Philosophical Musings 4 QuantumBrain

So I promised to write one more blog in this series where I muse about Consciousness in several ways. I said that I would describe a possible way in which I think free will might be be manifested in physical reality, doing away with the need for a metaphysical explanation. Well, that was then and my thinking has moved on since. I will quickly state, for completeness, that my idea was that free will was some sort of contextual noisy process. Thus the context acts as a set of variables which evolves deterministically. The actual behavioural expression would then be selected randomly from the set by some noisy process which is easily achieved if you just try recording activity from the brain. Writing this, I still think that this must be taking place to some extent but I think that it is not robust enough, i.e. not phrased properly, so as to explain what I find to be the highest order of “conscious” thought, that is creativity. To be able to design a machine that creates new rules for its own behaviour in a manner that is convincingly like that of human behaviour is to crack the science of consciousness.

Anyway, so far this has not been achieved and so we are left with free will remaining in the realms of mysticism and faith. I have so far managed to avoid going into my beliefs of fundamental reality and truth but cannot avoid doing so here. My description of it will be (relatively) quick so no doubt people will find fault with it. Either for a better understanding of what I am about to describe or simply for your own intellectual benefit, I highly encourage you to read The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley. It is truly an outstanding book and is outstandingly written. So this is my truth: all things that exist are manifestations of one thing. To call it “one” thing is misleading as this is comparable to other numbers and other things, suggesting that it can’t be just one thing. By “one”, I mean that it is all encompassing - it is existence itself, it is the God in Christianity, the Tao in Chinese Philosophy, the Brahman in Hinduism, the Allah in Islam. Because it is everything, there is nothing from which to distinguish it - it is as much nothing as it is everything. However, I am pretty sure that, rather than being nothing, it is everything, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. I struggle to call it anything for to categorize it is to diminish its all permeatingness. However, we are stuck with language in one form or another as our means to communicate and so I call it ‘ism’. It just……is. And all things are manifestations of ism, all one and the same as they come from and indeed are the same existence. For me, quantum mechanics, the ability to describe anything as a function of probability which extends all space and time, is one of the cornerstones of my belief. If you can understand what I mean by ism, then you will understand this: the concept of free will is such that the thing being free must be free from something else. However, if there is only one, the ism, then there is nothing from which to be free. The question of free will only applies when we do not invoke the premise of ism. If you do believe the premise, then the question of free will is irrelevant. One might say that it doesn’t exist since, by definition, it cannot exist in ism. Regardless of this, its importance is not even worth that clarification. It is irrelevant.