"I think therefore I am". A phrase coined by the famous French philosopher Rene Descartes sums up in simple words how most human beings at a fundamental level feel about themselves as human beings. However if we begin to dissect the words "I think" where do we arrive? Are we just forms through which thoughts coalesce and pass as the result of determinism? Or are we active and solid creatures who birth our thoughts and are able to influence our own trajectory by our thoughts and choices? I.e. free from cause and capable of choosing our own effects.
It's a funny couple of queries. The ability to even launch them seems to require the second question to be yes, yet modern physics dictates that the first is the most true. That we are basically slaves to cause and effect, and that the deterministic view seems to state with absolute clarity that free will is a silly illusion we all buy into. However a glaring problem in establishing that free will doesn't exist as a certainty and that we are all slaves to circumstance leaves out a huge and glaringly obvious truth. Time and space as we understand them in their linear 3D current perception don't exist. Further more for us to understand that which is true, and that which is not , requires free will to be able to decide between the two. Without free will we have science chasing something difficult to attain (fact) by murdering the very thing we need to capture it (free will).
It's of course hilarious when you consider that in science and modern physics ever persistent hound dogging of truth they actually kill science itself. I tend to blame Issac Newton here. Lazy ass that he was sleeping under apple trees in Lincolnshire spending so much time on his back, that he naturally speculated endlessly on what was up, and of course the fine details of its opposite down. It was his observations of celestial bodies that opened this door of a universe that could easily be describes as a series of mechanisms which all made sense with the theory of determinism. Explainable and cozy. The clock ticks because you wound it... We'll just leave you choosing to wind it out though. It ticks because...
But of course that which seems to be obvious surely must be right?....... So to obscure the matter a little further our good tongue poking out friend Albert Einstein shot his arrow into free will by creating the theory of the block universe. Here there is no moving time much less free decision making going on. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, are just all complex illusions. Both time, choice, and everything in between are illusions. Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny? Forget about it.
The interesting thing here is we continue to arrive at nothing solid because I'm not so sure it's a game of pursuit of anything absolute, but rather a word soup cook off. Theory being the ingredients and the explanation the finished dish. Whichever explanation taste the best is the certainty. If we even ask if free will is certain we must first acknowledge that certainty requires free will. This was a thought put forward by Jules Lequyer in the 19th century.
From philosophers to scientist the certainty of free will is forever being attacked. Often through the windows of the idea of certainty, or the pursuit of fact. Descartes was particularly good at this when he coined the idea of real numbers and fake numbers. For instance, the result of the square root of -5 could never exist in what we call the real world. Well, it certainly doesn't have any practicality does it? Oh, but our friends 123456 etc do right? Well, except for their part in day to day equations and horrendously thought of passwords on crypto brain wallets you'll actually find that "real numbers" aren't actually real at all. Oh they can be encoded, answers hidden within never ending lines of encryption, hold the location of the Holy Grail, etc. But when you're dealing with the idea of the finite, numbers actually become less real than our previously mentioned friend Santa Clause. The amount of information held within anything is finite, numbers are how we come to grips with this. But are they real in any solid sense? Nah.
However, I'm not knocking the use of numbers in creating models in nature or their use in exploring how's or why's. I don't have a grudge against mathematics here. But using deterministic models in nature does not mean nature as a whole is actually deterministic. Create whatever metric you wish it still all begins at a non-existent digit. We have arrived at the erroneous conclusion of being the slaves to cause and effect simply because of our current, and today recognized inadequate perception of time, space, and the universe around us as a whole. Because we can determine that the universe has reacted predictably simply from what we can observe in a limited fashion then case closed. We call absolute on what we knowingly are limited in seeing......Yummy yum. Sir may I have some more? ....see where I'm going here?
In defense of free will I have to point out that the fact that our universe is not as predictable as our current numerical explanations lead us to believe, and we can arrive at the conclusion that not everything is predetermined. Chaos actually exist. Predictability actually exist. Science put down the knife. You don't need to kill free will to survive. In fact if you kill free will you kill science. The pursuit of fact has lead us to a logical fallacy of sorts. It seems for some strange reason we believe we have to explain free will, or explore it in the same way Plato used to try and explain concepts like piety or justice existing in pure form. When in reality free will requires no more an explanation than numbers.
As contradictory as this may sound I'm going to say it. Free will doesn't create new potentials. It simply allows us to arrive at a series of preordained possibilities that once CHOICE is made the other fields of possibilities collapse and no longer exist. We see anomalies in choice made all the time in human beings around us. We see anomalies all the time in nature. Consider where this frame of thinking takes us? There is a time before a non necessary event unfolds and the time after. Two different times existing in completely different states. If you take any quantum event you won't be able to measure it by a rather crude and simplistic series of evolving guidelines.
It is the space between the state of a time before, and the state of another time after where I think we can find free will dwelling. It shares space with remarkable neighbors like belief, and unadulterated initial response. We will never be able to wholesale create our futures in their entirety. But we can certainly influence them, and those nudges are not entirely predictable. The problem of applying the scientific method to intelligence's is that the results hold the potential to continually be inconsistent. Well it's certainly difficult to pin them down to a pure controlled environments to test.
I have noticed from the political to the science communities a crusade of sorts against the very idea of free will existing has been underway. For some reason the explanation of understanding demands that free will must die at the cruel hands of an impostor masquerading under the cloaks of understanding, progression, or truth. I don't believe this is necessary. We can't control collisions, but what we do in the space of the time before, and the time after is entirely our choice. Well guys, that's it for now. Thank you for reading my humble little write up/rant and I look forward to all your amazing content. Many blessings and thanks again. Steem on.
Image credits:
cosmosmagazine.com
cartoon stock
Granger of Fine Art America
mariborinfo.com
WordPress.com
NBC Reboot
Paras Chopra's Blog
Wow, it's 11:46pm central time, I found a kernel of truth in media today,
thanks @mudcat36!
Free will and deterniminsm are contradictory.
Either your choices are the results of mechanical processes, or they are in fact your choices.
I believe the latter.
And just how is this possible?
It’s the mind, the spirit, that originates choices. A non-physical thing not subject to laws of physics.
If you, reader, believe in determinism, did you decide to believe in it?
And if you didn’t decide to believe in it, is belief in it warranted at all?
Sometimes the answer just stares back at you, like Pilate asking Jesus - What is Truth?
We are born, we live, we die. Every life follows the same pattern. What happens between those two moments is a moment of superposition, where the cat is in the box alive and dead. Same as when a skeptic is juggling with multiple choice questions in his mind and decides he doesn't like any of them but still has to pick one. Does he?
If you watch Westworld, the robots are programmed to run behavior loops over and over. One day the guy who runs the show introduces subconscious recall of past events - robots start taking vengeance because people were monsters to them.
Science has filled the role of God's shoes - it recreated the world in its own image, it tries to determine what is true and what is not, and where man should go. It is my opinion we should take a skeptical position when dealing with science, because it came out of the same dogmatic world of myth and legend it tries to annihilate. In my mind it is just another monster hiding in plain sight.
Wonderfully written ☆
Makes me think of this song by system of a down:
Probability of existance is very small, and yet the fact we do is often ignored and unappreciated.
☆☆☆
"Making two possibilities a reality,
Predicting the future of things we all know,
Fighting off the diseased programming
Of centuries, centuries, centuries, centuries
Science fails to recognize the single most
Potent element of human existence
Letting the reigns go to the unfolding
Is faith, faith, faith, faith
Science has failed our world
Science has failed our Mother Earth"
Meanwhile:
Interesting combination of thoughts :) just yesterday I wrote a post about Nature of Ideas. It kind of ties in with what you were talking about. It would be awesome if you could read it and let me know what you think about it. Not just saying that, I am interested. I think you and your audience is smart bunch, might actually be able to understand it And add on to the discussion :) enjoy
It is very nice!!!
Love the article. Things I consider and ponder all the time. Thank you for sharing!
Thank you for reading. Will head over to your blog to check out your content. :)
please follow mw
One of the questions that has always bothered me is, what is the falsifiable hypothesis in the free will debate? How would we know it doesn't exist? This all comes down to how we define it and life so many things such as soul or god, I don't think there is a clear univocal definition. Nontheless, conversations often come down do to determinism or super-determinism. What is the alternative to that? Stochastic systems? Assuming that there is such a thing of true randomness (eg a deterministic explaination for Bell's inequalities, such as retro-causality, does not obtain), is this tantamount to free will? To the contrary, I think it flies in the face of the very reason we often ask the question in the first place: we want to know that we have some impact on the world. Living in a world where cause and effect are reliable is essential to projecting will. Chance mutes it. So there lies the dilemma: we cannot exercise will without some determinism but too much determinism also makes us feel impotent. Perhaps the mistake was tying will to determinism in the first place.
It seems logical to me that there is no free will. Everything was specified at the beginning of universe, we and all what we are doing is just a result of countless events and coincidences triggered by big bang.
But if someone truly believe that there is not free will and think too much about this topic he/she tends to suffer for the lack of ambition, motivation, plans and decisions.
Those who believe that people have free will in their hands and those who never even think about this issue are more likely successful and have happier life.
Don't think too much, just live.
In the end we all will die anyway.
What if: we are all one soul learning to identify meaning by expiriencing life in seperate individual realities?
What if we know ourselves so well we have written for our selves our own expirience based on the expansion we wish to grow into and do indeed have free will, but are tied into the same laws that maintain order in the system called Karma?
This worlds natural law appears ro be equivalent exchange. In physics if we push on something the object we are pushing on is pushing back with equivalent force.
Same probably goes for the energetical realm of emotions and thoughts, yet we cannot see or measure these things so its difficult for science to study it.
Quantum physics has been interesting.
☆ thanks for the wonderful insightful article!
Nice to meet you ^_^/
Wow it´s a really intersting concep, good post.
Congratulations! excellent post.
Abstract philosophy. Not bad. First time reading your blog. Thank you for your content.
lol. Something like that. It was more an exercise in exhaustion after years of teaching/working with the worse and the best. lol. Thanks for reading mate and heading over to your blog to throw support and cast some votes. :)
God damn...lol, as usual deep thinking shit Mudcat. Do you ever take a holiday from thought? lol Genuinely mate good write up and damn lots of votes. Maybe we can convince these people to do a Steem up meet up as we did last time. seriously though its probably all Bots. Anyways catch you on the flip and keep doing what you do mate :)
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Wao! Its cool. Very interesting. Its look wao. Keep the good work going high.
follow me
Let me make something abundantly clear.... rude. I visited your blog as is courteous of anyone who sees someone who visits their post and no.... I will not follow you. I am sure you arrived on Steemit believing it maybe easy money or perhaps you visited a users blog and said "Yeah, I can create better stuff than that." Guess what?... no go. Sadly there is no free money here. I see on a daily basis wonderful people dump their heart and soul into this platform. If you want to put the same amount in then do the same. Work and share. I've put both money and time into my post, and actually will put time into yours if you are working hard. Simply work to produce content. Genuinely work. If you find yourself sitting infront of your keyboard asking yourself "What should I write about?" then youre in the right spot. Write about what follows and I will uncategoricallly follow you. I recently tried this post to see if something heartfelt gains traction on Steemit. There are so many more cleverer people than myself on here. Amazing people. Wonderful people. Yet I will admit with no shame I wanted to see if votes can be bought. In short blame can be shamed.... Does it work? Damn. It does. But you can put your input on the block chain? Work hard and put your signature on the block chain. But please......don't ask me to follow you with no good reason. But provide good reason and I'm behind you 110%
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we are the ones holding our destiny to come into manisfestation