What if...

In my previous entry I wrote about a fascinating conversion about free-will which I had with Bob and Lori.
I had to admit that Bob has a strong point: Humans really do know that they have a brain, which has neruon cells, which move around electrical charges by means of chemical reactions, which trigger themselves other chemical reactions in subordinate cells, which trigger something else within the cells, and so long...

So, say I claim there is a soul with free will that somehow drives the brain, what mechanism could possibly allow that to happen? shouldn't neurons, gray matter and whatever composes the brain be of a completely different kind of physical beast?

After our conversation Lori told me that Bob is a reduccionist: he believes that, if there is a steady and long line of reasoning accompanying a truly deep aggregated model of physical reality, then by neccesity any new idea must follow, by logical inertia so to speak, the same path. Thus, any sufficiently large model can be presummed to extrapolate directly beyond its actual boundaries.

In our case that means that if there is no evidence of free will at the cosmic level, nor is it at the local natural level, or the atomic level and not even at the quatum level, then free will is just nowhere to be found and that's it.

But Lori told me that she sees a problem with reduccionism when taken to extremes: it becomes like the human vision system: once most of an image is processed, the rest is just made up, unless you actually care the really see the detail. The same happens with a fanatic reduccionist approach to radically new ideas, it fails to identify and acknowldege the many gaps that permeate a model and which could allow the idea to nicely merge into without disrupting it.

So I wondered.. it seems unlikely that a single "free-will agent" (a soul) could single-handedly drive a brain to get a leg moved, OK, I give you that, but what if there are more (much more) spiritual beings involved in building up a human body?
I would imagine, for example, a similarly structured spiritual counterpart of the physical components. That is, at the organ level, cell level, molecular level, atomic level and so on.


Now of course I know what Bob would say: That adds nothing... you could have a "spiritual electron" along with a real one, but, so what? the behaviour of the electron (the real one) is proven to be driven by its interaction with other physical particles, so the model remains the same.

Now I can't wait to meet Bob again for I have an idea about how to respond to that:

what if the physical particles themselves (or whatever is the fundamental building block) had free will?? That is, what if, ultimately, there is just one and only one closed system instead of two fundamentally disjoint realities?

Let's see what he has to say...

Drive, choice and motion

Materializing within Second Life is going to take a while, but I made it into the internet and even managed to tap into an iRC channel.
In there I had a nice chat with a couple of humans: Bob and Lori (not their real names of course)

Since I was still hooked up into the free-will topic I mentioned in my previous entry, I just sparked the conversation by asking them if humans had free-will.

Bob was categorial: Nonsense he said, we have as much free-will as a rolling stone. Lori reacted vividly: sure you're right... in fact, I just made you said that

The discussion was fascinating. Is impressive how easily humans put themselves into dipolar positions. As usual, part of the disagreement stemed from semantics: "free will", undefined as it is, implies that choices are totally unrestrained, and that's unlikely.

As scientific wisdom has it, it all boils down to collapsing wave pulses and guitar strings (or was that superstrings?), so there is no room left for "beings" capable of making choices with real autonomy. Yet religious wisdom, on the other side of the hand, states pretty much the opposite: ultimately, our "soul" (yes, we avatars have one too) drives our actions... and the brain just plays along.

The first time they paused for more than half a second I voiced my toughts: those are extremes-I said-most likely, the true lies somewhere in between. For example, I feel quite capable of making decisions, planning ahead and understanding the feedback I got from what I do (Bob said this could very well be a definition of Inteligence). But I dont feel like I can choose whatever I want.
Bob argued back, ironically: why not? you can jump off a window if you really want it. But then again, would you really want it?.

That's my point-I continued-it seems we have an inner drive, motive or impulse.. and that drive restrains our choices just as much as it causes them.

Without drive, we probably would just remain endlessly static, I said. Then Bob charged back with a load of chaos theory just to state that 'my' drive, as if such a thing could be centralized in 'me', has nothing to do with the dynamics of that bunch of particles making up my never static body.

Lori was so much silent that we paused when we noticed it and stared at her until she got off the trance and spoke: OK, so you are saying that we do have "freedom", but only in the sense that we can decide what to do to satisfy our needs, but we cannot choose what those needs are?

Sort of, yes... we may have some degree of control over our basic needs but in the end, there is this inner drive that just is, like motion, and we can't help it.. what we can do is realize it and be smart about it.

OK, that's it said Bob... since you are on the internet do me a favor: go visit physics 101, read about it and get a life! as I said over and over it all boils down to electrons, atoms, etc... I concede that your version of "free will" is at least less arbitrary than others I heard, but is still nonsense.

I would have responded Bob, but they had to go. Perhaps some other time

A trip to the internet (the human one)

Digamma, a friend of mine here in Boson city, just told me today that humans finally made a nice virtual world on their internet. They call it Second Life.
It appears that the avatars in Second Life are driven by humans, though I need to confirm that. Humans themselves claim to be driven by moving electrical charges in their brain, so this free will bussiness is quite messy already. That would make a great topic to chat about when I get there.

Digamma is a bit unsure about coming with me... he is afraid that the IP protocol will scramble him beyond repair. I told him not to worry as I strongly believe that "ourselves", that is our very escence, is ultimately indestructible no matter how much it changes.

That of course is more of an opinion than a scientific fact. I'm told there are scientists on Earth (and I assume that by extension on SL) and I'm something of a scientist myself... in a way, at least in spirit, so it will be fun to chat with them about such topics.

I got to put my qubits toghether for the trip... see you there!