CHOICELESS_AWARENESS_12_JUNE_2023

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CHOICELESS_AWARENESS

The following paragraphs depict a conversation between fictional persons S and T and is a sequel to the web page of this website named ONTOLOGY_REVISITED. The conversation depicted on this web page explores the seemingly contradictory concepts of free will and determinism and, also, some variations of what a person could voluntarily prioritize as goals by which to organize that person’s use of finite resources.

S: “Suppose you find yourself in a situation in which your body is fully paralyzed (yet kept respirating and metabolizing nutrients using machines which keep your vital systems functioning) and you are constantly administered drugs which make you especially susceptible to hypnotic suggestions while you are forced to listen to propagandic messages constantly and perhaps even hooked up to a brain-to-computer interface which forcibly controls the minute firings of each of the neurons inside of your brain.”

T: “What you describe sounds like the complete annihilation of my agency.”

S: “How do you think you would react to being in that situation?”

T: “I doubt that I would have much control over how I react to sensory inputs nor do I think that I would have much control over the content of my thoughts. I suppose my life would feel like watching an immersive movie play which I cannot stop watching.”

S: “Do you presently feel that your life is more like a movie which you are forced to watch or that your life is more like a video game which you are forced to play (until and unless you find the means to effectively commit suicide)?”

T: “In order to survive and to not be in excruciating agony, I feel obliged to pretend that my life is a video game which I am forced to play (until and unless I find the means to effectively commit suicide) and, while playing such a video game, I assume that I am the only playable character which I have the means to inhabit and control (and, by control, I mean that I am constantly making decisions at every point in time which elapses during such game play. In order to be the best philosopher and scientist I can be, however, I do also feel obliged at times (to the extent that I am still able to survive and avoid excruciating agony) to analyze neuroscience data and the insights I gather through introspection which suggest that volition is entirely an illusion and that all of my brain activity is the result of rudimentary physical processes I have neither conscious control over nor awareness of taking place inside me.”

S: “Are you a compatibilist or a hard determinist?”

T: “Define those terms.”

S: “A compatibilist is a person who believes that free will (which is a synonym for agency and for volition (and such terms refer to a person’s hypothetical capacity to imagine multiple future outcomes to a decision and to implement only the behaviors which that person thinks is sufficiently likely going to cause what that person thinks is a desirable outcome to that decision)) is an emergent property of lower level and relatively involuntary physical processes. To use a computer science analogy, a compatibilist thinks of free will as an entirely virtual (rather than physical) phenomenon which is metaphorically comparable to a video game character’s move sets, weapons (or, more generally, tools that character can use within the confines of the game such as vehicles, money, food, communication devices, and portals which enable that character to instantaneously travel between disconnected traversable spaces within an otherwise open world game play environment), and other uniquely distinguishing characteristics (but in order for that video game character to exist and to exhibit the attributes it has and to use the tools which that character has access to, lower level physical processes in the computers which run the game’s software must be in effect). Ultimately, the video game character is a puppet of those lower level physical processes inside the computer’s hardware such as specific electronic circuit firings at specific times and in specific chronological orders. A hard determinist would say that free will is not an emergent property, but instead, entirely an illusion caused by entirely involuntary physical processes. In other words, a hard determinist would posit that free will does not exist.”

T: “I do not like constraining myself to any of those two limiting terms. I do think that all phenomena (including phenomena which occur inside of computer simulations) are fundamentally physical in nature. In order for a computer simulation to exist, I would presume that an end user of that simulation would also have to exist. Otherwise, there would be no computer simulated reality and, instead, just electrons and photons being manipulated inside of a computer’s hardware circuits. I would say that I am more of a compatibilist than a hard determinist because I believe that I can summon free will because my brain’s hardware allows me to do that (i.e. to imagine things that do not yet seem to exist in the universe I am inhabiting and to cause such imaginary things to become observed physical phenomena in the physical universe I perceive as being outside of my head through implementing goal-oriented actions which I think are likely to cause the things I imagine and desire to become physically measurable aspects of my physical environment).”

S: “Is your happiness dependent upon you having a sufficiently high degree of free will (whether that free will is illusory (i.e. the product of lower level physical processes which you do not control) or whether that free will is spontaneously emergent (i.e. a godlike creative and executive function which is not an emergent property of any lower level physical processes which you do not control))?”

T: “I think that my survival and hedonistic impulses compel me to say yes, but my speculative and empirically investigative impulses (which are more interested in truth than they are in my survival and comfort) oblige me to say no.”

S: “Which of those two answers is truer for you?”

T: “I think that both answers are equally true, but I think that my desire for truth is more important to me than is my desire for survival and comfort. The implications of what I just said are that I would rather drive myself insane and undergo tortuous experiences as a means to the end of deepening my understanding of reality than I would avoid such an undertaking in order to maximize my survival and comfort. If my highest priorities in life were to simply avoid suffering and to stay alive for as long as possible, I doubt my life would feel very satisfying to me because such a life would be dull, cowardly, and comparatively uneducated and comparatively lacking in a satisfying sense of personal achievement.”

S: “Suppose you find yourself imprisoned in the situation I described at the beginning of this conversation. How would you derive satisfaction from your conscious existence in such circumstances?”

T: “I doubt that I would be able to derive much satisfaction from such circumstances. Ideally, I would search for ways to outsmart the system which imprisons me and which seems to have totalitarian control over my perceptions, thoughts, and actions. For instance, if I have the ability to tell myself a joke or to otherwise find amusement in such abysmal circumstances, I would do my best to capitalize on such capabilities because doing so increases my sense of agency and my sense of enjoyment in the midst of a situation I would otherwise seemingly lack agency and enjoyment in. Even if I had no feasible means to control any aspect of my awareness in such a situation, I would just observe whatever there is for me to observe in a process of choiceless awareness.”

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