From: Share Long <sharelon...@yahoo.com>

To: "FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> 
Sent: Sunday, May 4, 2014 1:13 PM
Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: One last set of thoughts for Curtis
 


  
turq, I think most humans have a hierarchy, if only in that they have preferred 
states. Your preferred state  is to view all conditions as equal in value. But 
by that very preferring, you raise the state of no hierarchy to the top of the 
heap of states! 

For *me*, Share. I didn't try to sell it to you. 

Because the thing is, humans, at a fundamental level, cannot prefer or value 
more highly, what they even unconsciously hold as detrimental. 

Nonsense. People do this all the time, continue behaviors that they consciously 
*know* are detrimental to them. Their position within an imaginary hierarchy 
has no relationship to whether they continue those behaviors or not. 

My guess is that having preferences or hierarchies is hard wired into us for 
survival value.


I disagree. I see nothing wrong with preference or believing in hierarchies, 
but I definitely don't see them as the same thing. Despite your attempt at what 
you thought was a clever remark earlier, having a preference does NOT imply 
believing in a hierarchy. 

I think that the tendency to see the universe as hierarchical is a way of 
thinking that was *taught* to us -- so early and so often and for so long that 
most people don't even realize that it WAS *taught* to them. I do NOT believe 
it's inherent to the human condition.  


On Sunday, May 4, 2014 4:03 AM, TurquoiseBee <turquoi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
 
  
Great information, anartaxius. Wolfram's theories kinda mesh with mine, in that 
I don't see any *need* to postulate free will when both the complexity and the 
seeming order we see around us can just as easily be explained by random 
collisions within a somewhat-ordered but fundamentally random system. 

One of the ways I think some "spiritual" people get a bit "off" in their 
thinking about determinism or a lack of free will is that they're trying to 
impose their hierarchical *intellectual understanding" of a certain subjective 
state onto the universe as a whole and say, "That's it. That's how it works. 
That is how the universe IS at its most fundamental level."

I am speaking, of
 course, of the "Not the doer" experience.
 Most on this forum have heard about it; many have experienced it. I have, too. 
And it's an interesting feeling, being so "in the flow" of life that it seems 
as if you are a mere puppet dancing to someone or something else manipulating 
the puppet strings. 

I have NO PROBLEM with this feeling or subjective experience existing. I've had 
it myself. What I *don't* do is assign that subjective experience a *value* of 
being "higher" or "more fundamental" than any other subjective experience. "Not 
the doer" is, for me, Just Another Experience, Just Another State Of Attention. 

I think many "spiritual" folks have been taught that it ISN'T Just Another 
State Of Attention, it's the HIGHEST State Of Attention, and that one should 
"aspire" or "seek" to having it all the time. You pay yer dues on the spiritual 
path, and finally you get to live in this "highest state" all the time. That, 
of course, is
 the basis of Maharishi's "Seven States Of
 Consciousness." Completely and utterly hierarchical. 

As I've stated before, I don't believe that life or the universe IS 
hierarchical. And I don't believe that any subjective state of attention -- 
even Unity or Brahman as described by MMY -- is the "highest" or "best" or 
"most fundamental" state of attention. It's just another one. 

But if you believe this "Not the doer" feeling is *more* than a feeling, and 
how things "should" be when you've reached some supposed "pinnacle" of human 
evolution, you might come to believe that the subjective feeling is somehow 
"correct" or the "baseline" of existence and that you have no free will. 

I don't buy it. I think that the "Not the doer" thang, however interesting it 
may be, is -- as I said -- Just Another State Of Attention, and no closer to 
any fundamental "truth" about the universe than any other state. So there
 is no impetus on my part to want to believe that my personal "Not the doer"
 feelings were anything more *than* feelings. I don't have to try to postulate 
a lack of free will just because I've occasionally experienced something that 
feels like that subjectively. I don't buy the dogma that suggests that having 
an ego and a sense of self is in any way lesser than having a non-ego, 
not-the-doer sense of Self. They're just different states, that's all. No 
hierarchy or "better" about either one. 



________________________________
 From: "anartax...@yahoo.com" <anartax...@yahoo.com>
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Sunday, May 4, 2014 4:11 AM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: One last set of thoughts for Curtis
 


  
Based on ideas that began with the work of mathematicians Benoit Mandelbrot and 
John Conway, the physicist Stephen Wolfram has some interesting ideas on the 
nature of free will. Wolfram has been investigating simple computational 
systems that have very simple starting conditions and very simple rules which 
nonetheless result in extremely complicated results, as the rules are applied 
to the system iteratively ad infinitum. The results of these simple systems 
have been extraordinary order as well as what seems like total chaos. Here is 
what Wolfram, from his book A New Kind of Science says about free will: 

The Phenomenon of Free Will

Ever since antiquity it has been a great mystery how the universe can follow 
definite laws while we as humans still often manage to make decisions about how 
to act in ways that seem quite free of obvious laws.

But from the discoveries in this book it finally now seems possible to give an 
explanation for this. And the key, I believe, is the phenomenon of 
computational irreducibility.

For what this phenomenon implies is that even though a system may follow 
definite underlying laws its overall behaviour can still have aspects that 
fundamentally cannot be described by reasonable laws.

For if the evolution of a system corresponds to an irreducible computation then 
this means that the only way to work out how the system will behave is 
essentially to perform this computation--with the result that there can 
fundamentally be no laws that allow one to work out the behaviour more directly.

And it is this, I believe, that is the ultimate origin of the apparent freedom 
of human will. For even though all the components of our brains presumably 
follow definite laws, I strongly suspect that their overall behaviour 
corresponds to an irreducible computation whose outcome can never in effect be 
found by reasonable laws.

And indeed one can already see very much the same kind of thing going on in a 
simple system like the cellular automaton on the left [an example in the book 
not shown here]. For even though the underlying laws for this system are 
perfectly definite, its overall behaviour ends up being sufficiently 
complicated that many aspects of it seem to follow no obvious laws at all.

And indeed if one were to talk about how the cellular automaton seems to behave 
one might well say that it just decides to do this or that--thereby effectively 
attributing to it some sort of free will.

But can this possibly be reasonable? For if one looks at the individual cells 
in the cellular automaton one can plainly see that they just follow definite 
rules, with absolutely no freedom at all.

But at some level the same is probably true of the individual nerve cells in 
our brains. Yet somehow as a whole our brains still manage to behave with a 
certain apparent freedom.

Traditional science has made it very difficult to understand how this can 
possibly happen. For normally it has assumed that if one can only find the 
underlying rules for the components of a system then in a sense these tell one 
everything important about the system.

But what we have seen over and over again in this book is that this is not even 
close to correct, and that in fact there can be vastly more to the behaviour of 
a system than one could ever foresee just by looking at its underlying rules. 
And fundamentally this is a consequence of the phenomenon of computational 
irreducibility.

For if a system is computationally irreducible this means that there is in 
effect a tangible separation between the underlying rules for the system and 
its overall behaviour associated with the irreducible amount of computational 
work needed to go from one to the other.

And it is in this separation, I believe, that the basic origin of the apparent 
freedom we see in all sorts of systems lies--whether those systems are abstract 
cellular automata or actual living brains.

But so in the end what makes us think that there is freedom in what a system 
does? In practice the main criterion seems to be that we cannot readily make 
predictions about the behaviour of the system.

For certainly if we could, then this would show us that the behaviour must be 
determined in a definite way, and so cannot be free. But at least with our 
normal methods of perception and analysis one typically needs rather simple 
behaviour for us actually to be able to identify overall rules that let us make 
reasonable predictions about it.

Yet in fact even in living organisms such behaviour is quite common. And for 
example particularly in lower animals there are all sorts of cases where very 
simple and predictable responses to stimuli are seen. But the point is that 
these are normally just considered to be unavoidable reflexes that leave no 
room for decisions or freedom.

Yet as soon as the behaviour we see becomes more complex we quickly tend to 
imagine that it must be associated with some kind of underlying freedom. For at 
least with traditional intuition it has always seemed quite implausible that 
any real unpredictability could arise in a system that just follows definite 
underlying rules.

And so to explain the behaviour that we as humans exhibit it has often been 
assumed that there must be something fundamentally more going on--and perhaps 
something unique to humans.

In the past the most common belief has been that there must be some form of 
external influence from fate--associated perhaps with the intervention of a 
supernatural being or perhaps with configurations of celestial bodies. And in 
more recent times sensitivity to initial conditions and quantum randomness have 
been proposed as more appropriate scientific explanations.

But much as in our discussion of randomness in Chapter 6 nothing like this is 
actually needed. For as we have seen many times in this book even systems with 
quite simple and definite underlying rules can produce behaviour so complex 
that it seems free of obvious rules.

And the crucial point is that this happens just through the intrinsic evolution 
of the system--without the need for any additional input from outside or from 
any sort of explicit source of randomness.

And I believe that it is this kind of intrinsic process--that we now know 
occurs in a vast range of systems--that is primarily responsible for the 
apparent freedom in the operation of our brains.

But this is not to say that everything that goes on in our brains has an 
intrinsic origin. Indeed, as a practical matter what usually seems to happen is 
that we receive external input that leads to some train of thought which 
continues for a while, but then dies out until we get more input. And often the 
actual form of this train of thought is influenced by memory we have developed 
from inputs in the past--making it not necessarily repeatable even with exactly 
the same input.

But it seems likely that the individual steps in each train of thought follow 
quite definite underlying rules. And the crucial point is then that I suspect 
that the computation performed by applying these rules is often sophisticated 
enough to be computationally irreducible--with the result that it must 
intrinsically produce behaviour that seems to us free of obvious laws.




 

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