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

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/

  Post 121.  December 12, 2021

  Is FreeWill Fake Agency?

  Self-deception or Self-determinism?

 An article in Skeptic magazine [v26, no 1 2021] raised several thorny scientific & philosophical issues, including the ontological status of Consciousness and Free Will1. The author proposes to show why such immaterial non-things are not “illusions” or “delusions” as some have concluded after careful reasoning. They are as Real as anything else in the world, yet they are not Physical, but Metaphysical2 — in the philosophical, not religious, sense. Unfortunately, most scientists have inherited a profes-sional distrust of anything that cannot be verified empirically. Which includes everything that modern Philosophers place under their mental microscopes. Ironically, many of those same theoretical thinkers have adopted the same animosity toward what Aristotle called “first philosophy”. Thus motivated, they have spilled copious verbiage in their “attacks” on the foundation of their own specialty : Ideas about Reality.

The article begins with an exposition on Time, so I’ll start there to illustrate the fundamental distinction between tangible physical Objects and imaginary metaphysical Concepts. In the Real world, time is the essence of Change, Causality, & Consciousness. Consciousness is merely the awareness of Change3. No change, no causality, hence no cognizance of time passing. As humans, we observe dynamic changes from the stable perspective of our imaginary Self-image. So, Space, Time, Causality, and FreeWill are simply measures of Difference relative to Self. And that mental measurement is what we know as Meaning : significance to Self. Moreover, Meaning is the “difference that makes a difference”, as noted by Gregory Bateson, in his definition of “Information”4. So, FreeWill is merely the ability to detect a meaningful difference out there, and to modify behavior to accommodate that change.

Kassan next addresses the notion of Causality. And he distinguishes between Physical Causality, the subject matter of physics, and Agency as Causality, the purview of psychology and philosophy. The assumption of personal agency (intention) is “embedded” in our civil laws, even though it is much harder to prove than the impersonal actions of physical laws. He then says of Consciousness, “the sciences that seemed sufficient to account for all of physical reality are completely inadequate to deal with life”. That’s because Life introduces a new force into the world : a selfish agenda. The organism absorbs physical energy and re-directs it toward its own survival and flourishing. Add to Life the spooky power of Self-consciousness, and mundane energy gets deflected even farther from its natural course. In that case, we observers begin to distinguish between Nature and Culture. Ironically, those who label Consciousness as an illusion, fail to note that “illusion refers to a phenomenon that occurs within consciousness”.

Nevertheless, some still insist that consciousness is an “epiphenomenon”, implying that “it may occur, but it has no causal powers”. Kassan then notes that “illusionism seems to be an improvement on eliminative materialism”. The latter approach was taken by the Behaviorist school of Psychology which assumed that consciousness was “vastly overrated”, hence could safely be eliminated from consideration. As a retort, the author asks, if pain is an illusion : “do they choose to have surgery without anesthesia?”

                          Blog Post 121 continued . . .

1. Free Will :
“Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

2. Metaphysics :
Aristotle’s second volume on Nature was later labeled Metaphysics by theologians. But, “Aristotle himself described his subject matter in a variety of ways: as ‘first philosophy’, or ‘the study of being qua being’, or ‘wisdom’, or ‘theology’.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/

3. Consciousness :
"The state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

4. Difference is Information :
“Looking at information in the brain and then trying to trace it back to information in the genes that must be responsible for providing the design of the brain that can then carry information in other senses, you gradually begin to realize that this does tie in with Shannon's information theory. There’s a way of seeing information as "a difference that makes a difference," to quote Donald MacKay and Bateson.”
___Daniel Dennett
https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_c_dennett-a-difference-that-makes-a-difference

Information within Difference
 Re : Radio signals :

The information being transmitted is all carried in the differences between a modulated wave and the unmodulated carrier. In other words, slight frequency, amplitude, and phase variations are what gets interpreted as data.

Freedom from Determinism makes us
Responsible
Agents

ENFORMATIONISM

Who’s pulling your strings?