3. Do we have free will?
Cause Determines Effect
The ultimate adventure is to seek truth, openly, without bias, for an agenda driven toward fulfilling a desire may block the path. To be such a seeker is to dare the opening of Pandora’s Box of Truths, no longer being able to shut the lid on them.
Although I’ve derived and/or come across many astonishing truths, there is one that stubbornly stares us in the face as as something at first perhaps taken as horrendous, which is that cause determines effect, that is, input gives rise to the output, making life and nature to do what must be done as time moves along.
What ‘IS’ can no more not exist than it
Can rule any of what goes on in it;
Impute not thy blame, shame, or fame to it—
Fate’s Wheel’s more helpless than all within it.
— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #41 retransmogrified
There can be no outputs without inputs, no effects without causes, for Nothing cannot be, and so ‘it’ cannot be a cause or an input. Thus, there is no true ‘random’. A Geiger counter may appear to beep “randomly”, but why would it reach some threshold to beep when just exactly when it does and not at some other time? And why at a certain place and not another?
Now if someone wants to posit undiscovered causes, such as spirits helping or hindering, someone else’s brain waves traveling through the air to influence someone else (could be), cosmic rays affecting (at least this seems possible), or even ‘random’, then these are just another of the causes determining the outcome, which is why ‘cause determines effect’ is so intractable.
As for mental lapses, neurotransmitter spikes, distractions, coercions, the weather, they and the like, too, are just another cause inputting to the effect as the output.
Imagine a reality in which neither nature nor one’s brain leads to the effect of an output, that outputs and effects pop out of nowhere. Well, it can only be imagined.
All moves by law of output from input,
The will, too, since it votes to step a foot,
And worse, by the time we know, all’s been cast;
We can neither wax nor wane the mold’s root.
— Austin
So, the dropping of the first shoe of determinism startles and discomforts us, but then the imagined dropping the other shoe of the worse horror of what ‘random’ would mean at least makes us feel a little bit better.
So, we have found a truth, and from that we may learn more, but still know that it can be as Dennet’s universal acid that dissolves what we may have come to cherish.
The “disturbing” specter of cause leading to effect is:
1) Events are “decided” as they go, yet still determined.
The consolation prizes from cause and effect are:
It can’t be any other way, and this grants consistency.
Consistency grants continuance. Life was produced, via the necessities of evolution through natural selection, after forming a base for it through particles forming stars emitting the atomic elements, which formed molecules, cells, and so forth.
3) We experience life’s happenings, feeling them as novel.
4) We reduce agitation, for whatever will be, will be.
5) We gain compassion for those stuck, who resist change.
6) Knowing a truth provides for learning, and thus wisdom.
Whether we are for or against myths and folk tales no longer matters when they are eaten away by truth, although surely there are those who can (must) try to deflect, deny, and so forth, but that, too, is how it all must be. We learn to take it all in with a grain of salt that can reduce agitation.
What the meaning to this play we’re befit,
From dirt to dust within the script that’s writ?
The wise in search have thrown themselves to waste;
Experience alone is the benefit.
— Austin
To be fair, though, the experiences of living in third world countries may not be considered as a benefit by some.
From birth we can look forward to being host
To woe, and then to giving up the ghost.
Happy are they who quickly burn to toast,
And blessed are they who ne’er came to the roast.
— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #124 retransmogrified
Rejoice, for your goose was cooked long ago,
Your future eggs laid ‘fore you were aglow .
Ne’er can be recalled now’s bird that has flown,
So love life’s flight, on the winds that must blow.
— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #152 retransmogrified
Fate’s Wheel soft whispers in my ear, "I know
What’s been decreed—just ask and I will show.”
Were mine the hand that made myself revolve,
I should have saved myself from reeling so.
— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #154 retransmogrified
Sometimes I employ a knowing denial, not focusing on knowing all is like a play in which I unknowingly act out a script made as it goes along, and feel that I am making my way as some sort of mini first cause (mini first effect, really, with no resources of causes/inputs); however, I sought the truth and found it, so at the end of the day, I know, I know. I, too, let myself feel romantic love and such, though it be of the chemicals of bonding hormones. The same for the thrills of novelty brought on by rising dopamine levels. Oh, and the opiate endorphins feel so good!
I, of the endless forms most beautiful,
Am stunned that my glass to the brim is full,
Life’s wine coursing through me, as ‘magical’,
On this lovely, rolling sphere so bountiful.
— Austin
The universe’s mantle binds us worn—
Tears feeding the river on which we’re borne.
Hell’s but an ember of our senseless fears;
Heaven’s the rose-breath of opening morn.
— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #33 retransmogrified
Apparently, we evolved to to fully attend to the conscious, second story/storey, unaware of the first storey where all the machinery of the subconsciousness analysis of the neural network resides, until science informed us of it.
And what of the other clincher that time must go by for the brain to perform its subconscious analysis (200-300ms) before the result is put forth? The conscious realm of ‘I’, then, is as a tourist along for the ride. This is not to say that consciousness isn’t used for learning to do what can then become automatic, nor that it doesn't aid the envisioning of actionizing before committing to an action, but in so doing these becomes yet just another input, leaving my idea of determinism intact.
What about that “Life is a test.” Well, it can’t be so with determinism.
There goes that, as well as other sayings, some of them not meaning anything in the first place, such as ‘free will’, in this case the will not being free of doing what is has too, namely willing, or ‘free’ as opposed to ‘fixed’. So, ‘free will’ is reduced to indicating that the will is able to operate, which is no great shake, or that one’s actions are not being coerced, whether by another person or by the whether or whatnot, known as compatibilism, but this, too, gives us no real revelation or insight. Besides, coercion was going to happen as an effect from the causes that it had. The will is just the will—a neural network that votes.
The judicial courts differentiate between ‘responsible’ versus ‘coerced’ (or metal ills), this axis being orthogonal to the other axis of ‘free will’ versus ‘fixed will’ or ‘undetermined versus determined’, which the judges hardly get into, although there are cases in which defendants plead bad nurture, or, as of late, that addicts need help rather than being incarcerated as criminals.
Defendant: Your honor, the universe made me do it, so please don’t sentence me.
Judge: Yes, true, but we still have to lock you up until the universe doesn’t make you do it anymore, for learning may happen, plus we have to protect society.
What about “if, could have, and should have?” They are gone, too, have met their demise. What if Hitler had developed the A-bomb? He didn’t; there are no “if’s”. The actualities of the time trump any kind of ‘if’. Enrico Fermi covered his instrument with tin foil in 1938 and thus did not discover fusion, plus the Allies attacked the heavy water production plant, and Heisenberg perhaps thwarted the German nuclear effort, for he gave a drawing to Bohr that scientist at Los Alamos noted could never work.
Now’s pen inscribes, based on what was there,
Its destined words phrasing our sentence here.
Although it may spell to us right or wrong,
Even one letter’s change hasn’t a prayer.
— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #54 retransmogrified
‘We’ really don’t actually ‘do’ anything.
Since outputs always have inputs, so true,
Then what, we wonder, should we try to do?
It’s the other way around, oh, brain stew,
For cause, time, and the universe do you!
— Austin
Outputs must have inputs, they in turning
Becoming inputs to more ‘fates’ churning;
In that sense, all is writ, on every path,
As in ours, so what must be will e’er spring.
— Austin
We are thrust into life, unasked, because we can’t be consulted, and we must deal with it.
What matters where, what, when, or even who?
In life’s fill, any narrative will do.
Drink through all phases of the lunar month,
The cup waxing and waning, just like you.
— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #47 retransmogrified
What be: thy output must form from input,
For naught else can stride the moving foot,
And surely naught from nought makes no ‘random’;
The pen can’t revise its scroll; “we’re” caput.
— Omar’s Bodleian Manuscript q #95 retransmogrified
The wrap up, as a kind of poetry slam:
Ah, in the whole, you’re just afraid of being unfree,
But, hey, look, behold! There is still so much beauty!
It’s a sublime law, indeed,
Otherwise what beauty could there be?
So here the coin’s other side speaks—
A toss up, weighted equally.
It’s from the searched finding of truth—not of fright,
Though determinism is really not a very pretty sight.
Beauty exists either way, for there is still novelty,
But ‘determined’s opposite is of an impossible currency.
How dare you curse the freedom to be;
It’s because you are scared of He!
What greater proof of inner freedom then
Could His gift of wild flight to us send?
Really, it not of a scare that He is there,
But because ‘random’ cannot even be there,
For, then on nothing would things depend—all bare,
If it could even be, but it has no clothes to wear.
I swear I am more—that I do act freely!
Don’t pass off my passions so calculatingly.
I'll let the rams butt their heads together;
One absolute position subsides for its brother!
Yes, it seems that we can choose, even otherwise,
But what is within, as the state of being wise,
Knows not the hidden, non-apparent states below,
For that is a ‘second story’, having only one window.
One rigid mode of thought’ score
Consumes the other with folklore,
Unbending, unyielding with perfect defense,
To orchestrate life’s symphony at the song’s expense.
We’re happy to just find out the truth;
However, when subjected to the proof,
We wish that the coin could stand on its edge,
And see that it cannot, which is knowledge.
So lets define the world and human existence
On a couple hundred years of material witness,
Or burn the measuring eye to the stake!
After all, our freedom’s what it seeks to forsake!
Evolution didn’t work by chance for us to live,
For natural selection is the scientific alternative
To Intelligent Design from something outside;
The coin of determination has no other side.
The secret is simply that a secret does exist
And no amount of data can take away this,
But this doesn’t mean a ghost in the machinery;
But perhaps the heart isn’t just a pump, the liver a refinery.
We often forget the secret, willingly,
In order to live life excitingly,
Which it still would be, either way,
As we’re still part of the play, anyway.
But of course there is a past of ‘whethers’,
Through which we’ve been weathered.
Surely we are moved as dust from gust to gust,
But is two-twice-two as four always a must?
Math, too, is a must, and we try, as ever,
To predict a week ahead the weather,
Yet the data seem to much to work with,
But indetermination measures not random’s width.
Is not an unfree will a blatant contradiction
Developed from the an ‘enlightened conviction’?
If I’ve made a choice then I have willed it
And if it’s been willed then freedom’s fulfilled it.
This what I mean, that the will willed one’s self,
Which is that one does not will the will itself.
The neurons vote, based on who one is—
Nothing else is there to answer the quiz.
And of course it’s in and of a misguided pit
To say that from the past we’ve distilled it.
Is not the idea of complete self-autonomy a ruse
Born from the illusion of the existentialist blues?
We distill what comes into us, too,
For it has to become part of us, new,
For mirror neurons act it out, while we are still,
Invading our sanctum and altering the will.
But of course, this is to be much expected
From a culture that lacks all mythical perspective.
‘Nonsense’ we call it, a virtue of not thinking,
From which we have long since been departing,
So now will behold in all its transparency
Beyond childish ideals of essence and archaic fantasy.
That’s close, but it’s thinking that has grown,
By science and logic informed from reason sown,
In place of feeling, sensation, wishes, and the pleas
To have the universe be what it ought to be.
Do not distort with a desire for meaning.
Oh, the babe, lets leave the child a’weening,
But I ask of you: have you not tried in-betweening?
There are two ways of living, sometimes merging,
One of just ‘state of being’, of its only showing,
And one of the being plus the under-knowing;
As with our life’s wife, we dwell not on hormoning.
And in that same breath we say all is forgiven;
Why hold humans responsible, leading to derision?
Of course an eye for an eye was an unjust decision.
Well, we have a system that draws a line between
A crime of passion and a thought-out, sought-for infliction.
“The universe made me do it,” says the accused,
And the Judge replies, “Well, this does excuse,
But I still have to sentence you to the pen,
Until the universe can’t make you do it again.”
Why must it be a question of absolute freedom
As complete randomness over an unbending system
That structures everything that ever was, is, and will be,
Right down to the elementary structures
Of incomprehensibility.
What is set forth in the beginning
Is ever of itself continuing,
Restrained by time, yes, but unfolding,
For there is nothing else inputting.
I may understand why this has to be;
I have felt the rapture of black and white toxicity,
But why subjugate all possibility for novelty?
It will still be novel, even such as a new parking lot,
For the dopamine neurotransmitters will stir the pot.
New is still new, on the grand tour through life;
Then do some predicting, to then avoid some strife.
Can such a thought hope to cast a wrench into these gears,
A tool so heavy that dissuades all of our fears?
Will all order and inertia be torn asunder?
Will we have giant ants wearing top hats over,
With all rationality considered a blunder?
The truth was not sought to drop a spanner into the works,
But it even turns out to grant more of compassion’s perks
For those afflicted with the inability for learning,
Thus eliminating the great annoyances burning.
Am I simply a delusional puddle here,
Perceiving just my liquid perimeter,
As I think to myself I can control
The very rain that expands my rule.
And the humidity that thins
Should I condemn as that which sins?
There are no sins, but just destiny’s fate,
Which even includes one’s learnings of late.
We and all are but whirl-pools, of the same oscillations,
Some lasting longer, yes, but of the same instantiations.
Outputs without inputs cannot ever be,
Or the actions would pop randomly,
Yet to some people that’s the enemy,
A useless state that’s not here, thankfully.
— Austin
Note: — All my retransmogrifications of Omar Khayyam's Bodleian Manuscript are here:
https://austintorney.wordpress.com/2015 ... n-project/
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