You need to explain the link between free will and CRC.
But that is only true if we accept that free will doesn’t exist. If free will exists, then it was also (partly) based on free will.
In the model of reality I’m defending, free will and consciousness are the same thing. So the question is why I think worms and insects are conscious. The answer is that they behave like they are conscious. They are both descended from the new kinds of animal which appeared during the Cambrian Explosion (CE). Science cannot define consciousness, and can’t agree on an explanation for the CE, but if we ask ourselves which kinds of animals seem like they are conscious (a non-computable valuation..intuition), then it starts with worm-like organisms. They choose what to do next based on a their dynamic model of reality, instead of just reacting blindly to stimuli like amoebas and jellyfish do.
Short answer: anything with a brain, however primitive, is conscious and therefore has free will (can collapse wavefunctions).
Because it is the pivotal mechanism in a coherent model of the whole of reality. It leads to a simple structural-mechanism solution to 30 of the biggest problems in science and philosophy, including the problem of free will.
See: The Sacred Structure of Reality / Two-Phase Cosmology and a Metaphysics for the Quantum Age | Zenodo
I don’t know. But reality does. See quote in previous post. How much relative free will an agent has is dictated by how accurate their model of reality is, how good their predictions are, how highly they value certain outcomes, and the level of attention they are paying to a situation. This is not a competition to be judged by humans (or God), but a function of how deeply a person is interacting with objective reality. Humans are far more deeply involved (because we have much greater understanding, and greater reach) than any other species, so we have more free will. And not just over what happens to our own bodies. It applies to the whole of reality (apart from other people’s bodies, which are very closely entangled with their own agent).
There are two technical components to 2PC. The first is the Embodiment Threshold. This defines what counts as a conscious agent and what doesn’t - what counts as a brain, and what makes something capable of collapsing wavefunctions by making meaningful choices about the future. The ET defines the point where Phase 2 (classical reality within consciousness) emerges from Phase 1 (non-local quantum reality).
The first organism to cross this threshold I call LUCAS (the Last Universal Common Ancestor of Subjectivity). LUCAS’s existence retro-selects the timeline leading to its own evolution - it bootstraps the entire cosmos and timeline leading to consciousness (I call this “psychegenesis”, and “the psychetelic principle” is like the anthropic principle).
When LUCAS is the only agent, it is the luckiest creature that ever existed. Not only did its valuations allow it to control its own movements based on decisions about which future it prefers, but there is no other consciousness to stop its valuations for the rest of the cosmos (those bits it is entangled with) from deciding what happens (within the boundaries of the laws of physics). So reality conforms to its wishes, and since it is basically a solipsist, this causes no problems.
But what happens when LUCAS reproduces? Now we have multiple agents, who have different knowledge of reality and are assigning conflicting valuations about the future. This is a new version of a well-known problem which is at the core of the Wigner’s Friend and Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiments. How do multiple conscious wills create a single shared reality? CRC solves this problem in an original way, as already explained. So in this model “free will” doesn’t just mean an ability to control your own body. The same mechanism accounts for things like synchronicity, and certain other forms of “paranormal phenomena”.
Technically there are two parts to CRC. Basic CRC ensures the world doesn’t fragment into solipsistic branches, and Extended-CRC handles symbolic meaning like tarot cards and religious beliefs. But it does this in terms of constraints – our beliefs constrain what is possible in our reality, after CRC has been satisfied.
Why, apart from that you keep insisting it must be the case? You have never justified this. You just keep asserting it.
This premise assumes that free will is true because a freely willed act needs to be intended, that is, determined by an intention to perform the act.
There you go again.
Your argument boils down to this:
(1) Premise: determinism is true.
(2) Conclusion: therefore determinism is true.
Why should anybody accept your claim that something called an “intention” is required before you assign a value to a specific future? This “intention” is just a prior state of the system, which defines determinism to be true.
I keeping asking you this, and you keep responding by saying “It just has to”.
WHY does it have to?
Because that’s how intentions work. They precede the intended act.
I claim that a freely willed act needs to be intended, that is, determined by an intention to perform the act. I think it’s a pretty uncontroversial claim. Do you not accept this claim?
But that’s not a justification, is it? It’s just another restatement of your premise.
It is a deeply controversial claim, because it is directly equivalent to the claim that hard determinism is true. And no, of course I don’t accept it, because this entire thread is my defence of libertarian free will.
Your entire argument depends on an initial assumption which logically entails your conclusion. This is a textbook example of “begging the question”.
So are you claiming that unintended acts (like slipping unintentionally on a banana peel) are freely willed acts?
@Geoff_Dann @litewave
I don’t know if I’m going to muddy the waters, but it seems to me that intending to act and intending to create a preference are very different things. Yes, I have to intend to cook eggs before I cook eggs. I have to intend to throw a curveball before I throw a curveball. I have to intend to drive my car before I drive my car.
I guess I can intend to change my preference of chocolate ice cream over strawberry to strawberry over chocolate. But it’s not going to happen. The intention doesn’t come before the act if the act doesn’t take place. I can intend to try various things to bring about this new preference, then do those various things. But they aren’t going to change my preference.
But the creation of a preference would be an act too. I am not saying it is possible to create a preference intentionally. I am just saying that if the act of creating a preference is freely willed, it needs to be intended. Like any freely willed act.
Quite right, and far older than law. If you didn’t eat, they you would bear the responsibility of that choice. You’d die, and it would be your fault, not that of physics. Evolution has been holding responsible anything with choice, for billions of years.
We seriously disagree on this point. There is an empirical difference (apparently asserting brain physics is different from not-brain, so it isn’t an interpretation.
Right, and I’m open to ‘if not’. If not QM, then some other theory is needed to describe how everything (and not just non-human things) work. QM does not allow LFW. The new theory would replace it, correcting this discrepancy.
I pretty much put us as the least privileged thing in the system. We seem to be working from opposite ends of the biocentric spectrum of lines of thinking.
You might give an example of an advantage an animal has over a plant, some case where the plant’s inability to collapse a wave function somehow is not to the plant’s advantage.
This kind of implies that a rock (or a computer) does not collapse a wave function, that it’s existence isn’t classical, and thus it interacts with all worlds? Surely that’s an empirical claim that can be tested.
What happens to the other worlds when something with a brain forms at event X? Does it collapse away to nonexistence the rest of the universe, including places that were also developing life but hadn’t quite yet got to evolving a brain? Is it only an Earth brain that’s privileged in this way? If a life form elsewhere is not based on carbon/DNA but is still ‘biological’, and it evolves into a thinking thing, would that count?
What’s your guess as to the most primitive life form on Earth that has this LFW, this collapse ability?
I understand. I just don’t think we intentionally create preferences.
Although I can’t say it’s an absolute. If, for some reason, we really want to like something that we don’t like, we sometimes can. I think this scene from Mr. Holland’s Opus is what I’m trying to say.
I wonder what reason could make me want to like Country music. Some great songs now and then, but, on the whole, I really don’t like it. I can’t imagine why I would intend to change that preference.
Sorry if I’ve drifted too far off…
Sure, I get it. There are also reconditioning therapies for phobias or addictions.
No. The action which led to them was freely willed (you chose to be walking in that direction at that time), but in the system I am describing it is only possible to will things based on your accurate knowledge of the world. If something happens which you had no way of predicting then that is just an accident.
Even in a world where there is free will, the majority of what actually happens is determined either by the laws of physics or by the will of other conscious beings. We cannot predict everything. We need to make “best guesses”.
OK. In which case, an intention doesn’t necessarily lead to an action. It is just a “rough plan”. Nothing in my argument implies that we cannot plan ahead. I am specifically talking about what is happening in the present moment, as we experience it. That is the only place we can find free will. And we do not find any strategic thinking there. We don’t “intend” to do thing, in your sense, only 1 second before we actually do it. You are talking about something else.
Wouldn’t you agree free will doesn’t exist from above examples?
Or maybe free will exists, but only in the word or imagination of your mind making projections to unrelated cases of the actions, just like God or immortality, empty and vacuous in its reference in the world?
Could you explain again why you think this?
You might give an example of an advantage an animal has over a plant, where the plant’s inability to collapse a wave function somehow is not to the plant’s advantage.
Animals can choose to eat whatever plants they can access. The only plants which eat animals do so via non-conscious mechanisms, and these are strange anomalies. We find them almost alien.
In terms of evolution, we are talking about the advantage which kicked off the Cambrian Explosion. Almost everything which existed before - the entire Ediacaran ecosystem - disappeared within a few million years.
This kind of implies that a rock (or a computer) does not collapse a wave function, that it’s existence isn’t classical, and thus it interacts with all worlds? Surely that’s an empirical claim that can be tested.
It does imply that. In fact, the entire unobserved cosmos exists in a superposition. However, it is not an empirical claim. It cannot be tested for exactly the same reason we cannot test MWI, and cannot test Schrodinger’s cat. It would require us to observe the unobservable.
What happens to the other worlds when something with a brain forms at event X? Does it collapse away to nonexistence the rest of the universe, including places that were also developing life but hadn’t quite yet got to evolving a brain?
There are two answers to this, because there are two kinds of Phase 1. “Primordial Phase 1” is everything that exists eternally because it does not involve a conscious being. This includes the timeline that led to the first conscious being on Earth (LUCAS - the Last Universe Common Ancestor of Subjectivity).
However. once a cosmos has been instantiated (it has been bootstrapped by psychegenesis, and is up and running), then we have a new kind of Phase 1. Every time a collapse occurs, a new “now” is created – a configuration which cannot have exists in primordial phase 1 because it requires decisions to already have been made by conscious beings. This is the world we live in now. At each moment, possibility is being resolved into actuality by consciousness, and the non-chosen branches now cannot continue to exist permanently. They are gone.
This theory makes an empirical prediction that life almost certainly has not evolved elsewhere. Life evolved on Earth because the quantum dice were heavily loaded for 13bn years by the retro-causal selection event of psychegenesis. After that, the mechanism that led to life evolvihg (including abiogenesis) is no longer available. The bootstrap only works once, because the dice-loading now drive free will instead of psychegensis.
We are alone. I call this neo-geocentrism.
What’s your guess as to the most primitive life form on Earth that has this LFW, this collapse ability?
I have a very specific candidate for LUCAS. It was whatever lit the Cambrian Fuse, so should be right at the end of the Ediacaran era, and should be the prime candidate for the last common ancestor of all the Cambrian fauna. The obvious candidate is called Ikaria wariootia.
Fossil hunters find evidence of 555m-year-old human relative | Fossils | The Guardian
It sounds like a typical form of psychological projection. Some folks even claim plants are conscious, and even particles and electrons are conscious.
How can you verify that they are conscious without having a single verbal communication for the signs of being conscious just by seeing them moving for food and squirming around? Or have you had some conversation with them?
Which examples are you talking about?
The examples have been posted a few times so far.
Plants and particles do not behave like they are conscious. Panpsychism is incompatible with the position I am defending.
For many years I wasn’t sure about jellyfish and comb jellies. They are very close to the border – they are the most complex animals which aren’t conscious.
Do we need to have a conversation with cats and dogs to know they are conscious?