I’m always baffled that you don’t seem to see the infinite regress, which blows up to infinity. How do we explain how/why the realm of the even more unfathomable order is there?
Why not both?
You can’t possibly be more baffled than I am at how anyone could believe that the unthinkable order of the universe is a product of chance.
Furthermore, there is no infinite regress in my theory.
I assume you are thinking that if there is a more advanced realm encompassing and subsuming this realm, then what’s to stop the possibility of there being an even higher realm that encompasses and subsumes the two realms we’ve been talking about, and so on and so on into an infinite regress of higher and higher realms.
But no, what I am suggesting is that ultimate reality (or the “ALL-THAT-IS”) consists of only two interconnected realms:
1. The “corporeal” realm where minds are encapsulated in matter, such as what we are experiencing here in this universe (which, in truth, is the mind of the fully-fruitioned, adult version of that which our own minds hold the “seed-like” potential of evolving into post death), and…
2. The “incorporeal” realm (or the inverse of the corporeal realm) where “matter” (which is simply super-advanced and highly ordered mental holography) is incapsulated in incorporeal minds. I’m talking about a realm where there exists a probable infinity of incorporeal minds whose self-aware agents have awakened into the full-consciousness and full control of their mental imaging energy, and are free to create their own universes out of the living fabric of their very own inner being, just as the Creator of this universe has done. All of whom are unencumbered by the limiting speed of light, for they can traverse their universes, instantly, at the speed of thought.
And that is precisely what I am suggesting that we too will be able to do after our “second” and final birth into the incorporeal realm (as per my earlier Jesus quote).
The two realms together make up, again, the “ALL-THAT-IS,” which is an ever-growing infinity of living, organic (self-replicating), incorporeal Beings whose minds are the spatial arenas in which universes are created, which, in turn, function as the cosmic wombs in which their very own offspring (beings like us) are conceived.
Anyway, that’s the gist of it.
The only snag in this whacky sounding concept is that there is absolutely no way of comprehending the mystery of how it all began, for it implies an “alpha” agent and an alpha universe.
And if an alpha universe did indeed have its own beginning sometime in past eternity, then that’s where the concept of infinite regress rears its ugly head.
On the other hand, if it is as felix dakat suggested - that it had no beginning, then that is equally as mysterious, and seems to be something of which felix cannot understand is a profound conceptual problem that begs for a logical solution.
Now, if you think that what I have proposed above sounds preposterous,…
…then just harken back to our discussions about the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and how some materialists believe that fully-formed, multiple copies of us and this entire universe, instantly spring into existence (branch off of this universe) just to accommodate all of the probable locations where a singular electron might have landed on the phosphorescent screen of the double-slit experiment.
Come on now, Atla, if there’s room on the table for that load of horse crap, then surely there’s room for what I am suggesting.
Anything is possible. But the objection stands, explaining something very unlikely by positing something even far more unlikely, is one of the most self-refuting arguments in philosophy. Your idea is worse than multiverse ideas.
We are both since the two are one and the same.
You just don’t get it, Atla.
The existence of an infinite and ever-growing multiverse is precisely what my idea implies.
Infinite regress that explodes into infinity, plus fundamental temporal asymmetry.
Consciousness is irrefutable from a first person point of view. But, its existence poses a hard problem to explain. Freedom of action, on the other hand, is opposed to the natural law of cause and effect according to which it is a mere fiction of thought.
So this is yet another determinism argument… So I see
Free will based on quantum randomness is a corollary of Federico Faggin’s theory of consciousness that I presented in brief. Whether it is necessary for consciousness is debatable. Or not, if you prefer.
This reminds me of all that stuff Simone Weil said that if there wasn’t any kind of order …freedom wouldn’t even make sense or be possible. She was a fan of Kant.
Anyway.
I felt compelled beyond my ability to consent to say that.
Not that it even means anything or is even possible to say in a 100% non-agency determined universe.
Your reading it is a delusion given to you by an evil demon. None of this is real. Just kidding.
Quantum randomness is random, it has nothing to do with free will. Maybe some other features of QM might.
Oh god… not the quantum freewillers again. Say it isn’t so.
Consciousness is (reactive) reflex-action sublimated to the level of activity-as-such within a much larger context of the same thing, constructed with many layers feedback-looping into and through each other in slightly off-center or juxtaposed ways in order to produce what we experience as our subjective perspective, like the ability to think about something against a background of memories and sensory experiences or the ability to feel a feeling strongly at the expense of other feelings and in contrast to the proprioceptive background state of feeling in the overall body.
What this means is just that consciousness is a mystifying word for a neurological process that is relatively simple to understand: nerve cells conduct impulses and through being organized into super dense and intricate neural networks are able to store information. What information is stored? Impressions taken from sense organs on the body. The stored information correlates to what we call instincts or gene-programmed responses to certain situations such as “I feel this sensation in my mouth, therefore my jaw muscle tightens and loosens over and over, causing me to chew my food. Then at some point when the feeling in my mouth changes sufficiently other muscles in my throat contract causing me to swallow what I just chewed.” You can think of literally eveything about your body, your conscious movement, even your mind internally to itself as this kind of stimulus-response process of a sensation triggering a direct activity result in the body or triggering a space within neurological information storage which then causes whatever is being stored there to be re-activated as actively experience in the present moment sufficiently close to the way it was originally experienced when that information was first encoded in that particular neurological area.
Then you can see that every moment of consciousness you have is simply a set amount of the contents of your already-existing memories being re-activated in varying degrees and combined in slightly new ways, all against a backdrop of your body’s 5 senses taking in constant stimuli from the environment and also your body’s own proprioceptive sense of what it feels like to itself (inner changes like changes in heart rate, blood flow, muscles contracting, hormones being secreted, etc) all acting as the general background level of “what you feel like to yourself” and any more individuated/strong momentary feelings arise from within that and temporarily cloud over most of the background. Basically there is a huge amount of stimuli entering your brain every second you are awake, stimuli coming from outside of your body and from inside your body, as well as all the neurological activity going on in a given moment which is recalling and re-activating impressions already stored as memory… all of this crazy amount of probably trillions of bits of stimuli is then organized in the higher more derivative secondary, tertiary etc. areas of the brain like the neocortex, which exists to receive inputs from all over the body and rest of the brain and to loop and parse and dissect and recombine these in new ways, then all of that is immediately copied and laid down as new memories. Things like language allow us the tools to organize our inner sensations/reactivated experiences in more complex and interesting ways, eventually having led humanity to create things like culture and understanding facts about the world we live in. We have henceforth succeeded at creating countless divisions and demarcations within the overall structure of our massive neurological stimuli, often using words to identify a particular pattern or area within that and mark it out for future reactivation as the need arises based on shared connections and mutual correspondences between various areas of the contents of this neurological mass of stored stimuli information and how there are compatibilities and logical relations between different contents, some of these being merely spatial or temporal while others are based on meaning. All of those sets of relations are like a program running all the time helping to determine which contents are activated at which places and times, to help give meaning to your experiences all within the wider scope of a naturally selective necessity having been encoded into us at the biological and neurological levels over many millions of years. It’s really not any more complicated than that if you want to describe consciousness in the most basic way possible. And you can also arrive at this analysis by looking inwardly at your own consciousness, take a single moment and try to figure out what is the content of your consciousness in total at that given moment, and why each of those contents is a content in that moment, and from where those contents themselves came and why are they recalled now as they are, and keep tracing that outward and back in a phenomenological eidetic sort of regression-explosion outward following the relevant lines and you will begin to see that consciousness is literally just the sort of reactive stimuli-reflex system plus memory plus higher-level neocortical reorganization and repatterning (applying higher levels of derivative meaning) that I am describing here.
I suppose some of the difficulty is the whole “but why does it FEEL like this, why do I experience this kind of “being me” thing or the QUALIA of it?” That is a stupid question made by idiots who pretend to be philosophers. There is no special reason needed, there is no hidden mystery inside the mind or why you are “you” and have feelings and sensations and experiences and thoughts. Those things are literally exactly what they are as I have already described here, re-activated reflex-based stimuli causing certain other reflex-based activities to occur which then become stimuli for the next step in the chain, and so on and so on. Just like there is no reason why the color red is “red” and looks that particular way to us, rather than just being understood as a certain portion of the visible EM spectrum. It simply is that way probably by evolutionary accident in combination with the fact that there needed to be a way to visually immediately differentiate that particular area in the EM from other areas, as this was beneficial for our survival and thus evolved at some point in the distant past. Why does the experience take the form that it does? Because it had to take some form in order to exist and be conscious to us, otherwise the ability would not have been able to appear as a consequence of evolutionary mandate. The inner subjective experiences we have are not mysterious, in fact they reduce perfectly to exactly what is going on in the reality around us and the very exact reasons why being aware of those goings-on were important for us in the past, hence were selected for by evolution. Now we are way more complex in our thinking and inner visualization abilities, we have language and culture and we can comprehend facts for their own sake, so enter into a new higher and more derivative, precise form of consciousness than other animals are able to achieve. It doesn’t mean there is anything extra special or mysterious, it just means we are doing what other animals are doing but on a much more removed, abstracted, derivative and comprehensive-refined level. We are capable of sensing and responding to much subtler stimuli than other animals, like meaning or facts as such, whereas other animals are pretty much limited to their sensed physical surroundings and feelings/impulses in terms of what can become a stimuli and enter into their consciousness as a new content of that consciousness.
Physicist Henry Stapp says that it may be the ion channels in the neurology that allow for quantum indeterminacy effects to occur and scale upwards across the brain in terms of a macro-level standing quantum wave, which is the reason why we are able to make decisions and have sentient ‘free will’ outside of or alongside the context of a purely causal determinism.
So, the self is free from physical determinism to make choices. But why does it make the choices it makes? Wouldn’t its choices be based on prior causes, whether physical or not? Wouldn’t they reflect the desires, knowledge and goals of the self, these being causes? Indeterminacy doesn’t give freedom. It just throws some random in there. I understand he thinks we get to choose here, but wouldn’t this choice come from our mood, goals, desires, knowledge, all causes. If it is not caused by these things it seems a pyrrhic freedom. Yes, you can choose but this choice will not be caused by your values desires, goals in the context of your knowledge. How would that then not be random and not connected to you at all?
Right, its not random or indeterminate, rather it is like looping the impetus for causal action back upon the self and its more relevant or salient aspects, even when this overrides otherwise more ‘hard’ deterministic causal influences. But for Henry Stapp it’s even more interesting because according to him, what happens when we make a decision is not only creating a new parallel universe but in fact the universe we are in, or the new one that is created, is configured in such a way that the choice we made is retroactively causally determined by that universe’s past. He seems to think, or at least play around with the idea, that our choices actually recreate a past for themselves to end up having been predetermined “the whole time”.
I don’t really buy into that idea, but it’s fun to think about.
The free will thing makes more sense to me. We as an organism have this thing we call our mind or our self, a coherent being that maybe has this access to quantum-superpositional states such that we can superimpose various causes against or on top of one another in weird ways, allowing us to not just act as an immediate pre-determined robot at the behest of external forces but to mediate and moderate these forces with what our own being is and requires/desires… or something like that.
I really think free will is just a name for a more complex, subtle kind of causal determinism that is able to factor in things like expected future predictions and thus actually place causes in the future, meaning our minds gain the ability to be cross-temporal and are actually partially caused literally by futures that don’t even exist yet. That, along with many layers of possible self-reflection on our part and the fact that the whole inner causal chain of mentality has a few links we can see but then disappears into obscurity, means that we end up feeling like we have autonomy more or less independent of being compelled absolutely by this cause or that cause. We can more or less abstract-weight causes in our minds virtually, then a value comparison process unfolds that we are only partially aware of, and out of that process we make a decision. In the end its all deterministic, but a much more interesting and complex deterministic process than most others.
Self-caused or self-determined actions of our mind impact our body/world because we can manipulate causes/variables, not just be manipulated by them. It’s mind over matter by default, which is why we can change our mind, learn, and initiate full overhauls of whatever material/resource/narrative is involved. Mind was/is “first” (in God’s case, atemporal, or omnitranstemporal). It configures/subsumes matter/variation. In God’s case… eternally, the whole time “line”… complete.
This looks like a good take on Chalmers’s “easy problems of consciousness”, but all the mystery isn’t dissolved just yet, when the “hard problem” wasn’t addressed.
^^^ Tldr
It’s all really simple if u take my approach which is to call the theory of freewill (from libertarian to compatibilist) ‘agency dualism’ and here’s what that means.
First, as you’ve all noted, indeterminancy and randomness does not support, much less demonstrate, freewill. The usual mistake is to use the antonym of determined, ‘undetermined’, to describe the nature and essence of this thing ‘will’ we are talking about; it is not determined by causality, it is determined by me. I’m ‘undetermined’ by the world, etc.
The theory of freewill actually needs a form of determinism so to not be characterized as a theory of indeterminism… a world in which a causality doesn’t affect this thing ‘will’ and our freedom is nothing more than unpredicted randomness and so on.
That determining thing that causes what we do is our agency, then, and it has causal power. So there is one kind of causality that is what moves things about in the world and there’s another kind of cauality that is what happens when i choose to stand up.
Herein lies one problem. If there are two agencies interacting causally in the world - one causality affects the world and your body, and the other, not affected by the former causality, affects your body and through/by it, the world (when u move about and use your hands to move shit around) - how does the latter kind of causality ‘touch’ the world that the former kind of causality affects? Through the pituitary gland is not the right answer, frenchy.
And how does the latter kind of causality (your free agency) not be ‘touched’ by the former kind of causality?
Think of agency A as ‘the laws and forces of physics’, and A is the former kind of causality… the one that has control of everything in the world (but u). Agency B is u, the latter kind of causality. Your special power is that u can ‘direct’ and therefore control some of how your body moves. U share control of it with agency A.
Now we understand how particles move around and how forces (like magnetism, gravity, inertia, momentum) affect things in the physical material world. So much so and with such repetition that we can predict with great accuracy what’s gonna happen. I’m pretty solid on my claim that if i drop an apple out of an airplane, it’ll fall toward the erf and reach terminal velocity under wind conditions x. There’s a causality going on here behind the contiguity of events. It’s not just that they followed one another, but that antecedent conditions played a role in actually making y follow x. Anyway I’m digressing.
The point is that there’s a problem with agency dualism concerning the interaction of two essentially independent causal agencies or forces or whatever u wanna ascribe to agency B.
We have no problem understanding agency A’s affect on the body; we observe it interacting with the world and being affected by its objects and forces all the time. But agency B’s affect is rather elusive. We can’t find at what point it intervenes and disrupts agency A’s causal affect on the nervous system and makes the body do something agency A totally didn’t see comin.