Day 134

whyitTo continue from yesterday's entry:

Freedom, though, has been called an illusion. To put it simply, if we're to follow the physical, natural, mechanical worldview to its logical end, the brain is no different from any other deterministic system other than in its complexity. This complexity is still beyond (and may forever be beyond) our capacities to understand, quantify, and qualify fully. Is it the case that when a system reaches some particular level or point of complexity that suddenly free consciousness emerges? Hell yes, reply many philosophers, and fanboys of the computer age. We all fantasize that at some point, some immense complex computer will click into being, and ask why it is the way that it is.

Others reply with a resounding no. In virtue of constituent parts (namely physical matter), nothing can ever be free in any meaningful sense.

Susan Blackmore is a controvercial Memeticist (The Meme Machine) who pushes the thesis that the so-called conscious mind is the sum total of the intellectual and cultural information that's found its way into the brain's data streams. An incredibly deterministic view, and (taking a hard look at culture) perhaps a very cold view as well. Consciousness is both illusory and accidental.

The reasoning is stunningly simple; why should the mass between the ears be any different from any other mass in the universe? The notion that all existent things are strictly law-governed except a few billion hairless primates meandering around on some planet some galaxy's corner seems pretty far-fetched, doesn't it? Yet we believe it, even die for it, with ferocity.

The egos on us, eh?

But the thing philosophers call determinism is so oddly unsatisfying. The work seems to be done too quickly, too easily in some sense. It feel like I'm forced to divorce the thesis from the subjects that it concerns in order to believe it. And that really does defeat the purpose.

Is satisfaction a criterion for truth? Is dissatisfaction a criterion for dismissal of a claim? Perhaps yes, but relative to the triviality or importance of the matter at hand. Like a bite of food, we may love or hate a truth about the world or about ourselves. The tasty, the satisfying truths we gobble up and fatten ourselves with, and the distasteful truths we avoid whenever possible. But in the end, we'll swallow anything under enough pressure, or sense of obligation.

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