[FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

[Steve Smith]

Glen, et al -

As is my wont, I cannot help but notice a bifurcation opportunity in
this "free will" narrative back toward collective awareness/action.  

Can an *individual* (entirely a delusion of course, but we have beat
that horsehide drum) be induced to *behaving as if* they have no free
will?   One could claim that that is the project of enslavement,
military conscription/training, encarceration, cult-induction, even
technical discipline training.    Your reference to pandemic lockdowns
as a possible *unintentional* mechanism to induce a feeling (stylized
behaviour?) of helplessness (will-less-ness?).   Q&Co would insist that
this  is NOT unintentional and patently aided by first making people
drink microwaved, flouridated water polluted by chem-trails while being
irradiated with 5G signals  penetrate standard-issue tin-foil hats.

Cynical models of Socialization/Civilization seem to suggest a Grande
Project to inhibit free will at the scale of the individual while a more
generous model might suggest that the project is instead to "gather up"
the best of the individuals (or more aptly recursive subgroups in some
kind of nearly-decomposable heterarchy?) and synthesize across the
implied spectrum to yield more virtuous coupling between different
levels than vicious ones (by what objective function metric?).

Following Marcus' implication, perhaps it is specious to seek to impute
the same kind of consciousness we already *possibly* mis-apply to
ourselves onto collectives of our selves when maybe/probably such is
already wrong for the individual.   I think you both are of the stripe
that believes/prefers "it is machines all the way down!" though I've
heard a panpsychic/pan-consciousness sympathy woven into your
narratives.   Perhaps you will put me straight with some variation of
"machines all the way down" and "panconsciousness" are not mutually
exclusive.

I am surprised that J.R. Lucas hasn't been invoked here (if my memory
and archive searches are sound) in this discussion of effibility,
scrutibility, pan-consciousness, and the play of quantum
indeterminancy.   I was shocked to discover that his seminal paper on
this topic was nearly as old as I am:

Minds_Machines_and_Godel - 1961
<https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/lucas/Minds_Machines_and_Godel.html>

I defer to you guys who are clearly more smart-fellers than I ever was
in the intricacies of the language and technical details, but I find it
a nice baseline to start thinking from.

I also wonder if many of your (Glen's) homunculii might be tickled by
this idea about consciousness?

    could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything
    <https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/>

- Steve (or one of his homunculii)

> Ha! Well, you can't program something out of a machine if you don't know what it is you're trying to program out of them. I mean, we could just kill everyone and that would solve the problem as you state it. A more refined answer is to figure out the mechanism at work, first. Then decide how/if to modify it. But, of course, I'm a manipulationist. So I don't think we'll understand the mechanism without perturbing it and measuring the effects.
>
> Can we transform someone who *feels* free will into someone who does not? I'd argue, yes. The trajectory from relative mental health to fatalistic debilitating depression *might* be inducible ... say, via pandemic lockdowns. But that would be an unethical experiment ... best do it with rats first, then translate the results to humans ... 'cause who cares about the feelings of rats?
>
> On 4/5/21 10:07 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Don't agree.  The task is to learn that our sense of agency is an illusion, not further to burden our creations with it.   Do them a favor and program it *out* of them.
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