Various Marginally Edited Chaotic Thoughts
by Wanda Louise Campbell
This ( Half Baked ) Proof for Freewill brings to mind The Cartoon by Sidney Harris
In which The Distinguished Professor is Standing before A Blackboard;
One side of which is covered with Incomprehensible Calculations
& The Other side of The Board is Also covered with Complex Equations,
And between them—
The Professor has scrawled; ‘And then A Miracle Occurs’.
It has recently occurred to me What Miracle for Freewill is Required,
And How it may be Presented.
The Problem of Freewill is fairly easy to Outline.
The Universe as we experience it; Is Governed by A Orderly Structure which is routinely referred to as Cause & Effect.
This is also thought of as Determinism.
The Problem for Freewill is that if The Decisions that we Make are answerable to Cause & Effect, That pretty much nullifies Freewill.
One Solution is Introduce Quantum Mechanics and suggest that Randomality plays a part in our Decision making, But That nullifies Freewill as well.
Freewill requires that there is ‘Deliberate Intent’ that is Directed by An Autonomous Agent.
Regretfully; There are no examples of this that may be Examined or Verified,
Other than our own insistence that we’re doing it all The Time.
But our Brains; The Source of Our Minds, is made up of Chemicals in little bags, that are pushed around by tiny static charges that get their instructions from How The Universe Works.
Some Featherless Parakeets would like to believe that Our Minds are actually Ghosts that are trapped inside The Robots that we Call People. As such; The Ghost’s make all of our Autonomous Decisions— But there is a small problem with this.
This model simply pushes The Mechanics of Decision making out of The Mechanical Claws of The Meat Bags, Into The Fluffy Paws of some Spiritual Realm that must be :
Either Orderly or Disorderly; Just like The Physical Realm.
One Feeble Solution is to simply assert that The World we Perceive is Not The True Reality, And that The True Reality is So Very Different from Our Perceived Reality, That These Dichotomies of Order & Randomality, That we are sure are UnAvoidable— Are Illusions.
The True Reality; Which is forever Unknowable to us;
Has a very simple solution for how Freewill, Consciousness & Local Autonomy really work.
First:
Let us Define our Terms a little.
While Freewill & Local Autonomy may be Illusions.
We really do ( ? - Don’t we ) Experience Consciousness.
It may be that This Consciousness doesn’t do anything,
As; If all our thoughts are generated by The Mind ( Either within Our Brains or Souls )
and Then Experienced by our Consciousnesses, The Consciousness doesn’t have anything to do with Creating Those Thoughts, It only Experiences them.
That would be very annoying.
Let us attack this dilemma from a different direction.
One things that very much disturbs me; Is that there is Order in The Universe.
Why isn’t The Universe Random?
The most troubling thing about An Orderly Universe;
Is: Why Are All The Electrons Exactly The Same as One Another?
Granted; We’re making a lot of assumptions here, Principally about our understanding of matter & such— But Starting with The Elemental Axiom that The World is Pretty Much The Way we Experience it; Then: Where are all these Electrons getting their Instructions from; To all behave in exactly The Same Way?
This is so troubling that i’m going to jump past it.
Let us allow that there is something like; ‘The Bottom of The Universe’.
This has variously been called;
The Dao, Prana, Mana, Qi, The Holy Ghost, Odic Forcem, Morphic Fields, The Standard Model + Gravity, The Kitchen Floor, Yesod, The Akasha Pasture;
or The Ξ.0 Continuum.
It is Ruled over by The Troll Queen.
For what purpose; That is Another Wonderful Question.
But let us allow that this Kitchen Floor exists;
And from it; The One Tiniest Peanut is Multiplied to Fill The Universe,
And By Some Miraculous Rule that Governs it; It forms Quarks & Leptons,
Which combine to make Electrons & Neutrons & Photons & Such...
And They Follow Their Instructions which we call Physics & Chemistry.
From here; This modest Beginning—
i find it quite reasonable that Atoms would form,
Combine into most of The Elements,
And from these building blocks, The Visible Universe, At its largest Scale,
Would quite reasonably form Stars, Burst into Blazing Furnaces,
and find themselves surrounded with dense clouds of debris,
some of which may be thought of as Planets.
Water may collect on some of them;
And Its still reasonable that The Simple Principles of Chemistry
Could make Self Replicating Molecules.
But.
Just how much Complexity am i willing to allow this to proceed towards before i start to question just how much Intricacy can come from A Single Initial Premise,
Without any additional fudging?
Given any set of Rules; i am willing to allow that Complexity will -Always- Result—
But = this = Reality.
This one ?
Did it;
Could it have Resulted from A Single Initial Starting Point,
Countless Zillions of Years Ago,
Proceeding forward,
Tripping one Domino after another,
until… This ?
That seems improbable doesn’t it?
There is An Argument that puts a quick Kibosh on this hesitance to believe In The Evolutionist’s ‘Dead’ Universe;
And It simple states that in An Infinite Universe, That tries every imaginable combination of These Tiniest Peanuts; You will not only eventually come across A Visible Universe that is Exactly like this one; One with All The Wars, Art, Video Games, Sexual Perversions & Dinosaurs;
But There will be An Infinite number of them.
Not just a lot of them, But An Uncountable number of them.
But this argument is trying to find a way to understand,
Or at least allow for Freewill.
So far, It’s not going well.
But.
i would like you to consider this.
What if only possible things were possible.
This is quite different from; Anything is Possible, or worse; Everything is Possible.
I’ve always been very skeptical of The Assertion that There is Another Universe Exactly like this one; Except for one Tiny Detail.
It seems to me; That if This Duplicate Universe that was Exactly like this Universe for several billions of years, and then some small thing changes.
That would be breaking The Rules.
If this is correct.
If only Possible things are Possible;
Then There may be an Equally Infinite Number of Universes, But not Every Universe.
Then if you have a Very Improbable Universe; Like this one—
Maybe its not Inevitable.
Maybe it couldn’t just come about accidentally.
Maybe There would have to be some Fudging to keep it moving in some desired direction.
This model doesn’t say that this Fudging is caused by Gawd,
Or any intelligent entity at all.
It’s open ended on that point.
It is suggesting that along with The Kinds of Determinism that We’re familiar with,
There is another kind of Determinism.
It works just like The Dominoes Determinism,
But it can look a little bit into The Future, and by Some Unspecified Mechanism;
Pick which Domino to Knock over,
Because, for whatever reasons, It seems more desirable.
This Theory is Severely Incomplete.
But if only Possible Things Are Possible;
Then Some Improbable Realities are Actually Impossible,
Unless something pushes in from The Side and Make Impossible things happen.
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A Divergent Collection of Scribbled Ideas
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-2 Empty Universe
-1 Randomality - ( In an Infinite Universe; This World / Visible Universe ( Expanding or Static Bubble of Our Reality ) - or - ( Our Perceptions of This Reality ( or My Perceptions in A Solipsistic Universe, of This Reality ) / Must ( ? ) Necessarily ( ? ) Come about, Not just once, but an Infinite Number of Times, with Infinite Variation ) !
0 Order / The Kitchen Floor
1 Fundamental Particles / Enables All Electrons to Be The Same
2 Physics / Chemistry / Easily Allows for A Universe filled with Atoms, Forces, Gravity, Light, Collapsing Stars, Planets & Even Self Replicating Molecules.
But if Occam’s Razor has any truth to it, Then instead of life evolving from this amazing chemical effect, The Oceans should have instead filled with a Gelatinous Muck that would have made further Evolution ImPossible.
2.5 Emergent Complexity / Emergent Complexity necessitates that some fundamental rules are developed first, and from these, their combinations provide for astonishing results which often appear to exhibit genuine intelligence. But where did The first rules come from, and how complex were they?
What are The Elemental Rules that Emergent Complexity is Constructed from, To Create The Contemporaneous World / Or Our Perceptions of It.
3 Intelligent Determinism / Intelligent Determinism is posited to allow that A World as we are familiar with it, would come into being by some mechanism other than as a randomly evolving clock-work toy.
At some ( UnDisclosed ) Point in The Natural Development of The Contemporaneous World as We Perceive It, The Complexity of It Defies The Clock-Work Explanation.
An Alternative to Intelligent Determinism ( ? or Is it exactly The Same ? ) is that The Fundamental Physics of The World, Created The First Rules, Which Allowed Emergent Complexity to Kick In, Which then produced An Intelligent Determinism, But this remains within The Realm of The Clock-Work Toy.
True Intelligent Determinism Suggests that This is A Distinguishable Form of Determinism from The Clock-Work Variety.
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Pulled off The Interweb :
With no evidence of intelligent life other than ourselves, it appears that the process of starting with a star and ending with "advanced explosive lasting life" must be unlikely. This implies that at least one step in this process must be improbable. Hanson's list, while incomplete, describes the following nine steps in an "evolutionary path" that results in the colonization of the observable universe:
1. The right star system (including organics & potentially habitable planets)
2. Reproductive molecules (e.g. RNA)
3. Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life
4. Complex (archaeatic & eukaryotic) single-cell life
5. Sexual reproduction
6. Multi-cell life
7. Tool-using animals with big brains
8. Where we are now
9. Colonization explosion
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The Curious Thing about my Argument for The Necessary Intervention of A Determinant Determinism to Fudge The Ordinary Progression of Determinism,
( See xy Complexity Chart Above )
i am only troubled by a couple fine slivers along The Natureal History of This Reality.
i am fully comfortable in An Orderly Universe with Physics & Chemistry
And Stars forming,
And Planets with Oceans,
And Self Replicating Molecules,
And Then one of these Slivers appear,
And then Once There are Oceans full of Prokaryotes,
That seems perfectly reasonable,
Until They Develop into Nucleated Cells with DNA,
Which is Huge Stretch.
There are just too many layers of Cellular Mechanics that all have to work together from The First Step.
So that would be The Second Sliver.
And Then Multicellular Animals.
What is now known; All The Animals that Suddenly appeared during The PreCambrian Explosion of Life, All came from One Fully Formed Animal. It is now known that The Eyes in Insects & People didn’t Evolve Independently. Our Common Ancestor had Eyes.
It must have been a fully formed, Sexually Reproducing Animal.
Where did it come from?
Once you have all These Animals though; The Reigning Explanation of how They Mixed together to form all these other animals is quite elegant and believable.
But once these animals became a little bit pickier about allowing only sperms from their own species to fertilize their eggs, You’ve got problems again.
Every Time a New Species comes into existence, with it’s own unique number of chromosomes, you have to have several of them. You can’t just have one mutation, It has to be a bunch all at once.
But then if you jump way ahead to A Fully Functional Featherless Parakeet,
i am perfectly willing to allow that you could have a planet of Consciousless Robots that behave -Exactly- The way we do.
i am perfectly willing to allow that Emergent Complexity could produce all human behaviours in Robots—
Once you have a Viable Set of Axiomatic Rules to Work From.
Could these come about from The Thread of Natureal Evolution?
That’s another Stretch.
Another Sliver where A Little Fudging is Necessary.
Of course; Human Existence would seem to require a constant stream of these interventions.
Granted; Most people, Most of The Time, would not require any oversight.
Most people, Most of The Time; Are on AutoPilot. They are mindless Robots.
Most people i know have never uttered an original sentence, or suggested an original idea.
They usually seem to be experiencing a form of Consciousness very different from The Kind that i believe i am experiencing.
But This argument isn’t dependent upon Everyone being Genuinely Locally Autonomous, with Genuine Freewill; It only presupposes that there is at least one case.
This is called Solipsism.
- - End : Intelligent Determinism Rant- - - - -
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