Ran Prieur

October 8.

2021-10-08T20:20:14Z

October 8. Continuing from the last post, over on the subreddit there's a post about Sam Harris, in which sordidbear summarizes Harris as observing his own cognition closely, and discovering that "thoughts, ideas, intentions etc are simply popping into consciousness seemingly out of nowhere and then leaving just as abruptly to be replaced with new ones."

I haven't read Sam Harris, but if someone says, I looked really closely at consciousness and this is how it really is, I'm going to call observer effect, because if there's anything that behaves differently when it's being observed, it's consciousness.

Likewise, advanced meditators and psychedelic trippers have reported that the self is an illusion, that there are no persons, only actions. While I find that a compelling idea, I wonder if they've discovered a universal truth, or just found a local one.

Probably what Harris has discovered, is not how consciousness is, but how he can make it. And where one could see that as a refuation of free will, with the illusory chooser overwhelmed by meaninglessness, I see it as a necessary condition for free will, by getting off the treadmill of cause-and-effect.

So if something pops into your head, and you follow it, is the freedom really yours? It doesn't matter. You're participating in the creativity of the universe. Matt comments:

An idea that I keep coming back to is: the main lever of will is awareness. As awareness expands, our choices expand.... It seems to be the case in multiple spiritual traditions that, as awareness deepens, interconnectivity becomes more obvious. Causation looks more like connection. Your "own" desires are suddenly contextualized within a web of being.

October 5.

2021-10-05T17:50:16Z

October 5. This is my longest blog post ever. It's about determinism.

Even though we have direct experience of free will, some people believe that's an illusion, and the reason they give is a piece of 18th century pseudoscience. Mechanical devices were getting complex enough that people started thinking, suppose all of reality is as ordered and predictable as this little gadget.

Since then, the clockwork universe has been the foundational assumption that guides science as we know it. It's not a theory, because it was never put up for testing. And it's been falsified at least twice, once by quantum indeterminacy, and again more subtly, by the insight that a system can only be deterministic from the outside, and there is no perspective outside the universal.

Quantum physics is not some weird anomaly that we can brush away. It's the next level down from Newtonian physics, and it only seems weird to cultures that have been looking at reality wrong. Its message to us is that the assumption of a third person universe, if you keep looking, leads to a first person universe.

What's the mechanism for free will? That question might not even make sense, and if it does, we also don't know the mechanism for magnetism, and that's no reason to doubt our direct experience that magnets work.

There's an even deeper assumption that underlies determinism: that every event must have a cause. Yet astronomers say the Big Bang was causeless, a random spike of negative entropy. And theologians say it doesn't make sense to ask where God came from. So if the biggest thing of all can have no cause, it should be possible for anything to have no cause.

Obviously, a lot of things do. But it's an interesting exercise to try to imagine what a causeless event would look like, or feel like.

There is another way to argue for determinism. What does a dog do when a strange person comes to the door? It barks, with such perfect reliability that at that moment the dog has no free will, even if it thinks it does. In the same way, a lot of human behavior is automatic stimulus-and-response. Because humans can expand our consciousness, you can look back at your younger self and say, I thought I was making real choices, when I wasn't. Maybe you still aren't.

I appreciate the moral implications of determinism. It makes you less judgmental, because if you take it seriously, the only difference between Hitler and Mr. Rogers is luck.

If there's a psychological case for determinism, but not a physical case, it leads to a crazy speculation. What if there's more free will in little things than in big things? For example, we all know that our political institutions can't stop climate change. As systems get bigger, their behavior becomes more predictable. In the same way, you might be more predictable than your parts.

Suppose that every electron has free will, in the context of moving between available energy states. Then when you get up to the level of chemical reactions, it all becomes cleaner. But then, when you get to biology, maybe we can have free will again, by channeling the playfulness of the small.

Some nature-based cultures use random divination to decide which direction to go for hunting. Even if they're not tapping into deeper knowledge, they're still shaking up their own routines, and the animals never know when the hunters are coming. Modern people might flip a coin to make a decision. Why not make the decision yourself? Because the autonomous self is an illusion, so let's channel some chaos.

Two tangents: In politics, we could loosen up the machinery of the state with random ballot voting. Over time, it reflects the wishes of the majority, and the best thing about it is, there's no incentive to vote for someone you don't like just because everyone else is.

And this is my latest take on meditation: What I'm doing is not stilling my thoughts, exactly, but stilling the automatic, the habitual, and in that clarity, I might sense the mysterious uncaused.

(Related: Big Blood fans, go to my fan page and scroll to the fifth paragraph past the sun for a new interpretation of Haystack.)

October 1.

2021-10-01T13:10:13Z

October 1. This is my favorite month. Where I live, it's the month that requires the least heating and cooling, and the month that smells the best. It's also when trees lose their leaves. We're supposed to think that humans look better naked and trees look better clothed, but to me it's the other way around.

Some happy links. The ancient Persian way to keep cool, building towers that draw the warm air up and let the wind blow it away.

Telling the bees "is a traditional custom of many European countries in which bees would be told of important events in their keeper's lives, such as births, marriages, or departures and returns in the household."

And two nice soccer goals, by the same player within five minutes. In the first, Eugenie Le Sommer surprises the goalie with a sudden long strike. In the second, the shot is unremarkable, but it comes from a great run and a spectacular pinball assist. It's funny, in American football, "flag is down" means the score doesn't count, and in world football, it means it does.