Alexander,
I am onboard completely with choosing to go for choice. And appreciate your frame on agency.
As for ‘self’ and ‘consciousness’, how about, when referring to ‘self-conscious awareness’, we simply say that?
Many folks, at least in the West, consider consciousness “proper” to reference the felt experience of being. It is the experience of seeing a red chair. It is a viable construct in scientific psychology. See, for example, Dehaene’s brilliant
work, “Consciousness and the Brain”. It was what Nagel is trying to get at in
What is it Like to Be a Bat? This is an important construct in the ToK language System.
That said, I completely agree with you that the word consciousness carries so much baggage that we should consider dropping it. My preferred approach is to be sure we tag appropriate labels to its many facets or domains. So, explicit
self-consciousness is the capacity I have right now to say I am choosing to write this email to you. Experiential consciousness is the perceptual experience of seeing a red coffee cup to my right. Attentional consciousness is the point of focal awareness and
so forth.
Best,
G
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]>
On Behalf Of Alexander Bard
Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2019 4:59 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On the concept of sovereignty
Yes, let's totally drop "free will" as "freedom" and "will" have nothing to do with each other beyond simple Christian moralism. Let's go for "choice".
Choice can not occur within total constraint but let constraint loose one little bit and choice occurs.
Consciousness is minor in all this but let's admit that consciousness but let's admit that it is fundamentally self-awareness since the self is what consciousness creates to
have something to focus on in relation to the external "world". "Self" is then nothing but the fundamental dialectical opposition to "world". The void which consciousness fills with phantasmic meaning for allowing itself to exist.
Agency is then the result of action or enacted choice. The "self" becomes "agent" through its interactivity with "world". And "the body" is the arena where this interaction takes
place. Makes sense?
I am beyond ready to drop the term “free will”. It drags the argument down. “Choice” or “choosing” is all we need, not even “free choice” or “freely chosen", as it’s not a choice if it’s not chosen freely. Which means we also can dispense
with narrow definitions of self that do not include the entire organism that chooses.
That said, I get lost in the discussions about consciousness, emergence, intelligence, subconscious, unreflective, physical, nonphysical…
As discussed, consciousness requires something to be conscious of, which seems to need more consideration in its reach. Plus, consciousness is rarely self-reflective of its acts. Most importantly though, no choice is ever made in a vacuum,
so by necessity there will always be levels of external influences, or participations, behind every choice. This is to say that the question of choice must always be discussed within the context of the choosing agent and a specific environment as one. The
question of choosing is senseless within the vacuum of a choosing agent. Fair enough, we need to suss out an understanding of the choosing agent, but no matter how we define consciousness, or emergence, or brain activity, we are only addressing half of what
choosing is. If we are our act of consciousness, if we are our choices and are what we do, we are the context of world around us. My choice to sit is within this chair beside me as much as it is within me. Choice is always a shared activity, though that does
not necessarily make choosing unfree. No?
Peter Lloyd Jones
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562-209-4080
Sent by determined causes that no amount of will is able to thwart.
But indeterminism as defined from out of determinism is not adequate to describe how The Universe operates either.
The key is to understand emergence deeper and from that define a transdeterminism out of the deadlock.
But it ain't easy. "Emergence" and "intelligence" are two enormous challenges for philosophy to comprehend and develop. Meaning the same goes for "chance".
"Free will" however remains a Christian pseudo-question. What is interesting for humans is freedom of choice. Free choice, not free will. The will just wills whatever it wills,
regardless of constraints.
But which choices are we capable of and allowed to commit to?
Alexander,
I have come to consider determinists to be low-grade soothsayers. They claim that the future is written but then won’t tell us what it is. It’s a total rip off.
Peter Lloyd Jones
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562-209-4080
Sent by determined causes that no amount of will is able to thwart.
Another term for this indeterminism beyond the determinism versus indeterminism deadlock is transdeterminism.
Transdeterminism is where we arrive when we have two time dimensions and both operate indeterministically (precisely because one can not dictate the other) and the laws of nature
must be understood merely as habits of nature within specific emergence vectors and not as universal laws (which would require that they be determined prior to what they affect). Think Charles Sanders Peirce taken to his most Whiteheadian extreme.
Indeterminism requires contingency as the meta-law. Transdeterminism is even beyond such a meta-law. Nothing is not determined as much as the whole issue of determination is
dissolved.
I believe this is what Kaufman means when he says that what evolves evolves unprestatably. With an even further twist.
Can somebody please provide Kauffman with some Penrosian big bounce theory?
Peter,
The concept was from Stuart Kaufman in his recent work,
The World Beyond Physics (2019).
Here is the quote…
But what evolves cannot be said ahead of time: what evolves emerges
unprestatably—I know of no better word—and builds our biosphere of increasing complexity.
It refers to the idea that the future of emergence is not only not determined, it is of such a mystery that is simply cannot be stated what will come about.
Best,
Gregg
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]>
On Behalf Of Peter Lloyd Jones
Sent: Friday, September 13, 2019 1:16 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On the concept of sovereignty
Cory,
I am hoping that it reminds you that Schrodinger’s cat was meant to reveal the fallacy of applying quantum physics to the robust physical world in which we make choices.
Un-pre-stateable? Does that mean that we cannot dependably reveal potential?
Peter Lloyd Jones
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562-209-4080
Sent by determined causes that no amount of will is able to thwart.
@ Gregg
The un-pre-stateable concept immediately reminds me of Schrodinger’s cat.
Cory
The emergentist biologist has a nice word for the fact that the universe is not pre-determined. He argues it is not only not pre-determined, it is “un-pre-stateable” because of
the nature of unpredictable emergences…
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Peter Lloyd
Jones
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2019 4:04 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On the concept of sovereignty
As per your suggestion, I think it is best to keep free will and determinism as two separate arguments. Free will does not have too be a proof for the invalidity of determinism,
but after everything else is said it can be spoken of how free will does contradict determinism.
As you say, there can be degrees of freedom. I think that we all regularly witness this. The problem with determinism is that there cannot be degrees of determinism. That’s a conceptual
contradiction. We will need to toss out many words if the universe is determined: choice, choosing, chaos, chance, probability, accident, serendipitous, hope, achievement, failure...
Eeva and I had a lot of conversations about recursive systems because it is a major part of my own work. My thinking has been that if an agent can self-reference, then it determines
itself. But… if an agent determines itself, then isn’t that kinda the definition of free will?
My best guess has been that the truth is to be found by treating the positions of free-will and determinism as two halves of a greater whole – which is admittedly hard to imagine,
since everything we learn about it derives from a historically endless series of literary squabbles that we inherit from the literature, which fogs our vision on the matter.
Of course the issue is nuanced, and there are degrees of freedom, as is exemplified in nonlinear systems theories, and well-defined in phase space mathematics.
Thank you for sharing the intriguing article by Mascolo and Kallio.
It was a difficult but inspiring read, though I do not agree with how the “three perennial problems” that need to be addressed are presented: 1.) the dualism of the mental and physical,
2.) that it’s problematic that people argue for the existence free will, 3.) the role of consciousness. My thoughts are, in short, 1.) we are physical beings, 2.) there is no reason to doubt our conscious agency that we minute by minute witness, and 3.) consciousness
is not the measure of autonomy because many free acts are accomplished without reflection and even Libet disagrees with the determinist interpretation of his experiment.
I am guessing that my primary difficulty here, and with your subsequent blog, is that I do not agree that the concept of determinism is compatible with the laws of physics. Meanwhile,
despite claims by determinists, free will can exist in a material world and is compatible with the laws of physics. Determinism is a claim about the future, so it is unobservable, unrepeatable, and untestable, and there is useful evidence for doubting it.
The premise of the essay by Mascolo and Kallio is; “While consciousness contributes to the production of novel action, it cannot do so autonomously.” (p454-455) This is claimed
to be true because “…consciousness is itself an emergent product of nonconscious processes.” But what if consciousness can get in front of the nonconscious processes from which it emerges? What if a “non-autonomous” consciousness chooses to have experiences
that alter the biological nonconscious processes from which the consciousness emerges? What if this newly biologically altered “non-autonomous” consciousness then decides to have more experiences that then alter the whole of the embodied biological emergent
processes? At what point can one be considered an autonomous agent making free conscious choices that continuously manipulate one’s biological nonconscious processes that in turn manipulate the embodied emergence of one’s (biological) consciousness? In other
words, if we are free to alter the environments that alter our biological functions, are we not equally as free to consciously alter the interior environment of our(biological)selves? I am not positing here that there needs to be a specific goal in the alterations,
but that even change itself can be a goal.
Again, thank you for all that you share.
FYI, I put up a blog today that combines Mascolo and Kaillo’s paper with Jordan Hall’s concept of sovereignty:
I think the combination provides a nice, useful picture of self-conscious agency and responsibility.
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