious person merely an effect, or is she a cause of self-chosen events? In the BothAnd view, FreeWill is com-patible with Determinism, in the sense that local causes arise from feedback loops26 in self-aware brains. This assumes that the evolutionary program allows for self-determining creatures. Not just self-moving animals, but also self-directing persons.

• Non-random Causes :
“Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them.” ___Hume

Determinism is usually imagined as a simple linear chain of causation. But, in reality, the randomness of the universe results from an almost infinite array of causal forces coming in from all angles. So, a self-aware agent can re-direct those in-coming vectors to serve her own evolutionary path. Thus, a self-motivating bit of flotsam can take responsibility for its own progression, despite the tide of Destiny.

• Intention is Causation :
“It’s so much easier to just go on presuming that somehow our brains operate in another dimension where causality does not pertain.”

There’s no need to imagine a fifth dimension of freedom from causation. It’s more likely that evolutionary forces, over billions of years of complexification27, have produced a self-reflective brain that can imagine a hypothetical future state, then cause the body to move in that direction.

• Cultural Causation :
“Determinism undermines the foundation of social structure by removing personal responsibility.”

Natural evolution has created the complex social structures of ants & bees. But individual ants function like centrally-directed robots. Why then do humans require cultural structures28 if their freedom is limited to what nature dictates?

                Blog Post 122 continued  . . .

    GOODNESS
“Humanism is the ethical system favored by atheists and agnostics that can be endorsed by keepers of the faith. With no equation of morality with immortality, it sontends that mankind can be good, should be good, for goodness sake — that idealist-ically, and logically, optimistically and pragmatically, doing the right thing is the right thing to do.”
Chapter IV:14

Yes, but how can we choose between good & evil without Free Will? Do what comes naturally?

24. Block Time :
Einstein’s hypothetical version of timeless eternity would allow inter-action with no elapsed time. All particles are also bound-together (entangled) into a single spaceless whole.

25. Holon :
“A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole. . . . The holon represents a way to overcome the dichotomy between parts and wholes, as well as a way to account for both the self-assertive and the integrative tendencies of organisms.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holon_(philosophy)

26. Feedback Loops :
“Feedback loops are an important feature of complex adaptive systems.”
https://code.org/curriculum/science/files/CS_in_Science_Background_papers.pdf

27. Complexification :
Like multiplication, it is more than simple addition. Like evolution, it ramifies into novel forms. Like Holism, it entangles multiple parts into an integrated system with novel properties.

28. Cultural Causation :
Human culture has evolved more rapidly than Nature into endless forms most useful to  human purposes.

Animals seem to have no universal concept of Good or Evil. So they always do what comes naturally. The big fish kill & eat the little fish, because that’s the way of hierarchical Nature. Our lovable dogs have no compunctions about killing and eating living creatures for whom death is not a good thing.

But humans have developed the ability to generalize specific positives and negatives into the cultural concept of good behavior and bad behavior. And they make Cultural laws to fill the moral gaps in Natural laws. So, how did randomized evolution produce creatures with that can over-rule the natural determinants of do what thou wilt, even if it harms another?

The Single Simple Question
That challenges All Convictions

Peter Carter MD

Primary Care Physician

“Connecting the conundrums of God and Immortality, Free Will, the Strange Reality of Quantum Physics, and Finding Purpose in Existence”.

Integrated
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