The Russell Stannard Questions: Mind Over Matter

There are many Big Questions in science, many of which go back to the ancients, even back into prehistory in all probability. One of the best modern set I’ve found recently were sidebars in a book by Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University, Russell Stannard. These are my answers, thoughts and commentary to those Big Questions. Many readers might have ‘fun’ trying to come to terms with these in their own way based on their own worldview.

The following questions (Q) are taken verbatim from those poised by Russell Stannard in his 2010 book The End of Discovery [are we approaching the boundaries of the knowable?]; Oxford University Press, Oxford. I consider these typical of the sorts of modern Big Questions that are part and parcel of the philosophy of modern science, especially physical science.

My answers are based mainly with the thought of our being in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe that has been constructed by one or more Supreme Programmers. However, some of the answers apply regardless of what the nature of our ultimate reality is.

Q. The problem of consciousness.

A. How can your basic building blocks that are electrons, neutrons and protons combine to form atoms; atoms that combine to form molecules; molecules that combine to form complex molecules - complex molecules like organic molecules, biochemical molecules and molecules part and parcel of neurochemistry; the ultimate result being that this chain from the simple to the complex crosses a threshold from the inanimate to the animate and from the animate to the animate entity that is self-aware. It is a profound mystery why one has a fairly unique structure comprised of the same fundamental bits and pieces that comprise all other structures but yet one that can contemplate itself. That structure is the brain and the mind that resides within that structure. The brain is the only structure in the cosmos that can examine itself and yet that structure is ultimately comprised of just electrons, neutrons and protons. However, is there really a problem if that structure can ultimate figure out how to create another structure that also has consciousness. In other words, intelligent and conscious biological software can deliberately give rise to an artificial intelligent and conscious string of software and in doing so thus create a Simulated [Virtual Reality] Universe that houses or contains an apparent (but artificially) intelligent and conscious biological entity or entities that wonders whether or not there was an artificially intelligent software program that gave rise to it. That sort of reminds me of the human who dreamed she was a butterfly who dreamed it was a human, or was that the butterfly who dreamed it was a human who dreamed she was a butterfly.

  

Q. The free will/determinism problem.

A. I tend to have a belief in absolute causality, much like both Newton and Einstein who believed in a regular clockwork universe. If X happens, Y follows. All the laws, principles and relationships of the natural universe were forged at the time of the Big Bang event and once that clock was set in motion, all else flowed from those first established laws, principles and relationships. So, in other words, determinism rules, okay? That equally holds true if we’re in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe, regardless if we are, like a character in a video game a ‘puppet-on-a-string’ or the avatar as a stand-in in a simulated world for someone in the really real world, or as the consequence of someone programing a set of laws, principles and relationships then hitting ‘run program’ and standing back to see what eventuates. We’d all like to think we have free will, but if we are programmed to believe that, what harm has been done if you really do believe that what you had for dinner was something you freely did choose to have.

Q. Does complete understanding require more than solely physical explanations?

A. By complete understanding, one has to incorporate those seemingly nebulous things that reside within the mind, things that seem far removed from the physical world of forces and fields and particles and actions and reactions, etc. These so-called nebulous things revolve around consciousness and the subconscious, thinking (that’s clearly a neurochemical process), memory (clearly chemically encoded), creativity, emotions (definitely chemically driven), morals and ethics, right and wrong, a soul, spirituality, free will, etc. However, all these sorts of concepts reside in the brain or in a part of the brain normally identified as the mind. Whether mind-in-the-brain, or just in or a part of the brain, the brain is ultimately composed of fundamental particles that make up atoms that make up molecules that ultimately make up your neurochemistry and thus your brain and structures within. The proof of the pudding that these so-called nebulous concepts reside in the realm of the physical is that these concepts or things can be altered by physical things – physical happenings like injury (you can be knocked unconscious) or lose consciousness in sleep; chemical things like drugs, lack of sleep, the aging process and related can have decided effects on aspects of your personality, etc.; biological happenings like disease also can have profound effects on some of those so-called nebulous things. They can also be altered by your own self, being creative and via thinking deep thoughts which is an electrochemical process (you might think ‘morals be damned, crime does pay’) and of course closely related, the lifelong learning process (as in learning and altering your learning about say morals/ethics; right/wrong) – as you learn, you may find that what you thought was crystal clear, black and white, is really murky and grey. The learning process (formal or otherwise) can have profound effects on your belief systems and worldviews. Learning clearly has foundations in neurochemistry.   



Natural History: Some Even More Random Rambling

Sometimes you have a new thought, an idea, or eureka moment, but it’s not gutsy enough to expand into a reasonable length article or essay. So, here’s a potpourri of thoughts too good not to record, but with not enough meat available to flesh out. 

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* We’ve all read and heard about how we consume way more salt than is necessary and that too much salt can cause high blood pressure and heart attacks and associated nasty conditions. What is never mentioned in all these health warnings about salt is the feedback mechanism that restores the proper balance. It’s akin to how many bars will put out free salted peanuts or salted chips for the customers. It’s not out of the pure kindness of the bartender. If you take in a lot of salt you get, surprise, thirsty. And so the bar makes up for the ‘free’ peanuts and chips by selling more drinks to quench the thirst you build up by eating all that ‘free’ salty stuff. In other words, if you over indulge in the salt, you’ll drink more fluids because you get extra thirsty, and the additional liquids will, when filtered through the kidneys, take the unnecessary salt with it (salty urine) and the proper balance is restored. So, if we consume way more salt than is necessary, we probably drink way more fluids as well. 

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* I think most of us would agree that a reasonable definition of free will is the ability to voluntarily and consciously choose between two (or more) courses of action. You make a decision by your own free will that’s generated by your internal conscious self with no external influences, like someone, even Mother Nature, holding a gun to your head! However…

What if you view an optical illusion, an apparent reality of which there are numerous classic examples available? Initially you have two choices. You can convince yourself that what you are seeing is indeed reality (wrong choice) or you can convince yourself that what you’re seeing is not reality (right choice). But that’s mission impossible.

You know – you are consciously aware – that what you are looking at is an illusion and not reality. Can you now, of your own free will, take that course of action that will actually convince yourself that what you are looking at is an illusion and not reality? You know it’s an illusion, but can you convince yourself of that fact? Try as you might, no matter what, you will still see that apparent reality – the illusion – even though you know it’s just an illusion. Your brain is fooled and your mind can’t do a damn thing about it. Your free will cannot free yourself from seeing the illusion. You cannot negate that illusionary effect of your own free will even though you know it is not reality.

Now some optical illusions give you the apparent free will to view the illusion as this thing or that thing (like the classic two faces or one vase), but you can’t sustain that. You will shift perspective between the two illusionary options quite against what your own free will dictates. Further, you don’t have the free will third option of seeing neither of the two illusionary options.  

In a somewhat similar vein, watching one of the season three episodes of “Through the Wormhole”, part of that episode, exploring the subconscious, showed the experiment of a test subject who was fitted with a pair of camera-glasses that showed him an image of a test dummy dressed the same as the test subject. The test subject was fully aware of this. The test subject was then conditioned by being stroked with a rod while at the same time viewing the test dummy being stroked. Then, the test dummy was suddenly violently assaulted, and of course the test subject reacted as if he were being assaulted and not the dummy. Even when the test subject was told that the dummy was going to be assaulted, he was aware of this in his conscious mind, he still couldn’t help himself via his subconscious reacting as if he were being assaulted instead of the dummy. 

In short, your conscious mind cannot override or overturn your subconscious, free will be damned.

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* Despite the very popular but self-promotional conception, human beings are the least rational species on this planet. Any other animal that acts irrationally, say via a genetic defect or disease or the equivalent of dementia, is a dead animal. I have yet to witness any animal acting in any way, shape, manner or form that wasn’t rational for either its own survival or the survival of its genes, its community or its kind. I most certainly cannot say the same about the human species.

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* Here’s a wicked thought experiment. Create two clones of yourself. Raise them to maturity. Then, remove their brains and toss them away (this is just a thought experiment and so morals and ethics can be bypassed). Now have your brain removed (and toss your body away). Have one hemisphere transplanted into one clone; the other hemisphere transplanted into the second clone. While the two hemispheres of your brain have slightly different emphasis in terms of functionality, you can function as a reasonable whole with just one hemisphere. Now the question arises, will you be self-aware in two bodies at the exact same time? You could accomplish twice as much and be totally aware of the totality!

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* Humans and cycles go hand in glove. Though most are artificial constructions and therefore rather phoney, cycles are important to humans and human society. The Day-Night cycle is of the most prime importance, and it is a natural cycle. Humans put a lot of stock in the seven day week cycle, which is an artificial construct, and to a lesser extent the month (also a phoney cycle even if ever so loosely based on the lunar cycle). The year is a natural cycle (in terms of the seasons) and probably of greatest significance next to the day and week cycles. Decades and centuries rank fairly low in importance and are artificial constructs in any event. The millennia are only important when the calendar changes over from say 1999 to 2000 (though the new millennia actually began in 2001) and 1000 year cycles lie outside of the human lifespan in any event. And that should be pretty much it – except for some ancient societies who had cycles of apparent importance so long that predated the very existence of those societies (and concluded well after those societies went extinct), like the Mayan long count (recall that famous doomsday date of 21 December 2012). Other societies measure ongoing cycles of creation-destruction in such lengthy periods that they really have no imminent impact on the societies propagating them. When societies have cycles of significance that are of no immediate significance, then you have an anomaly and you have got to wonder where hence gave that particular cyclic concept.

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* Try as I might, I could never teach my cats the barest and most basic rudiments of algebra or even those boneheaded elementary mathematics of arithmetic that elementary schoolkids master. I could never get my cats to understand and appreciate the ancient Egyptian cat cults and goddesses. Even the concept of biological evolution – the how and why cats evolved into cats and the ancestry of my cats would be so much triple-Dutch to them. Their wetware, neurochemistry, etc. just isn’t up to this. Sunshine gives them warmth – that they understand but not how the sun shines.

Now, the upshot of that is, despite the human arrogance that our minds can comprehend everything part and parcel of life, the Universe and everything, perhaps we just can’t through absolutely no fault of our own. Maybe human brains, in the here and now, are not capable of figuring all things out, like the meaning of quantum physics, and the theory of everything (TOE) which is basically a theory of quantum gravity and coming to terms with what exactly is dark matter and dark energy and answering all those other questions that have gone without resolution for thousands of years.  

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* You probably think of yourself as one singular organism. The expression “me, myself and I” are all singular. Yet, you know perfectly well that you are really a colony of billions of organisms (cells) working in more often as not the case in total harmony. Yet, as things turn out, you play host to billions and billions more microbes. Nine out of ten of the microbes that make you up aren’t really a part of you at all, like say those bacteria that survive and thrive in your mouth. So, are you an organism, a colony of organisms or an environment for organisms? I’m quite astounded to learn that 90% of me isn’t me! So perhaps our real purpose in life is to serve as hosts for the greater multitudes. The needs of the many [microbes] outweigh the needs of the one [Human].

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* In the simulated universe scenario I (and many others) have suggested we exist inside a computer as a software program or subroutine within a larger software program. The un-stated assumption is that the Supreme Programmer was of flesh-and-blood (terrestrial or extraterrestrial). But why make that assumption? Why not suggest that the Supreme Programmer was/is an Artificial Intelligence in its own right just being creative. Silicon –and-steel (artificial) intelligence is a logical evolutionary successor to flesh-and-blood (natural) intelligence and is likely to not only evolve far more rapidly (Moore’s Law) than human evolution ever did but have an overall longevity vastly in extent of ours.



Natural History: Some More Random Rambling

Sometimes you have a new thought, an idea, or eureka moment, but it’s not gutsy enough to expand into a reasonable length article or essay. So, here’s a further potpourri of thoughts on or about natural history that are too good not to record, but with not enough meat available to flesh out. 

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* There are probably as many different definitions of “what is life?” as there have been and are biologists, life scientists, naturalists and philosophers, etc. Most centre on or around concepts like growth, reproduction, response to stimuli, metabolism, violations of the second law of thermodynamics (entropy), and related similar ilk. None have been entirely satisfactory otherwise we would have THE textbook definition. My take on “what is life?” is somewhat different. Life is some sort of complex organic structure that has a behaviour that is not absolutely predictable via classical (or even quantum) physics. Or, in other words, under the most tightly controlled and uniform set of laboratory conditions, the ‘structure’ will do as it damn well pleases!

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* Speaking of life, there is no such thing as ‘living matter’ vs. ‘dead matter’. All matter is ‘dead matter’ since all matter, from the ground up, is composed of electrons, protons (quarks and gluons), neutrons (more quarks and gluons), photons, neutrinos, etc. Few if any would ague that an electron, proton, neutron, etc. is ‘living matter’. And the atoms, hence molecules, even complex molecules they make up are not alive. No matter is alive or is ‘living matter’. What is ‘alive’ is the organisation, the overall structure of various bits and pieces of matter, in highly specific arrangements, such that – and this is the key point – entropy, at least temporarily, is thwarted. Entropy finally wins when the organisational structure breaks down, that is, life dies.   

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* Does free will require you to have an infinite or unlimited number of choices, or a finite number? If the latter, you’re still confined in a box, just a slightly larger box than if your box confined you to one and only one choice.

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* The ultimate lack of free will associated with you is that you had absolutely no say in being conceived and being popped headlong into this world. You had no choice in your ancestry or in your genetics or your sex or even what historical era you were to make your way in. Now if you have absolutely no free will in these rather important, in fact absolutely fundamental, parts of your life being kick-started, why should you expect any free will from there on in?

Of course in some societies you’d have no choice in schooling or religion or upbringing or even to the person you got hitched to, etc. But all of that really falls under a separate category of sociology and culture and has nothing to do with the metaphysical or usual notion of what it means to have free will.

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* It struck home to me recently how often we shift our worldviews. We have no worldview at birth. Our worldview at five is one that’s full of self, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, imaginary friends, and parties with lots of cakes, cookies, soda pop and presents. All of that certainly changes, and drastically so, when you hit the teens when your worldview shifts to the opposite sex and sex and rebellion against all things adult. Maybe somewhere there’s an easing in period, a first stirrings, where you start to acquire a worldview of a God and heaven and angels and all things bright and beautiful (that’s probably imposed on you by parents and social mores. Then you get trust out (usually by choice) into the adult world that’s full of bills and responsibilities and employment and/or family life raising your own brats. During all of this you probably never really think of the ‘natural’ cosmic context you find yourself in. But that tends to come as you pass the half-way mark and start heading downhill. The Big Questions come more to the fore and you start to adopt a worldview that makes comforting sense away from the normal routine worldview of taxes and nasty bosses and your kids in trouble with the police again. Again, for most, that tends to revolve around God and heaven and angels, etc. But some people start thinking more outside the comforting religious box and more about space and time, and before and after, and finite vs. infinity and what non-religious Big Picture makes the most philosophical and logical common sense. And whatever specific you come up with can also shift as you reflect on your earlier reflections without end as new concepts and connections come into being or focus which you’ve got to ponder and fit into the master worldview jigsaw puzzle you’ve established.

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* Death is not something to be afraid of. You experience dying, but not death since once dead, you have no existence and you need to have an existence, you have to be alive, in order to experience something, anything, even death. So you never experience death, only that up to but not including death.

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* There’s one absolute reason I’m convinced telepathy doesn’t exist. As I go about my daily walkabout routine and associated observations, I’m forever passing out mental thoughts and images of what I think of many of the deadbeat drivers and other lesser forms of humanity I spy with my little eyes. My thoughts tend not to be very complementary to say the least. But since the lowlifes and rift-rafts haven’t ever proceeded to immediately stop their lowlife activities and drop what ever rift-raft things they were up to, to instead change direction towards me and beat me about the heat and body unto a bloody pulp for my unflattering thoughts, I conclude telepathy doesn’t exist. If it did, I doubt I’d be typing these thoughts now.  

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* Humans call them weeds. Mother Nature calls them plants. So-called ‘weeds’ too have their place in the natural scheme of things. Stupid humans!



You’re Out of Your Subconscious Mind: Part Three

In psychology, there is the concept of the subconscious, or the unconscious, mind. Whatever you call it, you have no real apparent control over it and it’s not subject to your introspection. As such, you have no free will over this apparently automated non-awareness part of your mind (not to be confused with your automated nervous system which holds sway over your body). When you lack free will over the workings of your own mind, well that suggests something or someone else is pulling the strings: translated its evidence for a Simulated Universe.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

EMOTIONS

Emotions are strange in that you may see a picture of X and burst into tears, or laugh out loud, whereas I’m totally ho-hum, under-whelmed, boring. However, another image may cause me to rant and rave, while you just yawn-the-big-yawn. In either case, you seemingly have no control over your feelings. You don’t seem to have much free will in terms of who you like or dislike or who you fall head-over-heels in love with, so again, I’d conclude that emotions are part of your subconscious.

THE SUBCONSCIOUS IS THE CONSCIOUS?

It seems however unnecessarily messy to have both a subconscious and a conscious mind. Actually, it was Sigmund Freud who divided the mind into the conscious mind and the subconscious (unconscious) mind. The question arises, might the subconscious actually be doing ALL the number crunching and feeding the answers to your (illusionary) consciousness or conscious mind, sometimes unexpectedly – that eureka moment, but more often as not, humming a constant feed along to you in the background, a feeding which as far as you’re concerned is your (illusionary) conscious mind in action but it’s all just the subconscious. You think your conscious mind is composing that letter, but the words and sentences are being fed through to your (illusionary) consciousness via that subconscious interface without you being self-aware of that. So in fact there is no consciousness housed separate and apart as an organic structure, only the illusion of one. Your automated nervous system runs the body; what we now call the subconscious runs the mind – the entire mind.

That’s probably a vastly oversimplification, but regardless of whether or not the subconscious and the conscious are separate and apart or one and the same, the subconscious is top of the pecking order over which we have no control. Only the automated central nervous system rules above all else – if it didn’t you’d be kaput, extinct, stone dead as a doorknob.  

MEMORY

I’d be of the opinion that you can’t in fact operate on the conscious level at all at anytime as hinted at above. You read the word “tree” in a book, hear the word spoken, or see a “tree” in the movies or outside your window. You must immediately reach back into that subconscious cubby-hole and draw back out what a tree is in order for the work or image to make sense. You see gibberish in a book or hear it, say someone ‘speaking in tongues’; maybe it’s real gibberish or maybe it’s an unfamiliar foreign language, but it’s gibberish nonetheless. Or say you see something you’ve never seen before (or never heard or learnt about). There’s incomprehension because there’s no subconscious cubby-hole to reach back into that contains that something that will enlighten you. And so you have gibberish or the great unknown to contend with.

One hundred percent of your perception of reality comes into your mind via your five senses and if anything perceived doesn’t match up with your subconscious cubby-hole encyclopaedia then part of your reality makes no sense.

All of these millions of daily inputs, matching with cubby-hole outputs, take place so fast, not quite at the speed of light but getting there, that you have no awareness of it happening. The lag time between reading “tree” and the “ah ha, I know that that means” is so fast it just doesn’t register. If there was a significant time differential you’d know it. Back in our Stone Age cavemen days, our ancient ancestor’s world of fight or flight, survival of the fittest, any lag time would be detrimental to your well being. I see a “sabre-tooth cat” – five second delay – subconscious cubby-hole says “sabre-tooth cat bad news, run”. By then you’re its dinner; it’s too little too late for you.       

Take another common scenario. After you wake up in the morning you tend to greet those around you with a “Good morning (person’s name)”. Say it’s “Good morning, John”. Now you have to reach back into your memory to recall what the appropriate phrase is and what the persons name is. You also therefore need to remember the meaning of ‘appropriate’. It would be strange and inappropriate to say “Goodnight Josephine” instead, or “I think I’ll have pizza for dinner tonight”. But how do you reach back into your memory to draw out the correct phrase when you don’t remember what you’re looking for. If you did remember what you were looking for you wouldn’t have to look. It’s the same with any though process. You’ve got to remember what it is you need to remember in order to think the thought, or say the words, or perform the actions. It’s all very circular reasoning. You have to remember what you need to remember in order to remember!

If you remember where you put your keys you don’t need to search your memory to discover where you left your keys, but you initially still had to perform that search of your memory since you remember where you put your keys! But how did you know where to search for the answer (where did I put my keys), an answer that wasn’t an answer to an unasked question like how many keys are on the keychain or what’s the colour of the key I actually need. Your memory bank is a huge place with millions of bits and pieces of data. Only a very tiny fraction is relevant to “where did I put my keys”. It’s like trying to find one sentence in an encyclopaedia or that proverbial needle in a haystack. 

Further, you had to remember that you needed to remember where you left your keys. That infinite regression of I need to remember in order to remember in order to remember is almost like that series of Russian dolls, one inside the other inside the other. Ultimately your entire mind becomes 100% clogged with the key problem and you shut down from mental overload. But you don’t, shut down that is, so there’s another solution.

If you cannot consciously recall where you left your keys, and that’s a scenario we can probably all identify with, then you rely on your subconscious. If you’re too impatient for that relax, wait and see approach, there’s always the tried and true treasure hunt approach, but that in itself also involves numerous memory exercises. 

YOU’RE ON AUTOPILOT

You don’t need to remember to wake up, or to breathe,  or how to take one step in front of the other to walk from A to B, or how to digest your breakfast, or if you’re sick or injured your body by itself usually manages to put things right. You don’t have to remember how to heal a cut or get over the common cold. If nearly all of your body is on autopilot, pre-programmed as it were, perhaps all of your body is pre-programmed, including the mind, regardless how many divisions it has.

OFFICE ASSISTANT

 I actually have two separate and apart virtual reality critters on my PC, the standard Office Assistant (cleverly disguised as a cat) and Felix [the cat]. Now the question is, do these simulated critters in any shape, manner and form mirror the (apparently) really real human?

Firstly, I think we can all agree that these two virtual critters are just that – simulations. As such we can all agree that they are just software programmes and that they have no free will. But there are many, many parallels between their behaviour, their mental processes, and that of the (apparently) really real human being. 

For starters, the Office Assistant (OA) has memory. If I perform a certain action, I get a prompt to do something in response. The Office Assistant (OA) has searched its memory for an appropriate reply to my action. It has made a decision. It also shows an emotion in trying to attract my attention since it wants further input from me. Because software can and often is upgraded, well that’s learning in another guise. Felix, on the other hand, exhibits some sensory processing by exhibiting a sense of sight, smell and touch when interacting in a creative with other objects it encounters. It exhibits a range of behaviours that you’d identify with a really real cat. About the only things they are not programmed to do is go to the litter box or have sex or vomit, for fairly obvious reasons, though it could be so programmed if one wanted. 

They both feed, albeit off of electrical energy. They wake up when I turn on the PC and go to ‘sleep’ when I turn off the PC. The OA actually takes catnaps during long intervals of inactivity where its helpful hints aren’t necessary. There’s also no way of telling if they are programmed to enter a dream state like real cats do. I suspect probably not as it would be unnecessary and a waste of programming.

Of course it’s all just sophisticated programming. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but I’m sure any computer software programmer worthy of the title could spell it out in incredible technical detail.

The upshot is, these clearly simulated cats do indeed mirror many of what we’d identify as real biologically human traits. Of course given the relative sophistications, it’s like comparing the value of a five cent piece against a five dollar bill, but the commonality is that both the five cent piece and the five dollar bill are money. The difference between Office Assistant/Felix and me is just a matter of degree.

MIND OVER MATTER: THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING?

Try as you will, your mind cannot influence the behaviour of non-living material, otherwise you’d always win playing the slot or poker machines and 18 holes-in-one at the golf course would be, well, par for the course.

I say non-living because your mind can influence other living minds, though I don’t mean via telepathy or some such or various other technological devices allegedly used for mind-control purposes. The quite ordinary hard stare or the ‘evil eye’ or the barking voice is all that’s required as any raw recruit at the receiving end of the Drill Sergeant’s wrath can attest to. Some minds are putty in the ‘hands’ of other minds. On a gentler note, your thoughts, ideas, words spoken or written can shape the worldviews of other minds.

Two lovers gaze into each others eyes – mental communication of a sort transpires each affecting the physiological state of the other.

Influencing other odd bods and sods apart, your mind can have some minor influence over your own body. Some people have some control over their heart rate to some extent, and the placebo effect, both positive and negative has been proven beyond all doubt in terms of alleviating minor medical ailments by accenting the positive or aggravating the negative. With respect to the later, if you really think someone’s put the whammy on you, and you believe in the power of the whammy, then you can just waste away and curl up and snuff it. It’s not surprising that such things are possible since your mind is really matter (biochemistry) and your body is really matter (biochemistry) and biochemistry can flow from one to the other. Now that only works on a relatively minor scale. You might defy the Earth’s gravity and arm toss a ball up into the air, but you can’t defy it to the extent where you can arm toss the ball all the way to Mars. Likewise, your mind might be able to shorten the duration and severity of a common cold, but it’s probably beyond realism to expect it to overcome a case of pneumonia.   

CONCLUSION

 Free will means having control over your own mind. It’s mind-over-mind. You’re in command. But you’re not in command over your subconscious. Lack of free will points to another undefined nebulous someone (or something) in control of you, or in other words, a scenario that’s more likely as not makes you a virtual reality in a simulated universe.

And no, I didn’t come up with this topic consciously – it came to me unwanted, unbidden, via my subconscious.

You’re Out of Your Subconscious Mind: Part Two

In psychology, there is the concept of the subconscious, or the unconscious, mind. Whatever you call it, you have no real apparent control over it and it’s not subject to your introspection. As such, you have no free will over this apparently automated non-awareness part of your mind (not to be confused with your automated nervous system which holds sway over your body). When you lack free will over the workings of your own mind, well that suggests something or someone else is pulling the strings: translated its evidence for a Simulated Universe.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

CREATIVITY (The ‘What If’)

Is creativity pre-programmed or an act of free will? How many things do you do during the course of your day that you did not consciously plan to do, yet could have so planned in theory? Those spur of the moment things, even little things, you didn’t walk up having them on your agenda, must have originated from your subconscious. You really, apparently, didn’t have any free will over doing those agenda items - that is doing them consciously with a before-the-fact intent.

I call creativity the mental “what if” exercise. You take this bit from this cubby-hole and that bit from that cubby-hole and a third bit and fourth and fifth bit from other cubby-hols and combine them in a unique, theoretical, creative, what if, ways. It’s been said that from the reality of one drop of water you should be able to come up with, or envision, the idea of a waterfall or an ocean, even if you’ve never seen or heard about either and therefore don’t have a waterfall or ocean cubby-hole. So you reach into your cubby-hole for the concept of many, numerous, billions and billions; your cubby-hole for cliff; your cubby-hole for bowl or depression; your cubby-hole for gravity, and several more besides. And so you come up with new cubby-holes for theoretical waterfall (but probably lacking the thunderous sounds, spray and foam), and theoretical ocean (but probably without salt, marine life, the tides and waves), not actual parts of your reality, only your ‘what if’ reality, and to be honest, a lot of our cubby-holes are of that nature.  

Let’s take a simple everyday scenario. I think I’ll cook up a pizza for dinner tonight. It’s a spur of the moment eureka moment that wasn’t present when you woke up this morning. So where did that pizza for dinner thought come from? It probably came as a bolt out of the blue at lightning speed; it leapt into your conscious mind, but it was constructed from the various bits and pieces that resides elsewhere in your mind – in your subconscious mind.

Inside your mind you store a whole dictionary full of concepts, each in its own little cubby-hole, which you probably keep adding to all the time. The dictionary of a fifty-year-old is much bigger than that of a five-year old. Imagination or creativity is that which picks and chooses relevant concepts from those various cubby-holes and strings the chosen bits, at seemingly light speed, into a logical linear conglomerate. Sometimes the bits and pieces are strung together to form an original bit of creativity or of the imagination, though that may not be original or creative to someone else, but it is to you, and that’s what counts. I mean I / cook / small / mushroom / thin base / pizza / dinner might not be all that much a stretch of your imagination or overly creative, but I / cook / small / thin base / magic mushroom / pizza / dinner might be.

But let’s back up a second to that storehouse of cubby-hole concepts. That I / cook / small / mushroom / thin base / pizza / dinner is a very specific outcome. You have cubby-holes for cook from scratch vs. ready made frozen vs. dial-a-home-delivery vs. dine out. You have cubby-holes for toppings like mushroom vs. pineapple vs. pepperoni vs. beef vs. ham vs. olives vs. onions vs. capsicum or some combination of those, and a lot more besides. You have cubby-hole concepts for breakfast vs. lunch vs. TV snack-time vs. dinner. Then there’s small individual size vs. large size vs. family size where everybody gets the same deal. And thin base vs. medium base vs. thick base pizzas. Lastly, there’s the choice of pizza in the first place. Your cubby-holes contain concepts of alternative dinners like steak vs. lamb vs. seafood vs. spaghetti vs. chicken vs. turkey vs. ham vs. any of dozens of other possibilities. From the hundreds upon hundreds of choices / options / permutations drawn from those concepts stored in the cubby-holes of you mind, you make one subconscious decision. It could be even a slightly irrational decision – maybe you don’t have any pizza-related ingredients in stock; it’s nasty weather and you’ll need to go to the supermarket! 

I’d suggest that with so many hundreds of options (and this is just one tiny facet of your daily coming to terms with your day), how can you make a final conscious decision using only your conscious mind? You’d be stymied. You’d be indecisive faced with that multitude of conscious options. It seems as if your subconscious crunches the numbers; your consciousness acts on the answer. Your subconscious says I / cook / small / mushroom / thin base / pizza / dinner and then your conscious mind puts that answer into an action mode and makes it so.

Of course not all creative activity is subconscious in origin – or so you think. You compose a letter off the top of your head; ditto holding a real time conversation.

DECISIONS

Do you take a right turn or a left turn at Oak Street? That was the issue at hand for a popular song, and surely the resolution of the issue is a conscious decision and subject to free will. Your subconscious cubby-holes will store and provide for you the positives and negatives of either choice when you drag them to the fore. But what if it’s the very first time you are required to make such a decision and you have no prior knowledge to draw on. Surely that decision will be 100% a demonstration of free will. Or will it? How can you make an informed decision when you have no data on which to make a decision? The easy option is to toss heads or tails, but there’s no free will cigar awarded for that.

Perhaps if you are right-handed you might subconsciously (there’s that word again) true right when you reached Oak Street.

Your mind, like the rest of life, the Universe and everything, is composed of molecules, in turn composed of atoms, in turn made up of the elementary particles we all learn about in high school science classes. Now the realm of the micro-verse is governed by the probability laws of quantum physics. As such, if you really want to get down and dirty, any and all mental activities at any and all levels have to take quantum physics into account. So what’s the big deal? Well, your decision to go right or left at Oak Street might just boil down to a probabilistically quantum state of some elementary particle in your brain which could go either way in a totally random way which you have no control over.

In quantum physics, when you have an equally either/or state of affairs, well that’s known as a superposition of states. If nobody is looking, you go both left and right at Oak Street until someone peeks and it’s determined either/or. It’s another version of Schrodinger’s Cat-in-the-box thought experiment with a naturally radioactive substance that has a 50/50 chance of decaying in say one hour. If the decay happens, it triggers a device inside the box that kills the cat. If the decay fails to eventuate, the cat lives. Until someone looks after one hour, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. After someone peeks, the cat is either dead or alive.

So, in a sort of similar way, perhaps a radioactive atom inside your brain (and you are naturally slightly radioactive) will decay or not decay during the time you are agonising over that left or right turn. The decay/not decay will decide, not if the cat lives or dies but whether you turn left or right at Oak Street. In any case, you have no control. Quantum physics controls your subconscious which controls you and your decisions in the absence of any other driving force.

FREE WILL

As noted frequently above, when it comes to the subconscious you have no control over how it operates. Therefore, with respect to the subconscious, you have no free will.

While watching a DVD of a TV show or feature film for the first time, your phone rings. You hit the “pause” button while you answer the phone. Now when you return, mentally you can envision hundreds of possible scenarios or options that could unfold in the few minutes after you resume viewing by hitting the “play” button. But you know there will be only one scenario and it is fixed – absolutely. Why? It’s been pre-programmed. There’s no free will for the characters.

Now what if we could freeze frame your mind like a DVD – hit your mind’s “pause” button split seconds before a pizza dinner in all its finality detail entered your conscious mind. We, the outsiders, could imagine hundreds of scenarios of what would happen when we un-paused your mind, but just the one scenario would eventuate. 

Now the question arises – you have no control over your subconscious mind and what it comes up with, yet the subconscious seems to often rule the roost where much of your decision making is unplanned; much of your creativity is unplanned; all that much to do with your imagination is unplanned, unplanned meaning your conscious mind played no active role. You just slept on it; you had that unplanned eureka moment while your brain was idling in neutral.

The DVD analogy was pre-programming. Might your subconscious be pre-programming as well? If so, no free will, and one scenario that pre-empts your free will is your existence as virtual reality in a simulated universe!

So, if you are not in control of your subconscious then that implies a lack of free will of the mind and your mental processes. You certainly don’t have mind-over-matter free will (you can’t flap your arms and fly or run faster than the speed of sound), but you no doubt think you are in charge of your own mind. If that’s not the case, well any sign of that is suggestive that you are living in a computer software-generated simulated universe which gives you no free will at all, only an illusion of free will. 

Belief in astrology is self-negating your belief in your free will since the stars and the planets rule in your roost. Perhaps one idea for such acceptance of astrology is that you don’t have free will and so astrology is your scapegoat substitute.

To be continued…

You’re Out of Your Subconscious Mind: Part One

In psychology, there is the concept of the subconscious, or the unconscious, mind. Whatever you call it, you have no real apparent control over it and it’s not subject to your introspection. As such, you have no free will over this apparently automated non-awareness part of your mind (not to be confused with your automated nervous system which holds sway over your body). When you lack free will over the workings of your own mind, well that suggests something or someone else is pulling the strings: translated its evidence for a Simulated Universe.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR MIND

If there’s anything that should be 100% comprehensible to you in exquisite detail it’s the workings of your mind. I mean you and only you inhabit it 24/7/52. It’s a lifelong relationship, one-on-one; at the very least till death us do part. But if you understand even the workings of just your own mind, put yourself down for a Nobel Prize, you’ve earned it.

While different people have slightly different brain chemistries and neural network connections thus explaining different personalities, interests, worldviews and abilities, etc. you have just one normal brain chemistry (unless you deliberately alter it) and one neural network connection to come to terms with. So, we’ll (actually will have to) concentrate on the one, since you’re a typical representation of the generic whole.

You do a lot of mental stuff each day. From the moment you wake up your conscious mind goes into hyper-drive (your subconscious was still churning away while you were sleeping). Those daily mental gyrations tend to be interrelated but involve things like decisions and planning, from the chessboard to the dinner table; memory and recall; sensory processing (taste, smell, sight, sound, touch); and learning, even if it’s the evening news, the local gossip across the fence, or what’s on sale this week at the supermarket.

I need to state from the outset that the mind does have a very limited ability to deal with more than just a couple of things at one time. In fact it’s best to deal with issues arising in a linear fashion. You cannot concentrate on driving while at the same time concentrating on a cell-phone conversation as aptly demonstrated on the “MythBusters” TV show. I’m sure you can identify with trying to juggle three, four, five or more things at once, all demanding your full attention with things just sort of going to hell in a hand-basket, sometimes with serious or potentially serious consequences.  

YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

Have you ever had a complex thought leap suddenly, almost or even unbidden, into your conscious (the self-aware or self-conscious) mind? Why? Was it your conscious mind that brought it to the fore, or your subconscious (otherwise more technically known as the unconscious) mind? Chances are, it was your subconscious (unconscious) mind. It’s been shown that your subconscious mind makes up your mind for you split seconds before you’re consciously aware of it. It’s almost as if it was predetermined.

Your subconscious mind bubbles along under the radar without an actual conscious input from your self-aware you, processing, ever processing. What should be random bubbling like boiling water should therefore result in a mess – a hodgepodge. Instead, you seem to get a purposefully and linearly directed nebulous something which at the least expected time pops through your grey matter’s ‘wormhole’ that links your subconscious mind with your conscious mind. Your conscious mind cannot seemingly draw out of your subconscious mind the nebulous something you need when you need it.

So how does your subconscious stay on the straight and narrow without your conscious input? I have no idea, but it apparently does. When your conscious thoughts go off the rails, say you’re distracted by something not relevant to the task at hand; well you can quickly force your conscious mind back on track to the task at hand. You don’t have to do that with your subconscious since the subconscious apparently can’t be distracted. 

So I wonder whether the world’s greatest thinkers – scientists, philosophers, inventors, writers, etc. weren’t really conscious thinkers at all but derived much of their inspiration from their subconscious.

It’s not your conscious mind that connects the dots, it’s the subconscious. How often do you hear, or even tell yourself, “I’ll sleep on it” (which is why it is probably a good idea to always have pen and paper or a Dictaphone next to the bed)? How many people can relate to solving an out of the ordinary mental puzzle in their dreams, or the solution comes to them ‘out of the blue’ while preoccupied with something related. There are no tools, only the resources in your own mind. In fact if you consciously try to come up with an original creative idea, you’ll probably fail, but when you’re in mental neutral gear – eureka.

Ever immediately forget something you thought of just minutes before and cannot now for the life of you consciously recall? Throw your mind into neutral and when you least expect it, there it is back to the fore again. Now quickly, write it down!

Here are a few other examples where the subconscious rules your roost.

We’re all aware of hypnosis drawing out memories locked away, in the subconscious of course. You have no control in your conscious ability to recall. It takes a more extreme form of that “gotta put my mind in neutral”, the hypnotic state, to bring the data to the fore. Of course unethical or badly trained or amateur hypnotists can implant false memories or manipulate those already there thus producing unreliable results.

It’s not at all extraordinary for a minority (10 – 25%) of absolutely normal adult humans to have at least one vivid hallucination during their lifetime – a product of their subconscious that’s probably much more common in children’s ‘make-believe’ like there’s a monster in the closet or their inevitable invisible playmates. As our minds grow older and mature, we become less likely to have subconscious hallucinations, but they can still happen.

Perhaps connected, we’ve nearly all experienced involuntary (as to subject) daydreams, which, like sleeping dreams, is a product of the subconscious.

Speaking of sleep, when you go to sleep you go into lockdown mode courtesy of the subconscious so you don’t physically act out the actions you dream about. That makes sense otherwise you could do yourself and others in your immediate vicinity a serious mischief, but you have no control over that lockdown process.

An ordinary conscious level mental puzzle might be how to get from A to B on the bus when your car is in the repair shop. These are the sorts of ordinary every day mental gymnastics that usually require tools – hammer and nails; a cookbook; a train timetable; a table of trigonometry functions; and memory. However, in order to utilize them, you have got to have concepts of them filed away in your subconscious cubby-holes*, so everyday mental, and apparently conscious activity have mandatory roots in the subconscious, otherwise, no go.

Just as an aside, there’s another version of subconscious activity that usually deals with body language. How often do you see someone talking on the phone to someone else, neither party can see the other, yet probably both parties are making all sorts of hand gestures and using other kinds of body language as if they were talking face-to-face? Probably quite frequently – it’s the norm. Or you see a woman sitting on a bus or in a café or some such, and she’s preening her hair, running her fingers through it but not even aware she’s doing it.  

When you only have microseconds to act, say when you’re standing in the batters box 60 feet, 6 inches away from the pitchers mound and a rapidly rotating baseball is heading towards you at 95 mph, do you stand there and consciously crunch the numbers before your go/no-go swing, or just turn the issue over to your subconscious to go for it, or let the ball pass you by. Ditto that for an outfielder chasing down a fly ball. In such situations your conscious mind is worthless baggage. Instinct, training, practice and all those other facets embedded in your subconscious required come to the fore and takeover. You can do the physics calculations at your leisure after the game.

*You shouldn’t think of those cubby-holes literally as individual compartments within your brain. It’s just a convenient analogy or way of looking at things. Memory is apparently dispersed throughout your wetware similar to your documents or files on your PC not being located here or there or on this or that piece of hardware, but rather your files, the bits and pieces of your documents, are scattered wherever there’s a bit of space available, which is why every now and again you need a defragmenter program to bring the pits and pieces back together again so that your PC doesn’t strain itself unnecessarily bringing it all together.

To be continued…

Your Soul, Free Will and Afterlife in Heaven or Hell: Part One

The soul, free will, and the afterlife consisting of Heaven or Hell are among the central tenets of the Christian religion, and because they are central to the human psyche, fall within the providence of anthropology, hence natural history. All have philosophical baggage attached. In two cases, the soul and the afterlife, that baggage is a rather excessive amount.

The Concept of a Soul: The trouble here is that ‘the soul’ has so many diverse definitions that it can mean just about anything you want it to mean. Probably no two people would describe the concept in the exact same way. However, I think we can agree that an egg cell has no soul – however you define it. A sperm cell has no soul – however you define it. Therefore, at conception, you have no soul. No cell has a soul, therefore no tissue (a group of common cells) has a soul, therefore no body organ has a soul (an organ being composed of various tissues), therefore you, as a collection of various organs and organ systems must have no soul!

So when did you get a soul (assuming there is such a thing and that it has some degree of tangibility)? Did you get your soul at birth? Perhaps it was on your first birthday? Perhaps you received you soul when you became of age, say 21. Perhaps it’s just as likely that you don’t receive a soul at all – there is no such separate and apart physical thing you get from any higher authority. Perhaps your soul just develops or evolves naturally as part and parcel of your growing maturity over the years, in which case it can’t be totally separate and apart from the body. In other words, if you develop a soul akin to your developing a sense of morality or spirituality, then it can not ‘leave’ the body after death. Translated, your soul (however you define it) isn’t your ticket to an afterlife. It resides somewhere in that brain-thingy of yours, locked somewhere within that maze of biochemistry that collectively makes up your grey matter. As an aside, if you were to clone yourself, would your clone have a soul?

The Concept of Free Will:  To start will let’s examine the paradox of free will. Here’s one of many contradictions. You insist that you have free will. Therefore, God has no control over your actions. Therefore, God is not an all-powerful being. A God who isn’t all-powerful isn’t the most perfect being that can be conceived of. God has to be the most perfect being anyone can imagine. Therefore, there is no God. Now if God is all-powerful, even though God has granted you free will, your free will is ultimately an illusion living on somewhat borrowed time in that God can revoke that free will gift at any time He choses and thus have His wicked way with you!

Another take is that if God exists, all His attributes must be compatible. If all God’s attributes are not compatible, God must not exist. For example, God can not have His own personal free will and be all-knowing. If God is all knowing, then God knows in advance what He will and will not do. If God knows in advance that He will not do something, then He has no free will of His own. He has no options available to Him but to not do what He knows he won’t do.

Anyway, God has apparently granted humanity, including you, a concept called ‘free will’. That is, you are free to pick and choose between various alternatives, including making choices or decisions that can be described as good, or as evil; moral or immoral; ethical or otherwise. However, regarding such a free will, I would argue that you can never be 100% sure that any choice or decision that you make wasn’t due to the universal laws, principles and relations part and parcel of physical causality that started operating from Day One (the Big Bang event) and thus forever and ever predetermined. You might be 99.999% sure you have free will, and that it was God given, but I can’t figure out any way you could absolutely prove it to any outsider, or to yourself for that matter if you are honest with yourself..

If you accept free will, then you must of necessity admit that causality does not always operate. Just as you, dear reader might refuse to believe in pre-determinism, I absolutely refuse to abandon 100% causality, an absolute cause-and-affect principle, which then forces me to reject free will, even though I do so reluctantly. It gives me no joy to think that what I’m doing right now is the ultimate outcome of the set of conditions that existed at the time of the Big Bang event and that I therefore have no choice since that’s the nature of a clockwork Universe, but it’s the lesser of two philosophical evils for me!

I assume that anytime you, dear reader, make a voluntary choice, that there must have been some causality chain of cause-and-effect happenings that led to that choice vis-a-vis some other choice. Your decision didn’t happen for lack of any reason at all. Put another way, your choice has a foundation. Now I just extend that foundation, that causality chain, back to the initial set of conditions present at the origin of the Universe in much the same way as you can trace your (extremely improbable) existence via the chain of existences of (extremely improbable) ancestors, going right back through the unbroken chain to the first proto-cell some four billions years ago, (a proto-cell which in turn may have come from the depths of space and has an ancestry (your ancestry) extending back untold billions of years before Planet Earth ever formed).  You certainly can’t deny that ancestral causality chain, so why deny a causality chain that ultimately extends back to the Big Bang event and the pre-determined chain of happenings and which leads you to whatever choices you are currently contemplating?

And so ‘yes’, using that logic, you aren’t responsible for your decisions and resulting actions (though I’ll bet legal eagles everywhere would have something to say about that, for that undercuts our entire legal system). But from the point of view of the Universe, it might ask, ‘so what?’ It matters not at all to the cosmos (and to 99.9999% of all life forms, including humanity – past, present and future) whether you deposit money in a bank, or rob that bank!

Just as we have computer simulations (such as ‘Life’, a computer software package) that allow for no free will, that is, everything is pre-determined given the initial set of programmed conditions, could we in turn be part of a simulated ‘Planet Earth’ computer ‘game’ or simulation of someone (something) somewhere out there? Do the characters in a typical video game have free will, or do they dance to the tune of their programmer and player? Can you, dear reader, prove to me (or anyone) by some chain of logic that you or we are not the product of or existing in a simulated and therefore no free will, computer generated, virtual universe?  If not, then you have to admit, however remote the odds, that that possibility exists.

If the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of reality is correct, free will is an academic or moot point since all choices or decisions are enabled. To explain the ‘many worlds’ concept, it boils down to the interpretation that whenever you (or anything else – animate or inanimate) are forced to choose, to make a decision, all possibilities are entered into. So, you have this free will decision to do X or to do Y or to do Z. You actually end up doing all three, and thus there’s a new universe Y, and a new universe Z, which splits and branches off from universe X because you choose via your free will (or so you think) to choice X. In reality, you also choose Y and Z. Therefore, no free will was ultimately exhibited.

However, if I were a betting man, I’d bet that humanity does have free will, although that in no way actually proves the existence of God. Ultimately however, does it make any real difference whether you, dear reader, have free will, or the illusion of free will, as long as you actually believe you’re your own boss? 

By the way, can you have free will in Heaven? I mean can you, of your own free will, commit a sin in Heaven? If you can, well you shouldn’t be in Heaven at all and God has stuffed up, being all-knowing, in letting you in, in the first place. If you can’t commit a sin in Heaven, then God has revoked your free will!

To be continued…