It is important to investigate what MoQ can add to the Free Will/Determinism debate, otherwise we are:
Running over the same old ground What have we found? The same old fears -Pink Floyd We start with the age old idea of the mind/body. This also comes in the guises of materialism/spiritualism, and, as I will present below, Free Will/determinism (FW/D). In my interpretation of MoQ, this is also presented as the DQ/SQ pair. I will do my best to explain how one can arrive there. I believe everybody is familiar with the mind/body divide. That is, the body is what is physical, and the mind is what is not. In this way, it is exactly the same as the materialism/spiritualism duality. So, how does FW/D fit in? This is how I would go about analogizing it, but of course there a many ways to do this: Determinism is considered to be a domino effect in which subsequent occurrences rely on the original way in which the physical dominoes were set up, and the unchanging rules as how they are to fall there-after. That is, it is based on the Original Idea, and nothing changes from that original point of singularity. Free-will implies that there is something which lies outside the physical world, and the rules that govern it, and that this "something" can impact the physical world (how, is still a mystery to me). This "something" I will call spiritual since that is the vernacular of the day. Please do not be derailed by personal notions of new-age movements or religious monstrosities which have arisen in the last 2,500 years or so, since this concept has been around since the beginning of man. Since this non-material presence does not conform to the laws we have created, it does not necessarily have to abide by the cause-effect pattern we are all so fond of. This is not to say it is chaotic since Chaos Theory also follows a pattern (perhaps this is where the term Patterned can be brought in, but I do not particularly care for this particular use of the English language in MoQ, so I will not). The non-material world, which is the spirit or the soul or whatever you want to call it, may abide by some kind of (non-material) rules, but there is no method in the materialistic world to measure such a thing. In this way, the term "Free Will" is simply "that which can not be materialistically determined". Since such Free Will cannot be measured directly, we can only see its effects. This is not an unusual idea since Gravity behaves in the same way. So the question is therefore: What effects of Free Will can we measure? Now, anytime we create an subject-object system, the resulting static quality relegates that being discussed into the material world. To make a long story short, it is therefore a premise of mine, that Free Will can only be felt at the subjective level, and not the objective level. There are many times in which many of us feel we have Free Will. It could be claimed that we are just fooling ourselves since it can be rhetorical proven that cause and effect must exist. However, this is simply a materialistic argument to refute a spiritual knowing. It is similar to trying to refute spiritual teachings with science, or to witness a physicist arguing with a painter as to which concept is more beautiful. Both materialism and spiritualism use very different premises, and do not speak the same language. Since this is getting longer than I had planned, I will now bring in the DQ/SQ very briefly and hope to get some feedback on this. In past posts I have suggested that an analogy for DQ is "the moment". That infinitesimally small segment of time that all of us who are living currently share. Living in the moment is akin to living as DQ, there is no cause-effect since there is no time for this to happen. Thus the moment is free from any SQ dogma. We all know what living in SQ is since that is the dominant form agreement in this present age. SQ is formed when we create an entity (or reify if you must: another term that I do not find too useful). Such creation of object follows standard material methods, and can be attributed to the workings of the brain. The brain is therefore part of the determinism side of things. However, getting back to DQ I will use a term that Ham recently posted, we "color" these static objects with our own personal paintbrush. I will suggest that such painting occurs outside of the material brain, and will call it the soul for lack of a better word, and at the expense of being called a righteous Christian, which I am not and have never been. (I could call it Atman if you want me to get pretentiously Hindu on you.) The soul / body connection can be analogized to the current avatars that people become in many of these shared internet games. In such a game, the body is that which is presented over the ether. The soul is that which lies behind the presented avatar, which nobody else can see. It is therefore personal, subjective, and hidden. So, I will cut this short now. The "soul" is akin to DQ. It can not be described in material terms. That which can be described is SQ. As we have been witnessing, Free Will cannot be described since to do so would mean we would have to create a place where it comes from and thus encase it into the materialistic world. Determinism is easy to describe, like A results in B, simple logic. Free Will or any of those things from the non-material world are not subject to logical rules. It is only subject to the subjectivism of the subject; This non-material subjectivism is Free Will. Therefore: DQ = Free Will; SQ = Determinism Clear as mud, huh? If you have any questions, suggestions, refutations, or debates on this post, I will do my best in explaining my ideas using the examples you provide. Cheers, Mark Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
