Friday, January 27, 2006

on freedom

On Freedom


When we ask ourselves if we are free, we forget who we are. That is the problem. Not free will. There is no problem of free will, if only we conceive of ourselves properly. Now the following arguments are really counter-intuitive. So please do not draw any conclusions before reading the whole thing.

Who are we? We are simply a system of the interplay of matter and energy that is our bodies. When we talk of our soul, we actually mean our immediate consciousness, but we think it is something immaterial and independent of reality. When we think of free will, we apply it to the soul. But the soul is not wholly us, it is but part of us. That is why we have the free will ‘problem’, when we consider our other parts as separate from who we are. Taking Freud’s conception of the self, we are not the ego, we are the whole of which the id, the ego, and the superego are part.

Universal causality exist in time as far as we know it to be. We cannot in fact conceive of it otherwise. When we imagine to violate causality, we inevitably invoke another causal agent, except that it does not reside in this reality (e.g. God). Our mind has been hardwired to think in terms of causality. We cannot do otherwise, though we can do it incorrectly. Our brain is not evolutionarily equipped to deal with complex philosophical problems. We therefore bring over our inappropriate tendencies and intuition into our thought where careful thinking is instead needed. Therefore, everything that exist in time has a cause. We even define time with causality, as our measure of the second, as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom at zero Kelvin, clearly shows. To deny causality is to deny time (and much else is denied too, even ourselves).

Now does that mean we are caused? We are a system. (remember what we are!) A system defines how causality affects it. It interacts with the world of course, but in such a way that how it is affected is determined by itself. By its structure. By its organization. By the system that is itself. It is said to be energetically open, but organizationally closed. As we can see here, our intuition of what causality causes does not work. Things just don’t cause other things in the simple way we have learned through our experience in the world or high school Newtonian mechanics. In complex non-linear systems such as ourselves, there is no simple cause and effect. There is simultaneous causes and effects.

So if we think of ourselves as a system, even with determinism, (actually by virtue of determinism, because our existence as a system relies on causality) there is still free will, because the willing agent is a system and defines itself how causality affects itself, and thus functions by virtue of what it is, and not what the environment ‘determines’.

We thus have an undeniable conclusion, that we have free will.


Now, how about freedom? As we can immediately see without a doubt, that there is no absolute freedom. But first, what is freedom? We first conceive of freedom when we wanted to do something but cannot, because of circumstance. We then consider other facts, or laws, or reality that limits us, forgetting that those facts, laws, reality is what makes, our lives possible. Now how could this mistake have come about?

It is again the problem of our intuition lacking ability to think about systems. Our intuitive thinking is extremely myopic and naively straightforward. We thus commit a lot of system fallacies. In the case of freedom, when we perceive of freedom from outside from ourselves, we bring our cherished, precious concept of freedom outside, where it does not belong, and apply it. This fallacy can be clearly seen by analyzing Nozick’s analysis of his experience machine thought experiment. He says we would not want to plug into the experience machine because:

1. We want to do certain things, and not to merely experience doing certain things.
2. We want to be a certain way, to be a certain person, and not a thing in an experience machine.
3. We want a deeper reality instead of shallow experience.

Actually, there is only one necessary explanation. It is that we think in reality, and we love it to much to really leave it behind. What does that mean? Well all that has meaning to us is from this reality. In fact, our conception of other realities is from our understanding of this reality. We are hardwired to think of this reality, as reality. We therefore take it as an assumption wherever we go in our thought experiments. Plugging into the experience machine means exiting this reality. Yet when we do this experiment, we are inside, observing ourselves from the outside. As experimental psychologists would tell you, this is a bad idea. Introspection is known to give highly biased and wildly inaccurate results. Which is what happened with Nozick’s experience machine.

There are actually 2 mistakes in Nozick’s analysis of the thought experiment. The 1st is that, as mentioned, we are observing ourselves. And we are actually observing “ourselves”. Because even while doing this thought experiment, we are not actually in the machine. We are out here, in this reality. We therefore think from here. From here it seems that “we” are merely experiencing things, instead of actually “doing” them. From here it seems too that, “we” are just a thing plugged into a machine, not really a “person”. From here it also seems that, “we” are having but induced stimulation and experience, and not having a “deeper reality”. All fallacies. Experience is how we live our lives. An alien would look at us and, without a human theory of mind, pass us by as inanimate matter. And reality is our experience.

Yet why do we not think so? Please note that I’m not advocating thinking so, I’m advocating not thinking so when, engaging in dangerous thought experiments such as Nozick’s. We do not think so, because like the person in the experience machine, we are each in our respective realities. The person in the experience machine, might choose to, in a thought experiment in the experience machine, enter another experience machine. And he would, like you, perceive “himself” from outside. “He” in the experience machine is just a thing, while he is a person. While you think that he is a thing, and you are a person. Now what if you are like him and “him”, just a thing in a thought experiment and perceived by someone outside this reality?

Clearly, thinking of ourselves as things is undesirable. And that is the 2nd mistake. We are not things, we are people. We live our lives, not experience it. And so is the life of the person in the experience machine real. But we still wouldn’t want to go in there because from our vantage point, such a life would be unreal. And we are right! But then is our lives real? If you still insist on asking such a question, you have been neglecting the fact that our lives are seen to be real only from our experience of it. We cannot look at it from the outside. When we think we can, we merely fool ourselves and think still from the inside anyway. Outside of us, there is no freedom, which is always only in our head. We therefore really cannot think from the outside at all. And denying that we are part of this reality is not the solution. When we invent the immaterial soul, we are merely delaying the problem. The immaterial soul may be in an experience machine you know?

The solution is actually quite simple. You see, we are in this reality, so we truly cannot see ourselves from outside it. So what we should do is introspect. Whatever we are to anybody or anything else, what matters is that we know what we are from our point of view. This is where we find meaning. Not anywhere outside but in our minds. Freedom therefore is here and now, as we see it. We should acknowledge that we are who we are only to ourselves. Therefore we should take physical laws as granted and not question them when we really cannot do so. And that we have all the physical freedom we have, because if we were to have more, we wouldn’t be ourselves anymore, because it would require a change of our physical makeup. And also if we were to perceive a “truer” reality (e.g. seeing the entire electromagnetic spectrum), whatever that might mean. Freedom is not any physical thing, freedom is something that means something only to ourselves, and only exist in ourselves, not anywhere else. Freedom is independent of “reality”. It is like multiplatform software, that can run on any hardware system. In conclusion, we are not a slave. We are inhabitants of this home we, by our nature, built ourselves, and which we call reality.

We must accept the fact that we are in this reality, and not anywhere else. And that meaning is to be sought and found in this reality. Or we would forever be lost and plagued with senseless contradictions that threaten the meaning of our lives.

In final conclusion, we have free will and freedom, at least in the sense in which we often think we don’t. Now we can live our lives with a peace of mind. And work out real solutions, to real problems of freedom such as slavery and human rights.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

subtlety