[FRIAM] New philosophy book

[Steve Smith]

I prefer to frame in terms of (Levin-esque) cognition.   The 
bio/noo/techno-sphere is busy cogitating on solving the 
problems/opportunities of being a somewhat isolated gravity-well 
centered dynamic matter-energy complex moderately coupled to another 
much less complex (lunar) system and a highly energetic one (sol) and 
virtually independent otherwise of the other matter and energy fluxes 
swarming the solar system and orders of magnitude less closely coupled 
with the galactic/intergalactic context.

The cognitive processes around my woodstoves (are simultaneously) are 
those of the home/stead itself, trying to maintain human-comfort (and 
plumbing-friendly) temperatures (with the help of humans who light and 
feed and damper the fire) in the dead of winter while consuming 
household trash and prunings from the trees growing on-property.  They 
are also involved in the problem/opportunity solving work of humans who 
want to be comfortable, want to be soothed by flickering flames and want 
to heat/cook/dry various foodstuffs, etc.

If my conscious (and unconscious proprioceptive) self touches the stove 
surface it it is for various reasons most. relevant to itself (test the 
temperature, attempt to flick a bit of burnt food off the surface, 
recondition the steel surface with stove-polish,  catch my balance if I 
have lost it nearby...    but it is my neural-dominated sensory-motor 
feedback system whose "cognition" is causing my "jerk back".    In a 
larger context (organs scale) gut biomes, glucose/insulin couplings, 
blood-pressure/heart-rate/vaso-C-D, etc are very "busy" solving problems 
which are their primary/singular "job" which are *tuned* to the 
scope/scale-centric problems my conscious self, my id, my ego, my 
socio-cultural-political-economic embeddings, and from below, the 
tissues/cellular processes are trying to solve.

My conscious *awarenes* overlaps all of these to different degrees.    
After many cycles of Ketogenic dieting, occasional wearing of a 
Continuous Glucose Monitor, various exercise and meditation regimes, I 
feel my awareness my personal *cogitation/cognition* has spread 
*downward* a bit while my engagement in sociopoliticaleconomic regimes 
and awareness of geo-hydro-atmo-biospheric processes (mostly through 
theoretical/experimental writing/reports rather than direct 
apprehension) have shifted/spread my locus of awarenesess in the other 
direction.

My free "will" seems to be a slippery (often post-hoc) apprehension of 
the coupling between all of those levels.  When I reach out to test the 
temperature of the surface of the stove, I am trusting that my lower 
level sensorimotor feedback system will protect me from anything greater 
than a 1st degree burn (unless of course I've raised the temperature to 
the stove into orange-hot, when 2nd is very likely).

I've probably just stirred my own brand of mud into this conversation 
but my (free?) will was weak today and my compulsive slop-generator was 
apparently overstoked this morning?

- SteveS

EricC wrote:
> Good point!
> The "scale" at which we view a given event does seem to affect whether 
> we see it as an example of free will or not.
>
> Personally, I would (contra Claude) say that the reflexive pulling of 
> hand away from the hot stove which it touched was "zero" free will, 
> not "low" free will.
>
> Choosing the steak seem like a high free-will example, under (my) 
> normal circumstances, but I could certainly imagine various 
> social-and-cultural pressures modifying my view of someone else's 
> choice of steak. For example, if you could show me that Bill chose 
> steak every time, without fail, that the three people before him 
> ordered steak, and that he never ordered steak otherwise, I would be 
> less confident in my "free will" attribution. Maybe it was literally 
> beaten into him at some point in his life? Maybe he's just likes to go 
> with the crowd?
>