[FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

[Marcus Daniels]

Steve writes:


< Perhaps you will put me straight with some variation of "machines all the way down" and "panconsciousness" are not mutually exclusive. >

It seems to me if I feel some bad way, and I don’t believe that my consciousness is supernatural, then one way to remedy the situation is to subject myself to the environment or to other random things.   If I am a lucky person, this habit may subject me to forces that reliably knock me out of my rut(s).  Or maybe the bad feeling will cause me to be more analytical about how I feel, and I will think myself out of the condition.    Depressed people are known to be analytical.   One runs diagnostics, of course, when a system isn’t working right!  On the other hand, if the executive process is malfunctioning, there is no reason to trust it.   Others on the list have suggested chemical interventions that plausibly could result in rewiring to reset perceptions.

I think the least plausible of these is the think-yourself-happy approach.   If it always worked, that would be Free Will.  Mind over matter.

I don’t see machines all the way down and panconsciousness at odds.   Open source software.

Marcus
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 11:41 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic


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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