"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
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Granger of Fine Art America
mariborinfo.com
WordPress.com
NBC Reboot
Paras Chopra's Blog
