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

  Post 121.  December 12, 2021

  Is FreeWill Fake Agency?

  In Culture We are Free to Choose

 Kassan addresses the common question : “why”. And says, “the only satisfactory explanation is in terms of our intention-ality : our agency.” Then, he notes that “agency as causality is embedded in our laws”. So, the notion of voluntary agency has a practical application in the social milieu, if not in the physical environment. A honey bee doesn’t seem to have much free-dom to defy its evolutionary programming. So, we don’t bother to ask “why did you sting me?”. It was simply doing what came naturally. But humans, within an artificial Culture don’t have that excuse. We have more options.

He goes on to list several “respectable approaches to the hard problem of consciousness”, e.g. 1. Physical panpsychism : a> consciousness isn’t a thing that exists or a property that adheres, but a process that occurs. b> Except in the phenom-enon of life itself, consciousness seems entirely superfluous.  2. Information Theoretic : a> consciousness doesn’t pervade all of physical reality, but it arises spontaneously in any inform-ation processing system that exhibits certain objectively verifiable characteristics. 3. The double whammy : a> con-sciousness is spooky and weird, quantum mechanics is spooky and weird, maybe they’re connected. Maybe they’re not. Number (1) above is similar to my own notion that everything in the world is a form of Generic Information5 . I don’t use the traditional name though, due to it’s mystical baggage. Number (2) is the philosophical basis of my Enformationism thesis. And item (3) is the physical foundation of my speculation on how the original Singularity evolved into the Life & Mind that we know today.

His next topic is The Self as an illusion. He says “in Buddhism, the doctrine of no-self (anatman) contradicts the Hindu notion of (atman)”. But my Information Theoretic thesis reconciles both concepts under the heading of Generic Information, the shape-shifting power to enform Potential into Actual. In my view, the Self is not a misleading illusion, or a free-floating spirit, but merely a mentally constructed symbol to represent the body of the thinker. It’s as real and useful as any other idea by which we guide our behavior. Kassan seems to make the same point about erroneous attempts to pin down the Self. “the notion confuses the psychology of the self with its phenomen-ology”.7 So, he concludes that “the self is no more an illusion than any other aspect of phenomenal experience”.

After those scenic side-tracks, he finally gets around to “unpacking free will”. For his analysis, you can read the article. Here, I’ll only mention a couple of points. 1) “Trying to account for choice at the level of neurons . . . wouldn’t provide any causal account”. That would be like looking for Meaning in the circuits of a motherboard. 2) “Voluntary behavior  . . . Is an emergent phenomenon at the level of the entire organism embedded in physical reality”. That’s what I call “Holism”, or “Systems Theory”. Finally, he looks at “Freewill as Phenomenal Experience”, and says “Although this naïve view has largely been abandoned by serious thinkers, it can still be useful : what difference does it make if you believe that free will is an illusion? Would you no longer make any choices at all?”. In his considered opinion, “free will is a puzzle but it is not an illusion”. To that, I say “amen”. 

                          End of Blog Post 121

5. Generic Information :
Information is Generic in the sense of generating all forms from a formless pool of possibility :e.g. the Platonic Forms.
Like DNA, Information shapes things via internal rather than external constraints. Like the Laws of Physics, Information is the motivating & constraining force of physical reality. Like Energy, Information is the universal active agent of the cosmos. Like Spinoza's God, Information appears to be the single substance of the whole World. http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html

6. Self/Soul :
The brain can create the image of a fictional person (the Self) to represent its own perspective in dealings with other things and persons.
1. This imaginary Me is a low-resolution construct abstracted from the complex web of inter-relationships that actually form the human body, brain, mind, DNA, and social networks in the context of a vast universe.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page18.html

7. Phenomenology :
Appearances, conceptions, ideas, meaning, sensations in the mind.   
“phenomenology is the study of an individual's lived experience of the world”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40037-019-0509-2

More Blog articles on the topic of Free Will :

Free Will versus Free Won’t
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page63.html

Consciousness & Freewill
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page32.html

FreeWill Within Determinism
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page68.html

Karma or Fate or Freewill?
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page24.html

Paradox of FreeWill
http://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page13.html

Holism and FreeWill
Post 120 of Blog 7
http://bothandblog7.enformationism.info/page24.html

FreeWill
and other popular delusions
Post 122 of Blog 7
http://bothandblog7.enformationism.info/page28.html

We are Free to Risk the Effects
of our
Causal Choices

ENFORMATIONISM

SKEPTIC

Magazine

Peter Kassan

Software and
Artificial Intelligence engineer

DISILLUSIONED

“Few concepts have been more often targets of attack than time, causality, consciousness, the self, and free will”.

 — P. Kassan

https://www.skeptic.com/magazine/archives/26.1/

Disillusioned :  Why Time, Causality, Consciousness, the Self, and Free Will Are Not Illusions
___Peter Kassan
excerpt from Skeptic magazine article

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